Abstract
This chapter is mainly concerned with the relationships between the contents of a group of entities and that entire group’s character: between the local and the global. We address the occurrence of multiple different views of one and the same system. A consideration of applicable logic to causality and rationality is followed by an introduction to Brenner’s ‘Logic in Reality’, and to a description of the basic properties of ‘a system’. The implied relationships between local and global in a simple multi-elemental system are described in terms of direct and indirect couplings, and an initial view of their combination in our pictorial system notation is presented. We conclude with a brief overview of the difference between classical probability and that due to Dempster and Shafer.
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Notes
- 1.
An excellent simplified exposé of Gödel’s theorem is provided by Tsonis (2008, Chapter 2). One formulation of it is that ‘There exist numbers having complexity greater than any mathematical system can prove’.
- 2.
Any other position would necessarily assume that the logical rules at an arbitrary conceptual location are always unique in their application, which is certainly not the case, for example, in situations of extreme complexity .
- 3.
John Collier—private communication .
- 4.
We quote Brenner’s word complexity here: we will refer to our own definition of complexity in the following chapter.
- 5.
An expression due to Stan Salthe.
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Cottam, R., Ranson, W. (2017). Opening the Curtains. In: Bridging the Gap between Life and Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74533-6_2
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