Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and Complexity

Scientific, technological, and cultural changes have always had an impact upon philosophy. They can force a change in the way we perceive the world, reveal new kinds of phenomena to be understood, and provide new ways of understanding phenomena. Complexity science, immersed in a culture of information, is having a diverse but particularly significant impact upon philosophy. Previous ideas do not necessarily sit comfortably with the new paradigm, resulting in new ideas or new interpretations of old ideas.In this unprecedented interdisciplinary volume, researchers from different backgrounds join efforts to update thinking upon philosophical questions with developments in the scientific study of complex systems. The contributions focus on a wide range of topics, but share the common goal of increasing our understanding and improving our descriptions of our complex world. This revolutionary debate includes contributions from leading experts, as well as young researchers proposing fresh ideas.

Restricted Complexity, General Complexity (E Morin); Complexity Science as an Aspect of the Complexity of Science (D C Mikulecky); On the Importance of a Certain Slowness (P Cilliers); Simplicity Is Not Truth-Indicative (B Edmonds); Why Diachronically Emergent Properties Must Also Be Salient (C Imbert); Some Problems for an Ontology of Complexity (M McGuire); Physical Complexity and Cognitive Evolution (P Jedlicka); Informational Dynamic Systems: Autonomy, Information, Function (W Riofrio); The Complexity of Information-Processing Tasks in Vision (J Symons); and other papers.