Customer Reviews

Thinking in Complexity: The Complex Dynamics of Matter, Mind, and Mankind

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[A review of the 4th Edition, 2003.]

This book studies complexity and nonlinearity across a diverse range of applications. Much of the book revolves around organic evolution and the evolution of a sentient mind. And how complexity analysis might aid in the understanding of these fields. Not the least in devising deeper forms of artificial intelligence.

So intriguing techniques like cellular automata and neural networks are studied. There is a fair amount of speculation as to how these and other topics might ultimately relate to sentience or consciousness. But the musings are grounded in solid science. Like that of a Hopfield system or a Boltzmann machine. This 4th edition is a good reflection of the boundaries of our knowledge.

The book covers a broad field - all parts in close connection with the others and its background in modern science and historic cultural connotations. The theoretical aspects are merged with lively explanations. Readable for the non-specialist, understandable for the average science-educated and meaningful for the specilaists, both in physical systems science and in philosophy. A top-notch guide through this topic of multidisciplinary novelties.

This book is an extremely well-informed cataloguing of the many areas of human experience in which self-organisation and complexity phenomena play an important role. However the writer's style becomes very heavy as a result of transferring German constructions into English - so much so that I was forced to skim read many sections.