Summary
Hurled into hypercomplexity, we are facing a complex process of anthropological transformation, of a shift in paradigms, models and codes, other than an irreversible synthesis of new value systems and criteria for judgment. Our extraordinary scientific discoveries and technological innovations not only open dizzily onto as yet unimaginable horizons and scenarios, but show, ever more clearly, the urgency of radically rethinking education, teaching and training, and of a systemic approach to complexity, which in the meantime has become hypercomplexity, underlining the substantial inadequacy of our schools and universities in dealing with this hypercomplexity, in dealing with the indeterminateness and ambivalence of the ongoing metamorphosis, in dealing with the global extension of all political, social and cultural processes. The conceptual framework of this paper, therefore, has the following objectives: a) to provide a functional definition of complexity and hypercomplexity and of our limits in understanding them; b) to highlight the urgency of a systemic approach to complexity and of rethinking education and training beyond «false dichotomies» (education determines new asymmetries and inequalities, which in turn influence educational policies). The social and cultural innovation belongs to those who will succeed in healing the fracture between the human and the technological, to those who will succeed in redefining and rethinking the complex relationships between the natural and the artificial, to those who will manage to bring knowledge and skills together (not to separate them), to those who will, furthermore, know how to unite and merge the two cultures (scientific and humanistic), both in terms of education and formative training and in defining profiles and professional competences.
Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Hypercomplexity is not – has never been – an option; it is a “fact of life” [1, 6]: we are facing a hypercomplexity that has extended so far as to make any attempt to provide/formulate reductive schemes extremely difficult and complicated. We are dealing with a kind of (hyper)complexity that has been further enhanced by the ever more strategic relevance wielded by communication and by technological innovations, not only in the processes of education and socialization, but also – and above all -- in the representations and the perception of dynamics and of the systemic processes of evolution, that evidently, also closely regards the production of fields of knowledge, of “instruments” and of scientific knowledge, which are essential precisely for the analysis and management of this hypercomplexity, other than of the unpredictability that distinguishes it (epistemology of uncertainty).
