The Emerging Science
Before I ever encountered Eastern thought or anything like it, in my college years, I was a scientifically minded kid who tended to think in analytical ways. This was unusual for a ‘creative type’ art major.
My reading consisted of mostly science books and magazines. I was especially interested in the latest physics. I wanted to know more than the lighter descriptions in the popular science magazines so in the midst of my unrelated school studies, one of the books I found the time to read was Richard Boyd and Phillip Gasper’s, The Philosophy of Science1.
Not being a science major, I didn’t have the math background to crack its cryptic formulas (and intentionally decided not to invest time in that direction). But I developed a method of reading the explanatory text in between, and then identifying the pieces of the formulas referred to - good enough to get a sound conceptual understanding of the science. I was, however, probably the only art major in the department who could calculate how much mass, length, and time dilation a vessel would experience at any given percentage of the speed of light.
The most demanding material - for anyone - was/is quantum mechanics (QM). That would take several more books and conversations with the right people to ‘kind of get it’ (even its leading scientists don’t claim to fully get it). I wanted to know exactly what Bell’s Theorem meant, why the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle existed, and what it meant to ‘observe’ something in a QM experiment.
There are different proposals as to how to interpret the meaning of the strange experimental results of QM, and any one of them you pick is mind-boggling. QM disrupted my assumption that our understanding of reality is necessarily anything like what we think it is.
One thing I can tell you, however, is that quantum mechanics (at least what we know of it scientifically) does not prove or indicate nearly what a lot of religious or ‘spiritual types’ often claim it does. They often say things like ‘our consciousness makes reality’ and use these kinds of distortions and misunderstandings of QM to try to explain everything from consciousness to karma, psychic powers, magic, ‘laws of attraction’, and more. There are a lot of ways QM is amazing and profound in its implications2, but its use for genuine spirituality (outside of bolstering old superstitions) is limited at best. Given that I am someone who writes on scientifically-compatible forms of spirituality, it is necessary that I make this clear.
There is another field of study in science that doesn’t get nearly as much press. Although not it’s aim, it happens to speak to spirituality in far more practical and sober ways. Its subject also relates far more directly to the content of many ancient philosophies, on which contemplative practices are based. That field is the relatively new specialty of complex systems theory.
Both quantum mechanics and complexity science blew my mind and changed the way I looked at the world. But only complex systems gave me a religious experience3 (or what I prefer to call a profound experience). At the time I didn’t know what to do with that experience - how to process it or fit it into a practice. But complex systems theory prepared me for some of the most important concepts I would later encounter in traditions like Taoism, Buddhism, and Stoicism. Without that displacing experience, it is doubtful I would have been as capable of grasping some of their deeper perspectives.
Complexity science has brought together professionals from a multitude of vastly different disciplines. Some of the revelations of complexity science are not only awe inspiring, but there may also be deep implications for a modern scientifically-compatible spirituality.
The subject matter of this field is very similar to what Heraclitus referred to in his descriptions of the world, as well as the concept of organic pattern or “Li” in Chinese philosophy - that which is not entirely orderly, but clearly not entirely chaotic or random (you know it when you see it)4. One might even consider complex systems theory to be the modern continuation and refinement of these ancient natural philosophers’ very topic of study.
A complex system is something that is composed of many elements which interact with one another simultaneously, as in a network. Rather than a top-down command structure determining the activity of the network, its activity emerges bottom-up; from the nature of its individual elements. Thus a complex system is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’. This kind of activity requires a delicate balance between order and chaos, either extreme of which would spell death for the system.
Examples of complex systems include just about everything that is interesting about the world: organisms, earth’s climate, transportation systems, an economy, a single cell, cities, flocks of birds, the human brain, or even the interactions of ideas between human brains in a culture (memes)5. Remarkably, the organizational and mathematical principles for describing these systems are often the same. Yet, traditional fields and approaches of science are not very good at studying these kinds of things.
Other complex systems are capable of storing, using, or transmitting information. Even when they aren’t systems we traditionally call ‘life’, they can display remarkable traits like self-organization, adaptability, replacing their own parts to maintain their form (called autopoiesis), reproduction, evolution, nested levels of hierarchical organization, and so on.
Emergent properties within these systems arise - phenomena which only seem to exist on higher levels and cannot be reduced further without ignoring those qualities. Yet, incredibly, these emergent properties can themselves become inputs into that system, to direct its lower levels.
Many complex systems are dynamic and cannot be predicted or determined - even if you knew all of the starting conditions and rules by which their elements interact (they are effectively indeterminate). Some can grow or change slowly, and then feedback loops can cause a rapid phase transition to another state suddenly. In other words, they can be what’s called nonlinear, meaning their behavior (output) is not proportional to the input.
You may have heard of the butterfly effect. This refers to the fact that some complex systems are highly sensitive to small differences in their initial conditions. In the case of the weather, it is said that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world, could in principle later affect the course of a storm in another part of the world. Yet, in a kind of counter to the butterfly effect, hidden within the activity of these systems, grooves or patterns of behavior can appear that can seem to pull its activity in certain ways (called attractors)6.
All of these shared traits of complex systems in these various fields are not mere analogies. The underlying mathematics used to describe these systems is the same - that is the truly intriguing thing.
In the past few paragraphs I have been flooding you with a huge assortment of concepts from an immense field, simply to give you a flavor of the kinds of phenomena and some of their various terms within it. Each of these terms and concepts have with them a great deal of math and technicality that we needn’t ever be capable of for our purposes here.
The researchers, scientists, and mathematicians of Complexity are doing real science with implications in fields from engineering, to management, artificial intelligence, economics, physics, biology, and more. Many of them may be weary of people trying to associate a spirituality with their field. I’ve had at least one researcher confide in me that, though they agreed with many aspects of such a spirituality, they were concerned about ‘coming out’ because it might undermine the effort to establish complexity science as a respected field and their own career as a respected scientist.
Although many of us can imagine how a person can still do perfectly legitimate science while acknowledging the implications of the topic on spirituality, I can sympathize with these concerns. Perhaps they wish to avoid what happened with quantum mechanics: a hijacking of their field by all kinds of spacey New Agers and pseudoscientific ‘gurus’ misinterpreting or misrepresenting what QM actually proposes.
And yet, while we can understand and support the need to respect the integrity of rigorous science in the field, there is no reason that what their work tells us about the world cannot be an amazing source of inspiration; shaping our perspectives on life’s changes and dynamic unfolding of events.