Sunday, January 31, 2016

Deceptively Simple Complexity

I seemed to have taken all of 2015 off to write 3 books. While researching those books, I've come across the realization that how people conceptualize complexity in systems is very dependent on their paradigm(s) of science. This got me looking into various existing scientific paradigms -- how they enable or constrain what we can see, and affect how we understand, the "stuff" in and of the world.

Scientific historian Thomas Kuhn wrote of paradigms, their communities and their revolutions. I see these processes going on -- simmering beneath the surface -- almost everywhere I look. In the evolution of paradigms, many won't survive. Those that do, won't survive for very long periods of time.  Perhaps the biggest surprise I found was my confirmation of the principle: "Deception in distant objectives and deception in the paths of objective search" -- first identified and investigated by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman.

In addressing deception associated with lack of knowledge, for example, I see the complexity in systems as means to solutions (or resolutions) to complexity by deception  -- not always as a problem to be overcome. The hard part is understanding what makes complexity "interesting".