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Abstract

This is the core chapter of this book, about the complexity of complexity. After all of the rethinking in the preceding chapters, we think we are able to present a different notion and concept of complexity that can lead to a new way of thinking in complexity. We intend to develop a way of thinking in complexity that goes beyond the complexity as taken for granted in the field of our social sciences and humanities.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In Wendell Berry, in Vitek and Jackson 2008, “The Virtues of Ignorance”, p. 37 (emphasis added).

  2. 2.

    What are really fundamental and also general in this are causality itself (Smolin 2006, p. 241) and the underlying causal processes and relations of causality (Smolin 2006, p. 244). Interestingly, the importance of causality in this seems similar to understanding the fundamental role of causality in understanding of the new physics of spacetime (see Smolin’s Chap. 15). This makes our approach a real trans-disciplinary one.

  3. 3.

    Originally published in 1817. See Craig Holdrege, in Vitek and Jackson 2008, The Virtues of Ignorance, p. 332.

  4. 4.

    “The straight line leads to the end of humanity/mankind” (own translation).

  5. 5.

    We may stress, again, that recursion not only has the meaning of repetition but also that of a reversing of effects like in reciprocal interaction with reciprocal influences (see Chap. 11, about the meaning of non-recursive relationships).

  6. 6.

    What are really fundamental and also general in this are causality itself and the underlying causal processes and relations of causality (Smolin 2006, pp. 241, 244). Interestingly, the importance of causality in this seems similar to understanding the fundamental role of causality in understanding of the new physics of spacetime (see Smolin’s chapter 15). This makes our approach a real transdisciplinary one. We return to this topic in the last chapter.

  7. 7.

    Susan Oyama links this dogma here to a publication of Francis Crick (1957).

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Correspondence to Ton Jörg .

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Jörg, T. (2011). The Complexity of Complexity. In: New Thinking in Complexity for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1303-1_13

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