[My ‘reviews’ are not strictly book reviews. I’m not trying to distill the author’s ideas down into a simpler ‘bite-sized’ piece or discuss their ‘style’. These are my thoughts after having read these books. My attempts to make sense of them, usually after several rewrites, as I work to fit them into what I already ‘know’, an attempt to make the ideas presented in this book, consistent with those which I’ve read by other authors. They include ideas not covered by this author. Rarely, if ever, can you come to an understanding from a singular perspective. This is a link to an annotated bibliography on my Blog of several of the more significant books which have influenced me on this topic,]
Complexity theory? Do we need a theory to determine what is complex? No, that’s not what this is about. Theise’s book does not layout a system for determining what should be considered complex/complicated or not. This is a book about systems and structures in nature and how they come about. He discusses how mainstream science has fallen short in explaining this and why, the author believes, without changes in approach, we will continue to fall short. He goes on to present an alternative, or, rather, a ‘sister’ approach which can provide a previously excluded way of ‘knowing’, and in so doing, can account for the ‘gaps’. The problems are not just that this is a difficult concept to understand, but that at the most basic, quantum, level, that at which nothing can be divided smaller, where all things ‘begin’, actions and processes do not follow human logic and contemporary expectation….
I remember reading the book “The Limits to Growth” in the early ’80’s, which introduced me to ‘systems theory’, an approach which required looking at all of the parts and actions within a system, consider their relationships and how they work together, in order to understand its ‘working’. A system could be ‘modeled’, mathematically and the long complex equations run on a computer. There were generally multiple possible models to run. This gave us a degree of ‘predictive’ power, but these would always be approximations, because no model could be perfect and every situation, every starting point, would result in a somewhat different ‘answer’. I followed this with James Gleick’s book on Chaos Theory and its ‘ability’ to explain certain types of patterns, which appear spontaneously in nature, while introducing me to the idea and maths of ‘fractals’. There were multiple books on ecology which necessarily take a wholistic approach. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, published their book on Gaia Theory, a product of their collaboration which began in the 1970’s, a theory of the Earth itself functioning as a self-regulating system, as if it were a gigantic, single, organism of which we ourselves are a part. All of these were related, coming out over a short span of years. These were ‘new’ hypotheses and theories, never before seriously considered by science back then, but now being investigated, their validity, and the answers they suggest, impossible to ignore.
Science often advances this way. Seemingly radical ideas, rejected by the majority of the mainstream…until resistance worn down, their validity demonstrated through thoughtfully conducted and reviewed experimentation, the scientific community then coming around to more broadly adopt them and reshape science and our understanding. (Some argue that this ‘process’ requires some number of the old guard to literally die, younger minds being more free to consider the new.) Margulis and Lovelock’s ideas were just too far out there for most at the time. For many, such thinking then belonged to the realm of metaphysics, or fanciful science fiction, frivolous exercises in thought and belief. Exploring these ideas, testing their validity, only became possible with the computational capacity of ever more powerful computers and an openness to branches of thought once rejected by science. ‘Game Theory’ and cybernetics played a role in all of this as well. Complexity Theory has far more capacity to explain how matter and functional systems emerge, or manifest, than mainstream science could historically. Nature, through the conditions and forces in play at any given moment, ‘drive’ the universe toward order along with the ‘creation’ of complex structures and functions, at the cost of energy spent, ‘held’ in the new structures and dissipated away as lost heat. All of countless processes linked to one another through a myriad of relationships and the feedback loops which comprise them. The universe continues to evolve, and as it does, it continuously spins off everything in it, from sub-atomic particles to human beings over time, a process which it itself is directly influenced by its evolving ‘self’.
