Complex Systems Knowledge Base

A markdown-based knowledge base on complex systems, extracted and translated into English from sources by Juanje Ojeda:

• Blog about complex systems and learning (Spanish).
• Blog about health, how the human body works and learning (Spanish).
• Book "3 pasos contra el sedentarismo" — applying complexity thinking to health, movement, and sedentarism (Spanish).

What is this

A set of interconnected wiki pages covering complex adaptive systems: emergence, attractors, feedback, adaptation, resilience, embodied cognition, agent dynamics, and more. Each page is atomic, densely linked, and structured with frontmatter, key points, examples, and connections.

Built using Claude Code and the wiki-kb skill.

How to use it

Browse in Obsidian

Open the wiki/ folder as an Obsidian vault. The internal links and graph view make it easy to navigate and discover connections.

Query with Claude Code or Cursor

The CLAUDE.md file configures the AI assistant to answer questions using only the wiki content — a lightweight RAG approach without a vector database. The assistant navigates the wiki's internal links progressively instead of relying on keyword search.

cd complex-system-kb
claude

Try asking

The wiki shines when questions cross multiple topics, but it's also a good place to start learning the basics. Here are some good starting points:

Learning the basics

• "What are complex systems?"
• "What is an attractor? Give me examples."
• "What is emergence and why can't it be predicted from the parts?"
• "What's the difference between a complicated problem and a complex one?"
• "What are feedback loops and why do they matter?"
• "What does non-linearity mean in practice?"
• "What is self-organization? Give me real live examples"
• "What are agents in complex system? and what are strong agents?"

Complex systems and theory

• "What is the edge of chaos, and why is it where adaptation happens?"
• "If nobody is in charge, how does order emerge?"
• "What's the difference between optimizing a system and actually improving it?"
• "Why do small changes sometimes have huge consequences, and other times nothing happens?"
• "How can bureaucracy be a form of intelligence?"
• "How can I change the culture of my team of company?"

Health through the complexity lens

• "Is back pain a complicated or a complex problem?"
• "Why do my knees hurt going down stairs — and what does that have to do with my shoes?"
• "What really means to be sedentary and how it harms me?"
• "Why doesn't stretching fix my tight hamstrings permanently?"

Connecting both worlds

• "What relationship is there between learning and adaptation?"
• "How can understanding that pain is not damage actually reduce my pain?"
• "What do Nassim Taleb and complex systems have to do with cold showers?"
• "Why do diverse teams sometimes perform worse than homogeneous ones?"

License

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt the content as long as you give appropriate credit and distribute your contributions under the same license.