Is the Whole Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts?

In the attempt to explain how our world works, the science, for many centuries, used a so-called “reductionist” approach when a complicated phenomenon is broken down into simpler parts, which are studied and lessons from those studies are used to explain the phenomenon in its entirety. This approach led to many significant discoveries, but it also can be considered a cause to some significant failures, because sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, we have not yet answered the question of where or what the human mind is, although we know in much detail physiological and biochemical qualities of the brain.

At the same time, complex behavior in systems might have very simple underlying structure. The effort to study complexity comes from the hope that there are general principles underlying many or all complex systems.

 This book describes how new studies in the theory of complexity help to further our understanding of physical processes surrounding and within us.

Often the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Sometimes out of a multitude of simple processes comes something unexpected on a global scale.

As any other area of physical world, society and economy are also affected by the complexity phenomena

Impact of technological innovations on the society and economy is most profound when these innovations reach a certain degree of popularity (complexity). For example, societal impact of the Internet when it was just an inter-university network run by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency was negligible comparing to what it is now. As the Internet became open and popular (increased scale and complexity), its underlying technology enabled it to be used for a multitude of applications that it was not designed or originally intended for. That is one of the reasons why it is so difficult sometimes to objectively forecast significance of the societal/economic impact of a technology before the technology is widely adopted.

Synergetic (self-organizing) systems can tend to phase-lock

Business entities being such self-organizing systems might want to pay attention to this quality of complex systems and create connections with the right synergetic partners.

Many large-scale phenomena are driven from within and trying to control them from without is very difficult

An example of such phenomena can be a civil war caused by interethnic differences. If ethnic conflicts are settled on a very low (village or neighborhood) level, there will be no war. But if the system is ripe with conflicts on low level, attempts to pacify them from outside are most likely doomed to fail.

The way to analyze a complex system is to build a simulation

The authors recommend to perform analysis of complex systems through the following steps:

Identify a set of interacting agents
Identify a pattern of their interactions
Identify an existence or lack of connections between the agents
Build a step-by-step simulation of the system to reveal its behavior.