The Architecture of Complexity

Next in our Papers in Systems discussion series: “The Architecture of Complexity” by Herbert Simon.

The discussion will be led by Josh Reynolds.

When: December 1st, 2025, 1PM - 2PM Eastern Time (US/Canada) (19:00 CET). The Zoom room will remain open until 2:30PM for informal discussion. (Check time in your timezone: WorldTimeBuddy )

The paper is available at: https://faculty.sites.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/archive/tesfatsi/ArchitectureOfComplexity.HSimon1962.pdf

Some quotes to tease the appetite for reading this 1962 paper:

"Metaphor and analogy can be helpful, or they can be misleading. All depends on whether the similarities the metaphor captures are significant or superficial."

"In such systems, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, not in an ultimate, metaphysical sense, but in the important pragmatic sense that, given the properties of the parts and the laws of their interaction, it is not a trivial matter to infer the properties of the whole. In the face of complexity, an in-principle reductionist may be at the same time a pragmatic holist."

"Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms. We detect the organelles in a cell in the way we detect the raisins in a cake — they are “visibly” differentiated substructures localized spatially in the larger structure. On the other hand, we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom. These two points of view can be reconciled by defining hierarchy in terms of intensity of interaction, but observing that in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity."