Selforganization in Complex Systems: The Past, Present, and Future of Synergetics


Book Description

This proceedings volume contains talks and poster presentations from the International Symposium "Self-Organization in Complex Systems: The Past, Present, and Future of Synergetics", which took place at Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg, an Institute of Advanced Studies, in Delmenhorst, Germany, during the period November 13 - 16, 2012. The Symposium was organized in honour of Hermann Haken, who celebrated his 85th birthday in 2012. With his fundamental theory of Synergetics he had laid the mathematical-physical basis for describing and analyzing self-organization processes in a diversity of fields of research. The quest for common and universal principles of self-organization in complex systems was clearly covered by the wide range of interdisciplinary topics reported during the Symposium. These extended from complexity in classical systems and quantum systems over self-organisation in neuroscience even to the physics of finance. Moreover, by combining a historical view with a present status report the Symposium conveyed an impression of the allure and potency of this branch of research as well as its applicability in the future.




Information and Self-Organization


Book Description

Complex systems are ubiquitous, and practically all branches of science ranging from physics through chemistry and biology to economics and sociology have to deal with them. In this book we wish to present concepts and methods for dealing with complex systems from a unifying point of view. Therefore it may be of inter est to graduate students, professors and research workers who are concerned with theoretical work in the above-mentioned fields. The basic idea for our unified ap proach sterns from that of synergetics. In order to find unifying principles we shall focus our attention on those situations where a complex system changes its macroscopic behavior qualitatively, or in other words, where it changes its macroscopic spatial, temporal or functional structure. Until now, the theory of synergetics has usually begun with a microscopic or mesoscopic description of a complex system. In this book we present an approach which starts out from macroscopic data. In particular we shall treat systems that acquire their new structure without specific interference from the outside; i. e. systems which are self-organizing. The vehicle we shall use is information. Since this word has several quite different meanings, all of which are important for our purpose, we shall discuss its various aspects. These range from Shannon information, from which all semantics has been exorcised, to the effects of information on receivers and the self-creation of meaning.




Dynamic systems theory and embodiment in psychotherapy research. A new look at process and outcome


Book Description

In an attempt to cease from reducing the world and its (emergent) phenomena to linear modeling and analytic dissection, Dynamic Systems Theories (DST) and Embodiment theories and methods aim at accounting for the complex, dynamic, and non-linear phenomena that we constantly deal with in psychology. For instance, DST and Embodiment can enrich psychology’s understanding of the communicative process both in clinical and non-clinical settings. In psychotherapy, an important amount of research has shown that – next to other ingredients – the therapeutic relationship is the most important active factor contributing to psychotherapy outcome. These findings give communication a central role in the psychotherapy process. In the traditional view, the underlying model of understanding psychotherapy processes is that of a number of components summatively coming together enabling us to make a linear causal prediction. Yet, communication is inherently dynamic. A shift to viewing the communication process in psychotherapy as a field dynamic phenomenon helps us to take into account nonlinear phenomena, such as feedback processes within and between persons. We thus propose an embodied enactive dynamic systems view as a new theoretical and methodological perspective that can more realistically capture what happens among and between two persons in psychotherapy. This view reaches beyond the current narrow model of psychotherapy research. DST and Embodied Enactive Approaches can offer solutions to the loss of non-linear phenomena, the complex dynamics of reality, and the holistic level of analysis. DST and Embodied Enactive Approaches have developed not in a single discipline but in a joined movement based on various fields such as physics, biology, robotics, anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology, and have only recently entered clinical theorizing. The two new paradigms have already triggered a rethinking of the therapeutic exchange by recognizing the embodied nature of psychological and communicative phenomena. Their integration opens up a promising scenario in the field of psychotherapy research, developing new, profoundly transdisciplinary, theoretical concepts, methodologies, and standards of knowledge. The notion of field dynamics enables us to account for the role of the communicational context in the regulation of intra-psychological processes, while at the same time avoiding the pitfalls of an ontologization of the hierarchy of systemic organization. Moreover, the new approach implements methodological strategies that can transcend the conventional opposition between idiographic and nomothetic sciences.




Determinism and Self-Organization of Human Perception and Performance


Book Description

This book discusses human perception and performance within the framework of the theory of self-organizing systems. To that end, it presents a variety of phenomena and experimental findings in the research field, and provides an introduction to the theory of self-organization, with a focus on amplitude equations, order parameter and Lotka-Volterra equations. The book demonstrates that relating the experimental findings to the mathematical models provides an explicit account for the causal nature of human perception and performance. In particular, the notion of determinism versus free will is discussed in this context. The book is divided into four main parts, the first of which discusses the relationship between the concept of determinism and the fundamental laws of physics. The second part provides an introduction to using the self-organization approach from physics to understand human perception and performance, a strategy used throughout the remainder of the book to connect experimental findings and mathematical models. In turn, the third part of the book focuses on investigating performance guided by perception: climbing stairs and grasping tools are presented in detail. Perceptually relevant bifurcation parameters in the mathematical models are also identified, e.g. in the context of walk-to-run gait transitions. Chains of perceptions and actions together with their underlying mechanisms are then presented, and a number of experimental phenomena – such as selective attention, priming, child play, bistable perception, retrieval-induced forgetting, functional fixedness and memory effects exhibiting hysteresis with positive or negative sign – are discussed. Human judgment making, internal experiences such as dreaming and thinking, and Freud’s concept of consciousness are also addressed. The fourth and last part of the book explores several specific topics such as learning, social interactions between two people, life trajectories, and applications in clinical psychology. In particular, episodes of mania and depression under bipolar disorder, perception under schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive rituals are discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students in psychology, physics, applied mathematics, kinesiology, and the sport sciences who want to learn about the foundations of the field. Written for a mixed audience, the experiments and concepts are presented using non-technical language throughout. In addition, each chapter includes more advanced sections for modelers in the fields of physics and applied mathematics.




Psychosocial Development in Adolescence


Book Description

Over recent years, it has become clear that group-based approaches cannot directly be used to understand individual adolescent development. For that reason, interest in dynamic systems theory, or DST, has increased rapidly. Psychosocial Development in Adolescence: Insights from the Dynamic Systems Approach covers state-of-the-art insights into adolescent development that have resulted from adopting a dynamic systems approach. The first chapter of the book provides a basic introduction into dynamic systems principles and explains their consequences for the study of psychosocial development in adolescence. Subsequently, different experts discuss why and how we should apply a dynamic systems approach to the study of the adolescent transition period and psychological interventions. Various examples of the application of a dynamic systems approach are showcased, ranging from basic to more advanced techniques, as well as the insights they have generated. These applications cover a variety of fundamental topics in adolescent development, ranging from the development of identity, morality, sexuality, and peer networks, to more applied topics such as psychological interventions, educational dropout, and talent development. This book will be invaluable to both beginner and expert-level students and researchers interested in a dynamic systems approach and in the insights that it has yielded for adolescent development.




Agents and Artificial Intelligence


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2013, held in Barcelona, Spain, in February 2013. The 20 revised full papers presented together with one invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 269 submissions. The papers are organized in two topical sections on artificial intelligence and on agents.




The Ecological Brain


Book Description

The Ecological Brain is the first book of its kind, using complexity science to integrate the seemingly disparate fields of ecological psychology and neuroscience. The book develops a unique framework for unifying investigations and explanations of mind that span brain, body, and environment: the NeuroEcological Nexus Theory (NExT). Beginning with an introduction to the history of the fields, the author provides an assessment of why ecological psychology and neuroscience are commonly viewed as irreconcilable methods for investigating and explaining cognition, intelligent behavior, and the systems that realize them. The book then progresses to its central aim: presenting a unified investigative and explanatory framework offering concepts, methods, and theories applicable across neural and ecological scales of investigation. By combining the core principles of ecological psychology, neural population dynamics, and synergetics under a unified complexity science approach, NExT offers a compressive investigative framework to explain and understand neural, bodily, and environmental contributions to perception-action and other forms of intelligent behavior and thought. The book progresses the conversation around the role of brains in ecological psychology, as well as bodies and environments in neuroscience. It is essential reading for all students of ecological psychology, perception, cognitive sciences, and neuroscience, as well as anyone interested in the history and philosophy of the brain/mind sciences and their state-of-the-art methods and theories.




Synergetics


Book Description

The spontaneous formation of well organized structures out of germs or even out of chaos is one of the most fascinating phenomena and most challenging problems scientists are confronted with. Such phenomena are an experience of our daily life when we observe the growth of plants and animals. Thinking of much larger time scales, scientists are led into the problems of evolution, and, ultimately, of the origin of living matter. When we try to explain or understand in some sense these extremely complex biological phenomena it is a natural question, whether pro cesses of self-organization may be found in much simpler systems of the un animated world. In recent years it has become more and more evident that there exist numerous examples in physical and chemical systems where well organized spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal structures arise out of chaotic states. Furthermore, as in living of these systems can be maintained only by a flux of organisms, the functioning energy (and matter) through them. In contrast to man-made machines, which are to exhibit special structures and functionings, these structures develop spon devised It came as a surprise to many scientists that taneously-they are self-organizing. numerous such systems show striking similarities in their behavior when passing from the disordered to the ordered state. This strongly indicates that the function of such systems obeys the same basic principles. In our book we wish to explain ing such basic principles and underlying conceptions and to present the mathematical tools to cope with them.




COVID-19 Epidemiology and Virus Dynamics


Book Description

This book addresses the COVID-19 pandemic from a quantitative perspective based on mathematical models and methods largely used in nonlinear physics. It aims to study COVID-19 epidemics in countries and SARS-CoV-2 infections in individuals from the nonlinear physics perspective and to model explicitly COVID-19 data observed in countries and virus load data observed in COVID-19 patients. The first part of this book provides a short technical introduction into amplitude spaces given by eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and amplitudes.In the second part of the book, mathematical models of epidemiology are introduced such as the SIR and SEIR models and applied to describe COVID-19 epidemics in various countries around the world. In the third part of the book, virus dynamics models are considered and applied to infections in COVID-19 patients. This book is written for researchers, modellers, and graduate students in physics and medicine, epidemiology and virology, biology, applied mathematics, and computer sciences. This book identifies the relevant mechanisms behind past COVID-19 outbreaks and in doing so can help efforts to stop future COVID-19 outbreaks and other epidemic outbreaks. Likewise, this book points out the physics underlying SARS-CoV-2 infections in patients and in doing so supports a physics perspective to address human immune reactions to SARS-CoV-2 infections and similar virus infections.




Multiagent System Technologies


Book Description

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies, MATES 2014, held in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 2014. The 9 full papers and 7 short papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 31 submissions. The book also contains 2 invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections named: mechanisms, negotiation, and game theory; multiagent planning, learning, and control; and multiagent systems engineering, modeling and simulation.




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