Ever since I met Jesse Shiah, the CEO and founder of AgilePoint, complexity has been on my radar. Hence, “Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being”. It turned out to be a very different book than expected. In fact, it is complete confirmation of my conclusion after researching and writing my book about books about AI. You are the upgrade, augmented natural intelligence as the only way forward. The need for fundamental awareness and a passionate plea for mediation and developing your consciousness.
The CEO question
If your organisation is a living, complex system – not a machine – where are you still managing it like a machine and killing the emergence you actually depend on?
TechnoSphere
The book opens with the TechnoSphere. How, once several thousand creatures were wandering the TechnoSphere landscape, the founders discovered behaviors that had not been directly programmed but had emerged spontaneously from the creatures’ interactions. Self-organising technology in a virtual environment. The ghost in the machine?
The whole
The book moves from herds to ant colonies to life itself and its complexities. Nothing in the universe is more complex than life. A distinguishing feature of life’s complexity is that, in every single instance, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The topics in the book
Covering complexity theory, system classes, fractals, Mandelbrot sets, chaos, the Game of Life (cellular automation), phase transitions, John von Neuman, complementarity, Bohr, GAIA, Daisyworld, Erwin Schrödinger, quantum field theory, consciousness, Ayurvedic and Mesoamerican traditions, ancient Egypt, Vedic, Saivite, and Buddhist cultures, Japanese Zen, materialism, panpsychism, idealism, theorems, metaphysics, intuition, Jewish and Hindu mysticisms, Kabbalah and lots more.
Systems
To begin our journey into complexity, we must consider three basic classes of systems.
- The first is made up of systems in which the whole is precisely and predictably the sum of its parts. Water provides some simple examples.
- This brings us to the second class of systems, those described by chaos theory. In chaotic systems, the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts, but is greater than the sum of its parts.
- Life itself
There is a fourth. A class of patterns arises at the boundary between stable order and chaos. It is open-ended, evolving, yet self-sustaining, with shapes and movements reminiscent of living things. Fractal at the edge. It is also unpredictable. And for that, we need complexity theory.
Complexity theory
Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world. Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining. In complexity theory, these surprising outcomes are called emergent properties or just plain emergence.
Complex systems
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. Examples of complex systems are found in sociology and biology, but also in chemistry and physics. Complexity bridges the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the universe at its most infinitesimal, described by quantum mechanics, and at its most vast, described by the theory of relativity.
Being one
Complexity theory can foster an invaluable flexibility of perspectives and awaken us to our true, deep intimacy with the larger whole, so that we might return to what we once had: our birthright of being one with all.
Biology
Once you think about complexity, you need to consider biology. Biological complexity reflects how organisms take in information from the world, process it, and produce their behavioral responses. Such computational ability is a defining feature of living systems, whether colonies of relatively simple, single cells like bacteria, sensing and responding to nutrients and toxins in the environment, or large-scale, complex webs of organisms, such as trees and fungi in forests, processing nutrients in sun, water, and earth through the seasons and reacting to chemical, infectious, insect, and even human threats. It seems reasonable that survival requires computation.
Predictability as the main factor
Neither chaos nor complexity is summarized by a set of predictive equations. The difference between the emergence in chaotic systems and that in complex systems lies in their predictability.
- In a chaotic system, a computer model shows that the same starting conditions will always generate the same emergent properties. The whole is predictably greater than the sum of its parts. However, changing the starting conditions ever so slightly—if the butterfly happens to land on a flower or it then flutters to the next flower to the right rather than the one to the left—it can mean the difference between a tornado in Texas or a typhoon in Taipei or calm sailing on the Andaman Sea.
- In complexity, however, while we can predict that emergence will occur, its precise nature can never be predicted, even if we begin with the same starting conditions. In complexity, the whole is unpredictably greater than the sum of its parts. Kind of like the world. Kind of like our lives.
All around us, we can see parts self-assemble into dynamically alive, adaptive emergent forms and processes. Not only can we see it, but we are part of it.
There are rules
Rule #1. Numbers Matter. There must be a sufficient number of interacting parts to form a complex system.
Rule #2. Interactions Are Local, Not Global.
Rule #3. Negative Feedback Loops Prevail.
Rule #4. The Degree of Randomness Is Key. Unpredictability is a defining hallmark of complex systems.
Boundaries
The book starts talking about boundaries. Where is your boundary now? Is it your body, your skin, your biome, and how does that interact with the rest of the world? The ultimate conclusion is that we are one large cloud, or flock, or colony of microorganisms that interact with other clouds of microorganisms. You could easily argue that we are actually all one massive, single organism where everything is connected. There are no real distinctions between “our own” molecules and the molecules of the world around us.
What are we?
Are we a fluid continuum or a bunch of cells? Western medicine and other cultures of health and healing, such as those of South Asia, Tibet, China, and shamanic traditions of many lands disagree. We all agree that we are definitely not machines.
We are not machines
To this day, machines remain the dominant metaphor for biology. But cells are anything but inert, stackable bricks. Neither “engineering” nor “building” is an accurate metaphor. We are a complex ecosystem of cells within their molecular environments. At the molecular level, just as at the cellular level, each of us is in perpetual, direct continuity with the entire biomass of the planet.
We are Earth itself
Most of the molecules (and therefore the atoms) in our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless cycle of atomic recycling and replacement. We are in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?
We are quantum
In the end, everything is quantum. While bodies are composed of cells, cells are composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of everything down in the quantum realm. At Planck scales, the very smallest creations of all are wholes without parts that merely emanate from space-time and dissolve back into it like phantoms—there but not there, real but not real. 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 are the universe
A body, as a holarchy, appears as a solid object from one perspective, as a community of cells from a different perspective, and as a cloud of molecules from a still different perspective. If the universe is a unity, one vast holarchy of self-organizing complex systems, then we have to consider that what is true for any part is true for the whole.
We are not merely separate, lonely, disconnected beings searching for meaning; moment by moment, we are unique emergent expressions of the universe itself.
Proof
This conviction comes not only from a subset of philosophies, or from ancient religions, or from new age mystics, but from our modern, contemporary, empirical sciences.
It is all connected
Buddhists speak of direct perceptions of interdependence, impermanence, and the emptiness of all things. Interdependence reflects how every element of a complex system is linked to every other element.
We are consciousness
If I am alive, if you are alive, is not the entire universe alive? Also, then: If I am conscious, if you are conscious, is not the whole, seamless universe conscious? Space, time, matter, energy, the quantum foam, all the structures that emerge from these, have no inherent existence but are simply experiences within that Consciousness. There is nothing in the universe that is not the subjective experience of Consciousness.
Our brain as the transducer
Our best foot forward is to think of the brain not as a producer of mind but rather a transducer of mind. Transducers take one type of input and convert it into a different kind of output. A light bulb transduces electricity into light. A thermometer transduces heat into a number.
Back to intuition
For as long as most of us have been alive, our modern culture’s methods for exploring reality have prioritized mathematical logic and empirical science as the exclusive means to uncover truths about existence—science as the arbiter of truth. In an age of AI, maybe it is time to return to metaphysics and intuition. Insights experienced only within the mind; apprehensions of truths unreachable by empiricism or formal logic. Resurrecting intuitions as a viable, scientifically credible path for how humans can know the true nature of things.
Fundamental awareness
Accessing the depths of one’s mind from which direct perceptions that arise during meditation are described as primordially pristine, spontaneous, self-generating, and luminous. In some Buddhist traditions, this is called the “mind of clear light—consciousness as the ground of being, or what we came to call fundamental awareness.
More than AI
Algorithmically programmed computers can produce artificial intelligence, but not true consciousness, because consciousness is not just an emergent property of complex programming. If one wants to make “real” artificial intelligence, then computers need to become transducers of awareness, as we are.
We are an expression of the universe
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam. You are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, unequivocally, unavoidably, that however separate and alone we might feel, each one of us is—in each and every single moment—a pure expression of the entire living, conscious universe. Nothing separate, nothing left out, but true, pure, and complete, just as we are.
