On Novelty and Heterogeneity

Summary

Novelty and heterogeneity are two closely related issues. Heterogeneity is not only a result of the emergence of novelty which creates variety in any evolving system. Heterogeneous elements are also required as inputs for the recombination processes underlying the generation of novelty. However, while heterogeneity figures prominently in computational and agent-based economics and in complex adaptive systems analysis, novelty and its emergence are neglected topics. In order to make progress with the latter the paper starts with a discussion of how novelty is being generated both in the case of genetic novelty and that of mental novelty. For the case of mental novelty it is then shown that the bottleneck in our understanding of novelty is not the generation procedure proper, but rather the procedure by which our mind evaluates or interprets the outcome. On the basis of this distinction it is briefly sketched how, for different forms of novelty, the degree of novelty may be rank-ordered and how the limits to predictability in the context of novelty vary with that degree.

I should like to thank the participants of the workshop in Kiel, particularly Masanao Aoki and Sheri Markose, for their comments on my lecture which have induced me to rethink some points in this paper.