BookRupert Riedl.
Summary: In this book, the author Rupert Riedl investigates the structural and functional correlations of issues considered as "complex". He brilliantly analyzes the definition of complexity, the occurrence of complexity, the meaning of complexity, and last-but-not-least the way complexity is dealt with professionally. In recent years, our view of the world has been split into ever smaller segments - in part due to the increasing importance of the natural sciences and their associated analytical power. This calls for once again focusing on complexity and the holistic aspects, on interdisciplinary and synoptic approaches. This book is a translation of the original German version "Strukturen der Komplexität", which was published in 2000. The discussion of complexity from the perspective of a biologist has long been overdue when it was published and is still up-to-date.
Contents:
Intro; Foreword; Foreword; Preface; Contents;
Chapter 1: The Issues Tackled Here: An Introduction; 1.1 The Topic at Hand; 1.1.1 Research into Complexity Today; 1.1.2 Complexity: Its Characteristics and Its Meaning; 1.1.3 Why, of All Things, Structures?; 1.2 On Methods; 1.2.1 Morphology, Systems Theory and Gestalt; 1.2.2 Structuralism and Functionalism; 1.2.3 On cognition, Explanation and EE; 1.2.4 Biology as the Conceptual Framework;
Chapter 2: The World and Cognition as a Problem; 2.1 What Appears Reasonable to Us; 2.1.1 What Arose with Consciousness? 2.1.2 The Conceivable Validations of Perception and Knowledge Gain2.1.3 Forms of Perception Versus Communication; 2.2 How Knowledge Is Gained; 2.2.1 The Levels of Cognition; 2.2.2 What All This Can Tell Us About the World; 2.2.3 The Purpose Served by Such Knowledge; 2.3 The Nature of Our Knowledge; 2.3.1 Construction and Reality; 2.3.2 Emergence, Notions and Language; 2.3.3 Perceiving (Cognition) and Explaining;
Chapter 3: The Systems of Cognition; 3.1 Conditions of Perception; 3.1.1 Perception Means Problem Solving; 3.1.2 Fundamentals of Association and Conditioning 3.1.3 The Transition to Cognitive Processes3.2 Processing Consecutive Coincidences; 3.2.1 The Composition of the Algorithm; 3.2.2 Wherein the Seeds of Success Lie; 3.2.3 Wherein the Deficiencies Lie; 3.2.4 How to Overcome the Deficiencies; 3.3 Processing Simultaneous Coincidences; 3.3.1 The Composition of the Algorithm; 3.3.2 The Reasons for Success; 3.3.3 The Deficiencies of the Program; 3.3.4 The Path to Overcoming These Deficiencies; 3.4 On Structures and Classes; 3.4.1 The Evolution of Memory; 3.4.2 Fields of Similarity; 3.4.3 On Structural and Class Hierarchies 4.4.3 The Nature of the Natural System
Chapter 5: The Systems of Explanation and Understanding; 5.1 The Conditions and Our Faculties; 5.1.1 The Preconditions; 5.1.2 The Hypotheses of Causes and Purposes; 5.1.3 Common Sense and Intuition; 5.1.4 The Psychology of Explaining and Understanding; 5.2 Changes in Cultural History; 5.2.1 The Beginnings in Our Culture; 5.2.2 Antiquity and the Middle Ages; 5.2.3 The Modern Era; 5.2.4 The Concepts of Understanding Today; 5.3 The Conditions of Explaining; 5.3.1 On Causal Explanations; 5.3.2 The Double Pyramid of Explanation
Chapter 4: Structuring the Perceived4.1 A Theory of the World; 4.1.1 The Hierarchic Structure of Things; 4.1.2 On Transformation and Emergence; 4.1.3 The Broadest Parameters; 4.2 The Order of Things; 4.2.1 The Process of Reciprocal Enlightenment; 4.2.2 The Three Fundamental Types of Complex Similarity; 4.2.3 The Four Fundamental Forms of Complex Order; 4.3 The Principles of Morphology; 4.3.1 The Theorem of Homology; 4.3.2 Type and Bodyplan; 4.3.3 A Theory of the Phene and Character; 4.4 The Principles of Systematics; 4.4.1 The Weighting Problem; 4.4.2 Optimizing the Class Concepts