To me, it seems this dialogue diverged a lot into a question of what is self-referential, how important that is, etc. I don’t think that’s The core idea of complex systems, and does not seem a crux for anything in particular.
So, this matches my impression before this dialogue, but going back to this dialogue, the podcast that Nora linked does to me seem to indicate that self-referentiality and adaptiveness are the key thing that defines the field. To give a quote from the podcast that someone else posted:
We have to theorize about theorizers and that makes all the difference. And so notions of agency or reflexivity, these kinds of words we use to denote self-awareness or what does a mathematical theory look like when that’s an unavoidable component of the theory. Feynman and Murray both made that point. Imagine how hard physics would be if particles could think. That is essentially the essence of complexity. And whether it’s individual minds or collectives or societies, it doesn’t really matter. And we’ll get into why it doesn’t matter, but for me at least, that’s what complexity is. The study of teleonomic matter.
Which sure doesn’t sound to me like “applying physics to non-physics topics”. It seems to put the self-referentially pretty centrally into the field.
So, this matches my impression before this dialogue, but going back to this dialogue, the podcast that Nora linked does to me seem to indicate that self-referentiality and adaptiveness are the key thing that defines the field. To give a quote from the podcast that someone else posted:
Which sure doesn’t sound to me like “applying physics to non-physics topics”. It seems to put the self-referentially pretty centrally into the field.