Try to get your head around the word ‘emergence’ and you’ll go in circles. You’ll find dozens of definitions of that word, none of which really captures what anyone thinks it means. You’ll have a similar experience with the word ‘complex.’ This is a guess, or a prediction, of what your experience would be, but I’d put money on it. Both of those words are like porn, you know it when you see it even if you can’t write a definition for it.

‘Simple’ is even worse in my opinion, because Occam’s razor, Einstein, and etiquette make that word a value judgment. It is just as slippery.

“You know it when you see it” is important, I think, because all these words are about seeing. A friend of mine quipped that “you can’t take the ME out of eMErgence.” You see definitions employing words like “surprising” or “unexpected” or “unpredicted” with regards to saying something has emerged. Surprising to whom? Unpredicted with respect to what model?

A very short, simple computer program produces the Mandlebrot set. From the perspective of the computer program (”Kolmogorov complexity”), the Mandlebrot set is almost trivially simple. From the perspective of the image (e.g., its Hausdorff dimension), the Mandlebrot set is very complicated. However, if I choose to view the computer program in some way other than by its source code, well then the computer program may also look complicated. And if I choose to view the image in some way other than as an image on the screen (I look at the file “mandlebrot.jpg” on my hard drive), it may look very simple. It’s all about how I choose to view the data.

And so if these designations of simple and complex rely on how I choose to view something, do they really mean anything independently of those choices? Are they saying more about the *points of view* than they are about the thing *being* viewed? Thinking about this is a trap — you’re not doing philosophy, right?

That said, I think the way to avoid this trap is to formulate a more specific qustion. I think you’ve done that already. I think that as you explore what it means for a space to be nourshing, healthy, and ‘working’, you’ll naturally strip away the complexity (out of necessity) and eventually focus on a simple, elegant statement. Because what’s “complexity” but that which you don’t need to achieve your aim? You’re not really going to know what that is until you do. I tend to think you’ll reach a simpler and more elegant statement if you don’t pay attention to simplicity and elegance, but rather just let it happen as you create.

Your C12th Tuscan, Leonardo Fibonnaci, revealed rule that controls
evolutionary shapes. 2/3/5/8/13/21/34 . . . leads also to Golden
Section. So simplicity leads to complexity and beauty. And that is a
lot. Life being about beauty and love sounds cheese; but it may be
true.