On Principles of Emergent Organization

Adam T. Rupe; James P. Crutchfield

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arXiv · 2311.13749

On Principles of Emergent Organization

Adam T. Rupe·James P. Crutchfield

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Abstract

After more than a century of concerted effort, physics still lacks basic principles of spontaneous self-organization. To appreciate why, we first state the problem, outline historical approaches, and survey the present state of the physics of self-organization. This frames the particular challenges arising from mathematical intractability and the resulting need for computational approaches, as well as those arising from a chronic failure to define structure. Then, an overview of two modern mathematical formulations of organization -- intrinsic computation and evolution operators -- lays out a way to overcome these challenges. Together, the vantage point they afford shows how to account for the emergence of structured states via a statistical mechanics of systems arbitrarily far from equilibrium. The result is a constructive path forward to principles of organization that builds on mathematical identification of structure.

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cond-mat.stat-mech cs.LG nlin.CD nlin.PS physics.ao-ph

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Adam T. Rupe, James P. Crutchfield. 2023-11-23. On Principles of Emergent Organization. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.13749

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