A: What I meant is familiarity makes everything appear simpler. Like us, most people do confuse simplicity with familiarity and acceptability. Every now and then somebody blowing away a bus or a restaurant or raining bullets on innocent pedestrians is no more complex for us. It’s simply terrorism.

C: Exactly! We are talking about what people generally think as simple. Theoretically, simplicity may be different.

A: Simplicity is simplicity. There is no theoretical simplicity or practical simplicity. And I don’t agree that familiarity makes something more acceptable. Terrorism may have become simple but has it become acceptable? When you are familiar with something you stop thinking about it. But that does not make it more acceptable. Familiarity and acceptability are distinct.

B: Well, I agree that they are distinct, but we can’t ignore the association in popular perception. Things become simple also when they are too complex to understand. Terrorism hasn’t become familiar or acceptable because it is frequent. Pain and death never become familiar no matter how many times we encounter them. Terrorism has become simple because we don’t understand it at all. Like death. And like God. When we don’t understand something, we think it is too simple to be understood.

A: You can’t compare terrorism with death or God. They aren’t complex; they are unknown things.

C: And also unknowable! Better we confine our discussion to things that are known and knowable. By the way, we are discussing complexity and not terrorism or death or God.

A: There goes the Agnostic! I stick to my view that familiarity makes something appear simple, but acceptability is entirely different.

B: Before proceeding further we must decide whether we are talking about what appears or we are talking about what is. Just as familiarity makes things “appear” simple, it also makes things “appear” acceptable. It doesn’t make them either simple or acceptable though.

C: There goes the philosopher!

B: Well, many complex things are also called philosophy. When our previous generations didn’t understand something, they called it God and stopped thinking about it. When the current generation doesn’t understand something, it calls it philosophy and stops thinking about it.

A: We must stop thinking at some point lest we may all go mad. We are truly getting to the core of complexity now! Language too is democratic you know. If the majority uses a term to mean something, it has to mean that.

C: Let’s not complicate complexity. Things are complex because we don’t understand them. Grammar is simple to you because you understand it, but calculus is difficult because you don’t understand it. For others, grammar may be complex but calculus may be simple. Why we understand or do not understand something has many factors. The biggest factor, in my opinion, is our exposure.

A: I don’t agree with that. In most cases, what is complex is complex and what is simple is simple to everybody. Of course, ignorance can make something appear complex to anyone.

C: You are again breaking the rules, mom!

A: What rules?

B: Wait a minute! We are A, B and C. No mom and dad here. Listen to me. I have an improved definition of complexity now. Complexity is the phenomenon of several factors coming together and influencing each other in such a way that it is difficult to understand the influence of all those factors and their contribution to the result. I said difficult but not impossible.

A: What rules did I break?

C: You made a personal comment on me.

A: What comment?

B: You two are supposed to make an impersonal comment on my definition.

C: You called me ignorant.

A: Oh, did I? That’s complexity for me!

B: And for me, you two are complexity doubly confounded!