Connective Intelligence and the Concepts of Identity and Belonging

In an article, today famous, published in 1948 with the title Science and complexity, Weaver emphasised the need for whoever wanted to represent complex phenomena without compressing or distorting them arbitrarily, turning them into their opposite (oversimplifying), to give the greatest consideration to the potency of the essential feature of organisation. The link between the complexity of social and natural phenomena and organisation was thus placed explicitly at the centre of attention, and a strong tie consequently established between the science of complexity and the science of organisation. This link is expressed by the concept of “organised complexity”. However, reference to this concept, inexorable and necessary, is not enough, in that the forms of organisation that little by little gain ground and become established have in the past been the result not only (and now not so much) of specific intrinsic properties of nature and the external world, but of the active intervention of mankind to change to his advantage the environment of which he is part.