Complex Systems: 'The Four Demons of Causal Memory and the Taming of the Second Law' - March 27, 2015

Friday, March 27, 11:30 a.m.-12:45 p.m. Administration/Humanities Building, Room 143A

Please join UAA's Complex Systems Faculty Group for the following talk: "The Four Demons of Causal Memory and the Taming of the Second Law" presented by Mark Faller, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Alaska Pacific University.

Faller on his talk: "The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Entropy Law, has traditionally been known as the pessimist's guarantee that all will never end well. The world is certified by science to end in heat, death and chaos. More recently, theorists of complex and dynamic systems have begun to understand that the relationship between thermodynamics and self-organization is not so simple.

In this presentational summary of an assortment of papers, I have written over the years I utilize the motif of 'demonology' to more explicitly demonstrate how the various models of causal time can help us to understand just how the Second Law not only suffers self-organization, but is the sufficient and necessary cause of the same. I elaborate a call for a new, more dynamic theory of information that will better synthesize the classical understanding of order and chaos with the new fronts of organizational approaches to information. In this effort, I will take up Maxwell's Gauntlet to illustrate how the arrows of energy gradients and order are separable, yet complementary in such a fashion to insure that our cosmos is 'the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.' (Leibniz)"

Upcoming Complex Systems talks:

"Interdependent Networks and Network Failure" presented by Raissa D'Souza, Complexity Sciences Center, UC-Davis Thursday, April 2, 7 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 120

"Interdependent Networks and Network Failure" presented by Raissa D'Souza, Complexity Sciences Center, UC-Davis Friday, April 3, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Administration/Humanities Building, Room 143A

"Making Sense of Our Lives: A Computational Approach to Understanding Multi-agent Simulations" presented by Martin Cenek and Spencer Dahl, faculty in the departments of Computer Science and Engineering at UAA Friday, April 10, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. Administration/Humanities Building, Room 143A

"The Relation Between Computation and Interpretation" presented by Paul Kockelman, Ph.D., professor of linguistic anthropology at Yale University Thursday, April 16, 7 p.m. Rasmuson Hall, Room 101

"The Relation Between Computation and Interpretation" presented by Paul Kockelman, Ph.D., professor of linguistic anthropology at Yale University Friday, April 17, 11:30 a.m.-1 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 118

March Archive