Biblio

Existing security models are highly linear and fail to capture the rich interactions that occur across security technology, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and human/organizational components. In this work, we will leverage insights from resilience science, complex system theory, and network theory to develop a next-generation security model based on these interactions to address challenges in complex, nonlinear risk environments and against innovative and disruptive technologies. Developing such a model is a key step forward toward a dynamic security paradigm (e.g., shifting from detection to anticipation) and establishing the foundation for designing next-generation physical security systems against evolving threats in uncontrolled or contested operational environments.

This chapter explores the relationship between the concept of emergence, the goal of theoretical completeness, and the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Samuel Alexander and C. D. Broad argued for limits to the power of scientific explanation. Chemical explanation played a central role in their thinking. After Schrödinger’s work in the 1920s their examples seem to fall flat. However, there are more general lessons from the emergentists that need to be explored. There are cases where we know that explanation of some phenomenon is impossible. What are the implications of known limits to the explanatory power of science, and the apparent ineliminability of brute facts for emergence? One lesson drawn here is that we must embrace a methodological rather than a metaphysical conception of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.