I like this, I even wish it had a name because I have observed it frequently, but upon some reflection it really only seems to be the product of certain organized situations and perhaps even just an artifact of our own pattern recognition. Are these new collapsed systems really less complex or just easier for our brains to think about? Natural(chaotic) systems certainly don’t seem to follow that logic unless I’m mistaken. Thinking of a river system, it seems that it is just in a state of flux, making little wins across the system all the time, but also becoming more complex due to inputs. If we consider a star system I have trouble identifying how the system doesn’t become permanently less complex as energy is radiated away over time. (Although I’m clueless on how to actually model either sort of complexity appropriately)

That said, it appears to me that as soon as we start to tread against entropy we might notice this phenomenon cropping up. Life seems to “collapse” on new designs and human understanding too seems to collapse, but in both cases it seems that only the system complexity collapses, not the entity complexity. I think that the collapse of the complexity of the surrounding system is the result of outside stimulus causing additional entity complexity to be added to the total complexity. In a stable, complex, system this has the potential for massive system destabilization, but it is not certain and it doesn’t seem to be the nature of complex system themselves to inherently collapse on less complex states, rather it is the result of stimulus. Moreover, if we look at total complexity, does it really become less complex or does the complexity just shift from the system to the entity?