Quantum Adaptive Systems Theory in Brief

Quantum Adaptive Systems Theory is the merger of Complex Adaptive Systems Theory, developed principally at the Santa Fe Institute, with the Consilient Quantum Paradigm set out in the companion architecture document. The first accounts for how systems of interacting agents produce order without central direction. The second supplies the formal apparatus by which those properties can be realized in coordination rather than merely observed in nature.

Three properties of the theory bear on recognition, and a reviewer from any of the four disciplines will want them stated before the candidates.

• It is constructive rather than descriptive. Complex Adaptive Systems Theory explains order already present in systems that arose without design. Quantum Adaptive Systems Theory treats the eight mechanisms of self-organization as design requirements and supplies the structures that satisfy them deliberately. Complex adaptive systems are recovered as the restricted case.
• It spans the ladder rather than occupying a rung. The formal apparatus is imported from Riemannian geometry and manifold topology, quantum mechanics, molecular biology and evolutionary theory, autocatalytic set theory and critical-mass physics, inflationary cosmology, and market design — successive levels of physical, biological and economic organization. That the six compose without forcing is a consilience of inductions in Whewell's original sense, and it is the reason to suspect the composition is not arbitrary.
• Instances nest. A system embodying the theory's requirements is a Quantum Adaptive System. The Quantum Privacy Network is one; so is each Accelerator, Exchange Network, Resource Pool and the contribution graph. A Quantum Adaptive System assembled from Quantum Adaptive Systems is itself one, which is why the architecture composes rather than merely aggregates.

The consequence for this document is direct. Each candidate below is presented in the same form: the problem as its discipline states it, why the substrate made it unsolvable, which imported structure supplies the missing property, and what follows. A reviewer who rejects the paradigm should expect to reject all twelve. A reviewer who accepts it should find each candidate unsurprising, which is the correct response to a mechanism that works.