Holy complexity theory Batman I

Holy complexity theory Batman

I was just talking about my fascination with the desert with Dave last night. I was trying, poorly, to explain that I liked how the desert reduced all the clutter. I sometimes feel that the universe conceals one great truth that explains how everything interconnects and grows. If one could find those spots in the universe where the curtain that conceals the great truth had been worn down you might peek through. I feel as though those threadbare spots are places where everything has been reduced to some sort of primal elements. I think the desert is an example of one of those threadbare spots.

In the desert you have a small number of elements (sand, etc.), and a small number of rules that effect those elements (wind, gravity, etc.). What I find endlessly fascinating about it is the complexity that emerges from the way the dunes move and shift. The words I wish I had had last night is that In the desert you can clearly see a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. When I first had this realization in the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado it was the first time I felt like I had an understanding of what God is…I felt like God is that piece that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. Really, one could come to this realization anywhere, because complexity is everywhere. I needed a place with all the noise turned down for me to see it and for me that is the desert.

My pseudo-intellectual vomit aside, imagine my delight to get a new issue of Netfuture in my email today that covers this very topic! In it Steve Talbott mentions a great article he wrote in the latest Nature Institute publication on Complexity Theory. He spends a great deal of time documenting the complexity theories that have evolved from contemplating how grains of sand form dunes. Overall I thought the article did a really good job explaining complexity theory terms like emergence, holism, self-organization and generality. I came to it as a neophyte to complex systems. Considering the coincidence in timing, it has left me to wonder what role coincidence plays in emergent systems.

By the way, this all figures in quite nicely with Jim’s recent post on Kurt Gödel’s theorem of incompleteness. Complexity theory seems to fly in the face of Gödel’s assertion that a computer can never be anything more than the sum of its parts. Jim did an awesome job assembling a very thought-provoking entry.