Governing Features
Key Concepts
Diagram: Degrees of Freedom

Degrees of Freedom

'Degrees of freedom' is the way to describe the potential range of behaviors available within a given system. Without some freedom for a system to change its state, no complex adaptation can occur.

Understanding the degrees of freedom available within a complex system is important because it helps us understand the overall scope of potential ways in which a system can unfold. We can imagine that a given complex system is subject to a variety of inputs (many of which are unknown), but then we must ask, what is the system's range of possible outputs?

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Cybernetics | Law of Requisite Variety

This is a default subtitle for this page. Read more and see related content for Ross Ashby →

Building Blocks | Santa Fe

John Holland is considered one of the seminal thinkers in Complex Adaptive Systems theory.

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Topology | Bifurcations

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On Growth and Form

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epigenesis

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Manifolds

This is a default subtitle for this page. Read more and see related content for Bernhard Riemann →

Reaction/Diffusion | Computation

diffusion model spots Read more and see related content for Alan Turing →
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  • This is a list of Terms that Degrees of Freedom is related to.

    For a system to adapt, it needs to have variables to adjust.

    See also: Requisite Variety

    Read more and see related content for Variables →

    This term is used by relational/assemblage philosophers to speak about the 'space of possibilities'.

    'The Virtual' is a term used by Deleuze and Guattari that parallels the idea of {{phase-space}}. The Virtual alludes to aspects of reality that may or may not manifest, depending on how a system comes to be activated. Read more and see related content for The Virtual →

    The quantity and breadth of a system's adaptive potential is its 'requisite variety'.

    In order for a complex system to adapt, it needs to contain agents that have the capacity to behave in different ways - to enact adaptation you need adaptable things. Read more and see related content for Requisite Variety →

    Phase space is an abstract concept that refers to all possible behaviors available to an agent within a complex system.

    Related to {{degrees-of-freedom}}. Read more and see related content for Phase Space →

    A notion in Landscape Urbanism that relates to the notion of an environment's potentiality to be activated in different ways;

    can be thought of as connecting to phase space in physics, or the space of possibilities Read more and see related content for Open Scaffolds →

    The idea that systems can have more than one stable state.

    Early versions of systems theory assumed that systems could be 'optimized' to a single condition. CAS analysis assumes that more than one system state can satisfy optimizing criteria, and so the system is able to gravitate to multiple equilibria.

    Read more and see related content for Multiple Equilibria →

    A particular topological space that a system can occupy

    This is a default subtitle for this page. Read more and see related content for Manifold →

    The idea that many possible states or historical trajectories could have equally unfolded

    Beyond its day-to-day usage, this term used in now employed in the social sciences to highlight the Path Dependency exhibited in many social systems. This is seen to contrast with prior conceptions like "the march of history", which imply a clear causal structure. By speaking about the work as something contingent, it also begs the question of what other "worlds" might have just as equally manifested, had things been slightly different.

    Similar ideas are captured in the ideas of Non-Linearity, {{sensitivity-to-initial-conditions}}, History Matters.

    Pictured below: the contingent trajectory of the double pendulum:

    Read more and see related content for Contingency →
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  • There would be some thought experiments here.