W. Ross Ashby

The brilliant British psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and mathematician Ross Ashby was one of the pioneers in early and mid-phase cybernetics and thereby one of the leading progenitors of modern complexity theory. Not one to take either commonly used terms or popular notions for granted, Ashby probed deeply into the meaning of supposedly self-organizing systems. At the time of the following article, he had been working on a mathematical formalism of his homeostat, a hypothetical machine established on an axiomatic, set theoretical foundation that was supposed to offer a sufficient description of a living organism’s learning and adaptive intelligence. Ashby’s homeostat had a small number of essential variables serving to maintain its operation over a wide range of environmental conditions so that if the latter changed and thereby shifted the variables beyond the range where the homeostat could safely function, a new ‘higher’ level of the machine was activated in order to randomly reset the lower level’s internal connections or organization (see Dupuy, 2000). Like the role of random mutations during evolution, if the new range set at random proved functional, the homeostat survived, otherwise it expired.

One of Ashby’s goals was to repudiate that interpretation of the notion of self-organization, one commonly held to this day, which would have it that either a machine or a living organism could by itself change its own organization (or, in his phraseology, the functional mappings). For Ashby, self-organization in this sense was a bit of superfluous metaphysics since he believed not only could his formalism by itself completely delineate the homeostat’s lower level organization, the adaptive novelty of his homeostat was purely the result of its upper level randomization that could reorganize the lower level and not some innate propensity for autonomous change. We offer Ashby’s careful reasoning here as an enlightening guide for coming to terms with key ideas in complexity theory whose genuine significance lies less with facile bandying about and more with an intensive and extensive examination of the underlying assumptions.

Read the full article at: journal.emergentpublications.com

Also at http://femto4.chem.elte.hu/entropia/InfoTheoryPapers/Ashby1962.pdf 

Researchers say we’re on the cusp of “GoPro physics,” where a camera can point at an event and an algorithm can identify the underlying physics equation.

Read the full article at: www.quantamagazine.org

Marina Cortês, Stuart A. Kauffman, Andrew R. Liddle, Lee Smolin
We investigate solutions to the TAP equation, a phenomenological implementation of the Theory of the Adjacent Possible. Several implementations of TAP are studied, with potential applications in a range of topics including economics, social sciences, environmental change, evolutionary biological systems, and the nature of physical laws. The generic behaviour is an extended plateau followed by a sharp explosive divergence. We find accurate analytic approximations for the blow-up time that we validate against numerical simulations, and explore the properties of the equation in the vicinity of equilibrium between innovation and extinction. A particular variant, the two-scale TAP model, replaces the initial plateau with a phase of exponential growth, a widening of the TAP equation phenomenology that may enable it to be applied in a wider range of contexts.

Read the full article at: arxiv.org

Herbert A. Simon
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Vol. 106, No. 6 (Dec. 12, 1962), pp. 467-482

A number of proposals have been advanced in recent years for the development of “general systems theory” which, abstracting from properties peculiar to physical, biological, or social systems, would be applicable to all of them. We might well feel that, while the goal is laudable, systems of such diverse kinds could hardly be expected to have any nontrivial properties in common. Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial.

Read the full article at: www.jstor.org

Also at https://www2.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/ArchitectureOfComplexity.HSimon1962.pdf