ciao tutti,

just wanted to put some two cents in for good measure,

NOTE: complex does not neccessarily mean complicated.

This is a popular misconception in the complexity communities. As a noun, "complex" specifically means a set or arrangement of things so related or connected as to form a unity or organic whole. It means there is a group of two or more systems which are coupled. If these systems are models of real world phenomena, they obviously tend to be nonlinear and high dimensional, thus the Complex System is likely to be complicated, but not neccessarily.

So, with respect to the post about the most complex system, if you mean "which system has the largest number of component systems?", it would have to be "everything which IS", as everything together forms one connected whole. But the paradox is that "the whole enchilada" might also be the simplist thing which exists, because it is the only thing which is truely "one thing." Every specific thing which exists inside of everything only exists in a relational sense, and is therefore more more complicated than everything together "in the broadest sense". This is a nice way to frame the concept of "complexifically simple", or "simplex".

Actually this is not a paradox at all, because the only thing which actually exists is Everything, which we call "now". "Things" are human concepts created by slicing an uncountably infinite dimensional "N:oW" with a lower dimensional cognitive map. Things actually exist for real, but that doesn't mean they aren't illusions. Now, this is beyond the scope of physical and mathematical modeling in the current scientifc sense, but i thought you'd find it interesting.

The point was, in the strict mathematical context, known as complex dynamical systems theory, "complex" means a coupled group of two or more dynamical systems. Each system could even be a low dimensional linear system, and still the coupled system could still be considered complex, but not very complicated.

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saluti,

BrianX
www.gaianxaos.com