Goldstein, Jeffrey. “Emergence, radical novelty, and the philosophy of mathematics.” NATO ASI SERIES A LIFE SCIENCES 320 (2000): 133-152.
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Complex systems research has sparked a resurgence of interest in emergence-- a resurgence since the movement called Emergent Evolutionism in the 1920’s and 30’s considered emergence as a fundamental principle of nature that could explain puzzling aspects of evolution while steering a mid-course between mechanism and vitalism. Although this movement died-out within two decades of its birth, the idea of emergence occasionally found its way into the philosophies of biology and neuroscience. Now, as a result of research in Artificial Life, Neural Nets, Genetic Programming, and similar areas, emergence has re-emerged, but this time within a more rigorous scientific and mathematical setting. Several avenues of current research, notably models from Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Theory (NDS) and computational simulations from Artificial Life, have decidedly enriched our understanding of emergence. Yet, emergence has remained an elusive concept, primarily due to the lack of suitable constructs for investigating structure and patterns. Not at all helping this situation is the fact that emergence carries conceptual baggage having to do with causality, determinism, reductionism, and so on.
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