DAVID KRAKAUER & DAVID WOLPERT

What is reality? And is there just one reality or many, perhaps infinitely many? And how should we describe these realities, with mathematics, natural language, music, or visual art? The answer might be all of the above, but if so, can we justify these decisions based on a larger conception of reality?

Scientists tend to think about reality in one of two ways. The first perspective involves physically emergent hierarchies (ontologies)—ranging from the most “fundamental” elementary particles, through nuclear and atomic physics, collective chemistry, adaptive organisms and ecosystems, brains, minds, and, ultimately, human societies.

The second describes conceptually emergent hierarchies (epistemologies)—spanning logic, mathematics, natural language, natural science, and the arts. This perspective focuses on the cognitive and conceptual structures that humans create to describe the physical hierarchies in which they are embedded.

Increasingly these two ideas of reality—architectures of physical matter and conceptual information—are intersecting. Several contemporary areas of research are blurring the boundary between theories of reality and reality itself. The clearest example of this would be in the social sciences, where “social reality” and a model or theory of society are often difficult to disentangle. For example, does a formalism like John Nash’s non-cooperative game theory describe strategic interactions, or does game theory control strategic interactions? How might we ever disentangle these two possibilities?

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See Also: The Reality Issue

Roli, A.; Braccini, M.; Stano, P.

 Systems 2024, 12, 338.

Noise and error are usually considered to be disturbances negatively affecting the behavior of a system. Nevertheless, from a systemic perspective, taking into account openness and incompleteness of complex systems, noise and error may assume a creative, constructive, and positive role in that they are a source of novelty that can trigger the reorganization of the system, the growth of complexity, and the emergence of new meaning. Examples of this phenomenon can be found in evolutionary phenomena driven by affordances, the formation of new attractors in dynamic systems responding to external perturbations, and improvisation in music. We argue that it is possible to identify general properties that enable the positive effect of noise and errors in complex systems, namely, multilevel organization, redundancy, incompleteness, and criticality. These properties play a major role in living systems and can guide the design of robust and adaptive artificial systems.

Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com