¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 I often started my Intro Psych course with this written on the chalkboard:

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 EMBRACE COMPLEXITY: THE TEXTURE OF REALITY
LEARN-TO-LEARN RULES FOR NAVIGATING COMPLEXITY.

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0 Complexity Science, and its variants, are esoteric mathematical adventures. Some may find applications. Others are math art-forms. “Complexity”, as an open-ended, abstract discipline, can play with conceptual schemes well beyond what exists in Human or Material Reality.

Computer seafed finance gets increasingly more complicated (and unstable). On the other hand, human creative intuition can restructure the complicated into something with functionality, elegance and beauty.

The complexity of Material Reality appears to be fractal-like “organized” into “domains” of quite moderate complexity.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Individual human persons face a “complexity limit” due to their inability to keep conceptual schemes with more than 3 (5+/-9) independent variables in their “working consciousness” in any specious present. Humankind has worked collectively with conceptual schemes with a few more independent variables. Knowing what we are trying to do, we have the collective competency to navigate complexity far better than we do today. Utilizing collective/common semfields (e.g. cyberspace docs/sems), we have future competencis to process “complex information, collectively” far, far better then we can today. This will emerge through many OLLO cycles.

IMPORTANT: This doesn’t apply to transforming or fixing the social/societal systems of contemporary humankind. These are far different from “complex”, and even different from “complicated”. Many are systems doomed to collapse, linked in loose networks with other unstable systems. I don’t want the term “complex” to label ANY SUCH SYSTEM, no matter how dis-organized. Complexity is a complex attribute, relative to perspective and context.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0  

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Situations are “complicated” when we are “confused about complexity”. This brings out the essential distinction between “the complexity of objective material systems, independent of humans” and “the complexity of the mental models at play in human mind/brains”.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 Ease of Navigating vs Simplicity.  Some humans can learn to competently perform complex tasks, with ease. It varies with a person’s dominant propensities, the quality of training, and the available tools. For everyone, some simple tasks would be difficult to perform. History has demonstrated that tasks previously impossible or doable by only a few, can be done by anyone with the right tools and training.

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 Ease of Navigating Complexity is very sensitive to the levels of TECH6 applied. TECH6 = Tools, Techniques, Tasks, Training, Teams, Time.

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Systems whose structures/processes evolved over long periods in different environments have a unique kind of complexity – different from systems intentionally designed with requisite complexity (which usually only result in being complicated). Living organisms have unique complexity – that is “elegant” – in contrast with social and societal systems, often overburdened with features detrimental to their “intended” functions.

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 ————– A few relevant urls:

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 Simple/Complex – Human Limitations

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 Large, complex, dysfunctional societal systems cannot be transformed from within.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 The Law of Requisite Variety  (1st Law of Cybernetics) – Ross Ashby.

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 MAP vs TERRITORY – revisited

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 The Scientific Literature – SEMFIELD – Challenges

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Human LANGUAGE, as vitally significant it is for humankind, has many limitations – often due to how we mis-perceive it and construe it to be something other than it is. One misuse is the propensity to believe a word has an objective definition/meaning, even for a single use. Doug Hofstadter’s Surfaces and Essences is a long, but explication of this “problem”.  . The very terms we use when attempting explication of “big & complex ideas” are those with the greatest variability of use: complexity, consciousness, meaning, truth, reality, etc.