Definition of Complexity

What is Complexity?

Perhaps a word needs to be said directly about “complexity” before we go further. In daily speech, complex and complicated are usable pretty much interchangeably. But “complexity” in the sciences points to all the cases where richly interacting heterogeneous systems give rise via self-organizing processes to emergent global behaviors. Such systems are adaptive, non-linear, and emergent. 

Examples of this are livingness, cognition, the behavior of crowds, and ecosystems; in fact, viewed from a certain pragmatic perspective, everything that involves livingness involves complex emergent systems. In these situations, what might appear at first glance as “complicated” – a vast mess of things – habits, practices, environments, bodies, brains, tools becomes “simple” – in this case: cognition – e.g., me simply feeling like it is time for another sip of coffee. For us, in our work, we prefer to simply speak of emergence in regards to the phenomenon and keep the term “complexity” for the interdisciplinary sciences that experiment with it: “the complexity sciences”.

The long and short of all of this is that there is a radical rupture in how we engage with creativity, livingness, causality, individuality, agency, groups, and reality in general because of an understanding of emergence, and the complex behaviors of non-linear systems.