Complex Systems History
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| Complex Systems History |
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[edit] Introduction
The basis of the complex systems approach to the study of the world (http://necsi.org/guide/index.html) is the idea that collective behaviors are universal, i.e. systems that at first appear to be different in fact often share similar properties and behaviors.
Since Aristotle and still most frequently today, the western mode of thinking about the world is fundamentally domain-specific; the world is seen as made of parts which should be hierarchically classified because they are intrinsically different from each other. Thus even though the most basic elements of all matter (atoms) are the same, their collective behavior is not considered as being universal. With this view science gradually became more and more ramified into different fields and subfields: social sciences, themselves divided into psychology, anthropology, economics, etc; natural sciences: biology, chemistry, physics; and pure sciences: mathematics, and computer science. This had the disadvantage of little interaction between the different fields and therefore little benefit being drawn between them. Moreover this mode of thinking was appropriate as long as we focused on simple systems, where interactions between components are not that important. It is however not sufficient for understanding complex systems, where interactions between components matter.
However, it can be argued that, because systems are complex, trying to understand them as a whole without first implementing tools and concepts for doing so would have been difficult. Thus, similarly to the complex systems approach where one first defines the relevant agents and then defines their interactions, it can also be thought that throughout history we first developed domain-specific tools and ideas to understand simple and specific objects and behaviors. Today, with the realization that the world is not merely composed of atoms, planets, animals, people, etc, but rather is composed of systems, themselves made of universal objects exhibiting universal behaviors, these concepts and tools can now be brought together into a general framework for understanding complex systems.
Retracing the concepts and tools that led us to that realization and to the complex systems approach is not only interesting but also allows us to better grasp the necessity of that approach, as these advancements were often made necessary due to the failure of the reductionist or domain-specific approach. Also these advancements in general are characterized by a change in view point. Behaviors which appear difficult to understand with the reductionist view often become obvious and simple when one changes to the complex systems view, or when one draws inspiration from systems from other fields. Therefore knowledge of the changes in view points that science went through might teach us how to think about things and problems in a different way.
Here we wish to show how many of the scientific tools and ideas which were developed throughout history in the different fields of science are part of the universal complex systems approach of understanding the world. This then becomes a history of complex systems ideas, linked to more current ideas through the notion that they are applicable across disciplines. We will link them also to basic concepts of the modern complex systems approach: objects, structure, environment, emergence, universality, interactions, scale, space, evolution.
Note that one of the main driving forces in the development of present day complex systems concepts was the interest that we have in ourselves. Several major scientific fields have evolved around the study of the human being – sociology, history, anthropology, cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, to mention just the most prominent ones. In all those fields, a complex systems approach can overcome limitations of the reductionism paradigm.
Our aim in this brief history of complex systems studies is to provide a retrospective view of some of the intellectual developments relevant to the present state of the art and the formation of complex systems as a scientific endeavor on its own.
