Emergence in Complex, Cognitive, Social and Biological Systems
Emergence in Complex, Cognitive, Social and Biological Systems
Gianfranco Minati and Eliano Pessa (Editors)Kluwer Academic/Plenum PublishersNew York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow2002xvi+394 pp.ISBN 0-306-47358-5hardback $125/£87.50/ 144
When the Italian Systems Society, Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca sui Sistemi (AIRS) decided to devote its Second National Conference to the very important topic of EMERGENCE they faced an enormous challenge. This text reports the results by presenting the Proceedings of the Conference on Emergence in Complex, Cognitive, Social and Biological Systems, that was held on 9-10 November 2001, in Castel Ivano (Trento), Italy.
Both cyberneticians and systemists are aware of the great problems that arise when attempts were made to translate papers presented verbally by scientists into a published text. So many such books on conference proceedings end up merely as a collection of the summaries or abstracts of the presentations. Editors loathe to ask presenters after the conference to update or rewrite their contributions in the light of the speakers interaction with the conference participants. Often the discussions that follow a presentation are not reflected in the published text. One is also sorry for the compilers of the conference proceedings who, invariably have only the pre-conference submitted papers as the basis of their edited work. They would have been unlikely to have attended all the presentations in person.
Forty-six conference contributors presented their ideas and perspectives in 32 papers around the subject of Emergence. Their different views were collected together in eight conference sessions that dealt with modelling, cognitive science, theoretical issues in systemics, education, systemic approach and information technology, general systems, management, and systemic approaches to human care.
In addition, the final conference panel discussion of synergetics and systemics was included in the book in the form of invited contributions from some of the participants.
Readers of this review, like any potential readers of this book will be asking what is meant by Emergence. The editors in their preface do their best to explain what it means and attempt to answer some of the obvious questions that come to mind. They say that:
… we claim that the main role of systemics is to give contributions at the meta-modelling level; and emergence is just a property pertaining, to this level; without this contribution every scientific progress will be blocked; the science and the engineering of the future will be almost exclusively the science and engineering of emergent phenomena – in a world of systems, and not of aggregates.
They continue their preface by asking, rather than answering some of the most pertinent questions. They ask, for example:
What are the possible definitions of Emergence?Is it possible to build many-level models having more than the two usual levels of description(macroscopic and microscopic)?Up to what point is it possible to control the occurrence of Emergence?
They also ask other questions about building models and also about building a General Theory of the Interaction between the observer and the external world,able to contain, as a particular case, the quantum theory, but without using the traditional formalism of quantum theory?
Whilst we are told that Systemics should contribute to the answering of these questions both in a conceptual and in a technical (that is in a mathematical)way.
Readers of the book can justifiably expect to find some of the answers in the ten sections of the book that follow. What they found, however, were some excellent papers which certainly contributed to the literature of systems if not specifically to the conference theme of Emergence.
A number of papers presented at the conference must be praised for their content, lucidity and contribution to systems – if not necessarily to the theme, however, broad a definition of Emergence is taken. The Opening Lecture by Professor Hermann Haken of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Center of Synergetics (Stuttgart, Germany) provided a much-needed overview of Synergetics. He believes that Synergetics deals with complex systems that are practically ubiquitous. He looked at complex systems and dealt with many important considerations – its concepts, strategy, the Synergetic Computer. The reader of the proceedings, however, will need to fit this to the conference theme.
The papers that follow and are included in the book are both varied and interesting. To many of the contributors, expressing their ideas in a mathematical form comes naturally and the editors have unlike the compilers of so many new “systems” books, included them without worrying about the reactions of the many non-mathematical systemists. Even so, there are still sufficient non-mathematical contributions to make the text acceptable to them.
Obviously, with some of the reservations already discussed, it is not a book to be purchased if any sort of continuity of theme is expected. It would make an excellent “shelf” book for a systems or cybernetics department library or the reference section of any academic or institutional organisation’s library where potential readers have an interest in science and systems.
The book is well-worth pursuing but it does act as a warning to future conference organisers and to publishers who demand an all-embracing title for a collection of papers, however important, which in fact are “state-of-the-art”contributions to an established discipline.
D. M. Hutton
