Editorial for the Special Issue on 'Emergent Properties of Complex Systems': Emergence and levels of abstraction

The notions of emergence and emergent properties have a long history in science, and have recently regained popularity in systems science fuelled largely by the growth of computer simulation as an exploratory and investigative tool. Unfortunately, the notions and terms are not especially well defined: ideas of evolution, self-organization, collective ('systemic') properties and cooperative behaviour are all involved to a greater or lesser extent. It is often claimed that emergent properties arise at a particular level of system description by virtue of the interaction of relatively simple lower-level components- between themselves and with the environment- but cannot be explained at this lower level. Yet there are obvious scientific and philosophical problems with a definition based on an inability to explain observable effects in particular terms. This editorial outlines the history of emergence as a scientific concept, and reviews attempts to refine and qualify the term.

[1]  C. Broad,et al.  The Mind and Its Place in Nature. , 1928 .

[2]  Philip W. Anderson,et al.  More Is Different Broken symmetry and the nature of the hierarchical structure of science , 1972 .

[3]  Hermann Haken,et al.  Visions of synergetics , 1997 .

[4]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Associative memory. A system-theoretical approach , 1977 .

[5]  R. Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker , 1986 .

[6]  F. Crick The Astonishing Hypothesis , 1994 .

[7]  K. Denbigh,et al.  An inventive universe , 1975 .

[8]  Luc Steels,et al.  The Artificial Life Roots of Artificial Intelligence , 1994, Artif. Life.

[9]  C. D. Broad IV.—Mechanical Explanation and Its Alternatives , 1919 .

[10]  John A. Hawkins,et al.  THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN LANGUAGES , 2021, Information Theory and Evolution.

[11]  M. D. Mey The Cognitive Paradigm , 1992 .

[12]  Andy Clark,et al.  Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing , 1989 .

[13]  T. Kellam,et al.  Artificial Minds , 1996, Inf. Process. Manag..

[14]  Stephanie Forrest,et al.  Emergent computation: self-organizing, collective, and cooperative phenomena in natural and artificial computing networks , 1990 .

[15]  Per Bak,et al.  How Nature Works: The Science of Self‐Organized Criticality , 1997 .

[16]  S. Kauffman Emergent properties in random complex automata , 1984 .

[17]  R. Swinburne The existence of God , 2020 .

[18]  Ronald C. Arkin,et al.  An Behavior-based Robotics , 1998 .

[19]  A. Wilson,et al.  God's Funeral , 1999 .

[20]  Stewart W. Wilson Knowledge Growth in an Artificial Animal , 1985, ICGA.

[21]  J J Hopfield,et al.  Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. , 1982, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[22]  J. Casti Would-Be Worlds: How Simulation Is Changing the Frontiers of Science , 1996 .

[23]  Christopher G. Langton,et al.  Studying artificial life with cellular automata , 1986 .

[24]  M. Eigen,et al.  Steps Towards Life: A Perspective on Evolution , 1992 .

[25]  Wentian Li,et al.  Random texts exhibit Zipf's-law-like word frequency distribution , 1992, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[26]  Steven Levy,et al.  Artificial Life: A Report from the Frontier Where Computers Meet Biology , 1993 .

[27]  D. McFarland,et al.  Intelligent behavior in animals and robots , 1993 .

[28]  D. Dennett Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life , 1995 .

[29]  K. Popper Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind , 1978 .

[30]  Teuvo Kohonen,et al.  Emergence of invariant-feature detectors in the adaptive-subspace self-organizing map , 1996, Biological Cybernetics.

[31]  Manfred Schroeder,et al.  Fractals, Chaos, Power Laws: Minutes From an Infinite Paradise , 1992 .

[32]  R. Damper,et al.  What can auditory neuroethology tell us about speech processing? , 1998, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[33]  John H. Holland,et al.  Emergence. , 1997, Philosophica.

[34]  Philip T. Quinlan,et al.  Connectionsim and psychology - a psychological perspective on new connectionist research , 1991 .

[35]  F. Guenther,et al.  The perceptual magnet effect as an emergent property of neural map formation. , 1996, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[36]  Luc Steels,et al.  Towards a theory of emergent functionality , 1991 .

[37]  Pei-chun P. Liu,et al.  Associative memory system , 1994 .

[38]  Walter G. Rosen,et al.  The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age , 1996 .

[39]  D. Hofstadter,et al.  Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , 1979 .

[40]  George Kingsley Zipf,et al.  Human behavior and the principle of least effort , 1949 .

[41]  Douglas R. Hofstadter,et al.  Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid , 1981 .

[42]  C. Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , 1859 .

[43]  Achim Stephan,et al.  Varieties of Emergence in Artificial and Natural Systems , 1998 .

[44]  Stuart A. Kauffman,et al.  The origins of order , 1993 .

[45]  W. Stein,et al.  Thinking About Biology , 1993 .

[46]  N. Pierce Origin of Species , 1914, Nature.

[47]  M. Gell-Mann A Theory of Everything. (Book Reviews: The Quark and the Jaguar. Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.) , 1994 .

[48]  B. MacWhinney Models of the emergence of language. , 1998, Annual review of psychology.

[49]  Christoph Endres,et al.  Introduction to Artificial Life , 2000, Künstliche Intell..

[50]  Gary James Jason,et al.  The Logic of Scientific Discovery , 1988 .