Systemic reflections on knowledge, representation, and chaos.

I sense complexity in things that appear simple and in those that clearly aren’t. The ability to understand complexity is important for navigating life, especially in our era of technological acceleration. Acquiring basic skills to recognize complex systems, introduce experiments, and understand how they function can allow us to dance with complexity rather than being overwhelmed by it.

Greedy Ambitions and Complex Intuitions

I want to have everything. And if I can’t have it, then I want to know everything. And if I can’t know it, then I want to know how to know it.

Imagine the human brain: billions of tiny cells in constant dialogue with each other, creating the magic of thought and consciousness. Or think about the Internet, a giant invisible web connecting us all, continuously generating new ideas and behaviors. Knowledge can be a substitute for possession. Just as an artist possesses their subject through carefully placed spots of pigment, deeply understanding a concept is a form of ownership. In English, they say: “To master a concept, a discipline, a topic.”

In my naive and deluded amateur intellectual dream, I can’t help having intuitions about the reality I know and, especially, about what I don’t know. I sense the complexity of the world, nature, and knowledge itself. Whatever direction I take, I find myself overwhelmed not by what I see, but by what I perceive behind it. My great frustration comes from this mute perception: I intuit but cannot clearly explain the complexity that fascinates me.

Ubiquitous Interconnections

Explaining complexity without mentioning the word itself. To question its nature. “Don’t think about systems but about forests. Don’t dwell on hierarchies, think about family relationships.”

A coral reef isn’t just a collection of breathtaking colors and intricate shapes, but a delicate balance of life in continuous evolution. Cities, with their pulsating crowds and busy streets, tell hidden stories of casual encounters that change lives and entire communities. There’s a hidden thread connecting a regenerating forest, a crowd changing mood, a market crashing, a friendship forming or breaking. It’s not magic, nor simple logic, but something profound and often invisible.

Those who perceive its traces can no longer ignore them. A trivial event can reveal unexpected connections; a coincidence can show a hidden order. Every decision reveals networks larger than imagined.

What happens when we recognize what was invisible? How do our thinking and choices change? If everything is connected, every decision matters more than we imagine. Are we ready to become aware of this?

Represent to Understand

Drawing and modeling as a substitute for possession: if I can create it, then it belongs to me.

Imagine Earth’s climate, a gigantic puzzle where each piece influences the others, making every prediction a fascinating challenge. Or think about the global economy, where a single transaction can create waves that cross continents.

Sometimes I fall in love with my own ideas and feel adolescent enthusiasm when diving into the most disparate projects. It’s only when I clash with execution, problems and their infinite solutions, it’s only when I get my hands dirty with research, experimentation, and testing that the flavor of my intuitions changes. What were exciting visions of new technological and intellectual territories to conquer often become hard and intense work sessions where I rack my brain while making slow and uncertain progress.

Yet mapping the visible pieces and the connections between them to explain how they work often becomes a liberating first approach. Visualizing a context, a problem, a system is a powerful investigative activity that allows you to define and understand the context of the problem you’re facing. Visually representing a system or problem is often the first step to truly understanding it.

Prototyping becomes a fundamental tool: a prototype is a quick and economical draft to explore possible solutions before their final implementation. Often a drawing, a map, or a network of concepts is enough to clarify ideas and choose the best path.

How do you represent love?

“There’s no love in a carbon atom,
No hurricane in a water molecule,
No financial collapse in a dollar bill.”
– Peter Dodds

Not everything can be drawn. Not all phenomena can be represented.

How do you capture the emotional complexity of a relationship through words or drawings? Imagine a network of friendships and loves, emotions intertwining in ever-new ways. Or think about art, which escapes precise definitions, creating sensations that transcend words themselves. How do you draw a tornado? A beach of fine sand? How do you represent pain, or the relationship between a father and child?

The complexity of some phenomena lies in the very difficulty of representing them. When mapping and inventorying aren’t enough, other approaches are used: narrating the nature of the phenomenon, describing its components and behaviors.

But how many can feel the beauty of a musical piece by reading the score? How many different descriptions would we get if we asked ten people to describe Albinoni’s Adagio?

A Beautiful Problem

Thermodynamic death of the Universe, I don’t fear you.

Imagine a global pandemic, a small virus that brings the entire world to its knees, showing the incredible interconnection of our existence. Or think about political systems, intricate games of power and influence that often escape our immediate understanding.

Defining complexity is already a complex problem. I’m fascinated by the difficulty in finding simple definitions. We talk about complexity sciences because it doesn’t belong to a single discipline but requires the union of many scientific approaches.

Yet, if you ask seventy-five scientists for the definition of complexity, you’ll get seventy-five different versions.

“Sapere Aude“

In an increasingly complex, accelerated and accelerating world, where everything is interdependent, tangled, interconnected, why subject yourself to the torture of studying the most difficult things in the world?

• Because you can, as the guy who wanted to climb Everest said.
• Because the entropy of the universe increases, complexity can only increase.
• Because understanding how things work is both a totalizing and satisfying purpose and a means to live better and help others live better.
• Because we must explore the universe to its limits, if it has any, and return home with different eyes, or find new complexities to explore.
• Because we must dare to know.

Find the System: An Exploratory Approach

“I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity.”
– Stephen Hawking

We need, then, both a methodology and a mindset—an approach to complexity through systematic observation, representation, and interconnection. We must perceive the hidden systems operating beneath the surface of everyday reality: from social dynamics to natural phenomena, from information flows to emotional landscapes.

We can search for the system based on three fundamental principles:

1. Recognition: Perceiving systemic patterns in apparently chaotic or isolated phenomena.
2. Representation: Developing tools and languages to capture systems that resist traditional modeling.
3. Recursive Understanding: Recognizing that the observer is part of the observed system, creating a continuous and reciprocal feedback loop: our investigation influences systems, and systems influence our understanding.

We can then imagine exploratory exercises, visualization techniques, and conceptual frameworks to confront complexity without oversimplifying. We’ll embrace the paradox of understanding complex systems that requires both analytical precision and holistic intuition—the ability to zoom in and out of different scales of organization.

It’s not about conquering complexity, but learning to dance with it—learning to appreciate the beauty of interconnected systems while developing practical tools to navigate with greater awareness and effectiveness.

Find the system.