Complexity Science

What is complexity science? Complexity science, or complex systems science, can be defined in many ways. My favorite way to define it is that it's the study of systems that exhibit emergent properties, called complex systems. An emergent property is a gestalt macroscopic property produced by complex, non-linear interactions of the system's parts. In Mark Newman's words, a complex system "is a system composed of many interacting parts, such that the collective behavior of those parts together is more than the sum of their individual behaviors" (which I stole from this article). A common example I use to build some intuition behind the idea of emergent properties is states of matter. A substance is solid, for example, because its molecules are interacting in a particular way. A single molecule by itself cannot not be solid. The quality of being a solid emerges from the collective behavior of a group of molecules. Another great example is society/culture. Culture and society are phenomena that emerge from the highly-complex interactions between large groups of humans. One particularly intriguing emergent property is consciousness. For a long time, this was the focus of my interest and curiousity. I still love and am endlessly captivated by consciousness, but my interest has broadened to encompass a more general drive to understand emergence itself.

Complex systems have been my special interest for quite a few years now, but I spent many of those years obsessed with self-organization and criticality without knowing the field of "complexity science" even existed. Even though I consider the origins of this special interest to be my life-long interest in how people work, the interest that got me figuring things out was ecology. I used to explain to people that what fascinated me about ecology was the way an ecosystem was an extremely intricate and fragile-yet-unyielding network of relationships filled with checks, balances, (co)evolution, and adaptation. I was fascinated by biology as a whole because of the way living things interact with other living things and their environment to create something bigger than themselves. I was interested in living things because of the way they themselves were ecosystems too. At some point, I realized it wasn't biology itself which held my interest, it was the living nature of the adaptable system. From then on, I began to say my passion was self-organizing systems (a word I stumbled onto while browsing wikipedia). Still, it took me probably more than a year from that point to discover complex systems science, or realize I could be a complexity scientist.

Because complexity science is my special interest, I find myself bringing complexity science with me everywhere I go. Complexity thinking plays a large role in my study and practice of anarchism, it fuels my curiousity about consciousness and the human condition, forms a basis for my critical media analysis, and drives my passion for mathematics. My interest in complexity science is primarily mathematical and philosophical, and I think this is because it's the fact that complex systems emerge in a universe defined by entropy that drives my infatuation. Plus, I love that complexity science represents the newly emerging (ha-ha, but also ideology can be studied as a complex system) paradigm shift in science away from reductionism. I feel very strongly that complexity science can open doors and build (epistemological) bridges between what used to be conceived as totally opposite fields. I believe complexity science can bridge the gap between the objective and the subjective, the tangible and the metaphysical. And I want to be a part of that movement.

Sections I want to write

Why choose math as my path to complexity science? / Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer and complexity / What led me to complexity? / Vague thoughts on complexity and literature

Activity (little micro-blog)

I am currently reading (or at least... I've started):

COMPLEXITY: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION by John H. Holland / THE SELF-ORGANIZING UNIVERSE by Eric Jantsch / THE COMPLEX WORLD: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE FOUNDATIONS OF COMPLEXITY SCIENCE by David Krakauer / AN INTRODUCTION TO COMPLEX SYSTEMS: MAKING SENSE OF A CHANGING WORLD by Joe Tranquillo

I TRIED to read but couldn't parse:

COMPLEXITY SCIENCE: THE STUDY OF EMERGENCE by Henrik Jeldtoft Jensen

I've successfully read

DEEP SIMPLICITY by John Gribbin

Journal articles I've read

ANARCHY AND COMPLEXITY by Carlos Maldonado & Nathalie Mezza Garcia (E:CO 2016 18(1): 52-73

Stuff on my queue

Books: COMPLEXITY THEORY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES by David Byrne / EXPLORING COMPLEXITY: AN INTRODUCTION by Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine / COMPLEXITY: A GUIDED TOUR by Melanie Mitchell

Online stuff: DIALECTICS, COMPLEXITY AND THE CRISIS by Michael Brand / COMPLEXITY EXPLORER COURSES: like, most of 'em

last updated: 2026.02.12