moonlighTao

Vladimir Kush, Moonlight Sonata

Final Movement. The passionate ardor of pianist "inspires" the instrument, the folds of curtain, and figures of spectators, creating a sensation of imminent takeoff. The music reaches its peak emphasized by the solemn red coloring of the painting. Its streams soar to the concave mirror of the moon, and, focused by it, return to the scene. The reflected flow carries the magical energy of the moon, causing mysterious transformations all around. We see as the spectators are shrouding themselves in spectral cocoons, or acquiring something like butterfly wings. The play of light patches on the piano and glimmering reflections on the curtain create a unique sensation of a butterfly fluttering its wings.

the complexity from KaliYuga to Tao - II

12. Heraclitus: “live of death, die of life”
In this union of notions logically complex, there is a relationship between life and death.
I often quoted the illuminating phrase of Heraclitus, from the VIth century b.C.: “live of death, die of life”. It became recently intelligible, from the moment when we learned that our organism degrades its energy, not only to reconstitute its molecules, but that our cells themselves are degraded and that we produce new cells. We live from the death of our cells.
And this process of permanent regeneration, almost of permanent rejuvenation, is the process of life. What makes it possible to add to the very right formula of Bichat, saying: “life is the ensemble of the functions that fight against death”, this strange complement that presents us a logical complexity: “Integrating death to fight better against death”. What one again knows about this process is extremely interesting: it has been learned rather recently that cells that die are not only old cells; in fact apparently healthy cells receiving different messages from neighboring cells, “decide”, at a given moment, to commit suicide. They commit suicide and phagocytes devour their remains. Like this, the organism determines which cells must die before they have reached senescence. That is to say that the death of cells and their postmortem liquidation are included in the living organization.
There is a kind of phenomenon of self-destruction, of apoptosis, since this term has been taken from the vegetal world, indicating the split of the stems operated by trees in autumn so that dead leafs fall.
On the one hand, when there is an insufficiency of cellular deaths following different accidents and perturbations, there are a certain number of diseases that are deadly in the long run, like osteoporosis, various types of sclerosis, and certain cancers, where cells refuse to die, becoming immortal, forming tumors and go for a stroll in the form of metastases (It can seem that it is a revolt of cells against their individual death that lead to these forms of death of the organism). On the other hand, the excess of cellular deaths determine AIDS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease.
You see at which point this relationship between life and death is complex: it is necessary for cells to die, but not too much! One lives between two catastrophes, the excess or insufficiency of mortality. One finds again the fundamentally epistemological problem of generalized complexity.

13. On non-trivial machines
Living beings are certainly machines, but unlike artificial machines that are trivial deterministic machines (where one knows the outputs when one knows the inputs), these are non-trivial machines (von Foerster) where one can predict innovative behaviors.
We are machines, this truth was already in L'homme-machine of La Mettrie. We are physical machines, thermal machines, we function at the temperature of 37'. But we are complex machines.
Von Neumann established the difference between living machines and artificial machines produced by technology: the components of the technical machines, having the good quality of being extremely reliable, go towards their degradation, towards their wear, from the very start of their operation.
Whereas the living machine, made up mainly by components far from reliable, degrading proteins-and one understands very well that this lack of reliability of proteins makes it possible to reconstitute them non stop-is able to be regenerated and repaired; it also goes towards death, but after a process of development. The key of this difference lies in the capacity of self-repair and self-regeneration. The word regeneration is capital here.
One can say that the characteristic of innovations that emerge in the evolution of life (which are determined by environmental changes, or by the irruption of multiple hazards), such as the appearance of the skeleton in vertebrates, wings in insects, birds, or bats, all these creations, are characteristic non-trivial machines. That is to say, it gives a new solution to insurmountable challenges without this solution.
All the important figures of human history, on the intellectual, religious, messianic, or politic levels, were non-trivial machines. One can advance that all the History of Humankind, which begins ten thousand years ago-is a non-trivial history, i.e. a history made of unforeseen, of unexpected events, of destructions and creations. The history of life that precedes it is a nontrivial history, and the history of the universe, where the birth of life and then of humankind are included, is a non-trivial history.
We are obliged to detrivialize knowledge and our worldview.

14. To complexify the notion of chaos
We have seen how the notion of system brings us to complexities of organization which themselves lead us to logical complexities. Let us look now at the notion of chaos, as it appears within chaos theory, and which comprises disorder and unpredictability. The beat of the wings of a butterfly in Melbourne can cause by a succession of chain processes a hurricane in Jamaica, for example.
Actually, I believe that the word chaos must be considered in its deep sense, its Greek sense. We know that in the Greek worldview, Chaos is at the origin of Cosmos. Chaos is not pure disorder, it carries within itself the indistinctness between the potentialities of order, of disorder, and of organization from which a cosmos will be born, which is an ordered universe.
The Greeks saw a bit too much order in the cosmos, which is effectively ordered because the immediate spectacle, the impeccable order of the sky that we see each night with the stars, is always in the same place. And if the planets are mobile they also come to the same place with an impeccable order. However, we know today with the widened conceptions of cosmic time that all this order is at the same time temporary and partial in a universe of movement, collision, transformation.
Chaos and Cosmos are associated - I have employed the word Chaosmos - there is also a circular relation between both terms. It is necessary to take the word chaos in a much deeper and more intense sense than that of physical chaos theory.

15. The need of contextualization
Let us take again the “complexus” term in the sense of “what is woven together”.
It is a very important word, which indicates that the breaking up of knowledge prevents from linking. and contextualizing.
The knowledge mode characteristic of disciplinary science isolates objects, one from another, and isolates them compared to their environment. One can even say that the principle of scientific experimentation allows to take a physical body in Nature, to isolate it in an artificial and controlled laboratory environment, and then study this object in function of perturbations and variations that one makes it undergo. This indeed makes it possible to know a certain number of its qualities and properties. But one can also say that this principle of decontextualization was ill-fated, as soon as it was ported to the living. The observation since 1960 by Jane Goodall of a tribe of chimpanzees in their natural environment could show the supremacy of observation (in a natural environment) over experimentation
(in a laboratory) for knowledge. A lot of patience was necessary so that Jane Goodall could perceive that chimpanzees had different personalities, with rather complex relations of friendship, of rivalry; a whole psychology, a sociology of chimpanzees, invisible to the studies in a laboratory or in a cage, appeared in their complexity.
The idea of knowing the living in their environment became capital in animal ethology. Let us repeat it, the autonomy of the living needs to be known in its environment.
From now on, becoming aware of the degradations that our technoeconomic development makes to the biosphere, we realize the vital link with this same biosphere that we believe to have reduced to the rank of manipulable object. If we degrade it, we degrade ourselves, and if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.
The need for contextualization is extremely important. I would even say that it is a principle of knowledge: Anybody who has made a translation in a foreign language will seek an unknown word in the dictionary; but with words being polysemous, it is not immediately known which is the good translation; the sense of the word will be sought in the sense of the
sentence in the light of the global sense of the text. Thought this play from text to word, and from text to context, and from context to word, a sense will crystallize. In other words, the insertion in the text and in the context is an evident cognitive necessity. Take for example the economy, the most advanced social science from a mathematical point of view, but which is isolated from human, social, historic, and sociologic contexts: its prediction power is extremely weak because the economy does not function in isolation: its forecasts need to be unceasingly revised, which indicates us the disability of a science that is very advanced but too closed.
More generally, mutual contextualization is lacking in the whole of social sciences.
I have often quoted the case of the Aswan dam because it is revealing and significant: it was built in Nasser’s Egypt because it would make it possible to regulate the course of a capricious river, the Nile, and to produce electric power for a country which had a great need for it. However, after some time, what happened? This dam retained a part of the silts that fertilized the Nile valley, which obliged the farming population to desert the fields and overpopulate large metropolises like Cairo; it retained a part of the fish that the residents ate; moreover today, the accumulation of silts weakens the dam and causes new technical problems. That does not mean that the Aswan dam should not have been built, but that all the decisions taken in a techno-economic context are likely to be disastrous by their consequences.
It is like the deviation of rivers in Siberia that the Soviet government made and where the perverse consequences are more important than the positive ones.
It is thus necessary to recognize the inseparability of the separable, at the historical and social levels, as it has been recognized at the microphysical level. According to quantum physics, confirmed by Aspect’s experiments, two microphysical entities are immediately connected one to the other although they are separated by space and time. Even more, one arrives to the idea that everything that is separated is at the same time inseparable.

16. The hologrammatic and dialogical principles
The hologrammic or hologrammatic principle should also be advanced, according to which not only a part is inside a whole, but also the whole is inside the part; just as the totality of the genetic inheritance is found in each cell of our organism, the society with its culture is inside the spirit of an individual.
We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc.
It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.

17. For the sciences, a certain number of consequences
Regarding sciences, we can see a certain number of consequences.
First of all, classical science is somehow complex, even when it produces simplifying knowledge. Why?
Because science is a quadruped which walks on the following four legs: the leg of empiricism made of data, experimentation or observation; the leg of rationality, made of logically constituted theories; the leg of verification, always necessary; and the leg of imagination, because great theories are products of a powerful creative imagination. Thus science is complex, produced by a quadruped movement, which prevents it from solidifying.
The objective knowledge which is its idea, resulted in the need of eliminating
subjectivity, i.e. the emotional part inherent to each observer, to each scientist, but it also comprised the elimination of the subject, i.e. the being which conceives and knows. However, any knowledge, including objective, is at the same time a cerebral translation starting from data of the external world and a mental reconstruction, starting from certain organizing potentialities of the spirit. It is certain that the idea of a pure objectivity is utopian. Scientific objectivity is produced by beings who are subjects, within given historical conditions, starting from the rules of the scientific game. The great contribution of Kant was to show that the object of knowledge is co-constructed by our spirit. He indicated us that it is necessary to know knowledge to know its possibilities and limits. The knowledge of knowledge is a requirement of the complex thinking.
As Husserl indicated in the 30's, in particular in his conference on the crisis of European science, sciences developed extremely sophisticated means to know external objects, but no means to know themselves. There is no science of science, and even the science of science would be insufficient if it does not include epistemological problems. Science is a tumultuous building site, science is a process that could not be programmed in advance, because one can never program what one will find, since the characteristic of a discovery is its unexpectedness. This uncontrolled process has lead today to the development of potentialities of destruction and of manipulation, which must bring the introduction into science of a double conscience: a conscience of itself, and an ethical conscience.
Also, I believe that it will be necessary to arrive more and more to a scientific knowledge integrating the knowledge of the human spirit to the knowledge of the object which this spirit seizes and recognizing the inseparability between object and subject.

18. Two scientific revolutions introduced complexity de facto
I already indicated how the concept of complexity emerged in a marginal fashion in a sphere of mathematicians/engineers. It should be indicated now that the XXth century knew two scientific revolutions which de facto introduced complexity without, however, recognizing this notion that remains implicit.
The first revolution, after the thermodynamics of the XIXth century, is that of the microphysics and cosmophysics that introduced indeterminism, risk-where determinism reigned-and elaborated suitable methods to deal with the uncertainties met.
The second revolution is that which gathers disciplines and restores between them a common fabric. It begins in the second half of the XXth century. Thus in the 60's, Earth sciences designed Earth as a complex physical system, which makes it possible today to articulate geology, seismology, vulcanology, meteorology, ecology, etc. At the same time, ecology develops as a scientific knowledge bringing together data and information coming from different physical and biological disciplines in the conception of ecosystems. It makes it possible to conceive how an ecosystem either degrades, develops, or maintains its homeostasis. From the 70's, the ecological conception extends to the whole biosphere, necessarily introducing knowledge from the social sciences.
Although ecology, at the biosphere level, cannot make rigorous predictions, it can give us vital hypothesis, concerning, for example, global warming, which manifests itself by the melting of glaciers in the Antarctic or the Arctic. Thus ecology, cosmology, and Earth sciences have become poly-disciplinary sciences, even transdisciplinary. Sooner or later, this will arrive in biology, from the moment when the idea of self-organization will be established; this will arrive in the social sciences, although they are extremely resistant.
Finally, the observer, chased by the objectivity postulate, was introduced into certain sciences, such as microphysics where the observer perturbs what it observes. In the case of cosmology, even if one does not adhere to what Brandon Carter called the anthropic principle, which holds account of the place of humans in the universe, one is obliged to conceive that this universe, among its perhaps negligible possibilities, had the possibility of human life, perhaps only on this planet Earth, but perhaps also elsewhere.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this billowing cloud of cold interstellar gas and dust rising from a tempestuous stellar nursery located in the Carina Nebula, 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. This pillar of dust and gas serves as an incubator for new stars and is teeming with new star-forming activity.

Thus, the common fabric between the human, the living, and the Universe can be restored, which implies a complex conception capable at the same time to distinguish the human from the natural and to integrate it.

Li Liwei

19. The insertion of science in History
In addition, there is the problem of the insertion of the Sciences in human History.
You know that there are two conceptions of history of sciences, the internalist conception and the externalist conception. The internalist mode sees the development of sciences in isolation, only in function of their internal logic and their own discoveries. The externalist mode sees them in function of historical and social developments which determine the scientific developments.
I think that it is necessary to link both, and this is appropriate for other developments than those of sciences. Thus, some wanted to understand the perversion of the Soviet Union starting from internal factors, such as insufficiencies of the Marxist doctrine, limitations of that of Lenin. Others wanted to impute it to external elements such as the surrounding and hostility of the capitalist powers with regard to the Soviet Union or former elements such as the backwardness of tsarist Russia. Whereas the true cognitive game is to link these two aspects in a dialogical fashion.
If one continues to place oneself from the viewpoint of modern Western history of science, one sees how from its marginal and quasi-deviating birth in the XVIIth century, it is developed in the XVIIIth, introduced in universities in the XIXth, then in states and companies in the XXth, and how it becomes central and driving within human history in the form of techno-science, and produces not only all the major elements for a renewed knowledge of the world and beneficial effects for humanity, but also formidable and uncontrolled powers which threaten it.
I don’t know if I am right or wrong in retaking an expression of Vico, but it is necessary for us to arrive to the “Scienza Nuova”. Very precisely, Vico inscribed the historical perspective at the heart of the scienza nuova. It is necessary to amplify the idea of scienza nuova by introducing the interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving a science that does not suppress disciplines but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science which can at the same time distinguish and connect and where the transdisciplinarity is inseparable from complexity.
I repeat it, as much as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of complexity, as much a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it.

20. The link between science and philosophy
The link between science and philosophy has been broken. Still in the XVIIth century, the great scientists were at the same time great philosophers. Certainly, they did not identify Science and Philosophy. When Pascal made his experiments in Puy de Dome, he did not think about the bet problem. But in the times of Pascal, Gassendi, Leibniz, there was not this cut. This became a frightening ditch. The ditch of ignorance separates the scientific culture from the culture of the humanities.
But the current has started to be reversed: the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems: Why is there a universe out of nothing? How was this universe born from a vacuum which was not at the same time the vacuum? What is reality? Is the essence of the universe veiled or totally cognizable?
The problem of life is posed from now on in a complexity that exceeds biology: the singular conditions of its origin, the conditions of emergences of its creative powers. Bergson was mistaken by thinking that there was an élan vital, but was right while speaking about creative evolution. He could even have spoken about evolutionary creativity.
Today we can foresee the possibility of creating life. From the moment when it is believed that life is a process developed starting only from physicochemical matter under certain conditions, in underwater thermal vents or elsewhere, one can very well consider creating the physical, chemical, thermodynamic conditions which give birth to organisms gifted with qualities that one calls life. We can also foresee the possibility to modify the human being in its biological nature. Therefore, we have to meditate about life, as we never did it. And at the same time we must meditate about our relationship with the biosphere.
Thus all the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems that they thought to have eliminated. They do not only find them, they renew them.
If one defines philosophy by the will and capacity of reflection, it is necessary that the reflectivity is also introduced into the sciences, which does not eliminate the relative autonomy of philosophy nor the relative autonomy of scientific procedures compared to philosophical procedures.
Finally and especially, any knowledge, including the scientific one, must comprise in itself an epistemological reflection on its foundations, principles, and limits.
Still today there is the illusion that complexity is a philosophical problem and not a scientific one. In a certain way, it is true, in a certain way, it is false. It is true when you place yourselves from the point of view of an isolated and separated object: the fact that you isolate and separate the object made the complexity to disappear: thus it is not a scientific problem from the point of view of a closed discipline and a decontextualized object. But, as soon as you start to connect these isolated objects, you are in front of the problem of complexity.

21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity
It is here that a second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity appears.
Restricted complexity is interested essentially in dynamical systems called complex. That is to say, it constitutes its own field, within the field of sciences.
But generalized complexity not only concerns all fields, but also relates to our knowledge as human beings, individuals, persons, and citizens. Since we have been domesticated by our education which taught us much more to separate than to connect, our aptitude for connecting is underdeveloped and our aptitude for separating is overdeveloped; I repeat that knowing, is at the same time separating and connecting, it is to make analysis and synthesis. Both are inseparable, and our atrophy of the capacity to connect is increasingly serious in a globalized, complexified mode, where it is a matter of generalized interdependence of everything and everyone.
The International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium has formulated a declaration of interdependence which it would wish to see promulgated by the United Nations. We must think the interdependence in all fields, including the complex relation between the parts and the whole. We need to be able to face uncertainties of life whereas nothing prepares us for it. We need to face complexity, including for action, whereas one opposes the cautionary principle to the risk principle, while Pericles had truly expressed the union of the two antagonistic principles when he said during a speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war: “we Athenians, we are capable of combining prudence and audacity, whereas the others are either timorous or bold”. It is the combination which we need. Also, precaution needs today sometimes much invention.
We need to deeply reform all our way of knowing and thinking.

22. The principle of ecology of action
The principle of ecology of action is, in my opinion, central: from the moment an action enters a given environment, it escapes from the will and intention of that which created it, it enters a set of interactions and multiple feedbacks and then it will find itself derived from its finalities, and sometimes to even go in the opposite sense. The ecology of action has a universal value, including for the development of sciences, whose destructive nuclear consequences were absolutely unexpected.
Think that when Fermi elucidated the structure of the atom in the 30's, it was a purely speculative discovery and he had by no means thought that this could allow the fabrication of an atomic bomb. However, a few years later, the same Fermi went to the United States to contribute to the fabrication of the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Watson and Crick determined the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA, they thought that it was a great conquest of knowledge without any practical consequences. And hardly ten years after their discovery, the problem of genetic manipulations was posed in the biology community.
The ecology of action has a universal value. One can think of examples in our recent French history: a dissolution of the Parliament by President Chirac to have a governmental majority led to a socialist majority; a referendum made to win general support led to its rejection. Gorbachev tried a reform to save the Soviet Union but this one contributed to its disintegration. When one sees that a revolution was made in 1917 to suppress the exploitation of man by his fellow man, to create a new society, founded on the principles of community and liberty, and that this revolution, not only caused immense losses of blood, destruction, and repression by a police system, but, after seventy years, it led to its contrary, i.e. to a capitalism even more fierce and savage than that of the tsarist times, and with a return of religion! Everything that this revolution wanted to destroy resurrected.
How not to think about the ecology of action!

23. Creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”
The reform of the spirit seems to me absolutely necessary.
Once that I had understood that the reform of thought, deep work that I carried out in La Méthode, is a necessity, I accepted the offer of a Minister of Education when he called me for the reform of the content of secondary education. I tried to introduce my ideas of reform of thought into an educational project. I saw its total failure-finally it did not failed, it was not applied!-That pushed me to reflect even more. I wrote a book called La Tete bien faite (The head well made), then on the initiative of UNESCO I made a book called Les Sept savoirs nécessaires a l’éducation du futur (The seven knowledges necessary in the education of the future).
Following a University which will be created on these principles in Mexico, I had the more restricted but maybe more necessary idea of creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”, which would be sheltered in a University or independent, addressing everybody, i.e. before University or during University or after University, students, citizens, members of trade unions, entrepreneurs, everybody.
Why the word “fundamental culture”? Because it is that what is missing. In fact, it is the most vital matter to be taught, the most important to face life, and which is ignored by education.

1. Knowledge as a source of error or illusion; nowhere the traps of knowledge are taught, which come owing to the fact that all knowledge is translation and reconstruction.
2. Rationality, as if it were an obvious thing, whereas we know that rationality knows its perversion, its infantile or senile diseases.
3. Scientificity. What is science, its frontiers, its limits, its possibilities, its rules. Moreover, there is an abundant literature, but which has never been consulted by the scientists who are recruited at CNRS for example. Most of the time, they do not know anything about the polemic between Niels Bohr and Einstein, the works of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, etc.
4. What is complexity.

And also:

• A teaching on “what is the human identity and condition”, which is not found anywhere.
• A teaching on the global age, not only today’s globalization, but all its antecedents starting from the conquest of America, the colonization of the world, its current phase, and its future prospects.
• A teaching on human understanding.
• A teaching concerning the confrontation of uncertainties in all the fields: sciences, everyday life, history (we have lost the certainty of progress, and the future is completely uncertain and obscure).
• A teaching on the problems of our civilization.

That is for me the fundamental teaching that can aid the reform of the spirit, of thought, of knowledge, of action, of life.

24. I conclude: generalized complexity integrates restricted complexity
Unfortunately, restricted complexity rejects generalized complexity, which seems to the former as pure chattering, pure philosophy. It rejects it because restricted complexity did not make the epistemological and paradigmatic revolution which complexity obliges. That will be done without a doubt. But in the meantime, we see that the problematic of complexity have invaded all our horizons, and I repeat “problematic”, because it is an error to think that one will find in complexity a method that can be applied automatically to the world and anything.
Complexity is a certain number of principles which help the autonomous spirit to know. Whereas a program destroys the autonomy of the one who seeks, the problematic of complexity stimulates an autonomous strategy, obliges in the field of action-once that one knows that the ecology of action can pervert the best intentions-to reconsider our decisions like bets and incites us to develop an adequate strategy to more or less control the action.
In other words, in all the fields, I would say “help yourself and the complexity will help you”, which has nothing to do with the mechanical application of a program or a rule. It is a deep reform of our mental functioning, of our being.
These ideas now marginal, deviating, begin to constitute a tendency still in minority, or rather tendencies since there are several paths to go towards complexity. These ideas, these deviations, can be developed and become cultural, political, and social forces.
The probabilities of a global future are extremely alarming: our spaceship is pulled by four engines without any control: science, technology, economy, and the search for profit - all this under conditions of chaos since the techno-civilizational unification of the planet, under the Western push, causes singular cultural resistances and cultural and religious re-closings.
The planet is in crisis with all the possibilities, ones regressive and destructive, others stimulant and fertile, such as invention, creation, new solutions.

25. We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis
We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis because we have completely astonishing examples of it from the past. The change in certain places where there have been demographic concentrations in the Middle East, in the Indus basin, in China, in Mexico, in Peru, from prehistoric societies of hundreds of men, without cities, without state, without agriculture, without army, without social class, to enormous historical societies with cities, agriculture, army, civilization, religion, philosophy, works of art ... that constituted a sociological metamorphosis.
Perhaps we are going towards a meta-historical metamorphosis suitable for the birth of a society-world at a global scale.
I would say that complexity does not put us only in the distress of the uncertain, it allows us to see besides the probable, the possibilities of the improbable, because of those which have been in the past and those that can be found again in the future.
We are in an epoch of doubtful and uncertain combat.
That makes one think of the Pacific war, after the Japanese had broken into the Pacific Islands and had begun to threaten California, there was a gigantic naval fight over 200 kilometers along the Midways between the Japanese and American fleets: battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, planes. The global vision was impossible for both of them: there were sunken Japanese ships, sunken American ships, planes that did not find the enemy fleet; in short, total confusion, the battle divided in several fragments. At a given moment, the Japanese Admiral realizing his losses in battleships and planes, thought that they were defeated, thus called for retreat. But the Americans, who had lost as much, were not the first to think that they were defeated; after the Japanese retreat, they were victorious.
Well, the outcome of what will happen, we cannot conceive it yet! We can always hope and act in the direction of this hope.
The intelligence of complexity, isn’t it to explore the field of possibilities, without restricting it with what is formally probable? Doesn’t it invite us to reform, even to revolutionize?

the complexity from KaliYuga to Tao - I

how much Tao you know?

Metalogue: How Much Do You Know?*

Daughter: Daddy, how much do you know?

Father: Me? Hmm—I have about a pound of knowledge.

D: Don't be silly. Is it a pound sterling or a pound weight? I mean really how much do you know?

F: Well, my brain weighs about two pounds and I suppose I use about a quarter of it—or use it at about a quarter efficiency. So let's say half a pound.

D: But do you know more than Johnny's daddy? Do you know more than I do?

F: Hmm—I once knew a little boy in England who asked his father, "Do fathers always know more than sons?" and the father said, "Yes." The next question was, "Daddy, who invented the steam engine?" and the fa­ther said, "James Watt." And then the son came back with "—but why didn't James Watt's father invent it?"

* * *

D: I know. I know more than that boy because I know why James Watt's father didn't. It was because some-body else had to think of something else before anybody could make a steam engine. I mean something like—I don't know—but there was somebody else who had to discover oil before anybody could make an engine.

F: Yes—that makes a difference. I mean, it means that knowledge is all sort of knitted together, or woven, like cloth, and each piece of knowledge is only meaningful or useful because of the other pieces—and . . .

D: Do you think we ought to measure it by the yard?

F: No. I don't.

D: But that's how we buy cloth.

F: Yes. But I didn't mean that it is cloth. Only it's like it—and certainly would not be flat like cloth—but in three dimensions—perhaps four dimensions.

D: What do you mean, Daddy?

F:  I really don't know, my dear. I was just trying to think.

F:  I don't think we are doing very well this morning. Sup-pose we start out on another tack. What we have to think about is how the pieces of knowledge are woven together. How they help each other.

D: How do they?

F: Well—it's as if sometimes two facts get added together and all you have is just two facts. But sometimes instead of just adding they multiply—and you get four facts.

D: You cannot multiply one by one and get four. You know you can't.

F:  Oh.

* * *

F: But yes I can, too. If the things to be multiplied are pieces of knowledge or facts or something like that. Because every one of them is a double something.

D: I don't understand.

F:  Well—at least a double something.

D: Daddy!

F:  Yes—take the game of Twenty Questions. You think of something. Say you think of "tomorrow." All right. Now I ask ^"Is it abstract?" and you say "Yes.^" Now from your "yes" I have got a double bit of information. I know that it is abstract and I know that it isn't concrete. Or say it this way—from your "yes" I can halve the number of possibilities of what the thing can be. And that's a multiplying by one over two.

D: Isn't it a division?

F:  Yes—it's the same thing. I mean—all right—it's a multi­plication by .5. The important thing is that it's not just a subtraction or an addition.

D: How do you know it isn't?

F:  How do I know it?—Well, suppose I ask another question which will halve the possibilities among the ab­stractions. And then another. That will have brought down the total possibilities to an eighth of what they were at the beginning. And two times two times two is eight.

D: And two and two and two is only six.

F:  That's right.

D: But, Daddy, I don't see—what happens with Twenty Questions?

F: The point is that if I pick my questions properly I can decide between two times two times two times two twenty times over things—2²⁰ things. That's over a mil-lion things that you might have thought of. One question is enough to decide between two things; and two ques­tions will decide between four things—and so on.

D: I don't like arithmetic, Daddy.

F: Yes, I know. The working it out is dull, but some of the ideas in it are amusing. Anyhow, you wanted to know how to measure knowledge, and if you start measuring things that always leads to arithmetic.

D: We haven't measured any knowledge yet.

F:  No. I know. But we have made a step or two toward knowing how we would measure it if we wanted to. And that means we are a little nearer to knowing what knowledge is.

D: That would be a funny sort of knowledge, Daddy. I mean knowing about knowledge—would we measure that sort of knowing the same way?

F: Wait a minute—I don't know—that's really the $64 Question on this subject. Because—well, let's go back to the game of Twenty Questions. The point that we never mentioned is that those questions have to be in a certain order. First the wide general question and then the detailed question. And it's only from answers to the wide questions that I know which detailed questions to ask. But we counted them all alike. I don't know. But now you ask me if knowing about knowledge would be measured the same way as other knowledge. And the answer must surely be no. You see, if the early questions in the game tell me what questions to ask later, then they must be partly questions about know­ing. They're exploring the business of knowing.

D: Daddy—has anybody ever measured how much any-body knew.

F: Oh yes. Often. But I don^'t quite know what the answers meant. They do it with examinations and tests and quizzes, but it^'s like trying to find out how big a piece of paper is by throwing stones at it.

D: How do you mean?

F:  I mean—if you throw stones at two pieces of paper from the same distance and you find that you hit one piece more often than the other, then probably the one that you hit most will be bigger than the other. In the same way, in an examination you throw a lot of questions at the students, and if you find that you hit more pieces of knowledge in one student than in the others, then you think that student must know more. That's the idea.

D: But could one measure a piece of paper that way?

F:  Surely one could. It might even be quite a good way of doing it. We do measure a lot of things that way. For example, we judge how strong a cup of coffee is by looking to see how black it is—that is, we look to see how much light is stopped. We throw light waves at it instead of stones, it's the same idea.

D: Oh.

* * *

D: But then—why shouldn't we measure knowledge that way?

F: How? By quizzes? No—God forbid. The trouble is that that sort of measuring leaves out your point—that there are different sorts of knowledge—and that there^'s know­ing about knowledge. And ought one to give higher marks to the student who can answer the widest ques­tion? Or perhaps there should be a different sort of marks for each different sort of question.

D: Well, all right. Let's do that and then add the marks together and then .. .

F:  No—we couldn't add them together. We might multiply or divide one sort of marks by another sort but we couldn't add them.

D: Why not, Daddy?

F:  Because—because we couldn't. No wonder you don't like arithmetic if they don't tell you that sort of thing at school—What do they tell you? Golly—I wonder what the teachers think arithmetic is about.

D: What is it about, Daddy?

F: No. Let's stick to the question of how to measure knowledge—Arithmetic is a set of tricks for thinking clearly and the only fun in it is just its clarity. And the first thing about being clear is not to mix up ideas which are really different from each other. The idea of two oranges is really different from the idea of two miles. Because if you add them together you only get fog in your head.

D: But, Daddy, I can't keep ideas separate. Ought I to do that?

F: No— No— Of course not. Combine them. But don't add them. That's all. I mean—if the ideas are numbers and you want to combine two different sorts, the thing to do is to multiply them by each other. Or divide them by each other. And then you'll get some new sort of idea, a new sort of quantity. If you have miles in your head, and you have hours in your head, and you divide the miles by the hours, you get "miles per hour"—that's a speed.

D: Yes, Daddy. What would I get if I multiplied them?

F:  Oh—er—I suppose you'd get mile-hours. Yes. I know what they are. I mean, what a mile-hour is. It^'s what you pay a taxi driver. His meter measures miles and he has a clock which measures hours, and the meter and the clock work together and multiply the hours by the miles and then it multiplies the mile-hours by something else which makes mile-hours into dollars.

D: I did an experiment once.

F:  Yes?

D: I wanted to find out if I could think two thoughts at the same time. So I thought "It's summer" and I thought "It's winter." And then I tried to think the two thoughts together.

F:  Yes?

D: But I found I wasn't having two thoughts. I was only having one thought about having two thoughts.

F:  Sure, that's just it. You can't mix thoughts, you can only combine them. And in the end, that means you can't count them. Because counting is really only adding things together. And you mostly can't do that.

D: Then really do we only have one big thought which has lots of branches and lots and lots of branches?

F:  Yes. I think so. I don't know. Anyhow I think that is a clearer way of saying it. I mean it's clearer

 than talking about bits of knowledge and trying to count them.

* * *

D: Daddy, why don't you use the other three-quarters of your brain?

F: Oh, yes—that—you see the trouble is that I had school-teachers too. And they filled up about a quarter of my brain with fog. And then I read newspapers and lis­tened to what other people said, and that filled up another quarter with fog.

D: And the other quarter, Daddy?

F: Oh—that's fog that I made for myself when I was trying to think.

---

* from ETC.:A Review of General Semantics, Vol. X, 1953. 91

from complicated to complex T@O

Internet nodes and routes mapping

Scientific apparatus offers a window to knowledge,

but as they grow more elaborate,

scientists spend ever more time washing the windows.

Isaac Asimov

For systems with a very high number of networked elements with many dynamic processes which interact each other the main distinction is between complicated and complex systems.
Generally a system may be very complicated but not complex, while a relatively simple system may exhibit high complexity. Furthermore if in a system, simple or complicated, one introduces just one complex element or process then the whole system becomes so.

As an example of emergence of complexity in a very complicated system it is possible to use the most complicated one existing today, Internet.

•  Complicated

Network structure
As a telecommunications network Internet has a partially or totally meshed structure, where the elements, the network nodes (estimated in approximately 100 millions known in 2006), are partially directly connected among them. The networked connecting and control structure is an evolution of the hierarchical structure of the type:

 which represents the maximum possible degree of complexity - in this case of complication:

from:Yaneer Bar-Yam, Introducing Complex Systems

Fundamentals

Internet, as any communication system, has its basis in the information theory founded by Claude Shannon in 1948:

In his study he defines the theoretical basis of description applicable to any communication channels. Shannon refers to the following quite general model:

where a message should be transmitted from the information source to the left to the destination to the right. The communication channel involves the message encoding in a signal by a transmitter, the transmission through a physical media and the receiving by a receiver, which decodes it delivering to the destination. The received signal generally is not equal to the transmitted one due to distortion and random noise added by the channel. Shannon's theory defines the meaningful parameters and the transmissive channel capacity and is totally general for any transmission system, from smoke signals of native americans to voice/fax telephone networks, from Assyrian-Babylonians scripts to global data networks such Internet.

The second basis is technological, being represented from the extensive research conducted for about two decades since the 70s by all the telephone companies of the world, with several other centres and universities, to develop optical fiber communication systems, a research which involved investments for tens of billions of dollars and that - perhaps unique - it can be considered completed forever. The acknowledgement of this development has been formalized awarding to one of the pioneers, Charles K. Kao, the 2009 Nobel prize for physics "for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication";

Proc. IEE, 1966

Systems with transmission capacities up to tens of thousands of billions of bits per second (bit/s) have been demonstrated:

and about 420.000 Km of intercontinental submarine fiber cables have been installed and deployed to 2006:

Communication

Currently Internet is a composition of public (such the WWW - World Wide Web, the service that historically determined the explosion of Internet, invented conceived and designed in 1990-91 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN) and private networks (intranet) which has by now an almost unknowable number of network equipments and subscribers - estimated of the order of billions; for example the number of subscribers in the 2011 was estimable in around 2 billions.

A small portion of the Web surrounding the Wikipedia website

 In its most synthetic form Internet may be represented as:

where two users are represented linked by any fixed or mobile device, which is considered by the network as host,  and which use two classical services: the first is browsing of a webpage through a web server in a classical exchange modality of client/server type; the second can be a chat or an email exchange or a peer-to-peer (P2P) link between the two users. Internet is represented by a cloud, indicating that at this level one does not enter into details on how these services and links are made.
The fundamental distinctions between a telecommunication network such Internet and the traditional telephony are between the transport of the information signal in analog or digital form and in the information transfer mode, divided in packet or circuit switching.

In the traditional plain old telephone network (POTS) the transmitted signal is of analog type, eventually sampled, that is digitally converted, and the linking between the two users is made by switching based on the called telephone number with a physical circuit obtained - in an historical progression - manually, mechanically, electro-mechanically or electronically. This type of switching is indicated as circuit switching, since the two users are directly linked by a circuit.

Hierarchical protocol stack

In data network such Internet the transmitted signal is of digital (or discrete) type, divided and collected by determined rules through a communication protocol in a set of digital data (a sequence of "1" and "0" bits which encodes information) of variable or fixed length called a data packet, where the link between the two users is made reading some specified fields of the data packet called source and destination addresses, which allow the network to determine to who transfer to and back the information, according to a communication packet  switching type.
In the case of Internet the communication protocol which makes packet-switching is known as TCP/IP suite, a set of several tens of protocols used to establish connectivity and manage the network equipments; in particular the interconnecting protocol is defined as Internet Protocol (IP) and structured according to a hierarchical stack of type:

The seven levels to the left are stacked according to an historical reference classification named ISO/OSI model; those to the right are actually operative in the network ans define the the hierarchical structure of, from level 1 physical to level 4 of transport to level 7 of application. The structuring by levels of the communication protocol, which reflects directly on the hardware architecture, is one of the points - together with the network structure with a very high number of elements - which drive a system like Internet to border complexity.
The use of the TCP/IP protocol to connect the network hosts is schematized in the following two figures. In the first:

is illustrated how data packets are organized in the different protocol levels. At the highest level the host demands an information, for example the browsing of a webpage by a browser; this demand is passed to the application level - in this case http - which adds in the first part of the data packet a specific packet called header, passing it to next transport level where the TCP adds in turn a specific to pass to next network level where the IP protocol adds a further header to arrive to the data link layer where, in the example, the layer 2 protocol Ethernet (eth) adds a final header. At this point the overall packet is passed to the physical level with a specific protocol, for example the same eth.
The use of the TCP/IP protocol stack for the connectivity between the two users which use a network host is as follow:

where user A by host A requires a link with host B with user B. The host A encapsulate according to the previous figure the data packets, these are transmitted through the network, transit on several zones (for example net1 and net3 can be access areas and net2 a long-distance transport area) addressed by the equipment which work specifically of routing  the packets through the different networks, named switch at level 2 data link or routers at level 3 IP network, which play the same role of telephone switches in the circuit switched networks, such traditional telephony. Delivered the overall packet to the host B network interface this is decapsulated with an inverse procedure followed by A to arrive to the application used by the hosts. The transition from the host level - hardware - to the users level - humans - marks the border between the complicated network system to the complex interactive social/virtual human.
The connectivity at geographical level and the transport modalities of a packet along the network are illustrated as:

where host A belongs to LAN ethernet local area network - typically a business situation - which send the eth packet to dedicated switches at this level; this part of the network is the one named access, which converges to that of transport, where the packet is brought to the IP level and routed and, with an inverse process, delivered to the destination host B.
The protocol structure of the IP set is rather complex, as illustrated in the following:

where some of the main protocols and applications used over the 5 network levels are summarized. At the application layer IP provides the basic applications for the elementary services, like http for browsing, smtp for email, ftp for files transfer etc. At transport layer 4 there are the TCP and UDP protocols which manage specific points like packets check, flow control and congestion. At network layer 3 works the IP protocol specifically dedicated for interconnection inside the network. At this level there are also a set of routing protocols, like BGP and OSPF, which allow the routers to exchange information among them to build routing tables which allow the knowledge of the network topology to the routers for a correct routing toward the destination. At the data link layer 2 there are protocols either for the accessd network like ethernet, ATM - a still existing past protocol no more deployed - and the Point-to-Point_Protocol (PPP) - used to connect residential users with ADSL through the conventional telephonic line, and protocols used in long-distance core/transport network, such MPLS, which has been added to IP to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) and allow traffic engineering which plain IP does not allow, specifically for voice transport as Voice over IP (VoIP), one of the fundamental services in modern Ip networks where the telephone traffic is digitalized and transported as IP packets. At this level there are protocols for long-distance transport, typically by fiber optics, as SDH - in Europe - and SONET - in North America. Finally at the physical layer 1 there is all the hardware used as transmissive media, from telephone lines fixed or mobile to high frequency HFC cables for network access to optical fiber systems and satellite links for transport inside the network. 

A more detailed schematic view of the access and transport/core architecture for several users typologies is:

where are shown the access network to the left and the long-distance transport-core network to the right; between the two there is a Point of Presence (POP) which interconnects the two networks and collects and distributes traffic at regional and national level, distinguished in primary POPs, connected by optical high bandwidth links, and secondary POPs which collect user areas and are connected to the primaries; for example in nations like Italy, France, Germany and United Kingdom the primary POPs may be some units and the secondaries some tens, each with some millions of users. The users types are commonly divided by residential mass-market and business users. The first includes traditional telephony collected by the POTS network and transformed into IP datagrams, the residential users with ADSL line collected by DSLAM equipments and mobile devices users collected by the mobile network. These typologies are then collected by a metro MAN ethernet aggregation network connected to the access router (BNAS) of the metropolitan POP. The business users with their LANs are connected to the POP through two specific switches or routers, one user-side, Customer Edge (CE), and one POP's Internet Service Provider side, Provider Edge (PE). The business traffic is then generally associated to a virtual private network (VPN)  which allow institution or organizations with a wide distribution of locations or branches (typically government offices and banks) the possibility to have a private intranet where nodes are linked through the public national network.

The access traffic entered in the POP (if not local) goes to the transport network, with high-end routers (Giga and Tera routers) with processing capabilities of the order from billions to hundreds of billions of bits per second, and typically transmitted through optical fiber rings with the SDH/SONET protocol by ADM equipments; in the high-traffic national links is also possible to transmit several optical channels into the fiber by different wavelengths using DWDM technologies; for example there are some DWDM systems where a single optical fiber is capable to carry all the fix-to-fix world calls. If the link required by the user is international - typically the browsing of a webpage or a peering by a Server Farm - specific national network POPs connect and exchange toward international networks, the union of which is globally named Internet or WWW for the public portion. Furthermore the national ISP network manager should provide to collect voice and data traffic coming from other fixed or mobile telecommunication operators (Other Licensed Operators - OLO) through an Internet Exchange Point (IX - IXP).

The national network is divided, by the routing protocols, in several areas at national level (by OSPF) and autonomous systems (AS) at international level (by BGP), named also domains. At the global level Internet is representable also as the union of the existing domains:

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy

Network evolutions, involutions and coevolutions

The Internet schematic evolution from the 70s to the medium and long term future can be shown as:

the historical evolution of the network, particularly of the level 3 IP protocol, cannot take into account in the 70-80 years of its enormous growth at world level. This has resulted in several critical present points and present and future developments among which:

the IP protocol was developed having in mind small-medium networks dimensions, typically for connecting some tens of hosts between metropolitan locations, and certainly not those of billions of machines. In particular, the two address fields (destination and source) of the protocol have been codified at 32 bits, which allows an address space of 2³² -1, that is about 4,3 billions, a number considered at time largely sufficient, if not overestimated, compared to the estimated developments, mainly of research. These have been further divided in classes which further limited the number of available and assignable addresses, distributed by the IANA ICANN - Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - which, in the first years, assigned them in a easy and free way to those few entities which required them. Starting from the early 90s, with the Web development and the beginning of commercial applications, the explosion of the global demand of classes of IP addresses from ISPs and agencies of any kind is bringing to the saturation and exhaustion of available addresses, as shown in the following figure which reports the global Internet routing table as aggregated routes announced by the BGP protocol, around 400.000 at present.

Internet global routing table: BGP Routing Information Base entries to date 

To remedy this situation from 1998 an evolution of the protocol has been proposed and developed named IP version 6 (IPv6), as an updated release of the present version, named IP version 4 (IPv4). With IPv6, besides to introduce a number of improvements compared to IPv4, the address field is codified over 128 bits, that is an address space of 2¹²⁸ , about 3,4 × 10³⁸; the typical example which shows the difference is to note that for any square meter of the earth's surface there are 655.570.793.348.866.943.898.599 IPv6 unique addresses (that is 655.571 billions of billions), but only 0,000007 IPv4 (that is only 7 IPv4 every million of square meters). If IPv6 resolves forever the assignable address number problem it raises another very serious, that IPv6 and IPv4 are not compatible with each other (if nothing else for the different dimension of the address field), whereby the introduction of IPv6 should provide a migration between the two protocols by several proposed solutions, which choice is reserved to ISPs and institutions which, necessarily if they grow and deplete their IPv4 addresses, should switch to IPv6.

Internet is born and historically developed as an overlay of the telephone network, where data transmission was made by a modem which allowed to transmit, in a limited way, digital data over lines designed for analog voice. With IP networks development the situation is reversed, currently telephony is becoming increasingly a downlay of Internet, starting from higher stages down to lowers - international, national, extraurban and urban. To carry the analog voice digitally converted over a network designed for data as VoIP raises a number of problems, first of all that to introduce into the network a Quality of Service (QoS) that strongly privileges voice real-time, particularly in term of delay and packets loss compared to other services; as an example, if a webpage loading takes some seconds the user does not experience any particular malfunction, while if applied to an audio/video streaming such as YouTube it becomes difficult and if applied to a phone conversation makes it unintelligible. For this reason several technologies have been added to the IP protocol, which alone does not solve the question since at time it was not designed for voice transport, as new protocols at the interface of level 3 IP and the 2 Data Link such MPLS, which intrinsically have been designed to privilege the stringent requirements of voice compared to streaming and browsing.

Finally Internet development until around 2000 was mainly related to connectivity, that is in a way that all the network resources would be always reachable, a target largely achieved today. After connectivity is taken for granted and user-transparent then the next step is based on the fact that the network is largely used for information search and retrieval, mainly for multimedia files of text, music, video and so on. Following the example of peer-to-peer and file sharing applications like eMule and BitTorrent- which now are an Internet overlay - the user search for information on a content base and for where this content resides. Therefore the development is toward a distributed network intelligence based on connectivity which makes a content-based network, Content Delivery Network (CDN), where the present P2P overlay follows the previous example of Internet over the telephone network and incorporate it.

• from Complicated to Complex: Dynamical Networks

The high number of nodes, intended as domains/autonomous systems (groups of routers), routers and hosts, the intrinsic presence of a protocol hierarchy in data transmission and the meshed network geographically distributed makes globally Internet very close to a complex system.

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy

At this level Internet and the WWW have been investigated for their statistical properties related to their structure and connectivity. For example in a 2007 study has been determined that either the incoming and outgoing probability in a hypertext link document inserted in a web URL and the probability on the links number that, in a router's domain, one of these has with the others either follows a power law distribution, characterized by a scale invariance :

Ref.: A. Barabási: "The Architecture of Complexity", IEEE Control System Magazine (2007)

The dynamic network structure is shared by a large number of systems, from the relational structure of family systems (in the example the Medici family in renaissance Florence):

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy.

to proteic networks generation which interact in the cellular cycle in molecular biology:

 to metabolic networks:

Ref.: G. Cardarelli: "Lectures on Complex Networks", (2008)

to drug users networks:

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy.

to the network of ingredients for a cooking recipe:

Portion (full) of an ingredients network for a cooking recipe.
From: L. Adamic et al., "Recipe recommendation using ingredient networks", WebSci 2011, ArXiv.org.

to end with the most complex system of all: the human brain, a system with evident  emergent phenomena made in the human cerebral cortex by about one hundred billions neurons, with about one hundred thousand billions synaptic interconnections and composed by at least two networks, one axonal, with middle and long-range links and the other denditric, considered of short-distance.

A typical cerebral interconnection among different areas is of the type:

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy.

with particular dynamics of interaction, for example the enhancement of synchronization in a local neuronal network due to the addition of long-range interneurons:

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy.

•  Complex: Social Networks and Virtual Communities

Networks on networks on networks: virtual communities over users over Internet

The Internet full complexity is reached when users are added, which interact in a virtual relation equivalent to the "real" one except the impossibility of body contact. The study of social dynamics and information and opinion diffusion through Internet has been particularly researched in the virtual communities environment, for example on Social Sites, like Second Life, Facebook, Twitter and so, which emulate social network. The situation can be described as emergent social networks from emergent virtual networks from a global physical-logical network, Internet.

Ref.: S. Boccaletti et al.: "Complex networks: Structure and dynamics", Physics Reports (2006) 
 Cactus Group, Catania, Italy.

A recent study on information diffusion in a virtual community with some results about the kind of the established relationship has been obtained diffusing and studying the propagation of a meme on Facebook of the type:

Do any of us really know everybody on our friend list?
Here is a task for you. I want all my fb friends to comment
on this status about how you met me. After you
comment, copy this to your status so I can do the same.
You will be amazed at the results you get in 12 hours.

its diffusion from July 6 to 9, 2010 has been:

A brief portion of the diffusion of the meme. Nodes are users who posted their meme as their Facebook status. Edges are drawn between nodes if one user commented on the meme post of another. The colors denote the time at which the status update was posted, starting on the 6th of July 2010 (red), and ending 9th July 2010 (blue).
The meme continued propagating past this point, eventually reaching millions of users.
Ref.: Adamic and FB: "How you met me", (2012).

providing various other data as popularity over time, the age and location of distributors which contribute to describe the establishment of a "friendship" relation typical of Facebook. In another 2011 study the observed relation between the virtual network structure evolution and the information it carries has been modeled, showing that the network structure alone can be extremely revealing about the diversity and the novelty of information and contents which are communicated. Networks with a higher conductance in link structure exhibit higher information entropy, or higher information disorder, while unexpected network configurations can be tied to information novelty, for example an online user which announces a scoop - true or false - rapidly increase his fan's group network for a certain period of time.

 The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

The Internet Mapping Project

Guido Caldarelli

Lada Adamic