Shahin A. Shayan.
Understanding Complex Adaptive Systems: a macro and holistic approach.
independent. 2019
In this book, we use a general, holistic, and macro approach
to analyze and understand the world around us.
Historically, the reductionist approach has been used to model the world,
which included simplifying microscopic assumptions
for a build-up to a larger macroscopic picture.
The reductionist approach has worked reasonably well in physics and some areas of chemistry.
When one has to deal with many-body problems, the reductionist approach fails.
This approach usually does not work well in environments that have multi-body or interacting agents
as observed in the biological, psychological, business, social, or political world.
Instead, one has to take a more holistic approach in such environments,
or the large scale dynamics of the system must be analyzed and modeled using its holistic properties.
Similar to the non-statistical mechanic and general thermodynamic models
for understanding enthalpy and entropy,
this is a different way to explain the observed dynamics around us.
Complexity concepts have become very handy and useful in these situations.
In this book, we will explain the introductory macro concepts
and more qualitative aspects of what Complex Adaptive Systems are, and why we need to understand them.