Buzsaki on Complexity

«Complexity is not just complicated stuff but a unique quality that emerges from the relationship or interaction among elements. Think about a good wine. When you describe its bouquet, you refer to a blend of scents, richness, finesse, harmony, balance and other fancy words that characterize a really good cabernet sauvignon.

Analogously, the territory of complexity is somewhere halfway between chaos and order, stochastic and deterministic, random and predictable, labile and stable, homogeneous and nonhomogeneous, segregated and integrated, autonomous and dependent, unconstraint and fixed, chance and necessity, aggregation and differentiation, competition and cooperation, figure and background, context and content, anarchy and constraint, light and dark, matter and energy, good and evil, similar and different.

Complex connectivity can be defined quantitatively using the same halfway logic: neither random nor regular, neither local nor fully connected, that is, a scale-free system that obeys a power law.»