I made this button for all those people out there who want to keep complexity complex, who understand that feedback is the name of the game, and that the main rule of the game is that the rules must continually be modified. If you know about Calvinball, you know what I’m talking about: a recursive looping, a complex manifestation of manifestation, a new way of knowing, and a new way of knowing about knowing, which happens to be very, very old.
Tag: Complexity
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What you don’t know about your cells will astound you.
We are ecologies within ecologies within ecologies. Complex processes, such as inflammatory responses, span multiple systems as multivalent expressions of dynamic self organization. Within constant interlaced boundaries provided by the dual and complementary forces of growth and decay, life becomes possible; we become possible. Interactivity, specialization, contextual adaptation, flexibility, utilization of ‘randomness’ and dynamic flow are parameters by means of which the game of life yields autopoesis and apoptosis. The dance of advancing and receeding energies, the undulating glissando of electromagnetic interactions reverberating between hydrophilc and hydrophobic ends of phospho-bilipid layers, reveal a chorus of dynamic forces meeting in miniscule harmonies that literally embody and mirror the complexities of life all the way up.
If you are not awed and humbled by this cosmic-microcosmic dance, this alchemical transformation of matter into forms that inform, then you have lost your ear for poetry:
http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife_lo.html
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Gasp! Newton LIED to you about his three laws of motion!
I’ve been thinking about the co-existence of multiple descriptions of reality lately. In particular, as someone who has taught high-school physics, I run up against a philosophical quandary when I’m presenting, say Newton’s laws of motion. Am I presenting a lie to the students, because quantum mechanics and general relativity replaced the Newtonian physics?
On the one hand, we can argue that classical physics is flat-out wrong in its basic foundations, and thus that all of the subsequent predictions of it’s theories are equally (and absolutely) wrong as well. For example, take the prediction of a cannonball’s trajectory. Classically this follows a simple parabolic curve… but there are a number of non-Newtonian complexifications to this story that are required for a ‘truer’ description of the event. First you have the non-linear, chaotic effects of friction, then you have general relativistic corrections (changes in space-time curvature vary with distance to the mass of the Earth, thus changes in momentum, and even the mass of the cannonball, plus time dilation and other flying pink elephants), and then quantum corrections (virtual particle interactions, uncertainty limits, kryptonite fragments).But, as evidenced by the crumbling city walls, the cannonball hits them anyway, whether or not we take these things into account (well, friction is really pretty important, but that’s why things in physics-world are always frictionless to begin with). In other words, even though, in an abstract and theoretical sense, classical physics is complexly wrong, it is also simply correct. It will get you to the moon just fine, thank you, no relativistic corrections needed.
The issue may require some consideration of the shifting between an epistemological stance and an ontological stance (that confounded relationship again!).
Ontologically we must say that Newton’s physics provides only an approximation of more fundamental principles. We can thus think of the classical principles as “wrong” because if we are to look at the phenomenon in its more complete ontological situation, other principles are required. However, when we don’t look in this way, the classical principles are arguably just as “right” as the more fundamental principles that need to be introduced when you look at the situation more completely. In other words, questions about ontology can be taken in-situ, and not, as most philosophers would have it, absolutely. This is a big faux-pas, as it undermines the common meaning of ‘ontology’, which refers to the essence or real being of a phenomena.
But if we our queues from Whitehead, we realize that the idea of being may no longer require some kind of Parmenidean, unalterable and unchangeable essence that is just itself for all eternity. Essence-being-may rather have existence only as a process, as an ongoing creation, subject always to the bursting through of novelty.
Somewhat ironically, if we took this, rather than the Newtonian assumptions as a starting point, then it would not be problematic to see that Newton’s physics can indeed have an equivalent ontological status in certain circumstances as the relativistic and quantum laws do in other circumstances. There may be no ontological need to posit relativistic effects unless such effects create differences that impinge upon classically-based predictions.
Of course, the fact that just this does occur in some situations is exactly why people had to come up with relativity and quantum mechanics! But the establishment of new ‘laws’ may not obviate the ontological status of earlier laws when we don’t arbitrarily discount the importance of the evolving context within which any ontological consideration arises in the first place.
The situation becomes more apparent when we are no longer considering simple physical systems, but try to account for more complex phenomena: life, emotion, healing, consciousness, social effects, etc. In these cases, the ‘laws’ of physics are simply completely and utterly inadequate to the phenomena; they explain only a tiny fraction of each phenomenon. New ‘laws’, and other principles are required to make sense of these different realms. These laws may or may not be ultimately reducible to known physical laws, but that may not even matter!What ‘exists’ for a given way of approaching a complex, embedded, extended, and recursive system may change on the basis of how that system is approached, i.e. by the ‘question’ that is asked of it. Which of course leads us to the insight, offered by Bohr, that just this is how the universe works: it answers questions (is something for us) by virtue of the questions asked of it, which is another way to say “How you pay attention changes what comes to your attention.”
Classical physics will never ‘go away’, unless human experience changes so radically as to no longer require its principles for explanation (this is highly unlikely). We should be careful of the classical assumptions about ontology, and of projecting an absoluteness onto ‘being’ that is not sensitive to the human act of in-situ knowing. To declare, because the fundamental principles of chemistry can be reduced to physical principles, that “chemistry is not needed” would be a folly; chemical principles, when unreduced, still operate in an ontologically satisfying way – for the chemist. The fact that those behaviors can be thought of in ‘more fundamental’ terms does not automatically privilege the more fundamental understanding in an ontological sense.
This does not lead to ‘state-specific sciences’ (ala Charles Tart), which are radically separate, in which every question may have its own unique ontology and epistemology. It appears that the universe doesn’t quite work this way, because principles from one realm don’t stay put; they leak out into other, seemingly unrelated disciplines, where they may find fruitful soil, even taking over the previous assumptions at times. The universe doesn’t seem to split itself up quite the way we do. In other words, we cannot hold onto an ontology that abstracts itself indefinitely, but we cannot also completely de-reify ontological considerations (the mistake of much of post-modernism) in favor of purely ‘constructed’ ontologies.
We are thus lead to consider an epistemology – an embedded, flexible, transformable epistemology – may be go hand-in-hand with a companion ontology – a process-oriented, non-reductive, complex ontology. The ontology is thus capable of shifting on the basis of epistemological concerns, but is not reducible to them. The epistemology is likewise capable of transforming on the basis of ontological considerations, but cannot be completely enslaved to them. Rather, the epistemology and the ontology co-exist in a creative dance of becoming, mutually reinforcing each other and destroying each other in a complex cybernetic loop. -
is reliance upon dualism hardwired?
I wonder about the extent to which dichotomous thinking is either hard-wired or at least dependent on completely non-social forces. It seems almost to be a thermodynamic question, that is, a question of trying to optimize the amount of energy spent in thinking for a given situation. Thinking is a very expensive activity, physiologically speaking – it is essentially a catabolic process which relies upon the breakdown of molecules for their energy.
Evolution isn’t usually needlessly extravagant – in fact it’s kind of lazy, if you don’t mind the anthropomorphism. It seems that in a broad sense, there is a sort of law of diminishing returns for the energy investment required for thinking. In other words, if you encounter a situation in which some kind of action or distinction is called for, you get the most bang for your buck by quickly assessing things according to an either/or model. Identify one aspect, which automatically calls up some kind of opposite, and make a determination on the basis of this division. It’s quick, dirty, and effective for generating actions, feelings, and new thoughts. If the feelings, actions, etc. that result from this distinction are ‘good enough’ then there is little reason/pressure to continue the act of thinking about it in a way that calls into question the basic assumptions of the underlying duality. In other words, it’s easy to make and maintain the most basic of distinctions, those of duality.
So it seems to me that it is largely social factors that mitigate this tendency. Trying to think through the layers and layers and layers of connection that inevitably describe EVERY situation is simply not practical energy-wise, and thus requires very significant counter-pressure for its activation. We must run into situations in which our original duality is experientially shown to be inadequate for there to be a commitment to another round, or three or ten, of thinking over and through a given situation. At some point things seem to just get too complex and we give up, and the point at which we abandon the process relates to the level of depth and complexity we are able to experience.
This is why I really like Kwame Anthony Appiah’s appeal to respectful experience with people not like us, i.e. through conversation: “Conversation doesn’t have to lead to consensus about anything, especially not values; it’s enough that it helps people get used to one another” (Appiah, 2006, p.85). At a very basic level, time spent with others presents us with countless variations on the experience of discovering that our implicit or explicit distinctions are not always shared. This presents (often, but maybe not often enough?) a kind of social pressure to go through a second round of thinking about our primary distinctions, the effect of which at least sets up a greater likelihood that we can ‘get used to’ differences which before were causes for anxiety.
In any case, it seems that there is a certain amount of ‘going against the biological grain’ required to produce people like Morin, Bernstein, or Appiah. Luckily it’s not all biology! Of course, applying this little analysis to itself, I should be wary of relying upon the duality of biology/sociality, because, following Morin, ‘it isn’t quite that simple’. Round 1 over.
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on why you will have trouble predicting what I say in this post
One of the things about complexity/chaos theory is that prediction submits to very specific limits, in the sense that with anything but a VERY simple system, we must give up the potential for long-term predictive certainty. This is because very small differences can lead towards extremely large differences later down the line, and we simply can’t account for the effects of these very small differences.
The problem is that one never knows whether a small difference will actually make a difference or not. And in any case, with any non-trivial system, the small differences are all complexly interrelated to larger scale changes, with much cross-feedback.
So SOME kinds of predictions are possible — it’s the RANGE that’s a problem. For example, we can predict with high certainty that certain climatic patterns will continue far into the future — but we can’t predict with any accuracy on any given future date whether it will be cloudy and raining or sunny, because those detailed specifics are precisely what are affected the most by the tiny shifts in today’s weather.
Then there is a completely separate but equally problematic blow to our predictive abilities. If the only problem was the butterfly effect, we might be able to make a computer powerful enough to predict far-future events with accuracy, because it could take everything into account — after all, the universe follows its own laws, right? We just tell the computer what those laws are, the initial conditions, and give it enough time to calculate and we should have an accurate and complete answer, right?
Nope. The problem is two-fold. On the one hand, we simply don’t know how to account for (measure) all the very small initial states that would be required for such a computer to have sufficient information to do its job. It’s simply too huge of a task in a practical sense. You would, for example, need to know (in the case of weather, a good chaotic system) the pressure and temperature of the air… but for WHAT air? Can you generalize and only look at average values for large volumes of air, say, those the size of a city? Or do you need accuracy to within a cubic meter of air, so you can have distinct values for every cubic meter of air on the planet? You see the practical problems associated with this. Other complex systems, such as the body, behave in the same way — measuring hormone levels in the blood, the distance between dendrites and axons, the thickness of their myelination, etc. etc. — there is no practical way to get the information needed.
BUT WAIT, IT GETS WORSE!
Unfortunately for our predictive abilities, it isn’t even just a question of the practical difficulties in obtaining such information, but rather that such information is IN PRINCIPLE, not gettable. This is because, as the quantum mechanics shows, we cannot help but disturb a system when we measure it, and that disturbance always introduces an uncertainty with respect to some other aspect of the system that we can never – IN PRINCIPLE – simultaneously account for so as to know the COMPLETE state of the system at any given instant. We have to do all our predictive work on the basis of PROBABILITIES, not certainties – at least when we are talking about the quantum level.But here’s the rub: NOBODY knows when it might be okay to ignore quantum effects and stick with much more manageable ‘classical’ (and predictable) rules. It’s a real philosophical and practical problem, because we see more and more that the quantum world and the world of macro-scale qualities are not separate. Of course, it would be quite bizarre if quantum-scale effects simply occurred over a very well-defined set of limits, beyond which different rules took over that needed no reference to the quantum rules. Of course, this is precisely how most scientists actually do their work — they either work in particle physics or other fields that look at very small scales, in which case they use the rules that describe the quantum realm, or they work in engineering or biology and only worry about quantum effects when they have to, otherwise they use classical rules as much as possible.
Chaos theory itself is fractal – it’s laws span all scales. We cannot ignore the potential and actual effects that cross over from one scale to another, decreasing our certainty at each level. The change on one level of a phenomenon may very well cause a change on a completely different level — but in predicting that change to arbitrary accuracy we run into practical as well as principled issues which we cannot overcome. Thus, the built-in indeterminacy at the quantum level can, through the scalar linking effects described by chaos theory, can link single, quantum-scale processes to shifts at the macro scale.
We can always make predictions, and for many situations and circumstances, the above problems are ignorable. But for other situations–those near criticality, for example–the full effects of both quantum indeterminacy and chaos theory may make all the difference.
On the one hand, we can argue that classical physics is flat-out wrong in its basic foundations, and thus that all of the subsequent predictions of it’s theories are equally (and absolutely) wrong as well. For example, take the prediction of a cannonball’s trajectory. Classically this follows a simple parabolic curve… but there are a number of non-Newtonian complexifications to this story that are required for a ‘truer’ description of the event. First you have the non-linear, chaotic effects of friction, then you have general relativistic corrections (changes in space-time curvature vary with distance to the mass of the Earth, thus changes in momentum, and even the mass of the cannonball, plus time dilation and other flying pink elephants), and then quantum corrections (virtual particle interactions, uncertainty limits, kryptonite fragments).
The situation becomes more apparent when we are no longer considering simple physical systems, but try to account for more complex phenomena: life, emotion, healing, consciousness, social effects, etc. In these cases, the ‘laws’ of physics are simply completely and utterly inadequate to the phenomena; they explain only a tiny fraction of each phenomenon. New ‘laws’, and other principles are required to make sense of these different realms. These laws may or may not be ultimately reducible to known physical laws, but that may not even matter!
We are thus lead to consider an epistemology – an embedded, flexible, transformable epistemology – may be go hand-in-hand with a companion ontology – a process-oriented, non-reductive, complex ontology. The ontology is thus capable of shifting on the basis of epistemological concerns, but is not reducible to them. The epistemology is likewise capable of transforming on the basis of ontological considerations, but cannot be completely enslaved to them. Rather, the epistemology and the ontology co-exist in a creative dance of becoming, mutually reinforcing each other and destroying each other in a complex cybernetic loop.
