Notes on Complexity By Neil Theise
Neil Theise explores how complexity theory helps us understand the interconnectedness of life and existence. He argues that living systems exhibit emergent properties that cannot be predicted from their individual parts. This perspective reveals that we are not separate from the world but are part of a complex, dynamic whole.
Highlights
Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world. The use of the word complexity here does not mean “complicated,” however. Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining.
A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.
Chaotic systems, in contrast, are processes that only reveal themselves over time. They can’t be summarized in a simple formula but must emerge with computer programs, or models, that play out over minutes, hours, or days.
As science writer Roger Lewin described it, complexity—information-rich, lifelike systems—erupts at this phase transition where “chaos and stability pull in opposite directions.”
Likewise, there is no cell monitoring your body as a whole to detect whether you are sleepy or hungry or horny. There isn’t even a globally sensing organ that does that. Of course, we would leap to suggest the brain, but despite our cultural instinct to put it at the very top of some sort of body-wide sensing system, the brain does not in fact monitor everything any more than the autocrat who believes they can watch all the social networks of their realm. While the brain communicates with the body via signals passing along nerves, reaching out to the body and receiving information in return, we know that the rest of the body also modulates the brain itself.
there is ceaseless change in complexity, continual oscillation within the healthy, life-sustaining ranges. Life is ceaseless movement; stability is found in balance, not rigidity.
Thus, the limited randomness that is the source of creativity in complex systems, and in all life, will inevitably lead to partial mass-extinction events and, eventually, given enough time, the death of the entire system. What makes us alive necessitates that we will die. There is no such thing as eternal life or a fountain of youth.
The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime.
Only within a very narrow range of body temperature is there a life-sustaining balance between the energy of molecular agitation and the energy for limiting that disorder. That balance provides the safe, homeostatic zone at the molecular level in which a cell or a body can live.
Everything only looks like a thing from its own particular vantage point, the level of scale at which it can be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Above that level of scale, it is hidden from view by the higher-level emergent properties it gives rise to. Below that level, it disappears from view into the active phenomena from which it emerged. Every one of these entities cloaks itself in the appearance of being something material, something solid, something real, but such appearances can be verified only from very selected perspectives, each of which necessarily excludes all others.
we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.
Our usual, habitual experiences of the material world and our Western cultural bias toward materialism—that the world is only its physical substance—continually push us in the other direction. But complexity theory, woven together with relativity and quantum mechanics, tells us a different story. Oneness is real and true. And while separation is also true, it is not any more true than oneness. They are a complementarity—each, though different, is equally indispensable for a full comprehension of reality.
The Vienna Circle led the way for our modern culture to award science and mathematics exclusive ownership over the truth.
Quantum mechanics sets a limit on the capacity of empirical science to define reality in a purely objective fashion.
mathematical Platonism. Mathematical Platonists believe that mathematical expressions—numbers and formulas and geometric forms—belong to the realm of Plato’s ideals, not to the realm of material existence. From this view, mathematics is not merely a means invented by humans to count bushels of wheat; it is a true realm unto itself, beyond our own questing human minds. Mathematics awaits human discovery, not human invention.
If any formal system that includes arithmetic is consistent, it is necessarily incomplete. And if such a system is actually complete, then it must be inconsistent. The treasured goal of simultaneous consistency and completeness was, from the beginning, an aspirational sham.
In other words, it is now a certainty that the universe cannot be entirely described, captured, and “proved” by such exercises in producing theorems from axioms. Formal logic is unable to be the final measure of all mathematical truths. Ultimately, some truths must always be apprehensible only by intuition.