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Complex Systems and Quantitative Mereology

Have a look at these three rings: Why are they connected? If you only consider two of the rings and ignore the third, then any pair can be smoothly separated. The triplet is connected and cannot be taken apart, but any description purely in terms of pairwise relationships would miss the fact that the three rings are connected.

The paper is called A Mereological Approach to Higher-Order Structure in Complex Systems: from Macro to Micro with Möbius and is publicly available here. I suspect the aforementioned philosophers and logicians would find my approach simplistic, naive, or superficial, but I have found it to be very practical. Biology is much more exciting than that: genes can individually contribute to your height, but they can also interact in complex ways and change each other’s effects.

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