Very good! If I can make a recommendation on emergence and complexity readings, "The Origin of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker is a really good place to start. Plus, it focuses on economics so I like that, but really it starts from the bottom up, so the focus is sort of irrelevant because it teaches a ton on the subject along the way. It really kick started my interest in agent based modeling, complex adaptive system modeling and the like. It's a long read too, because it is very content dense; I found I couldn't read it when at all drowsy because I missed things, and I never really felt like skipping ahead because the author was repeating something for the millionth time and I GET IT ALREADY! One of the rare books where I didn't think "This could have been like 200 pages shorter."
I will also give you fair warning: you can ask 10 complexity theorists what "emergence" is, and get 11 different answers. I don't like Tom Stafford's definition from the linked article because it doesn't speak to the fact that the macro pattern isn't present in the individual units, or that the interaction of individual units is what drives the macro pattern, but it is kind of ok I think, and I have heard worse.
I took Computational Social Science with Rob Axtel and each of us had to read and review/present a book on complexity, and he always asked "what definition of emergence did they use?" The only answer that ever repeated was "Well... he doesn't really."
Very good! If I can make a recommendation on emergence and complexity readings, "The Origin of Wealth" by Eric Beinhocker is a really good place to start. Plus, it focuses on economics so I like that, but really it starts from the bottom up, so the focus is sort of irrelevant because it teaches a ton on the subject along the way. It really kick started my interest in agent based modeling, complex adaptive system modeling and the like. It's a long read too, because it is very content dense; I found I couldn't read it when at all drowsy because I missed things, and I never really felt like skipping ahead because the author was repeating something for the millionth time and I GET IT ALREADY! One of the rare books where I didn't think "This could have been like 200 pages shorter."
I will also give you fair warning: you can ask 10 complexity theorists what "emergence" is, and get 11 different answers. I don't like Tom Stafford's definition from the linked article because it doesn't speak to the fact that the macro pattern isn't present in the individual units, or that the interaction of individual units is what drives the macro pattern, but it is kind of ok I think, and I have heard worse.
I took Computational Social Science with Rob Axtel and each of us had to read and review/present a book on complexity, and he always asked "what definition of emergence did they use?" The only answer that ever repeated was "Well... he doesn't really."