When Physics is Not "Just Physics": Complexity Science Invites New Measurement Frames for Exploring the Physics of Cognitive and Biological Development

Abstract

The neurobiological sciences have struggled to resolve the physical foundations for biological and cognitive phenomena with a suspicion that biological and cognitive systems, capable of exhibiting and contributing to structure within themselves and through their contexts, are fundamentally distinct or autonomous from purely physical systems. Complexity science offers new physics-based approaches to explaining biological and cognitive phenomena. In response to controversy over whether complexity science might seek to "explain away" biology and cognition as "just physics," we propose that complexity science serves as an application of recent advances in physics to phenomena in biology and cognition without reducing or undermining the integrity of the phenomena to be explained. We highlight that physics is, like the neurobiological sciences, an evolving field and that the threat of reduction is overstated. We propose that distinctions between biological and cognitive systems from physical systems are pretheoretical and thus optional. We review our own work applying insights from post-classical physics regarding turbulence and fractal fluctuations to the problems of developing cognitive structure. Far from hoping to reduce biology and cognition to "nothing but" physics, we present our view that complexity science offers new explanatory frameworks for considering physical foundations of biological and cognitive phenomena.