The unbearable simplicity of complexity

First draft

2025-10-19

Latest draft

2025-10-19

While there are some seemingly simple things - like time and gravity - most of the things around us are very complex. To understand how multicellular organisms or computers function, it helps to understand what complexity is.

In this text I'll try to make complexity simple, with the help of ideas by such scientists as Melanie Mitchell, Stuart Kauffman, and many others.

At the core there are simpler things, and by the way of them interacting, more complex things emerge. The more complex those interacting simpler things are, the more complex the emerging things are. After a large number of interaction iterations, the emerging result has very high complexity.

Entropy is a closely related concept.