The World is Complex
Interconnectivity
My favorite conversations, like my favorite movies, are unexpected. They start somewhere familiar, and then flip everything on its head. To leave for 15 minutes and come back is to find yourself in an alien landscape, with no clue as to how you got there. When the ride ends, your view of life is irreparably altered. Kansas isn’t the same once you’ve been to Oz. Waking reality doesn’t sit right once you’ve been to level three of the dream state. You feel as if you’ve been swept along in powerful undercurrents that have been there the whole time, just below your ordinary view of life. You’ve been awakened to new possibilities. Your world has gotten bigger.
I imagine that my mind catalogues each new word, concept, or object I encounter as a single node in my memory. The new node ties into the network of pre-existing data points by strings of similarity and relatedness. This process creates a mental spider’s web of connectivity. When I look upon objects in the world or follow trains of thought, my unprompted brain brings me the ends of these connecting threads like a cat dropping off dead birds on my doorstep. If I reel in the line, I become conscious of a new framework that transports me somewhere I’ve never been. When I walk around and catch myself daydreaming, I know I’ve been tangled by this net of interrelatedness.
The other day I was getting dressed up in the morning to go to my office, but as I shrugged my coat over my shoulders, I had a thought: dressing up for work is a contemporary analog of a medieval knight suiting up for battle. Suddenly, instead of tying a knot in my necktie, I was mentally fastening the drawstrings on a leather, archer’s vest. As I stepped onto the Metro and looked at my fellow passengers I saw fellow soldiers, grim with determination before storming the castle.
How drastically the nature of human work has changed in just a few centuries! And comparatively, how ridiculous some of our modern workplace squabbles are… like “who took my yogurt?” level squabbles. I felt silly that I had bemoaned a data-entry task because I was sitting pretty, in an air-conditioned office, sipping on peach Yoplait instead of dodging metal barbs meant to tear human flesh asunder. Instead of parrying broadswords, I was engaging in friendly workplace banter and weaving through well-dressed city-folk to order a sandwich.
Just by following one thread in my mind: time, waiting in line at Subway can transport me into the fray of a Game of Thrones-style battle. Its moments like these that I feel intimately connected to the grand, complicated drama in which each of us plays an integral part. It’s the mental equivalent of staring up at the stars in awe until your neck hurts. When I follow these mind-wanderings, I’m reminded of just how crazy complex the world is.
Science as a Lens
We experience life through the lens of the human individual, but behind the scenes, trillions of cells are interacting in concert to make “us” happen. Like us, these organisms are independent stars of the show in their own right. Their molecular sub-structures dance around one another, speaking the language of chemical reactions. Instead of exchanging words, they exchange electrons. They perform micro-movements, following mini currents of forces produced by electromagnetic fields. These eddies of energy take us deep into the territory of theoretical physics. In this land, math reigns supreme as the tools of group theory and differential equations connect numbers and logical equivalencies to the workings of the physical universe. From this paradigm, even mundane moments, like texting on the toilet, are transformed into an act as mathematically complicated and beautiful as a cosmic event.
We all clamor to stand outside to watch a solar eclipse; but try posting a snapchat story of your morning coffee shit, title it: “the beautiful unfolding of a biological supernova,” and you’re sure to get some stares.
Think just one human is complicated enough? Try 8 billion on the same planet interacting with each other, frolicking, copulating, and giving rise to macroeconomic behavior. Following ingrained cooperative inclinations, we organize ourselves into cities and nation states. In these clumped communities, we produce resources to feed ourselves. In our free time, we explore the planes of the imagination. We produce art, fictions, and systems of governance like bees produce honey. Our collective data multiplies, unfurls, and expands against the fog of ignorance, crystallizing into increasingly complex patterns. Simultaneously, we record all physical and metaphysical events for posterity. You can trace back the arc of history, and watch the motions and musings of pioneering individuals and civilized societies ages hence.
This absurdly intractable dance is strange enough without the fact that the levels of analysis are entirely subjective. Scientific disciplines and academic fields of study intermingle in a causal loop; each seems to affect and be affected by the other. What you ate yesterday brings your endocrine system into play. Circulating hormones go on to alter your neurotransmitter levels. These chemicals color the content of your thoughts and finally, influence what you decide to eat next. The very words you speak today can somehow be traced back to that extra spoonful of mini-wheats from last week. The “higher” up you go in the hierarchy of biological systems, the more interactions you must track to understand what is really going on. Because of the exponential difficulty involved in modeling this multitude of interactions, predicting the behavior of complex systems quickly becomes the most infuriating game of “Follow the Cup” ever (see Chaos Theory ).
System Boundaries
Take the task of modeling a chemical reactor for example. On paper, nothing exists but a metal tank and a few simple equations, but in the real world, no tank exists in isolation. Somehow the weather in Chile is affecting the temperature of the room you’re standing in and, in some barely perceptible way, the rate of every chemical reaction in Norway. This makes the exact calculations impossible for people who aren’t Elon Musk, but with the right tricks, we can get pretty close.
Engineers have a useful tool called a system boundary that can help us here. To simplify the computations behind questions like “how long will it take for the polar ice caps to melt?” or “how much fuel do we need to get to Mars?”, we draw an imaginary box around the things we can reasonably know the answer to and call it our system.
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The system is what we pay attention to. We say that everything inside the boundary matters and everything outside doesn’t. Instead of paying attention to everything possible, we exclude all but the most important pieces of the puzzle and settle for a rounding error. The idea is to get 99.99% of the answer by paying attention to only the parts that matter a lot.
If you want to model the weather PERFECTLY, you’re going to need to quantify how many times Obama sneezes per minute because you can bet that plays a role. But if you want to model it just well enough to get an idea if it’s going to rain tomorrow or not… that’s doable. Typically, the more accurate you want to be, the more information your system will have to encompass. The important part to remember is that where the engineer draws the line is arbitrary, it depends on the answer you want to get. System boundaries don’t exist outside of our imagination, they require a third party, a reference frame, to exist.
Humans come into the world with many of these sorts of reference frames built-in. Our brains, by design, overlook much of the complexity inherent to our environment because dealing with everything on an individual basis would require too much processing. Our nervous system and sense organs selectively attune to the information most important to our evolutionary goals. Homo sapiens just needed to see enough of the visible spectrum so that we could differentiate which berries would give us diarrhea and which would give us the ideal skin complexion to attract Gronk, the alpha-male with perfect genes. It wasn’t a survival advantage for our brains to see ultraviolet light, individual bacteria, or quantum fluctuations, so we don’t see them.
But just because we can’t see them doesn’t mean those things don’t exist. We can verify by experiment and eating copious amounts of raw cookie dough that bacteria are quite real. Generalizing this principle, we can rest assured that when we experience the world through our everyday intuitions and senses, what we are seeing is an arbitrarily distorted picture of what is really there.
Not all of these shortcuts are hard-wired into our biology. Some of them we learn and perpetuate through culture and language. One example is stereotypes. We say things like “Chinese people are hardworking” and “Americans are fat” because its hard for us to count to one billion, let alone differentiate between a billion people. Without thinking, we put things and people into boxes and we put those boxes into more boxes.
All this box-putting is really just a way of grouping things together based off of broad-swath characteristics to get the “gist” of something. They are system boundaries that help us make enough sense of the world to fulfill our homeostatic drives: hunger and the two types of thirst. And although these generalizations and invented shortcuts might be useful for certain problems, they also obscure the nuanced truth.
Is GDP really the best measure of the economic success of a country? Of course not, it’s a vast oversimplification. It’s like saying that the Box Office Revenue is the only thing that makes a good movie. By defining metrics and categories like GDP, we create footholds for us to work off of, step stones to more complicated societies, but we also miss the big picture. Sometimes it’s important to remember why the boxes are there in the first place.
By defining a reference frame, we can make observations about objects. But the observations belong more to the reference frame than the object itself. Light is both a particle and a wave depending on the experiment. Counter-intuitively, to observe something in one way, to precisely define its performance in simple terms, is to obscure its real character. From the objective standpoint, there is no “right” reference frame, simply the ones we are accustomed to looking through. To see the universe clearly is to realize that the lines between things and defining them are invented by us, simply shortcuts for us to reduce unnecessary mental processing so we can conserve body heat.
How you respond to this complexity will be a mixture of two approaches. The first is to ignore the system-error entirely, to live at the level of human experience without questioning or worrying over your inability to describe what is actually happening. You can adopt a pre-existing worldview from the many on offer and remain content within the system boundaries that your brain and others have constructed. You can consolidate material power, go to church weekly, and gorge yourself on Rubio’s fish tacos until you die.
The other approach is to literally “think outside the box” by pushing against the walls of the normative bouncy castle and seeing what holds. By exploring outside of the default reference frames that your culture, society, and brain have peddled since day one, and remaining open to new experiences, you can learn to color outside of the lines, update your boxes, and redefine your system boundaries. To be creative and original is to be unconstrained and nonlinear, to bring some of the universe’s madness to the forefront. You can play around in the chaotic froth, spend your time grappling with endless uncertainty, and embrace the act of endlessly revising your narratives for your life and the world.
