What is it about?
The behavior of complex multi-scale systems, from physics to ecology to economics, is notoriously difficult to understand and predict, especially when such systems are changing in response to disturbance. This paper presents and illustrates with examples a new theory of complex systems dynamics that combines information-theoretic concepts with more traditional mechanistic methods.
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Why is it important?
The spread of diseases, the survival of stressed forests, the changing climate all exemplify how the well being of humanity is tied to the fate of disturbed complex systems. Our work advances our capacity to predict the behavior of such systems.
Perspectives
This work has been, for me, a fifteen-year effort that began with my search for a purely information-theory-based approach to predicting patterns observed in complex systems. That effort resulted in a theory that successfully predicted patterns observed in static ecosystems but failed dramatically in disturbed ecosystems. My search for a theory that could apply to dynamic as well as static systems led to our new paper in PNAS; it describes an extension of that earlier work to a more universal theory of complex systems applicable to systems undergoing change. Moreover it can be applied to complex systems found across many disciplines.
John Harte
University of California Berkeley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Dynamical theory of complex systems with two-way micro–macro causation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408676121.
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