Janus

By Arthur Koestler,

Book cover of Janus: A Summing Up

Book description

Excellent Book


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Why read it?

1 author picked Janus as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

We appreciate this book because it helped us to introduce the concept of a ‘hierarchical category,’ which is necessary to describe our MES. We accomplished this by translating Koestler's concept of a "hierarchy of holons," where a holon embodies a 'hybrid nature' akin to a two-faced Janus.

Technically, a hierarchical category organizes objects into numbered levels (0 to m). An object at level n is dual-faced: 'simple' compared to levels above n, but 'complex' compared to levels < n, this object being the "colimit" (or combination) of linked objects < n. Within a hierarchical category, we compute the 'complexity order'…

From Andrée and Jean-Paul's list on mathematical approaches to complex systems.

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