Notes on Complexity

An esteemed colleague (Hobitronix 2023, personal communication) recently suggested Niel Theise's Notes on Complexity.  While Theise is an MD who made a career of specializing almost exclusively in liver pathology, his book is about the most sprawling and ambitious theory of everything you could imagine.  He'd like to link quantum physics, biological life, social organization, and non-dual spiritual awareness into a single framework.

However, since this is a priori a ridiculously ambitious project that is bound to fail, Theise tries to sneak up on us by first talking about complexity theory.  Perhaps because this is meant to be an accessible book for the general reader, Theise never really makes clear exactly what body of research he's talking about when he references "complexity theory" (check out this entry on the variety of things one might mean).  He seems to be referring to non-linear dynamics and chaos, and perhaps more generally to the type of thinking about emergence and self-organization that we associate with the Sante Fe Institute.   So we hear a bit about fractals, Conway's Game of Life, Wolfram's simple algorithms, Stuart Kauffmann's adjacent possible, Maturana and Varela, etc ... In other words, all the usual suspects are mentioned in passing.  His real definition of complexity seems to be just systems with many locally interacting parts that can display emergent behavior.  These systems can contain enough homeostatic feedback loops to support the emergence of stable "things", but have enough randomness and uncertainty for the things to do interesting stuff (he refers to this as "quenched disorder", a term I was unfamiliar with).  In other words, he's interested in the exact same types of cybernetic systems our colleagues over at FPiPE have been rambling on about for ages.  It's interesting stuff, and the writing is engaging and clear, but his discussion of it is pretty superficial and redundant if you've spent much time thinking about these things.

Despite the title, complexity theory is just a pretext.  Theise simply uses it to introduce the idea that things arise from the interaction of smaller things, and that, therefore, what we call things are better understood as patterns.  Cue the water and the wave analogy.  This view leads naturally into the idea that things don't have fixed and immutable boundaries but constantly changing ones that depend on their manner of arising.  After all, where does the wave stop and the moving water start?  Again, this fluid dynamic view of reality is, I think, fascinating and profound.  In an attempt to illustrate that this idea applies at any level of scale, there's some interesting discussion of research on the importance of random thermal motion in an actin-myosin contraction, followed by some vague gesturing at the Gaia theory, and the obligatory comments on the double-slit experiment and Schrodinger's cat.  Aside from the first, I can't say the Theise advanced my understanding of this viewpoint at all.  His point is just to argue that each level of the 'holarchy' (see ENDNOTE) arises through the self-organizing fluid dynamics of the level below.   This goes all the way down to the level of the quantum foam where virtual particles are created out of the, "seething energies contained within the space-time fabric of the universe" (end of chapter 8).  Since we can look at reality on any of these levels, we discover that, "everything only looks like a thing".  In fact, everywhere there is only the reality of pattern and process.  Theise concludes that we are one with the universe.  Which strikes me as an odd conclusion to jump to when discussing a universe capable of producing an endless and ever-changing variety of distinct forms. 

In the end though, this mystical conclusion is the core of Theise's book.  He waits until halfway through to spring it on us so that we're nodding along when the acid hits.  Turns out the Theise is a long term meditator (he does not specify exactly what flavor).  So he would like to jump from the general observation that things emerge from not-things (aka emptiness) straight to the idea that a spiritual Awareness is the fundamental nature of the universe.  The bridge between these seemingly only vaguely related ideas is meant to be the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which requires Consciousness to collapse the wave function into a determinate state.  In other words, our consciousness measurements of quantum phenomena correspond to the fluid universe of Consciousness self-organizing into a a particular form.  Now, while I sympathize with the desire to develop the philosophical implications of a scientific understanding of self-organization, I think this is where the book starts to go off the rails.  

First, we get a undergrad level survey of philosophical responses to the "hard problem".  These sort of whirlwind tours have started to bother me more the more philosophy I read because they just kinda mulch everything together into labels like materialist, panpsychist, monist, etc ... They never seem to involve a real encounter with the philosopher's they mention, so, for example Theise files Whitehead, Spinoza, and Kant together in the "idealism" section.  Broad brushstrokes like this never seem useful to me.  Second, we are abruptly told that anyhow, neither science nor philosophy can provide a way to understand the Consciousness or Awareness that constitutes the universe.  Instead, we have to appeal to the contemplative metaphysics.  Which begs the question of why we just took that sophomore survey course.  

The justification for this rather curt dismissal of pretty much the entire history of thought is meant to be the way quantum mechanics and Gödel's theorem ruined the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.   So we get quite long, not especially insightful, overviews of these topics, which, if you are not already familiar with them makes them appear to "prove" things that they just don't prove.  In fact, his explanations of these two areas might even give you the impression that scientists and mathematicians simply threw their hands up and quit once Bohr and Gödel got finished demolishing everything.  While I would hardly pretend that we understand all the implications of these ideas even today, Theise would like us to think that the counterintuitive complications they point to license our "metaphysical intuition" to make the mental money printer go brrrrr.  In particular, he'd like Gödel to have proven that there are true and real things which we can only have access to through intuition.  Which, regardless of what Gödel himself may have thought, he did not prove.  After all, if intuition is so great, then why doesn't our original "intuition" that set theory should be both complete and consistent hold?  Indeed, both quantum mechanics and incompleteness seem to affirm that there are counter-intuitive things that nevertheless appear to be "true" in some sense (even if specifying this sense leads us down a bit of a rabbit hole).  So to conclude that, "... quantum mechanics and our encounter with Gödel show that metaphysical speculation is necessary for a complete understanding of the true nature of reality" (end of chapter 11) is akin to concluding that, since we'll never really figure it out, we'll have to just make it up.

Which of course is exactly what Theise proceeds to do.  The final chapter of the book is devoted to a very broad overview of the theory of everything you can find discussed in more detail here.  In fact, this overview is so broad that I don't even consider it fair to criticize the theory; I can't even tell you exactly how it works. [Note: after reading their paper I remain in the same position].  The basic idea seems to be that everything is "Fundamental Awareness".  This ur-state somehow splits into separated subject and object by creating space-time.  From that point we've already seen the rest of the chain, which progresses from space-time to quantum foam, to atoms, molecules, life, consciounsess, the universe and everything.  It's truly a theory of everything.  And the success of its all embracing agenda clearly revolves around what we mean by Fundamental Awareness.

Fundamental Awareness here seems to be defined as whatever it is Theise experiences when he meditates.  Obviously, the presumption is that if you meditate, you'll experience the same thing, and anybody else who has ever meditated has likewise experienced this same thing.  Or at least, the specific claim here is that Buddhists (which ones are not specified in the book, but the paper discusses Dzogchen), practitioners of Lurianic Kabbala,  Advaita Vedantists, and Kashmiri Saivists have all experienced the same thing, even though they have pointed to different aspects of it.  Since I'm actually a little familiar with three of these four, I can definitely agree that they share a family resemblance we might simply call non-dualism.  But to claim that they all share "the same" vision is going to lead us precisely nowhere, since whatever definition of sameness we might come up with would depend on some notion of identity equally anathema to all of them.  In a meditative context, this problem doesn't matter.  You experience whatever it is you experience when you meditate.   You associate with people who talk about it and incorporate it into their lives in a way you can understand.  You find teachers who open up more of that experience.  Insofar as you continue connecting with others regarding this experience, you might say that you have all had "the same" experience of this mysterious and intuitive realm.  This label is entirely redundant though; feeling connected is all that counts.  But as soon as we try to collect these perspectives into a single objective theory of everything, we have to leave behind this realm where every experience is equally valid, and start separating one theory from another, starting comparing them according to some criteria.  Unfortunately, Theise's whole argument has made it entirely unclear what sort of criterion would apply here.  He's literally just making stuff up.  He's explicitly discarded the rules of science and logic as a means of adjudication, but he hasn't replaced them with anything except meditative introspection.  So how can you engage with his theory at all?  It either feels right or it doesn't.  I kinda like it.  Reminds me of the pre-individual.  But, as they say, your mileage may vary.