Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems Engineering

Chapter 3SYSTEM THEORETIC FOUNDATIONS FOR EMERGENT BEHAVIOR MODELING: THE CASE OF EMERGENCE OF HUMAN LANGUAGE IN A RESOURCE-CONSTRAINED COMPLEX INTELLIGENT DYNAMICAL SYSTEM

Bernard P. Zeigler¹ and Saurabh Mittal²

¹RTSync Corporation, Rockville, MD, USA and, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

²MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA

SUMMARY

A recent paper laid a systems theoretic foundation for understanding how human language could have emerged from prelinguistic elements. The systems theoretic approach to incorporating emergence (as a construct) to understand a complex phenomenon first required the formulation of a system model of the phenomena. Having the correct formal system specification is a key to demonstrating that the obtained holistic behaviors denote the intended emergent behavior. The case study of human language is presented as an instance of a set of language-ready components that must be coupled to form a system with innovative inter-component information exchange. In this chapter, we first review the systems theoretic foundation for modeling accurate emergent behavior. We then review the activity-based monitoring paradigm and the emergent property of attention-focusing in resource-constrained activity-based complex dynamical intelligent systems (RCIDS): a class of systems that exhibit intelligent behaviors. We then pose the problem of shared attention among hominins within these paradigms. A fundamental property of stable systems may lie in their ability to obtain ...