The Problem with Complexity

The unfortunate historical connection

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Sometimes what seemed a good idea in the heat of the moment becomes a puzzling, "Now how in the world could I have ever thought that was a good idea?!"    

That has been a concept problem I've seen with Complexity over the past several years, but it's a reflexive notion that Complexity proponents are loath to admit, let alone recognize.  And I've been troubled about raising my opposition to this, one of Complexity's cherished concepts, because its been raised almost to the level of   sacro-sanct a priori.  What I'm referring to is the notion of "emergence".

Emergence - in the fractal mathematics context of Complexity - is the sudden appearance of relationships, patternings and system dynamics which were not apparent ... and therefore unpredicted ... from the face of original equations or formulae.   Recursive functions, which might be predicted to be rather boring re-tracings of some identical track over and over again, are instead, variable enactments with very interesting qualities.  They produce patterns which are infinitely scale-able - the intricacy and detail remain extraordinary fine and exact.  And they also produce behavioral patterns which trace around regions, hovering like a moth around a flame, which regions are therefore called "attractors" and "strange attractors".

Now in looking around at what systems fractal emergence is likenable to in the "real" world, two were identified  immediately and are actively being explored by many Complexity theorists  The first is the novel arising of "life" (in apposition to entropy driven general thermodynamics).     The laws of physics encourage energy dissipation and drain ... and yet life "emerges" quite counter to that "rule of nature".   The second is that special aspect of human life which hasn't yet been ascribed to other life forms - consciousness.   Humans have a cognitive function and capacity which we can't identify in lower life forms, so again, whether out of the architecture of our biological metabolism or due to some other factors, consciousness "emerges" from the surrounding abyss of non-sentience.

The spiritual connotations are rife.  Soul, spirit, miraculously "implanted" in an otherwise bland carcass.  Angelic god-connected essence which exists beyond, above and outside the restrictions of decomposible flesh.   "Special" such qualities, which are unpredictable from the corpus of physical existence.  Fractal mathematicians have literally - if only subliminally to establish "provenance" - assumed the mantle and stature of a Science Priesthood by way of the notion of emergence.   In a cognitive millieu where religion and science continue to butt heads in a continuation of the millenial old struggle of "faith" vs "reason", this is the first opportunity for science to show that it finally has something in common with human spirituality.  And it has leapt at the opportunity with gusto.   "See," goes the narrative, "science is a clinical empirical endeavor, but it has sensitive almost mystical qualities too!"

"Well", says I, raising my hand from a back of the theatre perspective, "I'm a God-fearing sentient human myself.  I am a scientist who recognizes that even if all this creation can be reduced to quantum mechanical equations, I don't believe that QM would exist unless as the product of an Omniscience, first and foremost.  So I don't need some contrived sibling-cy to reconcile the two viewpoint realities.  And more than that, 'emergence' is not what it is currently described to be."

It is not the "unknown", miraculously arising where nothing was there before.    No, it is "Spontaneous Generation" raising it's ignorant head once more.  Only now the concept has the planet's financial leaders entranced and mezmerized, and so has more "vested interest" - literally and figuretively - to protect and support it.   But that's ok, because real science is its own best re-tester and validator of ideas.

"Spontaneous Generation" is a creed of science stemming from Aristotle and even earlier.  It fills in any "holes" human knowledge suffers with about the sequential development of life forms.  For lack of a causal trail, miraculousness is called upon to account for the absense of specific information. Abiogenesis - its alternative name - was good for a while for some earlier generations of researchers, and apparently it's acceptable for "modern" mathematics too - as they claim a new degree of modeling competence re the practical world, and co-claim a companion territory of Faith and spirituality.  But, just as Spontaneous Generation was countered in elegant experiments and explanations by Francesco Redi (c.1626-97), Abbé Lazaro Spallanzani (c1729-99), and Louis Pasteur (1861), the time is also ripe to put "emergence" into proper perspective.

Just because humanity lacks specific information which might enable exact elucidation of causal connections that produce one set of processes from some previous ones, that doesn't give science the free license to claim happenstantial intervention ... even if that event is given a neutral name like "emergence".     The whole condition doesn't merely and simply concern itself with acknowledging human innocence/ignorance, and so justify naming the newest latest "black- box" as emergence.    It means avoiding at all costs the notion that existence is susceptible to "intervention"   (whether divine or not), where absolutely new dynamics or behavioral rules arise out of ... nowhere.  Quite serendipitously, mysteriously, wondrously.  And it is not to be confused with quantum non-locality.  Because even that universal mechanism has a "linkage" quality which binds very specific events together.

We may not yet have discovered or enunciated the connection between simplicity/entropy and complexity/ negentropy - though obviously it's my own hope that Integrity dynamics is a viable possibility - but to allow emergence the attributes of a 21st century version of spontaneous generation is no intermediate, let alone 'satisfactory', solution.  

May, 1998

Ref:
Encyclopedia Britannica.(1961). "Biology: History: Biogenesis versus Abiogenesis" Vol.3, p604. Encyc.Britt. Chicago.London

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