Some Concepts

Simplification is an attempt to explain, to understand the events of the world, to discover an order behind the apparent complexity of the world phenomenas. Simple is something unique, determined, that has the same meaning to different people. Galileo Galilei, for example, in formulating the fall of free bodies was trying to find a single equation to explain this natural phenomenon. Flusser says that Galileo did not discover the formula of free falling bodies, he invented it, he experiented one formula after another until the matter of the fall of heavy bodies had been framed. He simplified what was realized in order to fit the formula he had invented back in the environment. What experiments and recent discoveries are allowing to realize is that our logic rationalizing of reality is not enought to cover the phenomenal complexity of the environment in which we live. Morin said that the pathology of reason is not understand that part of our world is not rationalizable, determinable.

Complexity remind confusion, complication, because it also arises where the simplifying thinking fails, but the complexity can not be understood as simply a sensory overload, too much information available in a short period of time. Edgar Morin says that complexity can not be reduced by an idea, a principle, a keyword, so the complex can not be reduced to word complexity.

The Dictyostelium discoideum is a very interesting case, it is a unicellular organism that lives in the tree bark, when environmental conditions make it difficult to survive, it reorganizes itself into a multi-cellular organism. Scientists trying to study this phenomenon searched in vain for a colonel discoideum, a differentiated cell, a leader who caused the sudden organization of these cells. In the flight of flocks of birds the same thought occurs, the bird that goes ahead is called the leader, assuming that it puts order in the formation of the group. In both cases the organized complexity of the group emerges not from the imposition of the will of a subject, but from the interplay and exchange of information from the units, connection here means a two-way exchange, which begins with the sensitivity and abstraction of an environment near the unit, the accumulation and interpretation of the information acquired, which transforms the relations of the unit itself and is expressed in the form of behavior that will therefore change the environment.

What emerges from such natural phenomena populated by too many connections, it is not just one chance in combinatorial possibilities, because statistics and linear equations can not alone explain these kinds of organizational phenomena. Steven Strogatz says that our minds have difficulty understanding these types of problems because we are accustomed to thinking in terms of centralized control, clear chains of command, the linear logic of cause and consequence. But in large interconnected systems our ways of thinking fall apart. Flusser talking about calculations in complex and ‘autonomous’ systems says: “These calculations result in unexpected images (informative,” beautiful “), and with they we can play almost endlessly. (…) Observe: worlds will emerge.”