Professors:    * Peter Allen,       *Tassos Bountis,       * Stephen Guastello,     &     *Wolfgang Tschacher

Professor Dr. Peter Allen

“Complexity: the Challenge of a co-evolving Epistemology and Ontology”

If epistemology is about what we know and how we know what we know – what is inside - and ontology is about what there is to know – what is outside – then the most fundamental challenge that complexity makes is that these can no longer be considered as separable. Traditional science was based on the idea that there was an objective reality outside, and that we could study it and do experiments on it that allowed us to build, cumulatively, an increasingly accurate picture of that reality. Whilst for simple physical problems, and for planetary motion, this was a reasonable working hypothesis, for biological and social systems this has always been a problem. Experiments are not repeatable or transferable, and situations are historically evolved involving local, co-evolving contexts, and therefore can potentially all be unique and lacking in any generic behaviours or laws. Complexity science brings us face to face with this elusive reality, and tells us that we must accept uncertainty, and admit that our cognition, our descriptions and our models are necessarily incomplete and temporary props to our current functioning. They help us make some sense of the past and the present, and are all we have to help us in taking steps into the future.

Examples of these ideas will be given for ecological, social and economic systems, showing that models, despite their necessary incompleteness, can still be useful in clarifying and living with some of the real uncertainties we have, and in this way can help us explore possible futures. However, complexity also tells us that we need not limit our explorations to those suggested by our models, since they are necessarily incomplete, and that we should also indulge in “creative actions” in order to find out more about what might happen, and in this way both increase our possible choices of action, and also improve the scope of our models.         

Professor  Dr. Tassos Bountis

 Returning to Greece, he organized from 1986 until today 4 international conferences and 18 summer schools on topics of Chaos, Fractals and Complexity (the most recent ones are “Complexity in Science and Society”, Patras and Olympia Greece, July 2004 and the 18^th Summer School at Volos, Greece, July 2005). He is heading a Panhellenic Organizing Committee of Greek scientists from many fields, with whom he has edited 8 volumes of the series “Order and Chaos” (in Greek). He is a member of the editorial board of 4 International Journals of Nonlinear Dynamics and Applied Mathematics. His research projects are frequently funded by the Greek Government and the European Union and he is a member of the National Council of Research and Technology of Greece.

 At the University of Patras, he founded in 1996 the Center for Research and Applications of Nonlinear Systems (CRANS, http://www.math.upatras.gr/~crans), whose purpose is to support collaborative research and other scientific activities of Greek scientists in the fields of Nonlinear Systems, Chaos and Complexity. He is the author of 130 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings and 4 Greek textbooks on these topics. His last book, “The Wonderful World of Fractals”, published by Leader Books in 2004, has received favorable reviews and has become popular for its educational character and aesthetic format.

“The New Science of Complexity: Promises and Challenges for the 21^st Century”

Ever since the 1970’s, there has been revolutionary progress in the development of new theoretical approaches, computational methods and experimental discoveries, aiming to unravel the mysteries of unpredictable, irregular, chaotic or briefly “complex” phenomena, occurring in virtually all applied and engineering sciences. New theorems of Pure Mathematics, accompanied by a remarkably fruitful exploration of a variety of models using sophisticated numerical techniques, have led scientists to believe that a number of intricate and unexplained problems arising in physical, biological, engineering and even social scientific disciplines can now begin to be understood.

The Theory of Chaos was advanced as a means of exploring the unpredictable evolution of dynamical systems like the weather, the electrocardiogram and encephalogram, nonlinear mechanical, chemical and electrical oscillations, seismic activity and even stock market fluctuations. The Geometry of Fractals was developed in parallel and proved quite successful in analyzing the intricate nature of objects such as trees and rocks, the consistency of tumors, the dendritic structure of the bronchial tubes of the lungs, the cardiac muscle network and the blood circulatory system. Thus, Chaos and Fractals became the main pillars of what was to emerge as the new science of the 21^st century called Complexity.

In this lecture, I will describe some indicative applications of Chaos and Fractals, by reviewing results obtained by our team at the Center of Research and Applications of Nonlinear Systems at the University of Patras. The emphasis will be on complex physical and biological systems, as well as social models inspired by the theory of paradoxical games. 

Philosophical Remarks

Professor  Dr. Stephen J. Guastello

Leadership Emergence in Coordination-Intensive, Creative Problem Solving, and Production Groups

In self-organizing processes, a system acquires a structure without any external intervention. This presentation describes the process by which an initially leaderless group differentiates into one containing leadership and secondary role structures and how the process was aptly described by the swallowtail catastrophe model [1]. A subsequent study identified the control variables in the process of leadership emergence in creative problem solving and production-oriented groups [2] which were found to be different in the two cases. The third study, which is considered in greater depth here, examined a different case of coordination-intensive groups [3]

Coordination-intensive groups are particularly interesting because it is known that coordination can occur without talking and without leaders present, even though talking helps in some respects [4]. Coordination is also interesting because it is a nonlinear dynamical process all by itself [5]. In the experiment on coordination and leadership emergence, the participants (N = 104, group size = 4) played a coordination card game in which 13 of the groups were not allowed to talk to each other, and 13 groups were allowed to talk. After playing the game, the participants rated each other on leadership behavior, styles, and variables related to the process of conversation. Participants could identify no one as the leader or contributor of particular conversational remarks. Ironically, the levels of leadership emergence were equivalent in both verbal and nonverbal groups. A swallowtail catastrophe model was obtained here also, showing that the three control variables were: a broad range of task participation behaviors, whether the group worked verbally or nonverbally, and behaviors specific to task control. The study also represents a convergence between two independent lines of nonlinear dynamics research in group processes.

Professor Dr. Wolfgang Tschacher

Self-Organization of Cognition

My long-standing interest is the application of self-organization theory (synergetics) to clinical psychology (especially, psychotherapy process [4]) and neurocognition (gestalt phenomena [1], connectivity in the brain). We conducted numerous projects showing that finger prints of nonlinear systems, such as hysteresis and complexity reduction, are ubiquitous in these fields. Nonlinear phenomena are often related to meaningful variables of functioning (in psychopathology) and therapy outcome [3]. The self-organization approach may even be instrumental in linking first-person and third-person perspectives in cognition [2].