Understanding Society, Intelligence, and the Meaning of Life Through the Lens of Complex Systems
Introduction: I have always been very interested in the complexity of the world e.g. how different elements depend on each other, any simple principle behind these complexity etc. In the last half year, I finally got some leisure time digging into a couple of popular books written by scholars from Santa Fa institute which is a theoretical research institute dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems and founded by Nobel laureates in Physics. In the last half year, since I work as an engineer and am also very interested in philosophy of science, I read a couple books covering origin of life, history of intelligence and philosophy of intelligence which I collected from various AI talks in 2025. All the books are listed in the reference sections I gained many fascinating insights from these books. I also came to see complexity science and intelligence as deeply interconnected. Together, they inspired me to reflect not only ...