Ben Goertzel — Life Is Complicated

On "complexification" (complexity + complication) and modeling systems.

So why has the success of complexity science been so, well, complicated?

Some would say it’s because the core ideas of complexity, emergence, self-organization and so forth just aren’t the right ones to be looking at.

But I don’t think it’s that. These are critical, important ideas.

Rather, I think the correct message is a subtler one: Real-world systems aren’t just complex, in the Santa Fe Institute sense of displaying emergent properties and behaviors that self-organize from the large-scale simple interactions of many simple elements.

Rather, real-world systems are what I’ll -- a bit goofily, I acknowledge -- call “complexicated”.

That is: They are complex (in the Santa Fe Institute sense) AND complicated (in the sense of just having lots of different parts that are architected or evolved to have specific structures and properties, which play specific roles in the whole system).

The Multiverse According to Ben
Life Is Complicated

Ben Goertzel | Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics and financial prediction firm Aidyia Holdings; Chairman of AI software company Novamente LLC and bioinformatics company Biomind LLC; Chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Society and the OpenCog Foundation; Vice Chairman of futurist nonprofit Humanity+; Scientific Advisor of biopharma firm Genescient Corp.; Advisor to the Singularity University and Singularity Institute; Research Professor in the Fujian Key Lab for Brain-Like Intelligent Systems at Xiamen University, China; and general Chair of the Artificial General Intelligence conference series.

ht Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution