CA As Embodiments of a Paradigm Shift

Thomas Kuhn, in an influential work on the history of science entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [knhntTO], used the phrase paradigm shift to describe the essence of what happens when one established way of looking at the world is - either suddenly, or over time - replaced by another. 

Reductionist World-View Holistic World-View a shift away from a long held belief that complex self-organized behavior requires a complex underlying dynamics and/or substructure towards the new notion that complexity is an emer-gent/holistic phenomenon that often arises from the interactions among a large assemblage of otherwise simple parts i.e. the properties of the parts must be understood as a dynamics of whole. 

Physics and Information Physics of Information a shift away from the old notion that physics and computation are connected only insofar as computers 

Note that, as a concept, collectivism is really distinct from both the top-down reductionist approach traditionally favored by most physicists ( system as a simple edifice of its microscopic parts), and the more recent neural-net-like bottom-up approach favored by connectionists ( system as a synthesis of its constituent parts). Collectivism asserts that a system is more than just a large-part synthesized from smaller-parts, but is a coherent whole whose evolution is continuously redefined 

The developmental histories of artificial life and cellular automata have been intertwined ever since von Neumann hrst showed how to construct a self-reproducing automaton ([voiiN66] see section 11.7). A brief historical overview of artificial life appears in chapter 11. 

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