Thinking Systemically About Complex Systems

Thinking Systemically About Complex Systems

Complex systems: Network thinking

In this article, I discuss some recent ideas in complex systems on the topic of networks, contained in or inspired by three recent complex systems books. The general science of networks is the subject of Albert-Lazlo Barabási’s Linked [A.-L. Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks, Perseus, New York, 2002] and Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees [D. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Ag...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'