Local Activity: The Origin of Complexity

Many scientists have struggled to uncover the elusive origin of “complexity”, and its many equivalent jargons, such as emergence, self-organization, synergetics, collective behaviors, nonequilibrium phenomena, etc. They have provided some qualitative, but not quantitative, characterizations of numerous fascinating examples from many disciplines. For example, Schrodinger had identified “the exchange of energy” from open systems as a necessary condition for complexity. Prigogine has argued for the need to introduce a new principle of nature which he dubbed “the instability of the homogeneous”. Turing had proposed “symmetry breaking” as an origin of morphogenesis. Smale had asked what “axiomatic” properties must a reaction–diffusion system possess to make the Turing interacting system oscillate. The purpose of this paper is to show that all the jargons and issues cited above are mere manifestations of a new fundamental principle called local activity, which is mathematically precise and testable. The local activity theorem provides the quantitative characterization of Prigogine’s “instability of the homogeneous” and Smale’s quest for an axiomatic principle on Turing instability. Among other things, a mathematical proof is given which shows none of the complexityrelated jargons cited above is possible without local activity. Explicit mathematical criteria are given to identify a relatively small subset of the locally-active parameter region, called the edge of chaos, where most complex phenomena emerge.