What is novelty? Is there really such a thing as 'novelty' in reality, or does it all depend on your perspective and existing knowledge? Is novelty a problem now for modern philosophers as much as it was for the Ancients? The problem of novelty was a question that really exercised the minds of the early philosophers. The Ancient Greeks simply wondered where new things could come from and if genuine novelty really could occur at all. Nowadays what novelty is, is again a philosophical question but for very different reasons. To the Ancient Greeks, the idea of novelty itself seemed awful, as it seemed to prove that they didn’t actually understand or know enough about the world as it already was
By the end of this article, I promise you will understand what scientists usually mean when they talk about ‘complexity’ which is also what we mean by complexity when we talk about it on this website. By the way, as I will explain, it is not the same as 'chaos theory' but is related. So, where to begin? Complexity is a big subject and includes a lot of different ideas. It can be confusing because people often mean different things by the term ‘complexity’. I will explain here what ‘complexity science’ means to most scientists which is a bit different to what ‘complexity’ means in an everyday sense. I should note however, that this is my approach to explaining complexity science. Some of thes
'Complexity' from an artistic perspective I see complexity in nature as an artist, as a ubiquitous range of forms. They manifest themselves to me the way scientists talk about complexity. When I draw what I see, the things that I draw can be found within very different scales both macro and microscopic, but the form that they take can be very similar, and this kind of similarity is part of the concept of complexity used by mathematicians and physicists. They are forms that emerge over time and certain patterns and forms are converged on. If two drawn subjects are actually similar, then this is often revealed only through the act of drawing, as a dynamic process taking place in the present. F
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