Complexity

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The whole is more than the sum of its parts

The complexity framework has been largely ignored by the establishment because it closely resembles Austrian economics, however there are key differences.

Current mainstream economic policies are GIGO.

At the turn of them millennium Stephen Hawking stated that complexity is the science of the 21st century. The current method of reductionist science has greatly increased our understanding of the observable universe and all it contains, however this paradigm has limits. Now that we know more about the physical structures, the next questions is “why?” which cannot be answered with reductionist science alone. The pillar of complexity is emergence, that the whole is worth more than the sum of its parts, requiring that the parts be viewed holistically within the context of the systems they comprise.

Adam Smith was the first to articulate emergent complexity in economic systems with his “invisible hand” passage 239 years ago. Since neither the complicated algorithms nor the computing power required to run them existed until the last 50 years or so, this articulation has been dismissed by many quantitative economists as ideology and relegated to the realm of philosophy. As a result, mainstream neoclassical economics is still stuck on the reductionist method and is lagging behind much of the scientific community. Neoclassical economic models are admittedly observational approximations, and due to the butterfly effect small approximations become big ones over time. Scientific paradigm shifts are typically resisted and opposed by those invested in the current paradigm. Max Plank once stated, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Science advances by a series of funerals (Brockman).

With a complexity framework, one can see that this method of scientific advancement will not keep pace with the increasing speed of evolution and complexity. Biological evolution is occurring at an increasing rate, as is human understanding of the idea. The process of evolution itself is evolving and increasing in complexity. Biological evolution is a relatively slow process and can’t keep up with increasing complexity. Human evolution, which has been focused on our most complex organ for the last few hundred thousand years, is reaching its physical time-constraint limits. Our evolution is now being expressed and augmented by the machines we build.

This is already happening with artificial organs and replacement parts, and our brains are being augmented with the internet. About anybody with access to it can be a genius compared to pre-internet thinkers. Implanted hard drives and exoskeletons have already been developed and are being tested by the military (McGarry) [*note: due to OPSEC, by the time the military announces it’s beginning development of a new tech, that’s jargon for ‘it already has been developed and is well into with the testing phase,’ i.e. stealth technology]. It’s very unlikely there will be a Terminator style shooting war between man and machine as the transition will occur rather slowly on our perception of the time scale. There will doubtlessly be a few Darth Vaders among the early adopters, but they will create the need for proliferation of the technology in order to oppose them. Just as nuclear proliferation cannot be stopped, neither will democratization of machine augmentation.

Fossil fuels are considered to be the bane of our existence by many, as evidenced by the ongoing heated (no pun intended) debate over climate change. Once people discovered that fossil fuels worked much better and efficiently than wood and whale oil for energy, the rate of technological innovation and population growth has been increasing exponentially ever since. This suggests that were doing something beneficial for our host system (the planet), otherwise it would do its best to destroy us like the antibodies in us are unconsciously sent to destroy unwelcome destructive invaders. This action is unconscious to us because our cells are acting as independent organisms, reacting to their local environment just as we do. Obviously it would be rather inefficient if we had to consciously command each of our cells to do their jobs. Each individual cell has an important role in our self-contained biological system, just as each individual person has an interdependent role in society. Individuals in systems are usually referred to as agents. Each agent is in itself a system, and systems must be thought of as scale-free, so the terms ‘agent’ and ‘system’ can be used interchangeably.

Each agent within these similar systems requires structure to keep it synchronized with other agents, so the system can perform its role within the larger system. Agents are reacting and adapting to local environments, with each agent not overly concerned about much outside its own environment. Our brains receive environmental feedback from the senses and distribute relevant information through chemical and electronic signaling to various subsystems within us. Each of those systems is then expected to perform its duties in accordance the goals of the overall system, based on information passed down from the brain which is interpreting information passed to it from the local environment, which in turn is receiving information from the next level up in the system. The information is not coming from a single source, but is received as a networked matrix from various local sub and super systems all communicating information about their local environments. Information that is immediately relevant to each agent is then redistributed by that agent to other agents interacting in local systems.

When organizations grow and develop efficiency and various other processes, they become layered over time as problems are solved. Each solution then creates new problems, requiring new or revised processes to account for them. As the complexity of these processes increases with each layer, agents become increasingly unsynchronized, as more of their energy is expended on conformity with processes that were designed to solve a problem that already occurred in the past, under past conditions. While the processes may solve the problem at the moment. Over time the local systems adapt, and many of these processes become obsolete due the conditions from which they arose no longer existing. In addition, as agents within systems are replaced, each generation is a layer of complexity that is adapted to different conditions and further removed from conditions that created the need for previously established processes. Eventually, complexity reaches a diseconomy of scale breaking point, when resources are diverted from adaption to adhering to established processes. When the bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy, what once created efficiency and economy of scale becomes inefficient and slow to adapt.

Our cells have evolved from single-cell organisms out of the primordial soup in the oceans, that organized through emergent complexity to eventually become us. Our bodies consist mostly of water, saltwater in particular, that closely matches the salt content of the ocean. While we have evolved to live on land, were still not far removed from our single-cell ocean dwelling ancestors (Sapolsky). The addition of energy to a system causes it organize (ordering) and increase in complexity commiserate with the amount of energy introduced, while the inverse causes homogenization, aka chaos. Much of the observable universe beyond our world appears highly ordered and predictable, we know more about what’s going on outside our world than in it.

In the absence of an unrecoverable catastrophic event, the self-replication process will continue until its complexity can no longer be sustained, forcing the evolution of a new process to prevent the death, and dissipation of energy contained within, of the system. Our machines, while often complicated, are much simpler systems than our bodies. Evolution is outpacing our biology’s ability to adapt, and to prevent the death of the human system, our complexity must evolve into simplicity. The systems we observe outside our world appear simpler than Earth systems because they have had a lot more time to evolve from energy inefficient complexity into more efficient simplicity.

As cells are damaged or die of old age, they are replaced with new ones until we die and are replaced by our children. Our children replace us in organizations which eventually die of old age and are replaced by new ones. At the point of death, we no longer add food energy to our system and begin a transition from heterogeneity to homogeneity through decomposition, mirroring the process described by the Second Law. This appears to be the process taking place at every level of every system we can perceive. Everything is decomposing in a cyclical evolutionary process.

There is a perspective of thought in physics that life and complexity have evolved on this planet as a method to disperse energy (). The idea is similar to a radiator in a car, a man-made mathematical convergence solution to heat dissipation. With the exception of a few deep sea creatures that rely on Earth’s internally concentrated energy, all life on this planet requires sun energy. Looking at it from the other direction, our sun and planet need us to disperse energy. Our planet exhibits many characteristics of a biological organism, with the human population, and our subsystems, comprising one of its systems. Mother Earth may not be conscience on our terms, but there is not much argument against it being a living organic system composed of many smaller organisms, just as we are composed of many organic cells, both our own and the ones we host.

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