The Dreams of Reason: The Computer and the Rise of the Sciences of Complexity by Heinz R. Pagels (PDF)

Description

Describes the ability of computers to simulate complex systems, traces the rise of the science of complexity, and predicts the future influence of computers on business, science, telecommunications, and the military

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly Serious readers shouldn’t be put off by the New Age imprint on the esteemed physicist’s last work. Focusing here on three main themes–the advent of the sciences of complexity, the research role of computers and the philosophy of science, the late Pagels “again demonstrates his gift for synthesizing complex scientific information into concise, readable prose,” wrote PW. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A deep treatment of natural complexity written almost 30 years ago. Some of Pagels’ predictions of our modern and near future age are downright chilling in accuracy. You are left with the feeling that any entrepreneur who read this book before 1990 and followed it seriously like a roadmap, would be a master-of-the-universe today in the business and tech world. This work is among the most ahead-of-their-time futuristic treatments of science that I have read without invoking science fiction. It is equal parts science and “philosophy of science.”

⭐This may well be the single most brilliant non-fiction book I ever read. Pagels knew how to describe deep scientific theories and their evolution in a way that makes the book read like a novel.

⭐In the 1980s before there was the internet, when most people were just getting started with personal computers, American physicist Heinz Pagels understood the intimate connection between the exponential rise and proliferation of computing power and how it was contributing to the birth of a whole new realm of mathematics and physics, and with it, our understanding of the most important aspects of the world we live in. This was the rise of the sciences of complexity – chaos theory, fractal geometry, nonlinear dynamics, cyber-everything, parallel processing, neural networks, self-organizing and self-adaptive systems – in short, the science of the macro-world systems we experience everyday: the climate, air and water flows, traffic dynamics, biological organization, population dynamics, and a host of everyday systems that had previously been too complex to study.All at once, the explosion of computing power in smaller machines had become affordable to researchers with little grant money, grad students, garage nerds, or science enthusiasts of any sort and enabled them to study complex systems that hitherto were only available to small groups of researchers in the government, the military, and large universities. Simulations and analyses of complex systems with multiple variables, nonlinear system variables, were now possible and would lead to a revolution in our understanding of the organizational dynamics of natural systems.Because of this explosion of computing power, Pagels discusses the emergence of a new view of mathematics and with it, a new view of the foundational ideas of physical reality: the computational view. In mathematics this is the notion that to know a mathematical truth you must be able to compute it in a manner similar to a Turing machine. But the notion is extended in the physical world suggesting that the material world and the dynamical systems in it arise computationally, as “natural” computers. The brain, the weather, the solar system, are all like computers – “according to the computational view, the laws of nature are algorithms that control the development of the system in time, just like real programs do for computers” (p45). Computational biology is the study of biological systems and artificial life done on a computer. The computer, the tool which gave rise to this computational view, also gave rise to a new fundamental organizing principle of nature: that of information as the foundational principle underlying the organization of reality (e.g.,

⭐).Almost thirty years have passed since Pagels wrote his book and the sciences of complexity are now well established and part of many fields of study in the sciences. When I read it in the early 1990s, this book gave me a better idea of many of the trends in science that were birthed and propelled by the proliferation of computing power. I can still recommend this book as a good introduction to the sciences of complexity and their relation to the profound changes in our understanding of the world brought on by computers and computing power.

⭐This is not just a book on complexity (not black and white, true and false, linear) science.On page 242, the author talked about “cult’s profoundly self-deceiving and self-serving interpretation of their imagination and feelings.”Specifically the author wrote,”people who become obsessed with these things (i.e. hierarchies)are usually position themselves in such a spiritual hierarchy, aspiring to attain a higher awareness(yet) often by submitting to an authoritarian figure or a discipline.The result can be a form of mental enslavement,…”The xy%, supporting staffs, RP right wing leaders, …, complicit speakers of both houses, the extreme religion evangelicals,…On page 321, the author wrote about loss of Dreams of Reason:”Sometimes I wonder if it will be the poverty of the poor or greed of the rich that will be our undoing.”Included should be the under-educated mass, the supreme court’s Citizen United ruling, etc.There are few words yet so true about the “US UN-reasoning” in the pre- and post 2016 US presidential election.Hierarchy naturally grows out of complexity (network) dynamics.However, the demise of science literate mass, and hence the rise of extreme poverty-rich divisionis designed and engineered by a RP-dominated congress since 1960s?Without Dreams of Reason, false equivalence is the norm: the supreme court’s Citizen United ruling,equating corporation to people, replacing truth with falsehood, thushelping unfriendly foreign agents to weaken a democratic republic.

⭐I am reading this book again. I bought and read it when if was first published.What a shame this author passed away so soon after its publication. I would love to know where his thoughts on the topic would have migrated. The current status of Complexity Science seems to me, as a very interested outsider, to have stalled somewhat. Those of you who know better may correct me if you will. Though I do not seem to be able to find suitable reading for a lay person on the topic that is able to bring me up to date with the development in the field.Pagels’ prose is stellar. The topic seems to me to becoming more and more relevant in regards to the philosophy of science. I can find no other text that lays out the foundation of the assumptions, hopes and dreams for the notions voiced in this book. I am glad to be able to come back and revisit with Dr. Pagels.

⭐Indeed this is the best book I’ve ever read. The ideas discussed in this book have never been better described or explained by any other author I have read. I keep this book with me very often and I am constantly going through it highlighting and writing in my own thoughts. It is written in a way that it does not bring a bias until all sides are presented well and in detail. If you are a philosophy buff like me and you haven’t read this you either can’t find it or can’t read. buy it buy it buy it.

⭐pagels was a fantastic thinker and writer. this book is a must read as well as his all-encompassing “perfect symmetry”

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