Once it comes to thinking in terms of the 'new-trend' scientific concepts, we cannot free ourselves from the semantic quagmire.Language has an arsenal of words, mostly old ones, attached to their folk-meaning. When we exercise 'new' science, we use the same words to identify(circumscribe?) concepts with a changed meaning, while the words retain their usual content in the mind. The folk-definition is haunting, even surfacing, sometimes fighting for their validity vs. the meaning they are used for the 'new-trend' content. In some cases the difference may be devastating. An example is the 2-millennia old "chaos" with its inherited folk-content as 'absolute disorder', unruly - even disturbing - in its 'unfollowable, undecipherable' complexity. Then a century ago, Poincare' initiated the word into his ingenious turbulence-studies. Passed another 1/2 century, and the unpredictable was called 'chaos', defying the calculative predictions. Mathematical physicists plunged back into the turbulent (chaotic?) eddies and soon established chaology, a quantitative effort for the nonlinear, iterative, timed dynamics using the connection with spaced fractals. Parallel to that, a cognitive study focussed on the concept called - you guessed it - 'chaos', which transcends the spatial and temporal limitations and includes the (hard to observe) ideation, - looking for a materialistic worldview, a nature-philosophy, based on, but not limited to present observational skills and means. In this endeavor the concept 'chaos' is considered the order of nature not restricted to our linearly based thinking.

• Says the 'folk' to 'chaology': "chaos term is mine, stop calculating the uncalculable (predict or rather postdict the unpredictable) and don't you restrict it to dynamics of the (mathematically) nonlinear physical processes".
• Say the 'folk' to the cognitive 'chaosopher': "don't you call my 'nonlinear' disorder the 'order of nature', it doesn't make sense."
• Say the 'folk' to the 'chaologist': "Chaos is disorder, you cannot 'order' its unpredictability into a mathematical system: what you calculate, is not a 'lawless chaos' - the formless abyss - it is mathematical physics with constants, rules, 'laws'."
• Says 'chaologist' to 'chaosopher': "don't you dare babble about chaos beyond my iterative nonlinear dynamics I just identified 'chaos', - your babble is unscientific, counterproductive, disturbing, unreasonable."
• Says the 'chaosopher' to the 'chaologist': "let me think freely, unrestricted by the obsolescent quantitative limitations, the Procrustean bed of old equations/constants of a system of paradoxes which I want to transcend with a new worldview. Rather follow us and apply your skills to the 'new', even if it requires a new mathematical logic (if you HAVE to call it mathematics).
• All three speak about something different, using the same word: 'chaos'.
• Now the other semantic quagmire is complexity. Some say: it is "too complex", meaning: hard to understand. This implies the antithesis: "simple is just easy to understand". These are relative expressions. A. Einstein 'understood' things 'easily' which are hardly understandable for many of us. Are they 'simple'(cf.: A.E.), or 'complex' (cf.: us)? It seems the definition is not generally applicable. A certain part of the concerning literature identifies complexity as a system, composed of many parts, like a design of a 747 airplane. J. Cohen and I. Stewart in their excellent '94 book The Collapse of Chaos, identified (sort of) the level of complexity as the amount of information required to describe a thing. In their even better '97 book 'The Figment of Reality' they revoked that, shifting more to 'emergence' in the complexities. Two honest scientists, advancing with the development of this new field: still open for discussion.

'S i m p l e' vs. 'C o m p l e x'

Lately I posted an opinion on a discussion-list of the NewEngland Complex Systems Institute that 'nothing is simple'. In the system of the unlimited hierarchy of a holistic interconnectedness everything is an assemblage of complexities, all the way "down to the turtle" whether we have the means to follow through, or not. The fact that our contemporary physical horizon stops at e.g. the (hypothetical) quark, does not mean that Nature stops there. We have plenty of evidence that newer aspects didi open up during our own past evolutionary course so we must not deny an end to the further possibilities. So if we find something 'simplistic', it does not mean that it is at the buttom-end of the world. Of course we may cop-out by saying: 'for us' it is simple, which is not satisfactory in terms of the principle of 'general acceptability' or as an 'unrestricted' scientific statement.

On second thought: I wanted to expand this opinion of mine (in a subsequent post).

Complexity is a word of convenience, borrowed from the folk-connotation of some 'complicatedness' or something 'hard-to-understand' developed into a 'tectological' content in recent development. Tectology (Tektologhiya) has been coined back in the 1910s, by A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) for nature's system as a product of a buildup into new qualities. Intrinsical interaction among parts of a whole forms assemblages with some characteristic of the group as a unit, mostly unpredictable from the summation of analytical knowledge about the components that assembled, or about their quality. Such 'emergent' (used as a noun) is the quality of the assemblage (I dislike the plural term of David Chalmers for the domain of thought, now in use more generally - and controversially: the "emergent (a gerund) qualia"), and such quality pertains unequivocally to the matterly, the functional, or the ideational features. The emergent is not the product of the activity of the function of the 'assembling', in the conventional sense, it is a chaotic attribute, except for ... but let us see exceptions later on. The emergent influences the components and their components, just as the quality of those lrvrls is duly re-reflected upwards as well. A system of both recursive and adaptive (complex/chaotic) equilibration.

Chaotic in this sense is used as a sensitivity which is neither proportional to the originating quantitative feature(s), nor consequently followable by their qualitative features - at least to our existing cognitive inventory of science, logic and causality (the rules are unknown, to be developed later - hopefully).

An aside - (I apologize for a little digression here.)

My speculation of the 'Nature-system' is based on David Bohm's 'implicate order', into the spaceless - timeless chaotic equilibrium of holistic interconnectedness. In unlimited 'self-reshuffling' of the system there is an unavoidable chance of some imbalance to occur when groupings fall out from the chaotic order of the holism. Such imbalances, with unrestricted history are callable (Big?) Bangs, in cases resulting in some linearity, i.e. in some aspects of simplification (with)in the chaotic 'rules'. While such occurrence is readily self-fixed in the holistic balance, it develops an inside history of its own. Considerably such an imbalance prompted our universe. Our "Big Bang" is not different from other 'bangs' that may occur in nature without restrictions in number, extent, quality, beyond our world.

Looking -- FROM THE INSIDE,-- we experience space, time, (as in David Bohm's explicate order) and a gradual buildup of the complexity (evolution), leading (us, the universe that is) back into the chaotic system by eliminating the 'simplifiing' - linear - distortions, of and within the universal chaos. - End of digression.

Now it is time for a definition of the 'simple': a system, having linear features, an arithmetic calculability, predictable and consequent qualities, which is understandable (easily?) in terms of , or by the unsophisticated rules of the "logical", "causal", "quantitative" human minds.

In contrast, a definition of the 'complex ': a system following chaotic characteristics, mustering the unpredictable emergent, showing self-organizing adaptive/recursive formations and (the so far undetected) Rules that defy a quantiative proportionality and a qualitative consequence (in our present linear(?) terms).

Whatever we observe in this world may have both simplicity and complexity features - in different proportions. It is up to our judgement, which one do we find overwhelming.

Madison NJ, October 1998

John Mikes