About the Word Complex

From Emergence: The Connected Lives
of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software
by Steven Johnson

Complexity is a word that has frequently appeared in critical accounts of metropolitan space, but there are really two kinds of complexity fundamental to the city. There is, first, the more conventional sense of complexity as sensory overload, the city stretching the human nervous system to its very extremes, and in the process teaching it a new series of reflexes- and leading the way for a complementary series of aesthetic values, which develop out like a scab around the original wound…But complexity is not solely a matter of sensory overload. There is also the sense of complexity as a self-organizing system…the city is complex because it overwhelms, yes, but also because it has a coherent personality, a personality that self-organizes out of millions of individual decisions, a global order built out of local interactions.