1.3.1. (incomplete) The mystery of complexity

Then I press the I shaped key on my laptop an "I" appears on the screen, now for some people this is quite a dull event. But would we consider it dull if we could seewhat really is going on? When we see what we put in, what comes out, it all seems so trivial and repetitive. But if what if we were able to see the details? Not only a laptop made out of transparent materials, but in which all the electrical signals would be visible to you. If all the billions of communications that happen in each second were visible by little spots of light then the laptop would be thousands of times more lights than Las Vegas, moreover, if we were given the ability to understand what these electrical signals were doing, then we would be looking at the most complex story ever told, with more interconnected events than any writer was ever capable of imagining. In fact, our human understanding cannot possibly capture what happens inside a computer. Hordes of technicians design parts and bits of them, but no one person could possibly understand what each transistor or electrical impulse is doing, let alone in real time! In each second there are billions of things going on, and if only one of those things went wrong, the computer would probably become unable to display an "I" when I press the "I" on the keyboard. So, as a matter of fact, the story that is happening right now inside of this laptop is so complex that no human being can understand it, even if the outward result might seem simple and uneventful.

Now, if we could see what is really going on, perhaps we would not find it boring at all, what would be absolutely amazing was how such an almost unimaginably vast sequence of events would give rise to such a predictable outcome. How could that happen? How could billions of distinct events lead to such a simple outward behavior? How is it possible that we are entirely unable to understand the details of things that have the appearance of being simple and are, most of the time, predictable for the use we have for them?

The answer to this question is that, well, things are not what they seem! Somehow, which is a "how" that no one quite understands, the world is able to engage a gargantuan amount of elementary particles, combine them in varied and incredibly complex ways (in fact so complex that even the simplified folding of a single protein takes thousands of computers to simulate), and then combined them in bigger structures, combined these bigger structures into bigger structures, and so on and so forth, again and again and again, and voilá, amazingly, today, you have things made up of trillions of trillions of these things amassed together, that appear in the form of pigs, trees, rocks, humans, computers and so on, things that seem simple, while in fact, they are far from conceivable with our limited minds. In fact science is nothing more that the attempt to understand how such a vastly complex world works.

Now, let me ask again, if we could see this, all this complexity, would we be able to be bored any single moment of our lives? If we looked at our hands we would see billions or trillions of molecules, making up cells, cells that would be communicating, replicating, dying; cells so different that they would seem to belong to different worlds, all of them busy in their jobs, with different lifespan, all of them with a story to tell, a mission to accomplish, each immensely complex at the elementary scale. Of course, this is what we imagine the "eyesight of God" to be like.

Understanding reality is not only a method to make boredom impossible, it fundamentally changes our relation with it. If we do not understand how computers work we are powerless each time it has a bug! We have to call someone. However, the more we understand computers the more uses we can find for them. The same with the human body. If we don't understand how it works, well then each time we have a disease we can only hope for it gets better. We can pray, make sacrifices, ask for forgiveness, or just wait, but we are stuck, powerless. But as we start to understand the human body, we start also to understand how we can change it, improve it, protect it, or kill it. And the same happens with everything, understanding the details gives power, not only to build vaccines and antibiotics, but also to build MRI and cell phones, to go to the moon and see distant quasars. Things are not what they seem and the more we see them how they really are, the more we are able to unlock the true potential of the world we live in, its true range of possibilities.

Now, in human history there have been various attitudes to the complexity of the world, we can divide them in two: those that want the comfort and security of the old known theories, and therefore are scared to death that something will be found that puts those trusted assumptions down the drain, and those that realize their ignorance and want to unravel the mysteries they see before their eyes. This happens in all points of history, not only did it happen in the time of Galileu and Giordano Bruno, it happens today and it happened always.

What is distinctive of the people that want to have their eyes closed is not the kind of doctrine they defend, but the fact that they defend it. People like Galileu, Newton, Bruno, Kepler and others were avid for the new. They wanted to break previous limits, they were careless about what was already known, they saw it only as a mere trampoline to get to the unknown. Whereas dogmatic people tend to emphasize what is know, and how much the current theories explain and how well they succeed, and how the alternatives are so bad, etc, the revolutionary thinkers are always looking for the anomaly, for what can't be understood, and they prey on that, and they try to invent some new alternative that might succeed where the old theories have failed.

What really distinguishes dogmatic from revolutionary thinkers is that the first ones are always bored or boring other people with just investigating what is already known, or dwelling upon a small point of almost insignificant relevance, while the others question the foundations and are ready for everything. Dogmatic thinkers will spend all their lives debating details, revolutionaries aim for the big picture. Dogmatics want to feel safe and honored, revolutionaries just want to know the truth. The problem with human research is that dogmatic thinkers tend to amass positions of power in research institutes. Over time the individuals that "don't fit" get expelled from universities and the centers of intellectual debate. There is a common language there, things that can be said and things that can't, ideas that are simply too preposterous to be true. And all this mass of preconceived notions and acceptable arguments gets in the way of true understanding. Dogmatics are just unable to realize the simple, most obvious truth: that we, human beings, with our limited minds, know almost nothing of the world that surround us.

When the feelings of awe and mystery are replaced by "what is right to say and think" we are certainly in another Dark Ages that can last for millennia. In fact, the history of humanity is by and large made up from dogmatic periods, only punctuated, here and there, with small moments of really free thinking. Today we seem to be living in a world that has both types of people in charge, although a large part is merely trying to defend the current notions. Among the most notable dogmatics are the so-called skeptics, who try to ridicularize every kind of research that does not fit into the pre-conceived notions of the establishment. Just like in the Dark Ages, where biblical scholars would establish what could and could not be said and thought about the world, so these self-appointed censors come up to say, in the name of truth and rationality, what can and cannot be investigated. Even in the face of copious evidence of ESP, plants electrical response to distant events, and other "strange phenomena", they hide their faces blaming those researches of spooky theories and demonizing however does not fit into the contemporary dogma of materialism.

It is not that materialism is false. But the idea that we cannot question it, that we must simply start out by accepting that whatever happens has a physical cause, wow, that really amounts to censure and dogmatism, as strong as the one make by the catholic church in the dark ages, the only thing that changes is the idea. First was the bible, now it's materialism. What we need is to create a significant amount of research and researchers on these "forbidden topics", so that, with sufficient momentum, we will be able to break the walls of contemporary dogmatic thinking and institutions.

• • to be done:

• mystery of complexity (done above)

  • • I am writing on a laptop that has been working for 375 hours straight, in each second it's internal clock ticks hundreds of millions of times setting the pace for its billions of transistors to perform their absolute precise symphony. One single error in this unimaginable number of complex interactions would probably result in a serious system error. Organic animals are much more complex but they are also more resilient to errors which helps to hide from view the degree of complexity that makes possible an arm, eye, or even a simple hair. We are surrounded by a world so complex that it is a mystery how we can understand it at all. But somehow the complex rules that dictate the behavior of molecules and cells

    • My operating system, services and applications together, consume several hundred megabytes of memory to run. As far as I can understand all this works because there are a few billion transistors just below my hands, all etched together in precise ways, and feed by precise voltages, and a precise clock that makes the machine "tick" hundreds of millions of times per second. In spite of all this complexity I "understand" how the thing works: I press a button and a letter appears on the screen, or a menu comes up or some such predictable thing. That is why computers are useful: they behave in predictable, understandable ways.

• values vs facts

• ultimate reality

• • things that kick back, why do they, opaqueness in a translucent world - freedom as non-understandable - we would not see others if it was... (Dennett's design view, or the reality of choice)

    • • Without clarity we would have no access to an object, but, as we've seen, if the objects themselves were transparent, we would have difficulty in seeing them. It seems that perception of objects, or indeed any kind of relation, demands clarity in the medium and some opaqueness or "kicking back" power, from an object. We could sum it up saying that clarity is transparent while mysteries provide the colors of the world. To understand this better we might distinguish three ways of

      • What this means is that everything we see, touch, know, feel, etc, must have these two elements - a part of clarity and another of mystery. This applies to everything, electrons, aprons, brains and legs, words and ideas, eyes and visions... There is nothing we understand through and through. The only exception is our own simple existence: in some sense that only one knows one's existence is perfectly clear to himself (like Descartes' famous dictum: I think therefore I am). In that case there is no relation, one simply is. But in all other cases, for there to be a relation, there needs to be some degree of clarity (otherwise there would be no contact), and it is also necessary for some opaqueness (otherwise there would be nothing to resist or "kick back" to our contact).