Are good and bad carbohydrates the same thing as simple (bad) and complex (good)?

No, not the same as simple and complex. Apples are simple carbs (sugars) but they are good carbs. They do not cause a rapid rise in blood sugar.

Baked potatoes are complex carbs, but they aren't necessarily good carbs because they cause a huge rise in blood sugars.

I write about this in Lose Fat, Not Faith ... basically, just like simple and complex carbs were an oversimplificiation (I'll give you one more example - people like shakes because they are "low sugar" when in fact most shakes have maltodextrin as the main ingredient, which impacts your blood sugar more than table sugar!). The GI is an oversimplification as well. It can tell us a little bit about how foods impact blood sugar but doesn't tell us anything about how many nutrients the food carries, etc. There is also Glycemic Load, Satiety Index, and other factors to take into account.

Essentially when it comes down to it, the best carbs are the whole, unprocessed carbs. Sure, baked potatoes are high on the glycemic index but they also contain fiber, potassium, and other nutrients. Fruit is a simple sugar but also contains fiber, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, etc.

Here's an example:

When you take whole grains, you can boil them like oats and eat them kind of like a sugar. They are loaded with nutrients and fiber and are relatively low glycemic. The ingredients list is basically: whole grains. That's it. Simple - a whole food.

When you allow the grains to sprout and bake them into a bread, you have sprouted grain bread. Now it's a little more processed. You still have fiber and nutrients but the baking has altered them a bit and there are other ingredients in the mix.

Now you can grind the grains into flour and bake them into whole wheat bread. This is much more processed than the whole grains, so you lose a little bit of the nutrition. Because the grinding broke down the grains for you (your body no longer has to do this) they digest more quickly, which means a more rapid rise in blood sugar.

If you go the full route and bleach the grains to strip the fiber and nutrients and healthy fats so they sit on the shelf longer, and bake them into whole bread, you must add some synthetic chemicals to "enrich" the bread. Now you've basically stripped out nutrients the body can use, replaced them with synthetic ones that aren't as useable, removed the fiber and killed all of the healthy fats. This is the worse type of bread because despite of where it started, it is now digested so rapidly that your blood sugar will shoot through the roof and you won't get very much nutrition or very many nutrients from it.

So there is an example continuum. Good carbs = whole, unprocessed carbs. Bad carbs = highly processed carbs. Then there's a whole level of gradients "in between".