Stephen Downes

This is a long discussion of something I don't think was an issue to begin with, but I could be wrong about that, so I'm passing it along. It stems from the argument from Robert Dare that states "Complexity, the theory goes, manifests itself in 'complex adaptive systems', which are made up of many independent agents [my emphasis] who interact and adapt to each other." But if you read 'independent' as (say) 'completely immune from any external influence', then entities in a complex system are not 'independent'. I have used the word 'autonomous' to express the idea that they are the locus of decisions about how they react to all this input. Keith Hamon describes them as "partly competing, partly co-operating, or simply mutually ignoring."