Must Complex Systems Theory Be Materialistic?

So far, the sciences of complexity have received less attention from philosophers than from scientists. Responding to Salthe’s (Found Sci 15, 4(6):357–367, 2010a) model of evolution, I focus on its metaphysical implications, asking whether the implications of his canonical developmental trajectory (CDT) must be materialistic as his reading proposes.     

Participating in the Meaning of Life, a Contributor’s Critique

The aim of this contribution is to critically examine the metaphysical presuppositions that prevail in (Stewart in Found Sci 15(4):395–409, 2010a) answer to the question “are we in the midst of a developmental process?” as expressed in his statement “that humanity has discovered the trajectory of past evolution and can see how it is likely to continue in the future”.     

On the Nature of Initial Conditions and Fundamental Parameters in Physics and Cosmology

The cosmological theory of the author, discussed in (Greben in Found Sci 15(2):153–176, 2010), has a number of implications for the interpretation of initial conditions and the fine-tuning problem as discussed by Vidal (Found Sci 15(4):375–393, 2010a).     

Friends of Wisdom?

This commentary addresses the question of the meaning of critique in relation to objectivism or dogmatism. Inspired by Kant’s critical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, it defines the first in terms of conditionality, the second in terms of oppositionality. It works out an application on the basis of Salthe’s (Found Sci 15 4(6):357–367, 2010a) paper on development and evolution, where competition is criticized in oppositional, more than in conditional terms.     

Scale Relativity: an Extended Paradigm for Physics and Biology?

With scale relativity theory, Laurent Nottale has provided a powerful conceptual and mathematical framework with numerous validated predictions that has fundamental implications and applications for all sciences. We discuss how this extended framework reviewed in Nottale (Found Sci 152 (3):101–152, 2010a) may help facilitating integration across multiple size and time frames in systems biology, and the development of a scale relative biology with increased explanatory power.     

Symmetries and Symmetry-Breakings: The Fabric of Physical Interactions and the Flow of Time

This short note develops some ideas along the lines of the stimulating paper by Heylighen (Found Sci 15 4(3):345–356, 2010a). It summarizes a theme in several writings with Francis Bailly, downloadable from this author’s web page. The “geometrization” of time and causality is the common ground of the analysis hinted here and in Heylighen’s paper. Heylighen adds a logical notion, consistency, in order to understand a possible origin of the selective process that may have originated this organization of natural phenomena. We will join our perspectives by hinting to some gnoseological complexes, common to mathematics and physics, which may shed light on the issues raised by Heylighen.     

Competing Definitions of Information Versus Entropy in Physics

As was mentioned by Nicolas Lori in his (Found Sci, 2010) commentary, the definition of Information in Physics is something about which not all authors agreed. According to physicists like me Information decreases when Entropy increases (so entropy would be a negative measure of information), while many physicists, seemingly the majority of them, are convinced of the contrary (even in the camp of Quantum Information Theoreticians). In this reply I reproduce, and make more precise, some of my arguments, that appeared here and there in my (2010) paper, in order to clarify the presentation of my personal point of view on the subject.     

Model,Metamodel and Topology

This reply to Gash’s (Found Sci 2013) commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci 2013) answers the three questions raised and at the same time opens up new questions.     

Revealing the Face of Isis

This reply to Gash’s (Found Sci 2014) commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci 2014b) answers the questions raised and at the same time opens up new questions.     

Embracing the Political in Technology and Transition Studies: A Response to Philip Vergragt and Bram Bos

This article is a short reaction to the comments of Vergragt (Found Sci, 2012) and Bos (Found Sci, 2012) on my article “Sustainability transition and the nature of technology” (Paredis in Found Sci 16(2–3):195–225, Paredis 2011). I start by situating current transition research in the sustainability debate. The relation between the two is simultaneously specific and vague: specific about processes at work during transitions, vague about the content and direction of the change. I then move on to a discussion of how a better conceptualisation of technology could strengthen the transition framework. I want to thank the two reviewers for their critical remarks, that stimulated me to better explain my position.     

The Meaning of Life in a Developing Universe

The evolution of life on Earth has produced an organism that is beginning to model and understand its own evolution and the possible future evolution of life in the universe. These models and associated evidence show that evolution on Earth has a trajectory. The scale over which living processes are organized cooperatively has increased progressively, as has its evolvability. Recent theoretical advances raise the possibility that this trajectory is itself part of a wider developmental process. According to these theories, the developmental process has been shaped by a yet larger evolutionary dynamic that involves the reproduction of universes. This evolutionary dynamic has tuned the key parameters of the universe to increase the likelihood that life will emerge and produce outcomes that are successful in the larger process (e.g. a key outcome may be to produce life and intelligence that intentionally reproduces the universe and tunes the parameters of ‘offspring’ universes). Theory suggests that when life emerges on a planet, it moves along this trajectory of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if organisms emerge that decide to advance the developmental process intentionally. The organisms must be prepared to make this commitment even though the ultimate nature and destination of the process is uncertain, and may forever remain unknown. Organisms that complete this transition to intentional evolution will drive the further development of life and intelligence in the universe. Humanity’s increasing understanding of the evolution of life in the universe is rapidly bringing it to the threshold of this major evolutionary transition.     

The Constructive Realist Account of Science and Its Application to Ilya Prigogine’s Conception of Laws of Nature

Sciences are often regarded as providing the best, or, ideally, exact, knowledge of the world, especially in providing laws of nature. Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of non-equilibrium chemical processes—this being also an important attempt to bridge the gap between exact and non-exact sciences [mentioned in the Presentation Speech by Professor Stig Claesson (nobelprize.org, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977)]—has had this ideal in mind when trying to formulate a new kind of science. Philosophers of science distinguish theory and reality, examining relations between these two. Nancy Cartwright’s distinction of fundamental and phenomenological laws, Rein Vihalemm’s conception of the peculiarity of the exact sciences, and Ronald Giere’s account of models in science and science as a set of models are deployed in this article to criticise the common view of science and analyse Ilya Prigogine’s view in particular. We will conclude that on a more abstract, philosophical level, Prigogine’s understanding of science doesn’t differ from the common understanding.

Fixed or Probable Ideas?

This commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci, 2013) raises questions about the dynamic versus static nature of the model proposed, and in addition asks whether the model might be used to explain ethical flexibility and rigidity.     

Data Analysis: Models or Techniques?

In this commentary to Napoletani et al. (Found Sci 16:1–20, 2011), we argue that the approach the authors adopt suggests that neural nets are mathematical techniques rather than models of cognitive processing, that the general approach dates as far back as Ptolemy, and that applied mathematics is more than simply applying results from pure mathematics.     

n-Way Metrics

We study a family of n-way metrics that generalize the usual two-way metric. The n-way metrics are totally symmetric maps from E ⁿ into \mathbbR _{\geqslant 0} {\mathbb{R}_{ \geqslant 0}} . The three-way metrics introduced by Joly and Le Calvé (1995) and Heiser and Bennani (1997) and the n-way metrics studied in Deza and Rosenberg (2000) belong to this family. It is shown how the n-way metrics and n-way distance measures are related to (n − 1)-way metrics, respectively, (n − 1)-way distance measures.     

Coherence of Our Best Scientific Theories

Putnam in Realism in mathematics and Elsewhere, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1975) infers from the success of a scientific theory to its approximate truth and the reference of its key term. Laudan in Philos Sci 49:19–49 (1981) objects that some past theories were successful, and yet their key terms did not refer, so they were not even approximately true. Kitcher in The advancement of science, Oxford University Press, New York (1993) replies that the past theories are approximately true because their working posits are true, although their idle posits are false. In contrast, I argue that successful theories which cohere with each other are approximately true, and that their key terms refer. My position is immune to Laudan’s counterexamples to Putnam’s inference and yields a solution to a problem with Kitcher’s position.     

Artificial Diamonds are Still Diamonds

As a reply to the commentary (Lenhard in Found Sci, 2012), we stress here that structural understanding of data analysis techniques is the natural counterpart to the lack of understanding of phenomena in agnostic science. We suggest moreover that the dynamics of computational processes, and their parallels with the dynamics of natural processes, will increasingly be, possibly, the driving force of the development of data analysis.     

The Arrow of Time and Meaning

All the attempts to find the justification of the privileged evolution of phenomena exclusively in the external world need to refer to the inescapable fact that we are living in such an asymmetric universe. This leads us to look for the origin of the “arrow of time” in the relationship between the subject and the world. The anthropic argument shows that the arrow of time is the condition of the possibility of emergence and maintenance of life in the universe. Moreover, according to Bohr’s, Poincaré’s and Watanabe’s analysis, this agreement between the earlier-later direction of entropy increase and the past-future direction of life is the very condition of the possibility for meaningful action, representation and creation. Beyond this relationship of logical necessity between the meaning process and the arrow of time the question of their possible physical connection is explored. To answer affirmatively to this question, the meaning process is modelled as an evolving tree-like structure, called “Semantic Time”, where thermodynamic irreversibility can be shown. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river ; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger ; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. – (Jorge Luis Borges)     

Optimization Strategies for Two-Mode Partitioning

Two-mode partitioning is a relatively new form of clustering that clusters both rows and columns of a data matrix. In this paper, we consider deterministic two-mode partitioning methods in which a criterion similar to k-means is optimized. A variety of optimization methods have been proposed for this type of problem. However, it is still unclear which method should be used, as various methods may lead to non-global optima. This paper reviews and compares several optimization methods for two-mode partitioning. Several known methods are discussed, and a new fuzzy steps method is introduced. The fuzzy steps method is based on the fuzzy c-means algorithm of Bezdek (1981) and the fuzzy steps approach of Heiser and Groenen (1997) and Groenen and Jajuga (2001). The performances of all methods are compared in a large simulation study. In our simulations, a two-mode k-means optimization method most often gives the best results. Finally, an empirical data set is used to give a practical example of two-mode partitioning. We would like to thank two anonymous referees whose comments have improved the quality of this paper. We are also grateful to Peter Verhoef for providing the data set used in this paper.