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I’ve been reading and thinking about Complexity since 1999 when I read Complexity by Waldrop. It was a revelation and I understood that these ideas were the necessary inverse of deconstructionism. Where one tears things down to understand them, the other examines what happens when they come together.

In reading tonight, I had an insight. The author was discussing the impossibility of deconstructing or isolating the constituent pieces that together form the basis of an emergence. And I flashed on Information Theory and Claude Shannon’s work.

Perhaps, just as you cannot express, for example, 16 different states in less than 4 bits, an emergent property cannot manifest with less than a absolute minimum set of required components. Now that I’ve written that, I see that it is trivial and obvious but I hadn’t made the possible connection before between minimal information content and minimal requirements for an emergence.

Following on in this vein, emergent properties may not typically be derived from absolute minimal sets because nature is noisy and we see, empirically, that emergent properties are generally conserved.

So might there be an analogy between the extra error correcting codes we send to make data transmissions robust in noisy environments and how a set of minimal components may be augmented to yield a more robust emergent property rather than a fragile one? You could, perhaps, stretch this analogy and suggest that the minimal components are like a (genetic?) code that corresponds to the emergence and that redundancy in this code is what improves its conservation and gives it robustness.

But this musing brings me to the central question which has always puzzled me about ‘why’ emergence happens at all. Pardon me for how lame the following will sound but I am really overextending here.

I don’t believe in mystical explanations as to why matter self organizes. So, I find myself thinking about chemical reactions and why they happen – because the products are at a lower energy level after the reaction than before, typically.

Using this analogy with respect to emergence, so far the best I can manage is to visualize matter as storing energy in the form of organization.  And that when a sufficient collection of essential components have gathered in effective proximity, they will yeild an emergent property and that property will tend to be conserved because, somehow, nature is happier (i.e. at a lower energy state) when the matter is so configured than when it is not.

Comments and thoughts are encouraged….

…when you described the incremental way in which we embrace deep changes, I kept remembering the function daily meditation plays in my life. I often tell people that while meditation can be about spirituality, it also stands alone quite well as a purely secular tool. In this manner, it helps one develop the ability to maintain focus and the ability and opportunity to ‘remember’ daily what it is you want yourself to become. So that rather than deriving your motivations to change from an occasional epiphany of insight or a spasm of disgust, you sit consciously each day and ask ‘who am I and who do I want to be and why do I want to be that.‘ And by revisiting these thoughts daily, you quicken your own transitions.

You also talked about bouncing between doing the ‘right thing’ and just giving into what’s easy. It made me remember a line from the recent movie, “Way of the Peaceful Warrior“, where Socrates tells Dan, his student – as he, Socrates, lights up a cigar and downs a shot of whisky and invites Dan to join him – that you actually can do anything you want – you just have to consciously choose to be responsible for it.

And you mentioned that a good antidote to feelings of stress about the coming problems is developing an ever deeper awareness about the actual situation. Hindu scriptures and Buddhist as well, tell us that we cannot hope to see anything clearly, and thus deal with it with maximal effectiveness, until we can see into it deeply and remain emotionally unaffected by what we are seeing. Indeed, they urge us to do the very best we can at every moment – just because – and to also be utterly indifferent to the fruits of our labor. Excellence and freedom all in one.

And finally, I’d like to offer a thought of my own. I believe that the causal roots of why civilization and the planet are in the mess they are now can be traced back to our biological imperatives. I.e., to our inborn drives to survive, to propagate our genes forward in time and to create a space of safety within which our progeny can also have their chance to propagate themselves as well.

All biological forms have had this inborn motivation since early evolutionary time. And until recently, these drives have not been life threatening to ourselves and the other biological entities we share the planet with because we’ve had sufficient room to expand. But, now that we’ve essentially come up against the walls of this finite Eden, it has become critical that we consciously understand our biological imperatives and work to transcend them for more rational motivations. And, given that these imperatives are woven into the very grain of what we are, that will not be easy.

And all of this leads us back to meditation and other forms of consciousness raising and expansion.

Have any of you ever heard of any studies comparing the informational content of western monotonal languages vs. eastern multitonal languages?

I’m thinking here of information theory as Claude Shannon first defined it in 1948.  If we think of natural language as a ‘pipe’ through which information is being passed, then the characteristics of the pipe certainly will influence the amount of information which may be passed per unit time.   Shannon would have told us that the efficiency of natural languages could be improved by doing a number of things like speaking faster and faster until the receiver could no longer understand, by dropping redundant and/or unnecessary words and by choosing the shorter words among synonyms.

The fact that eastern languages encode alternate word meanings in terms of tones and western languages do not (though western languages do encode emotional information as tonal variations), may give it a higher efficiency in terms of information transmitted per unit time.

Certainly, one could reason so about Kanji and other such symbolic systems wherein the symbols represent concepts rather than phonemes and thus convey more information per symbol in general.

Of course, thinking about natural language in terms of information theory is a reach at best since natural language is so very sloppy and inefficient but these ideas seemed interesting to me and I was wondering if anyone has read anything along these lines.

– I’ve been thinking of taking snippets out of various E-mail and posting them. Just bits here and there that have something pithy to say and stand alone fairly well. Sort of like recycling yesterday’s news in a new package? Well, whatever. Here’s one:

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The presence or absence of God cannot be proven. That’s a pretty absolute statement but I think it’s valid. Consider, if everything is an omnipotent God’s doing then the situation is indistinguishable from a universe in which there is no God and nothing is God’s doing. It all goes back to the quandary that to tell the difference between two things – you need at least two, eh? A discussion of light is meaningless to a man profoundly blind from birth since he has always and only ever experienced blackness. In fact, he doesn’t even know he’s experiencing blackness because he’s never experienced anything else to differ it against. In one universe, everything is God and so we cannot experience not-God. In the other, nothing is God and therefore, we cannot experience God.

So, for me, it all comes down to making an a-priori choice and admitting full well that I have no basis other than that it is what I want to believe. I choose to live in a world where I think God is everywhere and everything and that this God-force is benevolent. And, for me, since I believe it to be so, it seems to be so. It is all beyond science and I make no quibbles that it is otherwise.

So to me, Dawkins is shrill because he believes there is no God and he can’t seem to recognize that his position is a choice – just an a-priori choice like mine – because he cannot know if there is or there is not a God anymore than I can. He still wants to argue with the same faith-based passion that the religious fanatics enjoy – he’s just on the other side of the argument doing the same thing.