Why Anthro-complexity replaced Cognitive Complexity

After trying out Cognitive Complexity for a bit I realised that it was too limiting as we were drawing on more than the cognitive sciences and I wanted to link out work into the humanities so I settled on anthropology-complexity as the name for the study of complexity in human systems and the term is now being used, and abused so it may settle.

The essence of this is to argue what I called the three ‘I’s namely:

Intelligence Humans have the capacity to reflect on their world and to work with abstractions, we can shape our world physically (and have done so for good, but more for bad) and also spiritually (I am not using that word in a religious sense). That allows us to go through phase shifts in the way we perceive things and that adds a significant level of complexity over and above that of termites.
Identity Humans constantly shift between identities based on context and thus have fluid agencies, something that is not the case for insects and reptiles (I’ll put the higher apes and Octopi aside for the moment). Those identities can exist within and between individuals and are not always bounded by time or space so there is a significant question as to what would be modeled.
Intention We don’t just respond to stimuli, I can model the switch from midden to foraging behaviour in ants by genetically coded responses to pheromone traces. Humans are also subject to actions that do not arise from conscious intent, but we can also act intentionality and against our own interests – we are the only species to show empathy outside a kinship group and to an idea or ideology.

Now it is obviously more complex than this and I am not arguing a human-centric morality, but I am saying that human systems are different and the study of humans is anthropology hence anthro-complexity as a field. That brings me back to narrative and to knowledge management as well as a body of other knowledge. There is also the wider question of governance and how we manage in a complex world – that will be the final post in this section tomorrow.