Why complex systems theory already knows what it can’t say
The Familiar Intuition
They can absorb shocks, reorganise, adapt, or shift regimes — or they can shatter, lock up, or collapse. This intuition appears everywhere in the field, expressed through a rotating vocabulary:
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degrees of freedom,
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adaptability,
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robustness,
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resilience.
Each of these terms gestures toward the same underlying concern: how much relational capacity a system retains for further actualisation.
Yet this capacity itself is rarely named.
What the Vocabulary Is Really Tracking
Consider what these notions are used to diagnose.
None of these describe structure alone. They describe remaining possibility.
What is being tracked is not form, but potential space: the availability of further relational differentiation after a system has already stabilised some patterns.
In other words, complex systems theory is constantly pointing at readiness — without ever granting it ontological standing.
The Metric Detour
Instead of naming this capacity directly, the field typically detours through metrics:
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dimensionality,
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entropy,
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variance,
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attractor landscapes,
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critical thresholds.
These are powerful tools, but they do something subtle and consequential. They translate relational capacity into measurable quantities, as if readiness were a thing in the system rather than a property of how the system can still be meaningfully construed.
The result is a curious silence: readiness is everywhere inferred, nowhere acknowledged.
Readiness as Emergent Behaviour
When readiness appears explicitly, it is usually treated as an outcome:
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resilience emerges from network structure,
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adaptability emerges from diversity,
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robustness emerges from redundancy.
This framing has two effects.
First, it places readiness downstream of mechanisms, rather than recognising it as a second-order property of a system’s remaining relational capacity.
Second, it obscures the fact that readiness can be exhausted even while mechanisms persist. A system may continue operating, coordinating, or cycling — while losing the ability to respond meaningfully to novelty.
What looks like emergence is often deferred exhaustion.
The Missing Question
What complex systems theory rarely asks directly is:
How much potential space remains for this system to be otherwise, without losing coherence?
This question is not metric. It is relational.
It cannot be answered solely by simulation or extrapolation. It requires checking whether the current construal of the system still preserves room for further differentiation.
That check is absent — not because the field is careless, but because it lacks a conceptual slot in which readiness could appear as a first-class concern.
Not a Critique, a Diagnosis
This is not an indictment of complex systems theory. On the contrary.
The field’s greatest strengths — its sensitivity to instability, its refusal of linear causality, its attention to collapse — all arise because it is already tracking readiness implicitly.
What it lacks is not insight, but ontological articulation.
Until readiness is named, it will continue to reappear under different guises, smuggled through metrics, metaphors, and post hoc explanations.
Payoff
Complex systems theory is not wrong.
It is ontologically under-articulated.
By bringing readiness into view — not as a hidden variable or a measurable quantity, but as relational capacity for further actualisation — we can retain the field’s explanatory power while avoiding the slide into metric metaphysics and dynamical mysticism.
The next post will show how this under-articulation surfaces most dramatically in one of the field’s central concepts: phase transitions — moments when systems do not “change state,” but run out of horizon.
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