Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity Book 14)

by John H. Miller

Of course, as pointed out by Anderson (1972), the fallacy here is that the reductionist hypothesis does not imply a “constructionist” one. Even if we know the fundamentals of a particular system, we may not be able to use that knowledge to reconstruct higher-level systems. It may be, as Anderson says, that “the whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”