Complexity: The bigger picture

TL;DR

This paper discusses the ambiguous nature of complexity as a concept across disciplines, exploring its rise as a central scientific theme and emphasizing the importance of understanding emergent properties across different scales.

Contribution

It offers a critical analysis of the concept of complexity, highlighting the need for a unified theory and focusing on the emergence of new properties at different scales.

Findings

Complex systems are highly interconnected across multiple scales.

The notion of complexity has become a widespread scientific buzzword.

Understanding emergent properties is key to the science of complexity.

Abstract

If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to linguistics, but with no underlying, unified theory. Complexity has become a popular buzzword used in the hope of gaining attention or funding -- institutes and research networks associated with complex systems grow like mushrooms. Why and how did it happen that this vague notion has become a central motif in modern science? Is it only a fashion, a kind of sociological phenomenon, or is it a sign of a changing paradigm of our perception of the laws of nature and of the approaches required to understand them? Because virtually every real system is inherently extremely complicated, to say that a system is complex is almost an empty statement - couldn't an Institute of Complex Systems just as well be called an Institute for Almost Everything? Despite these valid concerns, the world is indeed made of many highly interconnected parts over many scales, whose interactions result in a complex behaviour needing separate interpretation for each level. This realization forces us to appreciate that new features emerge as one goes from one scale to another, so it follows that the science of complexity is about revealing the principles governing the ways by which these new properties appear.