The author notes that foundational questions include "How do we know that we can trust science?" when facing a complex system. If "Dynamical complexity" provides a physical interpretation of mathematical tools, how might this physical interpretation directly enhance our ability to build and justify trust in scientific models for complex systems like the climate, particularly concerning their predictions and explanations?

From the book

formation-theoretic objects (signals, for instance) rather than the physical and social systems ​ studied by scientists. Dynamical complexity, a concept articulated in detail in the first third of the dissertation, is designed to bridge the gap between the mathematics of contemporary complexity theory (in particular the formalism of “effective complexity” developed by Gell-Mann and Lloyd [2003]) and a more general account of the structure of science generally. Dynamical complexity provides a physical interpretation of the formal tools of mathematical complexity theory, and thus can be used as…

disciplinary and holistic methods of climatology can help us better understand the nature of complex systems in general. Questions surrounding climate science can be divided into three rough categories: foundational, methodological, and evaluative questions. ”How do we know that we can trust science?" is a paradigmatic foundational question (and a surprisingly difficult one to answer). Because the global climate is so complex, questions like “what makes a system complex?” also fall into this category. There are a number of existing definitions of ‘complexity,’ and while all of them capture…

up that project, and present a novel account of what it means for a physical system to be complex in the relevant sense. This concept, which I will call dynamical complexity , is presented as a physical interpretation of some very recent mathematical advancements in the field of information theory. The central problem that shall occupy us in the next chapter, then, is how to transform a discussion of complexity that seems to work very well for things like messages into an account that works well for things like climate systems. My hope is that dynamical complexity offers this bridge. Once…

with a system of high dynamical complexity, and think about and how have those challenges been met in different fields. We’ll examine why it is that scientists care about dynamical complexity, and what can be learned by assessing the dynamical complexity of a given system. In Chapter Five , I’ll synthesize the two threads that have, up to that point, been pursued more-or-less in parallel and argue the global climate is a paradigmatic dynamically complex system. We’ll examine how that fact has shaped the methodology of climate science, as well as how it has given rise to a number of unique…

This quiet conceptual revolution has proceeded more-or-less independently in these ​ disciplines until fairly recently. Increasingly, though, the question of whether there might be general principles underlying these cases—principles that deal with how systems of many highly connected interactive parts behave, regardless of the nature of those parts—has started to surface in these discussions. This is precisely the question that complexity theory aims to explore: what are the general features of systems for which the decompositionist approach fails to capture the whole story? What rigorous…