Complexity, Emergence and Creativity

How to woo the muse of inspiration

I’ve been thinking about emergence a lot recently. It’s the theme of the event that I’m curating, TEDxStroudWomen (which is now going to be virtual and livestreamed, so you can attend, no matter where in the world you are — tickets now on sale here!), and is also, I absolutely believe, going to be essential to the shift in consciousness that we need if we’re going to do anything more than dabble around the edges of our current existential crisis.

Emergence, in this sense, is a feature of a complex system, which in turn is defined as a system comprising many distinct elements that interact with each other, for example: financial markets, cities, and natural ecosystems such as forests and oceans. I am particularly interested in the subset of complex systems known as complex adaptive systems, which Wikipedia defines as:

“…a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the whole system’s behaviour. In complex adaptive systems, the whole is more complex than its parts, and more complicated and meaningful than the aggregate of its parts.”

Emergence refers to this particular aspect of complex adaptive systems (other features would be diverse agents and phase transitions, which I might write about in the…