The science of complexity is based on a new way of thinking that stands in sharp contrast to the philosophy underlying Newtonian science, which is based on reductionism, determinism, and objective knowledge...

The greater the variety of perturbations the system has to cope with, the greater the variety of compensating actions it should be able to perform (Ashby’s (1964) law of requisite variety), and the greater the knowledge or intelligence the system will need in order to know which action to perform in which circumstances...

the basic principle is simple: each agent through trial-and-error tries to achieve a situation that maximises its fitness within the environment. However, because the agent cannot foresee all the consequences, actions will generally collide with the actions of other agents, thus reaping a less than optimal result...

the organization of such a complex system is not frozen, but flexible... all complex systems created through self-organization and evolution are intrinsically adaptive, since they cannot rely on a fixed plan or blueprint to tell them how they should behave.

Modernism can be characterised, in Lyotard’s words (1988: xxiv), as a search for a single coherent meta-narrative, i.e. to find the language of the world, the one way in which to describe it correctly and completely. This can only be a reductive strategy, something which reduces the complexity and the diversity of the world to a finite number of essential features. If the central argument of postmodernism is a rejection of this dream of modernism, then postmodernism can be characterised in general as a way of thinking which is sensitive to the complexity of the world.