DOI
https://doi.org/10.1075/cvs.15.11dom<br />

Summary
The objectives of this paper are threefold: firstly, to reconstruct the controversies
and the scientific debate on the subject of complexity and on the factors
determining its passage to hypercomplexity; secondly, to underline that an
interdisciplinary and systemic approach which envisions objects as systems rather
than considering systems as objects (as sets of divisible parts) is of the utmost
urgency, calling for a radical makeover of our concepts of educative, formative
and skill-related processes, overstepping the “false dichotomies” common to
education and training, which reinforce the new asymmetries and inequalities
emerging today; and finally, to recognize and understand the “great mistake”
we are currently making in our attitude to technology in general and digital
technology in particular.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
From the very beginning, the concept of systems has revealed itself to be a
powerful explanatory and cognitive “device”, capable of recognizing and bringing
out the best aspects of the (by now) highly probabilistic and statistical character
of knowledge, giving up on the idea of (proven) truths and the absolute value
of knowledge. A concept, with all of its relative implications, capable of drawing
together the natural and artificial elements found in all phenomena and objects of
study. From this point of view, a systemic approach to complexity seems capable of
overstepping the traditional logics of separation that have been set up between the
fields of knowledge and the disciplines. The complexity of living beings provides
those cognitive elements that can put us in the condition of going beyond any
deterministic or linear perspectives.
The complexity of living beings (not to speak of that of social beings) is never
completely comprehensible or intelligible.

Point of Strength
Objects as systems, not systems as objects