The Modeling Principle of Governing Complexity with Simplicity

Faced with the endless phenomena of arising, passing, and transformation in the world, human cognition, if it remains only at the level of appearances, will inevitably fall into the mire of “information explosion.” The highest wisdom in the study of Heaven and humanity handed down by the ancients lies precisely in “governing complexity with simplicity.” The core tools for doing so are models and symbols. Modeling is the process of highly abstracting and compressing phenomena of great dimensionality and complexity.

Consider the modern automobile. A car is an extremely complex system composed of thirty or forty thousand intricate parts—engines, transmission systems, electronic components, and so forth. Yet through model-based thinking, people summarize and compress them into a few subsystems, such as the chassis, tires, and doors, and then recombine them into the concept of a “car.” In the same way, Chinese medicine compresses the complex regularities of the cosmos and the human body into temporal models such as day and night (the Earth’s rotation) and the four seasons (the Earth’s revolution). It can also divide the human trunk into different spatial subregions such as interior/exterior, upper/lower, and circular domains. This allows later generations to use models to grasp the objective regularities by which natural motion appears in time and space.