1.0.1 Complexity is everything that is the case.
1.0.2 The question of complexity is an old question. Lucretius asks, “And how is it that, without the machinations of the gods, all things can come about?” (Lucretius 2007, 25). Nearly 2000 years later, we hear the same question in Walt Whitman and Wittgenstein: “My words are words of questioning, and to indicate reality” (Whitman 2005, 35); “The question could actually be put this way: how does what is important for us depend on what is physically possible?” (Wittgenstein 1969, 72).
1.0.3 Complexity is related to entropy. In a way, to be a complex process is to be a process that moves to lower entropy. To be more complex is to have lower entropy. Schrödinger called it “negative entropy” (Schrödinger 2012, 71).
“He not busy being born is busy dying” (Dylan 2017, 52) is a pretty good summary of complexity versus entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. To be alive is to be complex. Life is a constant battle against entropy; it takes work. To paraphrase Dylan Thomas: rage, rage against the second law of thermodynamics (Thomas 2017, 193).
1.0.4. Negative entropy is part of the story, and yet it can’t be the whole story. Crystals have low entropy, and that’s not what we are after—this is not the complexity we’re looking for.
Herbert Simon starts to point us in a better direction: “Roughly, by a complex system I mean one made up of a large number of parts that interact in a non-simple way” (Simon 1962, 468).
1.0.5 Everything we might take to be interesting is complex—life, learning, language, a painting on the wall—it’s all a move toward higher states of complexity.
“The egret is as much a part of physical reality as the atom” (Kauffman 2000, 109).