MLE Friends Talk with Dr Fernando Rosas

“Towards a non-reductionist science and a scientific understanding of emergence”

If you would like to attend, please join MLE Friends Here!

On Thursday, 27 November, we are delighted to welcome Dr Fernando Rosas—a renowned scholar in complex systems, computational neuroscience, and machine learning—for our next MLE Friends talk of the season.

Emergence is one of the most fascinating and challenging aspects of complex systems, being also a controversial topic featuring long-standing debates and disagreements. In this talk I’ll discuss the benefits of formal approaches to conceptualise emergence. In doing this, I’ll argue towards a pragmatic and pluralistic stance, which embraces multiple complementary views on emergence while also focusing on methods to establish falsifiable hypotheses and procedures to verify them. This approach will be illustrated by exploring two distinct but complementary operationalisations of emergence: (i) self-contained levels of description, related to separation of scales, and (ii) synergistic interactions between constituents, related to interactions between scales. The talk will present these two operationalisations at a conceptual level and also presents applications that showcase their relative strengths and weaknesses.