Networking the complexity community since 1999
The eighth Dialogue was carried out by Sara Imari Walker and Carlos Gershenson. They explored the role of information in the emergence of complexity and the mechanisms underlying organization in natural and artificial systems. The title was: Information and the Emergence of Complexity. The session took place on November 19th, 2025. It was moderated by IAIS Board member Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic.
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Paola Di Maio
Artificial Intelligence and Digital Forensics
The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and digital forensics (DF) is becoming increasingly complex, ubiquitous, and pervasive, with overlapping techniques and technologies being adopted in all types of scientific and technical inquiry. Despite incredible advances, forensic sciences are not exempt from errors and remain vulnerable to fallibility. To mitigate the limitations of errors in DF, the systemic complexity is identified and addressed with the adoption of human-readable artifacts and open standards. A DF AI model schema based on the state of the art is outlined.
Read the full article at: www.taylorfrancis.com
Luiz H. A. Monteiro
Complexities 2025, 1(1), 2
Defining a complex system and evaluating its complexity typically requires an interdisciplinary approach, integrating information theory, signal processing techniques, principles of dynamical systems, algorithm length analysis, and network science. This overview presents the main characteristics of complex systems and outlines several metrics commonly used to quantify their complexity. Simple examples are provided to illustrate the key concepts. Speculative ideas regarding these topics are also discussed here.
Read the full article at: www.mdpi.com
Giulio Tononi, Melanie Boly
This overview of integrated information theory (IIT) emphasizes IIT’s “consciousness-first” approach to what exists. Consciousness demonstrates to each of us that something exists–experience–and reveals its essential properties–the axioms of phenomenal existence. IIT formulates these properties operationally, yielding the postulates of physical existence. To exist intrinsically or absolutely, an entity must have cause-effect power upon itself, in a specific, unitary, definite and structured manner. IIT’s explanatory identity claims that an entity’s cause-effect structure accounts for all properties of an experience–essential and accidental–with no additional ingredients. These include the feeling of spatial extendedness, temporal flow, of objects binding general concepts with particular configurations of features, and of qualia such as colors and sounds. IIT’s intrinsic ontology has implications for understanding meaning, perception, and free will, for assessing consciousness in patients, infants, other species, and artifacts, and for reassessing our place in nature.
Read the full article at: arxiv.org
“The Divided Mind”
I will talk about this recently published book: why did I write it, what was I trying to say that it would have been difficult to communicate in a peer-reviewed paper, and who was I hoping might read it? I will summarise the content and key themes of the book along the following lines, but I hope to leave a good amount of time for discussion. Briefly, the book tries to tell two occasionally interwoven histories. First, the world history of what we now call schizophrenia, especially the controversy between Freudian (brainless) and Kraepelinian (mindless) tribes, the dark crisis of the Kraepelinian concept of dementia praecox before and during World War 2, and its long-lasting imprint on how we continue to think about schizophrenia to this day. Second, my personal story as I became a psychiatrist and tried to get to grips with scientific questions about the origins of schizophrenia and the prospects for better treatments or preventions in future.
Watch at: www.youtube.com
Complexity Digest 