An epistemological and bio-physical point of view on complex systems

Stefano Polizzi

Abstract


In this article, after a historical introduction, we give an epistemological point of view of the physics of complex systems. Complex systems are epistemologically interesting because of the fundamental interaction experiment/observer and physicists in their everyday life can experience the paradoxes given by this interaction. Here we describe some of these paradoxes, we make a parallel with quantum mechanics and give a possible philosophical solution, based on notorious physicists/philosopher from the past, transposing and reinterpreting their ideas to modern times. In particular, we analyse the interaction with a complex system such as the living cell, and therefore we also analyse some biophysical implications of complexity.

Keywords


complex systems; epistemology; experiment/observer interaction

Full Text:

PDF

References


Poincaré, H. (1890) ‘Sur le problème des trois corps et les équations de la dynamique’, Acta Mathematica, 13, pp.A3-A270.

Polizzi, G. (2013) Aspetti filosofici dell'opera di Poincaré, Lettera Matematica PRISTEM, Henri Poincaré. Un matematico tra i due secoli, ed. C. Bartocci, 84/85, pp.66-79.

Lorenz, E. N. (1963) ‘Deterministic nonperiodic flow’, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, 20(2), pp.130-141.

James, W. (1990) The principles of psychology, Chicago: Encyclopaedia britannica.

McCulloch, W. S. and Pitts, W. (1943) ‘A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity’, The Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, 5(4), pp.115-133.

Ising, E. (1925) ‘Beitrag zur theorie des ferromagnetismus’, Zeitschrift für Physik, 31, pp.253-258.

Licata, I. (2011) Complessità: un'introduzione semplice, Palermo: Duepunti.

Anderson, P. W. (1972) ‘More is different’, Science, 177(4047), pp.393-396.

Purcell, E. M. (1977) ‘Life at low Reynolds number’, American Journal of Physics, 45(1), pp.3-11.

Hartmann, N. (2012) New ways of ontology (1942), Piscataway (NJ, USA): Transaction Publishers, pp.9-10.

Duhem, P. (2016) La théorie physique. Son objet, sa structure (1906), Paris: ENS éditions.

Pessa, E. ‘Phase transitions in biological matter’, Licata, I. ‘Emergence and computation at the edge of classical and quantum systems’, in Licata, I. and Sakaji, A. eds. (2008), Physics of Emergence and Organization Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, pp.1-26, pp.165-228.

Moran, P. A. P. (1958) ‘Random processes in genetics’, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 54(1), pp.60-71.

Polizzi, S., Arneodo, A., Perez-Reche, F. J. and Argoul, F. (2020). ‘Emergence of log-normal type distributions in avalanche processes in living systems’, Frontiers in Applied Mathematics and Statistics, 6(73).

doi: 10.3389/fams.2020.613962

Berryman, A. A. (1992) ‘The origins and evolution of predator-prey theory’, Ecology, 73(5), pp.1530-1535.

Arneodo, A., Bacry, E., Graves, P. and Muzy, J.-F. (1995) ‘Characterizing long-range correlations in dna sequences from wavelet analysis’, Physical Review Letters, 74(16), p.3293.

Huvet, M., Nicolay, S., Touchon, M., Audit, B., d'Aubenton Carafa, Y., Arneodo, A. and Thermes, C. (2007) ‘Human gene organization driven by the coordination of replication and transcription’, Genome Research, 17(9), pp.1278-1285.

Ranft, J., Prost, J., Jülicher, F. and Joanny, J.-F (2012) ‘Tissue dynamics with permeation’, The European Physical Journal E, 35(6), pp.1-13.

McCarty, O. J., King, M. R. and Insel, P. A. (2014) ‘A theme series on physical biology in cancer in AJP-Cell’, Cell Physiology, 306(2), p.C77.

Orr, A. W., Helmke, B. P., Blackman, B. R. and Schwartz, M. A. (2006) ‘Mechanisms of mechanotransduction’, Developmental Cell, 10(1), pp.11-20.

Parry, B. R., Surovtsev, I. V., Cabeen, M. T., O'Hern, C. S., Dufresne, E. R. and Jacobs-Wagner, C. (2014) ‘The bacterial cytoplasm has glass-like properties and is fluidized by metabolic activity’, Cell, 156(1-2), pp.183-194.

Feynman, R., Leighton, R. and Sands, M. (1966) The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. I, ch. 46, Reading (CA, USA): Addison-Wesley.

Jülicher, F., Ajdari, A. and Prost, J. (1997) ‘Modeling molecular motors’, Reviews of Modern Physics, 69(4), pp.1269-1281.

Cross, R., Jackson, A., Citi, S., Kendrick-Jones, J. and Bagshaw, C. (1988) ‘Active site trapping of nucleotide by smooth and non-muscle myosins’, Journal of Molecular Biology, 203(1), pp.173-181

Woehlke, G., Ruby, A. K., Hart, C. L., Ly, B., Hom-Booher, N., and Vale, R. D. (1997) ‘Microtubule interaction site of the kinesin motor’, Cell, 90(2), pp.207-216.

Good, B. H., McDonald, M. J., Barrick, J. E., Lenski, R. E. and Desai, M. M. (2017) ‘The dynamics of molecular evolution over 60,000 generations’, Nature, 551(7678), pp.45-50.

Wright, S. (1931) ‘Evolution in mendelian populations’, Genetics, 16(2), pp.97-159.

Fisher, R. A. (1930) The genetical theory of natural selection, Oxford (UK): Oxford University Press.

Sayer, R., Friedlander, M. and Redman, S. (1990) ‘The time course and amplitude of epsps evoked at synapses between pairs of ca3/ca1 neurons in the hippocampal slice’, Journal of Neuroscience, 10(3), pp.826-836.

Isope P. and Barbour, B. (2002) ‘Properties of unitary granule cell! purkinje cell synapses in adult rat cerebellar slices’, Journal of Neuroscience, 22(22), pp.9668-9678.

Song, S., Sjöström, P. J., Reigl, M., Nelson, S. and Chklovskii, D. B. (2005) ‘Highly nonrandom features of synaptic connectivity in local cortical circuits’, PLoS Biol., 3, p.e68.

Rumpel, S., Hatt, H. and Gottmann, K. (1998) ‘Silent synapses in the developing rat visual cortex: evidence for postsynaptic expression of synaptic plasticity’, Journal of Neuroscience, 18(21), pp.8863-8874.

Barbour, B., Brunel, N., Hakim, V., and Nadal, J.-P. (2007) ‘What can we learn from synaptic weight distributions?’, TRENDS in Neurosciences, 30(12), pp.622-629.

Varshney, L. R., Sjöström, P. J. and Chklovskii, D. B. (2006) ‘Optimal information storage in noisy synapses under resource constraints’, Neuron, 52(3), pp.409-423.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23756/sp.v9i2.686

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2022 Stefano Polizzi

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Science & Philosophy - Journal of Epistemology, Science and Philosophy. ISSN 2282-7757; eISSN  2282-7765.