In November 2014, the Bertalanffy Center hosted as Visiting Scholar John Collier from South Africa, University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. On 25 November 2014 he held a 3 hours workshop giving an overview of the concept of emergence (scientific and philosophical), a criticism of important approaches, a list of essential properties of emergence from a dynamical point of view and an outlook to the application of those ingredients to the problem of emergence of and in social systems. One important unanswered question was whether in social systems the term “dissipation” might be used to signify a dynamics different from the dissipation of energy in the thermodynamical sense.
John Collier on the right (photo: Stefan Blachfellner)
Please find the power-point presentation here.