19 Of Individual and Collective

At this time, humanity is a collective of about 8 billion human individuals, of which you are one. You’re also a collective of around 37 trillion individual cells, coordinated in the dance of your life—a spontaneous, self-organized intrinsic dynamics acting on many space and timescales. Such staggering complexity is next to impossible to comprehend. Or is it? The roles of individual and collective in the context of life’s complexity have been incessantly debated throughout history. Most often, one or the other is deemed more fundamental. Your squiggle sense can help you transcend such debates as you perceive individual and collective to be complementary aspects, and coordination dynamics (CD) to be the key to understanding their complementary nature. In fact, all of the complex systems studied by CD deal with individual~collectives, dynamic, self-organized collectives of individual coordinating elements or synergies. Every individual~collective is a synergy and vice versa.