What you describe here is not complexity. It is what they toyed with in the 60s when the retroactive effect of negative feedback was observed and experimented with when researching the use of relays in mechanical systems. It is complicated, not complex.

You use the word ‘emergent’. It is true that it applies to complexity. It describes the capricious (unpredictable) behaviour of a thing or system that makes it look as if it has a mind of its own. In the wake of the mechanical age, this is still a newbie. Only 30 years ago, ecology (a study of complexity systems) which was thought to be a discipline governed by scientific and mathematical parameters, baffled the observers at the time when its outcomes seemed to disobey the abundant theories that related to equilibria and their like.

We are still trying to make sense of behaviour and outcomes in terms of things mechanical when looking at systems that are anything but mechanical. We must stop doing this. It’s like trying to explain exponential effects in terms of addition, or digital effects in terms of their analogue equivalent. It cannot be done.

I posit here that most who talk and expound the concepts of complexity don’t know the fundamentals of complexity. It’s not that they’re out of their depth. It’s that they are in two dimensions when what they try to talk about is taking place in three. Try explaining volume and capacity to a two dimensional being who lives in the comic environment of the picture. They see the height and width of it, but the depth has to be manifest in terms of the other two dimensions, so understanding is just not possible. There is no panacea for this problem until a paradigm shift (I know it’s a 20th century term!) is made in our thinking.

We have to think complexity when dealing with complexity systems. The old and well known mechanically complicated systems behave differently, and their rules and what we can predict form those don’t apply to what we are looking at.

Catchya later
from Middle-earth