Complex Knowledge for Innovation in Economic and Social Development

About the Author

Rafael M. Gutierrez was born in Asunción, Paraguay, into a diverse family of Latin Americans and Europeans. In Argentina and Colombia, he studied physics, got his MSc in Canada and his PhD in USA in ‘Natural, Social and Human Complexity’. His intercultural development continued in Switzerland and France, returning to Colombia to build interdisciplinary R&D&I groups, centers, and doctoral programs with continuous travels within international collaborations and public service as Deputy Director of the current Colombian Ministry of Science-Technology-Innovation. Currently, Rafael is a professor at Universidad Antonio Nariño in Bogotá, Colombia, and a visiting professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Dedication

To my family, especially Marta, Sofia, Martin, and Alejandra. To all those who have always been, and to those who have already left but will always be.

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Rafael M. Gutierrez 2024

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First Published 2024

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Acknowledgement

I want and must acknowledge with great gratitude the long and unconditional support received from the Antonio Nariño University in Bogotá, Colombia, and during the last three years from the New York University in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. They have been fundamental and indispensable in building this work and granting me the autonomy and freedom of thought demanded by well-founded critical ideas typical of the skepticism and objectivity of the scientific method, those that have the power to transform society, but, frequently, so difficult to give them the support and freedom they need.

Preface

Once we have scientific theories and technical tools, what seemed humanly impossible, magical or the product of supernatural powers becomes easy and natural. This is the essential benefit of scientific and technological knowledge and it applies to all aspects of economic and social development.

Complexity is a new paradigm of knowledge which has its origin in the development of knowledge itself, from the interdisciplinary interaction of the immense amount of knowledge distributed in various disciplines that develop and interact in multiple natural, social and human aspects, organizing and self-organizing their constant evolution, open to cultural environment, which changes permanently. Knowledge grows faster and faster in terms of quantity, diversity and complexity because it feeds itself, generates new interactions between its growing number of components and causes the emergence of new qualities and capacities which are as unpredictable as they are surprising in order to learn more. Without false or naive optimism, humanity destiny can only be wonderful. It is the obvious consequence of understanding, accepting with courage and effort the challenge of knowing the universe in which we live and of which we are an inseparable part.

This book aims to contribute to the enrichment of culture, at least in its scientific and technical concerns and urgent need to understand more, apply better and clearly convince ourselves of the importance of science and technology as one of the more sound foundations of modern social and economic development, particularly in the new globalized world of knowledge-based societies, depending, now as never before, on people and their capacities to know, to be able to build an objective vision of reality.

The substantial increase in human and social capacities for innovation, indispensable for modern development, can be understood as an emerging quality of the complexity of modern knowledge, by coherently integrating its various natural, social and human aspects. The innovation of high added value products, goods and services, with a scientific and technological base, creates a constructive and virtuous cycle between knowledge development and the generation of economic and social resources to be financed permanently and incrementally. Building this mutual growth of economy and knowledge is basically a great social development. It is the objective and the fundamental value of the so-called knowledge society, the form of human society that emerges and is sustained and supported on the basis of strong scientific research, permanent technological development and streamlined and suitable processes of transformation and management of knowledge in high added value products. The three processes are as independent and differentiated as they are complementary and indispensable; they strengthen each other and thus, much neglect of any of them prevents the development of the others and, consequently, of the modern society of knowledge and its high economic, social and human levels.

In underdevelopment, the university as a sector is still poorly supported and, therefore, insufficiently developed in relation to world standards. However, both public and private universities make a fundamental and indispensable contribution to the structuring of the constructive cycles of knowledge and social development. It is at university where the base of human resources capable of generating, developing and taking advantage of knowledge is built and shaped. These processes are efficient and effective when the university has enough autonomy and support so that it can also innovate higher education programs beyond disciplinary information and training, new programs consistent with the complexity and convergence of modern knowledge, interdisciplinary and applied programs that make a good use of the synergies between disciplines and natural, human and social interdisciplinarity to generate new capacities for significant innovation at the level of individuals, the institutions that support them and the society of which they are part. This is the objective and method of the innovative doctoral programs in Applied Science¹.

In addition, this book aims to stimulate debate and reflection on the great weakness of innovation supported by scientific and technological base, which is an essential characteristic of underdevelopment, and on how to work in order to overcome it with the power that complexity theory and its practical application give us to perfectly understand, control and take advantage of the processes concerning the generation of high added value products. Scientific and technological-based innovation is the breakthrough that really can produce the true added value appreciated by profitable international markets of high-quality products. Unfortunately, the ignorance of underdevelopment believes that the innovation and high value-added production carried out by other countries and for which underdevelopment pays heavily are simple processes easy to build and relatively obvious and quick to install, without understanding the complexity and richness of the diverse and wealthy social fabric that they need and build.

Modern significant innovation is no longer an individual and isolated capacity, it is a result of diverse capacities of interdisciplinary work groups that need an equally diverse environment built with other complementary capacities and assessments, an innovation ecosystem that favors, supports and supplies knowledge, cultural and economic resources so that scientific and technological knowledge is transformed into innovations and these into new high added value products. Developing as a modern society demands knowing how to better consume a growing number of goods and services with greater added value, without underusing or over demanding and paying disproportionately for the benefits that can be extracted, importing, due to frivolity, without being able to export added value. Underdevelopment conditions can only change when a significant high added value production begins from the base to the final results, from scientific research to entrepreneurship, passing through all its stages. Intellectually lazy cultures with an entrenched claim to liveliness have developed a special form of ignorance which believes to have found the shortcut to meaningful innovation without having to build enough scientific and technological capacity and tradition.

Understanding is essential in order not to deceive others or deceive ourselves to take over the corresponding efforts and the responsibility to overcome. The new capacities for innovation based on scientific and technological knowledge are a great opportunity offered by the modern knowledge society to be able to take a great leap in economic and social development. There is plenty of evidence of what it has meant for the countries that have made the decision. Doctoral programs in applied science, such as the one presented in this book, are a new tool for higher education to efficiently and effectively take advantage of this accessible opportunity for rapid and sustainable development offered by the knowledge society through the modern university. Furthermore, they are a powerful and innovative higher education tool to make a good use of the capacities of society and better themselves, developing new capacities for innovation at the individual, institutional and social level that transform it.

The repetition, in different ways, of the concept of self-consistency of complexity will be insistent, which consists in understanding the process of transformation from appearance to foundation, from repetition and regularity of simple and isolated minimal details to a robust and powerful coherence of the emergent quality. Therefore, this book may initially seem like a medley of ideas and even repetitions of various forms without a clear and evident order or well-defined direction, but behind that appearance is the consistency of the form with the background of this work, its own complexity: a process of defining the multiple constituent parts and their interactions, building an organization and self-organizing conditions toward a new and emerging quality that is not explicit in the constituent parts, a new perception and understanding of complexity of the mental relationships that are built as the work develops. Finally, in the context and with the methodical power of complexity, it is concluded in a specific and new concept and method shaped as a higher education program to generate, strengthen and efficiently apply new innovation capacities with all the implications and powers of natural, social and human coherence to solve complex problems consistently and sustainably.

It is everyone’s responsibility to contribute to the development of a culture of knowledge; it is an urgent need to build modern, peaceful and democratic nations. We need to develop a culture of knowledge that allows us to get greater capacities for innovation based on modern science and technology, and thus achieve an economy and a society that contributes and takes advantage of the high added value goods and services that the world offers and that transform it permanently. We must avoid the caricature of science that only shows it as formulae or as a lack of humankind at work. In fact, science is one of the most creative activities of mankind².

The most important thing about knowledge is its originality, the new constituents and the new relationships that show us the world as it is, the ingenious way with which it is used to control the world as it is and the creative way to solve those pertinent problems come later. The scientific method is only the best method developed for the time being to show and demonstrate to everyone the new understanding of the world that only one or some have achieved. Besides, it is the rigor and minimum objective consistency necessary to make evident the universal and permanent transcendence of the new knowledge. But that is not the ultimate goal of scientific knowledge and that is why the most pragmatists try to discredit it by calling it knowledge for the sake of knowledge as if it were little more than frivolity. The ultimate goal of scientific knowledge is precisely to show the world what it really looks like, with its most important consequence, far above the so-claimed pragmatic consequences, the progress of human consciousness that understanding implies.

This work aims to show more explicitly the real importance of scientific knowledge in human consciousness and in social culture together with the practical consequence of increasing the capacities to solve the most complex problems of modern society as an emerging quality of complexity of modern knowledge. Paradoxical for some, but actually clearly consistent with the complexity of reality, the new capacities to solve complex problems arise less from the new practical and applied capacities, much more from the new human consciousness generated by the corresponding new vision of the interdisciplinary, intersectoral and international reality; therefore, more globally coherent in its various natural, social and human aspects. I fully love complexity because it dissolves the complications of simple visions of reality.

Rafael M. Gutiérrez

Abu Dhabi, 24th February 2022

¹ Such as the Doctorado en Ciencia Aplicada, Universidad Antonio Nariño, Bogotá, Colombia.↩︎

² Eric Ries, innovator and successful entrepreneur, author of The Lean Startup: How Today´s Entrepreneurs use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business, New York, 2011.↩︎

Chapter I: Knowledge for Development

In the knowledge society, innovation is an emergent quality of the complexity and wealth of knowledge itself and the tool par excellence to generate economic and social development.

Science and Technology

Modern human society enjoys many benefits that it does not appreciate enough because it takes them for granted, does not understand or it forgets easily that have been made possible by the scientific research, technological development, innovation and entrepreneurship of thousands of millions of people over many previous generations. It forgets how knowledge generates development and everything it has allowed us to overcome in order to call ourselves civilized and modern.

Science is the activity of applying the scientific method and scientific knowledge is what science produces. The scientific method is very well defined and understood, it helps us to take advantage of the existing knowledge to extend it methodically through well-founded speculations or hypotheses and creative and rigorous observations to support or refute previously constructed assumptions. It depends on the capacity and interest of observation of human beings, on their curiosity, on wanting to know reality through the information generated by their senses and with the sophisticated extensions developed with technologies that are precisely possible by knowing and understanding more about the nature. But technology not only extends our senses to obtain information that was previously inaccessible to us but also, and in particular, due to modern information and communications technology, it is allowing us to extend the capabilities of acquisition and analysis of information and of transforming such information into knowledge. We are already beginning to extend our rational capabilities, our intelligence with technology. The practice of the scientific method has been evolving it from its initial forms to its more modern forms, including some very important subtleties and consistencies. Besides, it has increased its complexity and therefore its power to generate new knowledge but essentially it remains a method to achieve consistency between the creativity of the human imagination and the capacity for observation of human sensitivity, generating an increasingly objective knowledge, building a growing complete and consistent vision of reality of universal and permanent value.

The modern world tends to globalize and is characterized by rapid changes and more difficult to predict, to control and to take advantage of if the intense relationships between the natural, social and human aspects are not better understood and shaped. Modern society constantly needs to improve more systemic, more complex, richer and more integrated views of all aspects of reality. Human society already has the maturity and the corresponding tools to start doing it quite well. Knowledge speeds up its own development and increases its complexity. Simultaneously, it is separated into deeper and more specialized disciplines and consolidated into new interdisciplinarity nature and alignments. These modern dynamics of knowledge require new information management capabilities with greater training, more skills and greater sensitivities in order to new generations of professionals capable of permanently performing and innovating themselves in multiple and diverse contexts.

In modern society, the university provides higher education at various levels of complexity and wealth to bring to light life projects that generate qualities and opportunities for both individuals and society, based on knowledge development. This is a long-term process with permanent challenges and demanding objectives that are achieved and exceeded with a positive impact on people and their environments. A Doctorate in any of the fields of knowledge is the highest academic degree awarded by society and represents a significant effort of the individual’s capacities, developed with dedication, motivation and intense cooperation in various aspects. In this way, people acquire highly qualified professional qualities in a new century with new demands: distinctive features in advanced knowledge and the ability to apply them, communication and persuasion social skills, self-management competences, leadership and coordination skills, business insight and knowledge of foreign languages¹, flexible and critical thinking, social action based on innovation and creativity, constructive and purposeful resolution to the challenges of modern uncertainties, interest in lifelong learning, recognition of the importance of teamwork, individual and social responsibility, participation in the internationalization of the economy and in the world labor market, recognition of the importance of the company and business management and recognize oneself as the greatest human enterprise². Human society bears in mind that there is no possibility of success for a true economic and social development without education and appropriate training of its population³.

Despite being the highest level of training, the doctorate must be demystified in modern society and must be addressed in its right measure so that many more young people assume it as a way of life and can give them all the aforementioned capacities to work in any social sector. Being a doctor does not mean being a researcher or scientist exclusively, or even a laboratory engineer or any other disciplinary expert locked in isolation. A modern doctor can also be a person who has made and has learned to make significant contributions to human knowledge, substantially interdisciplinary and creative. It has built an independence and intellectual self-sufficiency to continue generating new knowledge, thus convincing society of its importance and usefulness. Contributing to knowledge means formalizing, making something new explicit, coherent and consistent, and making it recognized by the social sectors that are going to make the best use of it. Any normal human being has that capacity, if he is offered good opportunities, not only those to leave a life dedicated to uncreative work that does not allow true potential to emerge and does limit society from the immense amount of potentials of human diversity. Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid⁴.

Although scientific research produces science, objective knowledge of great value and utility, its practice and process has a great educational value at the human and social level because it seeks to understand the phenomena that surround us, who we are and in all that where we intervene, it provides us an exceptional preparation to tackle very diverse and complex problems. Furthermore, it qualifies the results obtained by understanding the importance of abstract and formal concepts of objectivity and consistency processes, strengthens the intuition built on the basis of fundamental laws without which the universe and humankind would not have been possible, it gives an emotional curious and joyful vision of the world when seeing it on the shoulders of so many giants, it is a well-oriented, highly successful trial and error method aimed at understanding. All this pave the way to giving the human beings one of the most efficient, diverse, rich and complex adaptive strategies of nature.

The development of technology⁷ takes advantage of the understanding of the phenomena generated by the scientific knowledge of nature, of the human being and of social organizations to extend our capacities and senses, allowing us to better observe more details of the processes that surround us and where we take part in. The transformation of objective knowledge into tools is a very important creative process that shapes and develops new human intellectual capacities to understand and shape the world. In this way, scientific research and technological development create a constructive cycle where they positively feedback, transforming human reality and our vision of the world, dissolving multiple myths and legends to build realities that we understand, respectfully control and take advantage of to improve the quality of human life. In a few centuries we have gone from being observers to interveners and we are finally becoming creators, builders of our own destiny.

The person who does not know modern science and technology is, by definition, primitive. The one who only intends to use it is, by ignorance, underdeveloped. The convenient and comfortable ignorance of a few, with very few objectives beyond defending their privileges, leads their nations to the obscurantism of fanatical and irrational beliefs, full of fear, prejudice and despair to manipulative populism of any orientation that keep building the ideal conditions for barbarism and violence. Peace is not possible without objective, timeless and omnipresent knowledge; violence, on the other hand, is a direct consequence of ignorance that seeks to impose selfish subjectivities and inconsequential circumstances. Why are science and technology so absent or indirectly and modestly implicit or even not clearly and explicitly at the peace negotiating tables here and almost everywhere where violence consumes society? Simply because without that ignorance there would be no violence. Scientific illiteracy, typical of underdevelopment, allows us to believe that science and technology can be used and exploited quickly and efficiently without more effort than paying for them, pretending to take advantage of all its social and economic power, only buying it as any product is bought in the supermarket, as if the supermarket of knowledge existed. Modern science and technology, which others strive to research and develop for years, decades and even generations, are not easily transferable because they are complex processes both at the individual and social level, where various actors intervene in multiple ways, not just scientists and engineers in a disciplinary, independent and simple way. But ignorance is daring and arrogant, especially when it is surrounded by abundance and privileges. Moreover, it makes certain people believe that knowledge can simply be bought, not acquired and that it contributes to their development by investing many economic and human resources with high levels of education, designing policies and implementing development plans with tenacity and continuity over time. This is relevant as it builds in this way a diversity of infrastructures and generates organizational and management capacities in various aspects.

It is estimated that at the time of Jesus Christ approximately 250 million people lived scattered around the world gathered together in human groups that rarely exceeded one hundred thousand individuals. Today, some two thousand years later, we are more than seven billion people sharing the Earth. The number of a million of individuals no longer impresses us much, it no longer gives the sense of immensity that it surely could give to the contemporaries of Christ once they understood it. As we get to know that we have more intense and more diverse experiences, our perception of the world changes. Many infinite and minuscule concerns, which were previously mysteries, are now knowledge full of other kinds of expectations; many are not so mysterious, but not for that less fantastic and possibly more stimulating and curious. In a few centuries, the scientific method has become a powerful instrument to discover the universe and expand our horizons, taking us where we did not think we could ever go. It has even led us to see more fantastic things than we could even imagine before. Science has shown us that in there can be hundreds of millions of microbes in a very small amount of soil in the ground, that the world’s beaches may have billions of millions of millions of grains of sand and that all these quantities which seem so huge and impossible to imagine can be written in a corner of a paper and can be used to do many operations with them. These capacities change our image of the world and the universe, even our deepest sensibilities and emotions. The so-called scientific notation, which is nothing more than a number ten raised to any other number, that is two numbers with few digits, allows us to write the number of all the atoms the world contains in the palm of our hand, which in fact makes up the universe. This immense capacity for synthesis, invented by the human being thanks to his extraordinary intellectual capacities, helps us to make everything more achievable, accessible, tangible, measurable and controllable. It gives us great power among many other powers that science gives us as objective knowledge. The power of synthesis allows us to speak with great simplicity of an immense complexity: more or less 10³⁰ is the number of living things living on earth, from insects to humans and 10⁸⁰ are all the elementary particles making up everything that exists in the entire universe⁵. Unfortunately, this simple, practical and powerful tool, like many others and very diverse of modern knowledge, few people understand it, enjoy it and take advantage of it to apply and generate new knowledge, but there are plenty of people who prefer to stay with fanciful visions of reality, even apparently enlightened people in charge of making the most important social and economic decisions who are more limited than they believe in the correct way to assume their responsibilities.

Despite the immensity of these numbers of living beings and particles that represent the abundance and diversity of physical nature, the power of abstraction of the human being has generated so much knowledge and handles so much information that the bits constantly generated, accumulated and grown on the internet are even much larger numbers. These great information flows are new interactions between the constituents that make up nature, people and societies. Such information flows are changing them much more than we perceive, new qualities are emerging from which we are not sufficiently aware but that are rapidly transforming and enriching us and our environments. Awareness, as the most important quality of the human being, allows him to develop scientific and technical knowledge to capture and analyze huge amounts of information from various sources. Furthermore, it is his main capacity for adaptation. That is why human beings are more and more numerous, we are everywhere and all the time until we understand that we must set our own limits.

Natural evolution is a process of self-organization, of successive states that the energy and matter of the universe acquire according to natural laws, giving rise to a successive and increasing complexity, richness and diversity but not always evident, linear, or intuitively comprehensible. Simply, it is so in accordance with the most fundamental laws of physics and an increase in complexity with its growing diversity of consequences. In contrast, cultural development is a process of organization of knowledge; it is abstract and only exists in human minds; it is the abstraction that the human being performs to build his vision of the world; it exists in the human mind thanks to individual’s consciousness. Human culture is not governed by natural laws but by the knowledge that consciousness develops. Although this arises from processes subject to natural laws, it is an emergent quality of the natural complexity and diversity arising from natural evolution under physical laws. So, the human condition is simultaneously a consequence of natural laws and of itself because it is conscious. Natural evolution has led the universe of energy and matter from a very simple, homogeneous and stable state, not by complex balances but by immense simplicity, to the emergence of life from the inert matter and consciousness from life. Consciousness then adds, alters, complements, and eventually replaces natural evolution with cultural development. The processes of organization and self-organization of the fundamental constituents of the universe that interact in various ways under physical laws were generating natural and diverse wealth in all its current complexity, including conscious life. Unlike what happened before its existence, consciousness introduces processes not only addressed by natural laws but also by intentions, values and interests of human beings and of the social organizations that are built with them.

We are, then, both physical nature and culture or conscious nature. Culture also evolves within its new mechanisms of organization and self-organization, from which reflective processes such as self-evaluation which allows the development of values, principles and interests based on knowledge development, thus emerging new conscious forces that complement the physical framework in the processes of cultural evolution. In this evolution from simplicity to the complexity of the universe, from the inert matter to conscious life, a richness and diversity as immense as it is interdependent is generated. In that evolution from absolute simplicity from numbness to the complexity of culture, we can imagine a next cultural evolutionary step based on the process of systematic growth of complexity: the organization and self-organization of self-assessment processes with a growing enrichment of interactions, all of which allows, as an emergent quality, new, renewed, strengthened and different values, principles and interests with a new consistency, coherence, efficiency and effectiveness, harmoniously integrating all the natural, the human and the social aspects we understand. This new way of perceiving the world, with these new powers which allow us to understand it more and better in order to take more advantage of it and with greater responsibility in all its natural, social and human aspects, could lead human society in a natural way through knowledge development, to a new human culture with the ability to solve its greatest and most pressing problems and to the construction of a true paradise on earth based on the fundamental coherence of natural, human and social knowledge. It is perhaps, although we still cannot specify it, a culture that has been built through the emergence of the complexity of natural, social and human knowledge, of solid values and of great capacities to apply them consistently and tenaciously thanks to its universal and permanent objectivity. It will be a human culture that will automatically and naturally exclude the fundamental and practical defects and limitations of the current values sustained in the weakness of the grounds controlled by subjectivity. It will not be necessary or simply it will not be possible the concentration of any force, not even the power of any kind of personal authority that, by ignorance, inevitably corrupts itself and others.

All governments draw up policies that aim to respond to current needs and reach international standards in relation to the generation of scientific knowledge. Such policies are mainly included in relatively recent laws on Science, Technology and Innovation as well as on Productivity and Competitiveness. The objective of these national policies is to increase the country’s capacity to identify, produce, disseminate, use and integrate scientific and technological knowledge in order to improve competitiveness and contribute to the country’s productive transformation. The proposed policy seeks to stimulate three elements of knowledge: supply (generation of knowledge), demand (use of knowledge) and the interaction between supply and demand, the latter aimed to strengthen the national system of science, technology, innovation, productivity and competitiveness. Specifically, but in different ways, these policies seek to promote innovation in production systems, strengthen the training of human resources for research and innovation, promote the social appropriation of knowledge, focus public action on strategic areas, develop and strengthen public and private capacities based on knowledge. Theoretically speaking, as usual, everything looks good because everything can be idealized without any more commitment to reality than its appearance. It does not demand great effort or many talents or many abilities beyond great eloquence, sometimes and unfortunately quite shameless, hiding ignorance badly. Reality demands much more and making ideas come true is the real challenge, not just having good ideas. Bringing ideas to life requires many skills and talents including cooperation with many people of various specialties, talents and interests. The consistency of eloquent science and technology policies in the text, with the efforts in practice to build the reality of higher education, scientific research, technological development and innovation, allocation of resources, definition of priorities, and in many cases sacrifices for the important to be developed and resolved, turns out to be very modest and poor within the ignorance and inability of underdevelopment, without stop making many efforts to make things seem different. A scientific indolence persists as a consequence of scientific illiteracy and enlightened ignorance, typical of a poor scientific and technological tradition. With how much lack of knowledge do we pretend to develop knowledge?

If a National Science, Technology and Innovation System (NSTIS) is working well, then society will be able to compete and take advantage of the profitable world markets of high added-value goods and services, providing itself with enough resources to continue investing in scientific research and technological development, thereby making innovation a true development locomotive. What is the complexity and diversity necessary for significant innovation to emerge with strength and abundance from a NSTIS? This book is intended to contribute to answering this question in an important way, how it is trying to be solved and how it is being achieved in an efficient or inefficient way, showing explicitly and rigorously, the need to substantially increase the development dynamics of the NSTIS. In underdevelopment, it is essential to multiply efforts in order to generate the necessary substantial changes in the NSTIS that can quickly lead to a true knowledge society where people and social organization are the fundamental source to solve their problems and activate the engine of their progress, instead of an economy, already primitive today, predatory of the natural, social and human environment. Knowledge is very powerful and consistent and it can even be inexorably successful if its development is assumed responsibly. However, it is not an easy process. It involves many efforts, both material and cultural, without which the diversity of disciplinary knowledge is no more than a set of large, costly and dispersed potentials. Underdevelopment is characterized by importing the vast majority of all the added value that it consumes and needs for its operation and progress. This makes its social and economic dynamics inefficient, ineffective, slow progress and, too often, uncertain.

Quantify and Organize

Knowledge can be understood as a quantitative information organization. It is a way of creating a more accurate image of reality than that obtained with purely qualitative information. If, in addition, both qualitative and quantitative information are organized in a methodical way, seeking persistent and growing consistency between what is observed and what is imagined, the image of reality becomes more objective, less dependent on each individual, on the moment and on the place where it exists. It is also highly valuable to all contemporaries and their descendants. The quantity, organization and, eventually, self-organization of the information itself generate or allow the new quality of knowledge to emerge. Information by itself is not reality, it is a few items of an infinite number of details that can even take us away from reality itself, oversimplifying its immense complexity. That is the paradox that the complexity paradigm solves as part of modern knowledge: the emergence of new qualitatively different knowledge as an evolution of knowledge itself due to its quantitative, diverse and interactive accumulation.

The complexity or theory of the organization has as object of study to understand the processes and mechanisms that transform the quantity and diversity of interacting constituents in the existence of something new because it has a new quality, something more complex with other capacities to interact with other things without the need for any external force or energy in addition to the inputs that its constituents demand. This is an evident, ubiquitous and permanent phenomenon in nature which we are beginning to understand better; therefore, it can free us from the need and dependence on unnatural creative powers and let us understand the great creative potential of nature and human beings as part of it and with the responsibilities that correspond to them. By applying complexity to knowledge itself, we understand that the process of knowing is the greatest source of human creativity that does not exist in another part of nature and makes scientific and technical knowledge the fundamental source of innovation to solve human problems and improve their life quality at limits that we cannot imagine, if there are limits in fact and without the help of any other will in addition to the human spirit.

We see then the permanent change as something inevitable; it is a process that increases complexity simply because the physical laws are as they are, including its own change and even its own origin. The change emerges from the existing diversity and richness and with the possibility of starting without any external creative intervention from absolute simplicity, out of nowhere and of noting. When we add the concept of the entity-environment duality to complexity, which in itself is already included because any interacting constituent is the environment of the others with which it interacts and vice versa, the concept of adaptation emerges: the most useful, efficient or practical concept for the coexistence of the entity in its environment and at the same time the concept of evolution arises for entities and environments that change and generate their own changes. Change, adaptation and evolution are inevitable due to the complexity of nature. Its permanent increase is in contrast to the entropy which tends toward homogeneity and simplicity and toward numbness, to which we could eventually return. We could say that complexity and entropy are the benefit and cost of the universe, respectively, to be increasingly rich and diverse.

Complexity as part of knowledge leads us to understand how what exists is ordered so that something new exists and, therefore, gives human beings new and powerful tools to control the processes of generation of wealth and diversity without forgetting the costs and the pressure of disorder, of emerging free dynamics in the face of insistent conservative passivity, of productive harmony in the face of destructive chaos, although it sometimes seems the opposite. Complexity theory aims to explain what order is and what its processes, causes and consequences are, both concerned with matter and the information it generates through its interactions and with the processes that group matter and information together in ways that sometimes make them indistinguishable. In knowledge, complexity theory is the part of knowledge that simplifies it, as knowledge does in all aspects of reality because it orders the great richness and diversity of knowledge itself in all its constituents and interactions, disciplines and interdisciplinary to learn more. Like all knowledge, complexity is a powerful capacity for synthesis of the immeasurable and even infinite information that exists and is permanently generated by the interactions of things. Is the amount of information greater than the universe itself? Information is generated by the universe and the forces of interaction between its constituents, which allow to generate changes in each one, organize and generate even more information and organization that eventually becomes something new, something else from what already existed. The increase in complexity is the growth of the universe preserving what it is by definition: nothing enters and nothing leaves. By creating new things without creating new constituents, only new information and the organization that such universe allows arises. That is why the human being, as a very complex system due to