A Crude Look at the Whole

In March 2013, Para Limes organized the conference A Crude look at the Whole. It turned out to be an extraordinary meeting, even more so eleven years later. During the conference the speakers, all giants on their own turf, captured the excitement about what the new field of complexity science could mean for understanding our world and molded it in approaches to extract meaning from these budding insights. Now, eleven years later, the (video's of the) talks create a thrill, that may be similar to what Newton felt when he realized that standing on the shoulders of giants allowed him to see what he saw.

In this book we have tried to capture that whole, while at the same time keeping the individual parts in view. We have done so by transcribing and editing the individual presentations, adding a summary to all of them and indicating the relevance of each of the presentations to ongoing and further explorations.

Sample Chapter(s)
Preface
Chapter 1: A Crude Look at the Whole

Contents:

• Preface
• A Crude Look at the Whole (Murray Gell-Mann)
• A Theory of Meaning: Or How A Schema Reduces Complexity (Robert Axelrod)
• Curiosity, Innovation, and Complexity (Helga Nowotny)
• Land Use, Economy, and Complexity (Kristian Lindgren)
• Signals and Boundaries — Gated-Urn Models for a Crude Look at the Whole (John Holland)
• Innovation and Diversity (Douglas Erwin)
• A Dynamic Constructivist Approach to Culture (Ying-Yi Hong)
• A Complex World from a Virus's Point of View (Peter M A Sloot)
• Collective Phenomena, Collective Motion, and Collective Action in Ecological Systems (Simon Levin)
• Resilience for Human Development in the Anthropocene (Johan Rockstrom)
• Isotope Chemistry, Climate Change and the Fate of the Chinese Dynasties: Implications for the Future of Asian Societies (Wang Xian Feng)
• A Crude Look at Governance and Complexity by a Former Civil Servant (Peter Ho)

Readership: Potential readers of the book are expected to be researchers interested in complexity research, graduate students looking for their research directions, university lecturers whose teaching involves introductions of the aspects of interdisciplinary features of scientific exploration, and people that are interested in understanding the complex nature of our globe and the need to address the challenged resulting from that.