THE COMPLEXITY OF NATURE

D. C. Mikulecky

Professor of Physiology

Medical College of Virginia Commonwealth University

http://views.vcu.edu/~mikuleck/

 

Complexity is the property of a real world system that is manifest in the inability of any one formalism being adequate to capture all its properties. It requires that we find distinctly different ways of interacting with systems. Distinctly different in the sense that when we make successful models, the formal systems needed to describe each distinct aspect are NOT derivable from each other.

This is the basic definition of complexity that I suggest everyone adopt. I will now show that it either leads to or is consistent with all the following attributes/properties/definitions of a complex system.

 

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