Reducing complexity
Principles, Methods, and Challenges
Our daily experiences, as well as our scientific endeavors, are characterized by a constant reduction of complexity. Whether using a technical device, creating a scientific model, translating between languages, analyzing historical developments, or understanding complex systems and phenomena, ambiguities, uncertainties, and contradictions are methodically largely excluded through various principles of complexity reduction in order to arrive at valid results. However, this raises a number of fundamental questions:
How is it possible to make “universally” valid statements about formations and processes in a world that appears to be so irreducibly marked by differences? Is complexity merely a result of the fact that epistemological and empirical means are insufficient to grasp it? What role do (disciplinary) languages play in this? Is complexity a continuum that can only be reduced by interrupting the continuum at a single point? Is complexity, then, inevitable, and are scientific means sometimes insufficient to grasp it? What are the consequences of this? Can research only be conducted in teams? Is artificial intelligence needed to solve these problems? Does this finding spell the end of theories?
WIN projects
WIN-Kolleg
In the Age of Multiple Crises
How complex crises arise and how we can address them
Multiple crises have the potential to cause the collapse of social and political systems. This interdisciplinary project aims to examine the tension between complex crises and the need for sociopolitical measures to reduce this complexity.
WIN-Kolleg
Complexity Reduction, Explainability, and Interpretability (KEI)
Machine learning (ML) algorithms make predictions that are relevant to our daily lives, but why they make certain decisions rather than others often remains difficult to understand; in a sense, they are “opaque.” In our project, we aim to understand how this opacity arises and how it might be addressed retroactively.
WIN-Kolleg
Neutral by Choice
Cognitive Neuroscience Meets the Philosophy of Mind
Neutral mental states are systematically underrepresented in contemporary philosophical theories and cognitive neuroscience. This project is an attempt to restore that lost complexity and to arrive at a more naturalistic understanding of decision-making, one that allows for the possibility of being decidedly undecided.