Abstract

In total opposition to complicated systems, a complex system (whose whole is much greater than the sum of its parts) is not observable from outside, and its evolution cannot be predicted or controlled, nor can it be broken down into separate parts, as they are all intersecting, interdependent, interconnected and constantly interacting. Such was the revolutionary paradigm that was beginning to be discovered at the turn of the last century, regarding the dynamic, non-linear, self-organizing, and emergent features of living systems, made by a number of brilliant scientists from a variety of fields, going well beyond the artificial fracture between disciplines—veritable “false dichotomies”—persisting stubbornly even today. In any case, the ongoing anthropological transformation of our civilization is being fueled by a numerosity, a velocity and a virality of information and communication never before experienced, leading to a condition of hypercomplexity which we must learn to inhabit, breaking free of our cognitive and epistemological cages to realize that everything is interdependent and relational, that objects are systems rather than vice-versa, and even more, that what we think of as objects are themselves relations: everything is relationship.