Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Simplexity and complicity The British biologist Jack Cohen�and the British mathematician Ian Stewart�studied how the regularities of nature (from Cosmology to Quantum Theory, from Biology to Cognitive Psychology) emerge from the underlying chaos and complexity of nature: "emergent simplicities collapse chaos". They argued that external constraints are fundamental in shaping biological systems (DNA does not uniquely determine an organism) and defined new concepts: "simplexity" (the tendency of simple rules to emerge from underlying disorder and complexity) and "complicity" (the tendency of interacting systems to co-evolve leading to a growth of complexity). Simplexity is a "weak" form of emergence, and is ubiquitous. Complicity is a stronger form of emergence, and is responsible for consciousness and evolution. �Simplexity merely explores a fixed space of the possible� complicity enlarges it.� Emergence is the rule, not the exception, and it is shaped by simplexity and complicity.� � Back to the beginning of the chapter "Self-organization and the Science of Emergence" | Back to the index of all chapters