What Is a Complex System?

by James Ladyman, Karoline Wiesner

A clear, concise introduction to the quickly growing field of complexity science that explains its conceptual and mathematical foundations

What is a complex system? Although “complexity science” is used to understand phenomena as diverse as the behavior of honeybees, the economic markets, the human brain, and the climate, there is no agreement about its foundations. In this introduction for students, academics, and general readers, philosopher of science James Ladyman and physicist Karoline Wiesner develop an account of complexity that brings the different concepts and mathematical measures applied to complex systems into a single framework. They introduce the different features of complex systems, discuss different conceptions of complexity, and develop their own account. They explain why complexity science is so important in today’s world.

Genres: Science, Philosophy, Physics

184 pages, Paperback

Published August 5, 2020

Reviews

[Joseph Maranzelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic book treating complex systems with serious philosophical tools. You will think a lot about emergence, networks, reality, and modern science. Also ants are much cooler than I thought.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to read a bit more about complexity science, where it is standing today, and also hoped to get an idea of the philosophy around understanding systems that are complex (and the limits to this understanding). This is one of the more recent books around complexity, but I didn't get much out of it. It gives a bird's eye view of examples of complex systems and how they've been defined, pointing out that there is no clear consensus. They don't really formulate a vision of their own but say that complexity means a lot of different things to different people and it's ok that the concept is vague. I'm not necessarily against that but for me it just doesn't add much - I had hoped for a bit more synthesis or insight. Perhaps there is no further insight to be had, which is not on the authors of course, but for me it was disappointing.

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a difficult reading for a general reader. And I'm exactly this kind of reader. The chapter on the measuring of the features of the complex system was too difficult, even though the authors has provided some mathematical background in the appendix. For myself I got the definition of a complex system as some system, which has an adaptive behavior. However, more profound definition is a system, which has emerging properties.

A note on "efficient market hypothesis":
At the end of the twentieth century it was clear that, while markets are very efficient information processors, they do not equilibrate, because the time it takes a financial market to reach equilibrium is longer than the time between events disrupting the system.

[Arindam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book summarising complex systems and complexity science. It does a wonderful job of casting light on a science that was mostly shadowed by primary forms of sciences. It binds many disciplines through the common theme and defines numerous parameters that are prevalent in such systems. The book states that the degree of the parameters determines the complexity of the system. Its epistemological meaning and derivative is described very clearly.
However, there is a lot of similar subjective interpretation of different sciences like economics, physics and ecosystems. The mathematical interpretation is briefly described and is harder to relate with, for a general reader.

[Fotis Koutoulakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Decent treatise on complex systems.

Looks small in terms of page count, but it's quite thorough, devoting a whole chapter to mathematical modelling of certain aspects of complex systems.

[Lime Street Labrador · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rather shallow and uninformative introduction to a complex system.

[Avi Joshi Mahajan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fun read. Small decisions can accumulate to big consequences. Hard and technical at points