Self-Complexity and Organization

Future book purchase 1: At Home In the Universe

Description

"A major scientific revolution has begun, a new paradigm that rivals Darwin's theory in importance. At its heart is the discovery of the order that lies deep within the most complex of systems, from the origin of life, to the workings of giant corporations, to the rise and fall of great civilizations. And more than anyone else, this revolution is the work of one man, Stuart Kauffman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the new science of complexity. Now, in At Home in the Universe, Kauffman brilliantly weaves together the excitement of intellectual discovery and a fertile mix of insights to give the general reader a fascinating look at this new science--and at the forces for order that lie at the edge of chaos.

We all know of instances of spontaneous order in nature--an oil droplet in water forms a sphere, snowflakes have a six-fold symmetry. What we are only now discovering, Kauffman says, is that the range of spontaneous order is enormously greater than we had supposed. Indeed, self-organization is a great undiscovered principle of nature. But how does this spontaneous order arise? Kauffman contends that complexity itself triggers self-organization, or what he calls "order for free," that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organize into a new entity--a living cell. Kauffman uses the analogy of a thousand buttons on a rug--join two buttons randomly with thread, then another two, and so on. At first, you have isolated pairs; later, small clusters; but suddenly at around the 500th repetition, a remarkable transformation occurs--much like the phase transition when water abruptly turns to ice--and the buttons link up in one giant network. Likewise, life may have originated when the mix of different molecules in the primordial soup passed a certain level of complexity and self-organized into living entities (if so, then life is not a highly improbable chance event, but almost inevitable). Kauffman uses the basic insight of "order for free" to illuminate a staggering range of phenomena. We see how a single-celled embryo can grow to a highly complex organism with over two hundred different cell types. We learn how the science of complexity extends Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection: that self-organization, selection, and chance are the engines of the biosphere. And we gain insights into biotechnology, the stunning magic of the new frontier of genetic engineering--generating trillions of novel molecules to find new drugs, vaccines, enzymes, biosensors, and more. Indeed, Kauffman shows that ecosystems, economic systems, and even cultural systems may all evolve according to similar general laws, that tissues and terra cotta evolve in similar ways. And finally, there is a profoundly spiritual element to Kauffman's thought. If, as he argues, life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.

Kauffman's earlier volume, The Origins of Order, written for specialists, received lavish praise. Stephen Jay Gould called it "a landmark and a classic." And Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson wrote that "there are few people in this world who ever ask the right questions of science, and they are the ones who affect its future most profoundly. Stuart Kauffman is one of these." In At Home in the Universe, this visionary thinker takes you along as he explores new insights into the nature of life."


This book touches on a lot of the issues that Taneem and I have been discussing last term. Its quite remarkable how reality has evolved. It makes one think if organization and complexity are simply non-existant and just that our 'brains' are hardwired to perceive these ideas at a highly conceptual level; or if they are intrinsic to the properities of the universe. I like using ";" if you haven't noticed.

This leads on to another book that I had actually been searching for because I saw it on television a while back as a reinvention of science. Yet all my searches failed (i.e. I got distracted by other results on google). That is, until I spent 3 hours at Chapters just book-browsing and happened up on it. yay!


Future book purchase 2: A New Kind of Science
(Stephen Wolfram's website)

This book is actually available online; however its only 50 odd bucks for a 1000+ page book. And I do not intend to read a 1000+ page technically advanced book on my laptop.

These headings are directly from the website (yay copy-paste), but click here to view additional description of these points.

• Mathematical equations do not capture many of nature’s most essential mechanisms
• Thinking in terms of programs rather than equations opens up a new kind of science
• Even extremely simple programs can produce behavior of immense complexity
• Simple programs can yield behavior startlingly like what we see in nature
• Simple programs can do much more than typical programs written by programmers
• Simple computer experiments reveal a vast world of new phenomena
• Randomness in physics can be explained by mechanisms of simple programs
• Thermodynamic behavior can be explained by mechanisms of simple programs
• Complexity in biology can be explained by mechanisms of simple programs
• Simple programs may lay the groundwork for new insights about financial systems
• Our whole universe may be governed by a single underlying simple program
• Underlying space there may be a simple discrete structure
• Time may have a fundamentally different nature from space
• Systems with exceptionally simple rules can be universal computers
• Many systems in nature are capable of universal computation
• The Principle of Computational Equivalence provides a broad synthesis
• Many systems in nature are computationally equivalent to us as humans
• Many systems in nature can show features like intelligence
• Extraterrestrial intelligence is inevitably difficult to define and recognize
• It is easy to make randomness that we cannot decode
• Apparent complexity in nature follows from computational equivalence
• Many important phenomena are computationally irreducible
• Apparent free will can arise from computational irreducibility
  (this point is also argued in the book Freedom Evolves - fahd)
• Undecidability occurs in natural science, not just mathematics
• The difficulty of doing mathematics reflects computational irreducibility
• Existing mathematics covers only a tiny fraction of all possibilities
• Studying simple programs can form a basis for technical education
• Mechanisms from simple programs suggest new kinds of technology

People interested in bio-eng (as well as other fields such as math, comp sci, physics) should definately take a look at this and/or his previous book: Cellular Automata and Complexity

What's interesting about this book is that Wolfram has apparently reinterpeted classical mathematical representation of science into a programmatic form. I definately agree with his postulate that Mathematics is limited and not necessarily the best way to represent reality. It is possibly because programs function into time and its easy to get very complex actions with a very simply program.

Anyways; I have a ton of books to finish AND study for my 2B term's course material. So most likely I'll get these books as a new year's gift to myself for the winter co-op term.