About

Howard H. Pattee reshaped complex-systems science by insisting that any account of biological information must be physically grounded. His “Physics of Symbols” shows that organisms are not computers in the usual sense, but evolving symbol–matter systems in which rate-independent symbolic constraints (genetic codes, measurement records, linguistic conventions) and rate-dependent physical dynamics (chemical kinetics, development, behavior) form complementary, mutually enabling modes of organization. Pattee’s notion of the epistemic cut names the boundary that must be crossed (through measurement, control, coding, and interpretation) for symbols to orchestrate physical systems without being reducible to dynamics alone. 

The 2026 Conference on Complex Systems (October 9–16, Binghamton NY) coincides with Pattee’s 100th birthday (October 5, 1926). As a CCS Satellite, this workshop is a one-day centennial forum that is not merely retrospective, but uses Pattee’s ideas to illuminate contemporary scientific challenges where tensions between symbolic constraints and physical dynamics are again at the forefront: embodied AI, biological agency, emergence, origins of life, cognitive science, and inter-level causation in complex adaptive systems. His work remains unusually timely. As machine learning accelerates symbolic pattern-handling without grounding, and as biology and Artificial Life increasingly adopt constraint-based causal explanations, Pattee’s framework provides a unifying conceptual bridge across disciplines. 

Workshop's Scope 

1. Clarify Pattee’s core conceptual toolkit. Accessible, example-driven introductions to the epistemic cut, symbol–matter complementarity, non-integrable constraints, and the dual roles of measurement and control are entirely welcome. Talks will emphasize how these concepts function in real biological, cognitive, and technological systems.

2. Connect Pattee’s ideas to active research frontiers. Relevant topics include grounding and embodiment in AI and robotics, whether LLM-based systems can participate in semiotic closure without sensorimotor coupling, constraint-based multi-level causal explanations in biology, emergence / stabilization of codes and conventions in distributed systems, origins-of-life models involving symbolic/molecular complementarity, and implications for autonomy, agency, and adaptive behavior.

3. Build a cross-disciplinary community and research roadmap. We aim to identify shared terminology and conceptual bridges, open theoretical and empirical problems, and avenues for collaboration across biosemiotics, ALife, dynamical systems, information biology, embodied AI, and complex-systems theory.

Organizers