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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts THE SIMPLISTIC ROOTS OF COMPLEXITY Harold Morowitz Within the hierarchical framework of biology and the social disciplines, the reductionist approach attempts to understand phenomena in terms of the next, lower level. The new approaches of emergence and complexity seek to show how the behavior at a given level arises from the rule-governed interaction of agents at a lower level. For most phenomena on the earth's surface the reductionist path leads to electrons and nuclei as the lowest level agents that need to be considered and electromagnetic forces as the primary rules. The great energy gap between the quark world and the atomic world allows us to stop at the periodic table as the root level of our search for explanatory principles. The physical rules governing electrons and nuclei are the postulates of quantum mechanics and energy minimization from thermodynamics. These alone would produce a uniform sea of nuclei and electrons rather than the richness of objects and activities that we see around us. The observed complexity arises from the Pauli Exclusion Principle, a non energetic rule that leads to the well understood emergence of the periodic table and to chemical bonding. The existence of the kind of entities seen in the world of the chemist is entirely a consequence of the Pauli rule. Thus the relative simplicity of the periodic table leads to the elaborate complexity of possible molecules sampled in Beilstein's compendium of organic molecules. Out of this combinatoric complexity emerges the relative simplicity of the chart of intermediary metabolism. This emergence serves as a challenge to the complexity theorist, in moving from the universe of structures to the universe of kinetic networks. The Pauli Principle points the way to a kind of rule by which the whole is quite different from the sum of the parts. Such reasoning may be sought in emergence at higher levels. Because the exclusion principle is non-dynamic and overcomes energy minimization, it has a mentalistic character that some physicists, going back to Planck, have seen as the roots of mind. We will discuss the possible relation of exclusion principles to noetic emergence.
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