It's the way that M. Mitchell Waldrop's Complexity accesses the mysterious realm of Rilke's "sublime" that really blew open my mind. I could hear the old schemas and models grinding and cracking as I read the following passage:
The equation that governed the flow of wind and moisture looked simple enough.... until researchers realized that the flap of a butterfly's wings in Texas could change the course of a hurricane in Haiti a week later. Or that a flap of that butterfly's wings a millimeter to the left might have deflected the hurricane in a totally different direction.
In contrast to the linear cause-effect sequences that dominated post-Newtonian science and economics, the study of nonlinear dynamics opened up a world in which "everything is connected, and often with an incredible sensitivity". Waldrop elaborates:
Tiny perturbations won't always remain tiny. Under the right circumstances, the slightest uncertainty can grow until the system's future becomes utterly unpredictable- or, in a word, chaotic.
Source for these "fractalicious butterfly wings"
Complexity and/or Chaos Theory studies the non-linear dynamics of complex adaptive systems in an attempt to explain the dynamic behavior of complex systems by discovering the laws governing such behavior, which can range from the chaotic to the rigidly ordered, with a critical "edge-of-chaos" region in the middle where order and disorder co-exist.
At the edge-of-chaos region, complex dynamical systems become adaptive, solve problems and evolve by mutation and selection. Such systems are called Complex Adaptive Systems, or CAS.
Ultimately, it was Phil Anderson's 1972 article published in Science magazine that turned the world into a web. Michael Atkisson offers insight on how Phil rattled the reigning reductionist models. Anderson's "emergent properties" rippled through the world of hard and soft sciences, reaching even into the humanities to move our thinking from lines into networks.
Netvolution writes:
The examples of cellular automata and the computational universe illustrate the possibility of emergence as the results of complexity. The study of these systems has become defined as the field of Complexity Science. Through the interaction of many simple independent agents governed by simple rules operating in a non linear manner this space of enquiry has been able to model a vast array of environments, opening up new methods of looking at fields as varied as Urban Design, Economics, Neuroscience and Physics. The pioneers of Complexity Science - based at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico - saw that this space of generative emergence exists at the edge of chaos: “the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy.” It is at this domain, in the phase transition between order and disorder that complexity operates.
Don't settle for halfway measures or irrationalizations in your ethics, economics (pace Chicago School), science, or history. Lose your mind on the Santa Fe Institute website and emerge with a better one.
TWO MORE TANGLES
Waldrop's complexity reviewed chapter by chapter for Computational Modeling course
Complexity theory for software developers (Methods and Tools)
