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IV. Ecosmomics: Independent, UniVersal, Complex Network Systems and a Genetic Code-Script Source

4. Universality Affirmations: A Critical Complementarity

Convergent Paths towards Universality in Complex Systems. Google Title Terms. This event is a Santa Fe Institute workshop with a National Science Foundation sponsorship held in Alexandria, VA in December, 2019. The NSF director France Cordoba introduced the meeting. It was convened, as the quotes say, because it is apparent that two decades into 21st century that nonlinear studies across many physical to animal to societal realms were just now achieving a strong, integrative convergence upon similar uniVerse to human phenomena due to a common, bicameral code. Danielle Bassett, Geoffrey West, Jessica Flack, and Albert Barabasi were among the many speakers. In regard, Google for a Beyond Borders column by David Krakauer SFI President for entries such as Complexity & Universality and Cantor’s Invisible Chemistry.

Meeting Summary: This workshop will bring together scientists from very diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including psychologists, physicists, ecologists, biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, information theorists, and others to explore the recent discovery of universal properties of complex systems. It will address universality in five primary areas: Information Processing and Collective Computation, Adaptive Dynamics, Neural Systems, Interactions and Energetics, and Scaling. The workshop will bring together leaders across diverse disciplines to discuss and explore common mechanisms underlying a range of features of complex systems. (SFI title site)

In each of these areas, a range of universal phenomena have been observed that point towards fundamental constraints of structure, energy, resources, and information. These discoveries resemble recent work related to the relative primacy of matter versus information in the structuring of the physical universe. The convergent properties of each of these areas and their theoretical frameworks are of great interest and promise, pointing towards a more profound synthesis of complex systems. The workshop will contribute new perspectives on universality and will be an important and necessary step in the identification of further research necessary for discovery in these converging fields.

Bardoscia, Marco, et al. Pathways Toward Instability in Financial Networks. Nature Communications. 8/14416, 2017. In these later 2010s, complex system theorists from Zurich and London including Stefano Battiston and Guido Caldarelli can report a common recurrence between the widely separate domains of market transactions and natural ecological patternings. Once again an independent mathematical source realm is implicated in common effect everywhere

Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, a deep analogy between the origins of instability in financial systems and complex ecosystems has been pointed out: in both cases, topological features of network structures influence how easily distress can spread within the system. However, in financial network models, the details of how financial institutions interact typically play a decisive role, and a general understanding of precisely how network topology creates instability remains lacking. Here we show how processes that are widely believed to stabilize the financial system, that is, market integration and diversification, can actually drive it towards instability. This result holds irrespective of the details of how institutions interact, showing that policy-relevant analysis of the factors affecting financial stability can be carried out while abstracting away from such details. (Abstract)

Aguilera, Miguel and Manuel Bedia. Adaptation to Criticality through Organizational Invariance in Embodied Agents. arXiv:1712.05284. When we posted this site in the early 2000s, a theoretical and evidential basis for a universally recurrent iconic image was iffy and patchy at best. Back to the 1980s at the Santa Fe Institute, to general systems theory in the 1960s, and before, it was a Grail-like hope and goal. But in these later 2010s, University of Zaragoza, Spain biophysicists, for example, now immersed in a global sapiensphere can describe, the natural presence of a complementary, dynamic reciprocal balance between archetypal fixed and fluid, conservative and procreative, states and options. See also, e.g., physicist Gai Dvali for a cosmic and neural correspondence. In regard, perennial east and west wisdom has long intimated a common, bigender code which graces and moves this fraught existence. By this deep quality, it is made and meant to be humanly known, palliated, and created anew. If me + We = US may at last decipher, read and practice, a genesis code can inform and guide personal and planetary abidance.

Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality suggests that there may be general principles inducing this behaviour, yet there is no well-founded theory for understanding how criticality is generated at a wide span of levels and contexts. In order to explore how criticality might emerge from general adaptive mechanisms, we propose a simple learning rule that maintains an internal organizational structure from a specific family of systems at criticality. (Abstract excerpt)

In physics, the concept of universality allows to group a great variety of different critical phenomena into a small number of universality classes in such a way that all systems belonging to a given universality class are essentially identical near the critical point. Thus, systems belonging to the same universality class, even if defined by very different material parameters or physical properties, have the same critical exponents. (2) This surprising property provides a perspective on criticality in terms of universal relations, suggesting that we could model criticality using simple and non-specific mechanisms independently of the individual parameters of the system. (2)

Aguilera, Miguel and Manuel Bedia. Criticality as It Could Be: Organizational Invariance as Self-Organized Criticality in Embodied Agents. arXiv:1704.05255. Akin to Recent Advances in Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena (Bachmann), in 2017 University of Zaragoza, Spain system theorists cite a robust presence of an optimum balance between too little or too many interconnections, as exemplified by dynamic neural architectures.

This paper outlines a methodological approach to generate adaptive agents driving themselves near points of criticality. Using a synthetic approach we construct a conceptual model that, instead of specifying mechanistic requirements to generate criticality, exploits the maintenance of an organizational structure capable of reproducing critical behavior. Our approach captures the well-known principle of universality that classifies critical phenomena inside a few universality classes of systems without relying on specific mechanisms or topologies. (Abstract)

Ahn, Sungsook and Sang Joon Lee. Collective Ordering of Microscale Matters in Natural Analogy. Nature Scientific Reports. 5/10790, 2015. Based on many sophisticated, clever experiments, Pohang University of Science, Biofluid and Biomimic Research Center, engineers again confirm a constant, whole scale natural repetition of the same analogous phenomena everywhere.

Collective interaction occurs in many natural and artificial matters in broad scales. In a biological system, collective spatial organization of live individuals in a colony is important for their viability determination. Interactive motions between a single individual and an agglomerate are critical for whole procedure of the collective behaviors, but few has been clarified for these intermediate range behaviors. Here, collective interactions of microscale matters are investigated with human cells, plant seeds and artificial microspheres in terms of commonly occurring spatial arrangements. (Abstract)

In conclusion, this study demonstrates the collective interaction of microscale particulate systems in natural analogy. The representative natural systems of human cells, plant seeds and artificial spheres in microscale, already start collective interactions before the individual components are physically agglomerated. These are generally expressed by an optimized distance distribution determined by equilibrated force balance. The present results demonstrate the characteristic collective behaviors occurring in microscale and quantitative analogy between biological and artificial systems, which are plausible in nature. (14)

Ananthaswamy, Anil. Through Two Doors at Once The Elegant Experiment That Captures the Enigma of Our Quantum Reality. New York: Dutton, 2018. The international science journalist chronicles this iconic situation which harks back to Thomas Young in 1801 whence dual aspects of position and momentum seem to co-exist at the same time. It has been a quandary for quantum studies, often due to personal opinion. Niels Bohr cited it in 1927 as an example of particle/wave complementarity. By way of many interviews such as Alain Aspect, David Mermin, Tim Maudlin, the well told story arrives at a similar point as Philip Ball’s Beyond Weird does. A century of speculation may gain some resolution by Bayesian probabilities and J. A. Wheeler’s observer participation.

The story of the “double-slit" experiment which splits a light beam into two paths first challenged our understanding of natural reality. Thomas Young devised it in the early 1800s to show that light behaves like a wave, and thus opposed Isaac Newton. In to the 20th century the issue led to a long debate between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Richard Feynman held that the double slit embodies the central quantum mystery. Is there a place where the quantum world ends and the familiar classical world of our daily lives begins, and if so, can we find it? And if there's no such place, then does the universe split into two each time a particle goes through the double slit? (Publisher edits)

Ansell, Helen and Istvan Kovacs. Unveiling universal aspects of the cellular anatomy of the brain. Communications Physics. 7/184, 2024. . Northwestern University systems neuroscientists describe the latest neuroimaging insight findings which add strong support to a definitive self-organized, critically poised, invariance. They next view the relative neural architecture of other mammals and onto insects to observe the same definitive patterns and processes.

Recent cellular volumetric brain reconstructions have revealed even higher levels of anatomic complexity. But which aspects to focus on when by way of computational models remains a challenge. Our own work has now been able to perceive an intricate brain anatomy satisfies universal scaling laws to an extent as to reveal a structural criticality. To illustrate, we estimated critical exponents in human, mouse and fruit fly brains and show they are consistent between these organisms. Such universal quantities are robust to many microscopic details of the cellular structures of individual brains. This is a key step towards generative computational approaches and toward which sense one animal may be akin to another. (Abstract)

In regard, neuronal complexity can be described through its fractal dimension which exemplifies a scale invariance, or self-similarity which occurs in the structure and function of the cerebral cortex, human connectome, and synaptic network of multiple organisms. We next propose that statistical physics can provide a further guide to discern cellular complexity. An analysis of cell size, as well as pairwise and higher-order correlations, can then signify collective phenomena close to criticality. We estimate a set of exponents from for each subject organism and find critical scaling relations, again indicating that brains reside in the vicinity of criticality. (1,2)

Aschwanden, Markus. Self-Organized Criticality in Solar and Stellar Flares. arXiv:1906.05840. The Lockheed Martin, Palo Alto astrophysicist and leading researcher of cosmic SOC phenomena (search) finds that seemingly unpredictable extreme events are actually very rare or not at all, so that a prior mathematical model (Sornette, et al, search) for them does not apply to spacescape dynamics. We cite to note the total presence of SOC just being found everywhere.

We search for outliers in extreme events of statistical size distributions of astrophysical data sets, motivated by the {Dragon-King hypothesis} of (Didier) Sornette, which suggests that the most extreme events in a statistical distribution may belong to a different population, and thus may be generated by a different physical mechanism, in contrast to the strict power law behavior of self-organized criticality models. Identifying such disparate outliers is important for space weather predictions. However, we find that Dragon-King events are not common in solar and stellar flares. Consequently, small, large, and extreme flares remain scale-free with a single physical mechanism. (Abstract excerpt)

Aschwanden, Markus, et al. 25 Years of Self-Organized Criticality: Solar and Astrophysics. arXiv:1403.6528. A 137 page review of International Space Science Institute (ISSI) meetings in Bern, Switzerland in 2012 and 2013 upon this ubiquitous phenomena. As these studies reach mature veracity, researchers from the USA, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan, Canada, and the UK attest to their dynamic presence everywhere. As the quotes convey, a summary observation can now be made that could apply to all natural and social complex systems. A double domain is noted of their manifest exemplification across celestial realms, which then implies an independent, mathematical source from which they arise and occur. After decades of study, these confirmations of the iterative, scalar breadth and depth of a genesis nature, as it evokes a universal informative impetus, merit to be seen as a historic discovery. See also Aschwanden below in the Astrophysical Journal and as editor of the online work Self-Organized Criticality Systems.

Shortly after the seminal paper "Self-Organized Criticality: An Explanation of 1/f noise" by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld (1987), the idea has been applied to solar physics, in "Avalanches and the Distribution of Solar Flares" by Lu and Hamilton (1991). In the following years, an inspiring cross-fertilization from complexity theory to solar and astrophysics took place, where the SOC concept was initially applied to solar flares, stellar flares, and magnetospheric substorms, and later extended to the radiation belt, the heliosphere, lunar craters, the asteroid belt, the Saturn ring, pulsar glitches, soft X-ray repeaters, blazars, black-hole objects, cosmic rays, and boson clouds. The application of SOC concepts has been performed by numerical cellular automaton simulations, by analytical calculations of statistical (powerlaw-like) distributions based on physical scaling laws, and by observational tests of theoretically predicted size distributions and waiting time distributions. Attempts have been undertaken to import physical models into the numerical SOC toy models, such as the discretization of magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) processes. The novel applications stimulated also vigorous debates about the discrimination between SOC models, SOC-like, and non-SOC processes, such as phase transitions, turbulence, random-walk diffusion, percolation, branching processes, network theory, chaos theory, fractality, multi-scale, and other complexity phenomena. (Abstract)

A Dual Approach to Self-Organized Criticality Systems In this review we stress the dual nature of SOC models, in the sense that they include (i) universal statistical aspects that apply to all SOC systems, and (ii) special physical mechanisms that are idiosyncratic to a particular SOC phenomenon. There is a consensus that the powerlaw function of the size distribution of a SOC observable is a universal statistical aspect that is common to all SOC systems, regardless whether we sample statistics of solar flares or earthquakes, while the underlying physical mechanisms are completely different, such as magnetic reconnection in solar flares, or mechanical stressing in earthquakes. If we accept this dichotomy, we should be able to build a generalized SOC theory that predicts the universal statistical properties, which should be purely of “mathematical nature” and “physics-free”, while the nonlinear energy dissipation process of a SOC event still can be described with (single or multiple) specific physical SOC models that are different for every SOC manifestation. (93)

Universal Aspects of SOC Systems In astrophysical applications, the energy dissipation rate F is generally measured by the flux or intensity of electromagnetic radiation in some wavelength, but the universal meaning of the energy dissipation rate is simply the instantaneous avalanche size during a snapshot, while the total energy is the time-integrated avalanche volume. Thus this generalized SOC concept is still universally applicable to every SOC system, regardless if it is observed by an astronomical instrument, by a geophysical monitor, by financial statistics or by computer lattice stimulations. (94)

The Meaning of Self-Organized Criticality answer this question we remind again our pragmatic generalized definition of a SOC system: SOC is a critical state of a nonlinear energy dissipation system that is slowly and continuously driven towards a critical value of a system-wide instability threshold, producing scale-free, fractal-diffusive, and intermittent avalanches with powerlaw-like size distributions. This definition is independent of any particular physical mechanism, but describes only some universal system behavior that is common to virtually all threshold-operated nonlinear energy dissipation processes, in the limit of slow driving. (96)

Atay, Fatihcan, et al. Perspectives on Multi-Level Dynamics. arXiv:1606.05665. This complex paper is another example of realizations that a grand scientific synthesis from cosmic physics to social media can just now be gathered and achieved. A team of MPI Mathematics in the Sciences and University of Bielefeld researchers first cite an independent, generic model, and then illume its presence from information theory, Markov processes, agent-based models, mean-field methods in neuroscience, renormalization group theory, to quantum decoherence. While highly technical, the work conveys a broad conviction that as global collaborations build and converge, this historic goal is at last within reach.

As Physics did in previous centuries, there is currently a common dream of extracting generic laws of nature in economics, sociology, neuroscience, by focalising the description of phenomena to a minimal set of variables and parameters, linked together by causal equations of evolution whose structure may reveal hidden principles. (Abstract) It is generally agreed that complex systems are comprised of a large number of subcomponents and their interactions. Moreover, they often exhibit structures at various spatial and temporal levels. As a somewhat extreme example, spanning length and time scales of vastly different magnitudes, one can cite the hierarchy of molecules, neurons, brain areas, brains, individuals, social organizations, economies, etc., which can be viewed as manifestations of the same collective physical reality at different levels. (1).

Ayyad, Marouane and Saliya Coulibaly. The Cellular Automata Inside Optical Chimera States. Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. December, 2021. We note this entry by University of Lille, CNRS researchers as one example of how any natural phenomena seems to spontaneously seek and reside at optimum dynamic poise between more or less order.

Cellular automata are conceptual discrete dynamical systems useful in the theory of information. The spatiotemporal patterns that they produce are intimately related to computational mechanics in distributed complex systems. Here, we investigate their physical implementation in the framework of chimera states in which coherent and incoherent behavior coexist. Hence, chimera states were subject to quantitative and qualitative analyzes borrowing the same tools used to characterize cellular automata. Our results reveal the existence of cellular automata-type dynamics submerged in the dynamics exhibited by our optical chimera states. Thus, they share a panoply of attributes in terms of computational abilities.

Bachmann, Michael, et al. Recent Advances in Phase Transitions and Critical Phenomena. European Physical Journal Special Topics. 226/4, 2017. University of Georgia, USA, Coventry University, UK, Heidelberg University, and Leipzig University physicists, including Ralph Kenna, introduce a special issue on nature’s apparent propensity to move into and reside at a poised state betwixt chaos and order (chaorder?) everywhere from cosmos to culture. A typical paper might be From Dynamical Scaling to Local Scale-Invariance by Malte Henkel. For more, see also herein Criticality as It Could Be by Miguel Aguilera and Manuel Bedia.

Phase transitions and critical phenomena are of ubiquitous importance from the femtometre scale in quantum chromodynamics to galaxy formation in the universe, from the folding, adsorption or denaturation of bio-polymers to the magnetisation effects in storage media, from percolation in complex social networks to fragmentation transitions in atomic nuclei. The present issue discusses a cross section of the current research on phase transitions and critical phenomena in condensed-matter physics, with a focus on soft and hard matter systems as well as the most important methods used for studying such problems. (Abstract)

The study of phase transitions is by now a quite mature subject. Early notions akin to modern ideas of phase transitions are already present in ancient Greek philosophical texts, for instance in Aristotle’s theory of the elements. Still, it was only in the late 18th and early 19th century that the advent of the steam engine necessitated a profound theoretical description. (533) The character of this special point was only fully understood with the introduction of the renormalization group by (Leo) Kadanoff and (Kenneth) Wilson about 50 years ago, which explains scaling and universality and now serves as a complete fundamental theory of critical phenomena. (533-534)

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