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Complexity (and/or "Complex Systems")

Last update: 13 Dec 2024 22:24
First version: 25 September 1997 (or earlier?); major revisions 23 November 2002, and (even more substantial) 18 October 2024.

If pressed to explain what I mean by this, I'd say that it's processes showing some combination of non-linearity and lots of strongly interacting components --- but ones where the interactions aren't so strong that there is an effective low-dimensional description. The common thread is that you need lots of information to understand what's going on. As for more precise definitions, well, I give complexity measures their own notebook for a reason. My fuller views are expounded in some of my papers, linked to below.

My own views on this subject are, naturally, hard to separate from the fact that I've been going to the Santa Fe Institute since 1997, worked there full time 1998--2002, have been on its external faculty since the '00s, etc. That place, and the scientific network around it, has not only provided me with training, resources and professional opportunities, but mentors, collaborators, close personal friends, a professional agenda, and sense of belonging to something valuable. Like any home, it has moments when the other occupants make me roll my eyes, but it would be absurd for me to pretend to be an impartial critic. I'm only too aware that someone else interested in the same topics, but not inducted into the same epistemic community, the same network-and-tradition, might well make very different judgments about the literature...

To develop, someday: An exposition of how the whole field is a "series of footnotes" to Norbert Wiener and Herbert Simon.

The linkage/references here are sparser than they could be, because today my lumper/splitter pendulum has swung towards "split", and I've moved a lot of stuff to the more specialized notebooks.

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