"It is the calling of great men, not so much to preach new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old truths which it is our wisdom to remember and our weakness to forget."Sydney Smith (1771-1845)
"An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them."Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), The Part and the Whole
We seem to have learnt a lot in the last two thousand years, or have we ? The pedants still argue about whether 2000 or 2001 is the 'true' millennium, wars are still fought over trivial reasons, hate, domination and greed are still the predominate human emotions. Looking back over the history of what is so often called 'civilisation' one can almost despair at the waste and the destruction that has accompanied our supposed 'climb' from the animal world - a staircase that, in Escher fashion, leads us back to where we started - as predatory and intolerant beasts, technocratic primitives.
Yet throughout this period, which started well before the birth of Jesus that retrospectively initiated our calendar, great minds have thrived. Inventors, thinkers, innovators and sages have lived, been recognised and died. Their influences have been many and varied, both positive and negative, both global and local. These perturbations to the flow of civilisation however have had one thing in common, and that is their apparent inability to improve the common mind, to bring wisdom to the masses. True civilisation will require the tenets of enlightenment to percolate the global mind, to attain a critical mass such that it becomes self-sustaining and impervious to the pockets of negativity that so pervade current societies. Our millennium essay will consider this issue.
The most striking difference between humans and animals must relate to the diversity of interests pursued by our species. Whether at work or at play our complex societies exhibit a structure fragmented into myriad independent and varied pursuits. Some of these are formalised in our institutions and professions, but many are dynamic associations of like-minded people, dedicated to specific hobbies, goals or pleasures. These bubbles of commonality overlap and self-perpetuate due to their ability to produce mutual benefit. We gain from our associations, by the exchange of ideas, of material and support. As we have seen in our look at Metahuman Science our ability to enjoy such metahuman values presupposes that we have a stable society wherein our animal needs are satisfied, and that we have sufficient leisure and the means to develop our higher human qualities.
We seem to have little difficulty in being tolerant of variety in trivial things, anglers and bikers for example rarely war over their respective interests, each is content to allow the other to live their lives without interference. Why then does it seem to be so difficult to achieve this tolerance in wider areas ? Is it that these cannot be artificially kept separate, as we do in many cases, and we thus notice our clashes of belief ? It seems not, if we choose there is no more difficulty in being tolerant about big issues than about smaller ones. The problem relates more to power, the ingrained belief that we should impose a single standardised behaviour for anything important. This philosophical idea, that there is one truth, one 'correct' behaviour seems to lie at the heart of social and environmental conflict, and is also seen to be a deeply held prejudice in the ideological systems of most religions.
In the complex systems fields, the idea of systems having inherent interconnections is commonplace. Parts are not isolated, groupings are not disjoint, so perhaps our experience in this area can be related to our more human situations ? What is it that allows diversity to persist and even to arise in complex systems, despite our attempts to force standardisation ? This behaviour relates to part freedom. Unlike simple inorganic parts, living systems have internal memory and can behave in different ways to the same stimulus, dependent upon history. This inherent unpredictability means that it is impossible to control such systems without having complete knowledge of the possible states of each part and the entire past - obviously an impossible task. Each human has a unique history, and thus has an individual behaviour that goes far beyond the simplistic limitations of any political control system, whether democratic or not.
The idea that any one 'ruler' or 'class' can or should impose their will on everyone is a naive over-simplification, only made historically credible by the educational ignorance of most people in the past - the view that the masses were more stupid than the leaders and thus their experience or wishes counted for nothing. At most, only certain aspects can be controlled and only then if the people tolerate such attempts. Laws are ineffective if the majority (or even a substantial minority) freely choose not to follow them. People power matters, and knowledge is power, it shows us alternatives, ways of improving our lives. In a modern educated society with freedom of information, no leader should have any exclusive knowledge, no corporation a monopoly - in fact the opposite should be the case, true knowledge and the choice between alternatives resides in the experience of the masses (a set of freedoms supposedly accepted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but far too often just abused and ignored by the signatories).
Folk wisdom, or common sense, is often rejected as meaningless superstition. Sometimes it is, yet in increasingly many cases we see that traditional knowledge was based on facts neglected by current science, natural medicines being a case in point. In a similar way, the common people collectively have vast experience, far more so than any isolated academic. This acquired cultural heritage is no more likely to be wrong than are scientific theories, and this heritage can be tested, if we so choose, in just the same way by data collection and experiment. When this is done, surprisingly, we often find some unknown fact forms the basis of the folk myth, knowledge that when correctly applied is often more effective, cheaper and has less unwanted side effects than the elaborate solutions created in academic isolation for selfish commercial purposes.
So what can common sense tell us about life and values ? Here we have a number of sources of information, genetic, experiential and cultural. All of these reflect a common theme developed over different timescales, that of variation and selection. Such evolutionary trail and error in our lives teaches us many things, social behaviours being prominent, e.g. when to co-operate and when to fight. But such knowledge is also familiar to animals, in fact they are rather better at it than us, rarely being so stupid as to get themselves killed. We would have assumed that humans with the power of thought and language would have long since distilled what valuable lessons were to be learned from such information and arranged to pass on this wisdom to our children by educational means. Yet such appears, nowadays at least, not to be the case.
What are the biggest threats to civilisation in the world today ? It would be expected that all our best scientists and academics would be employed on resolving these issues of course. But research on the killers in question, war, famine, disease, is minimal. When is the last time you saw an academic argument against war ? Against poverty ? Against hate, selfishness or ignorance - the root causes of all these destructive perturbations? Such issues are lost in an academic myopia that disdains work on the wider values of society, whilst praising pseudo-exact research on trivial matters. The word 'values' here is a key one, since it is their neglect in science that avoids recognition of which complex issues are qualitatively worthwhile, in favour of the obsessive pursuit of those issues allowing quantitative simplification.
This value myopia has been a progressive phenomenon, perhaps originating in the divorce of science from religion in the middle ages, but exacerbated by the assumed need of science to give 'answers'. This forces academia into fields where the answers are relatively easy, in other words the simple questions, not the complex ones - the trivial and not the important issues. Lack of awareness of this bias has given a spurious authority to expert opinion, a tendency to extrapolate simplified numerical answers as if applicable to the whole, together with a failure to understand their interdependencies which has in itself contributed greatly to the unstable state of the world around us. Every action taken in isolation has unintended consequences in other areas, and in complex systems these consequences are often so severe that they invalidate the answers originally given - and the theories on which they were based.
Our school curriculum reflects the values of our society, rightly we include the ability to read and to write along with simple arithmetic, yet what we leave out tells us much more about ourselves than the inclusions. Each subject stands in isolation, a disjoint collection of unconnected specialisms. Excluded are those areas needed to live as part of a society, those aspects that merge society into a whole and prevent disintegration, that allow us to relate to each other. Worst, we behave as if each of us is self-sufficient and has no dependencies upon anyone else, quite the opposite to what is actually true in modern society. We ignore the effect of our knowledge on others and theirs on us, we fail to recognise that the interplay of individuals' knowledge creates unforeseen emergent effects, we neglect self-organization (jumping to conclusions - prejudicial attractors) and contextual options (coevolutionary alternatives) in the pursuit of 'instant' answers.
Holistic phenomena relate to a systems view of reality, to a process based approach instead of the part based one common to specialist thought. In a process what one part does depends upon its connectivity with the rest, mutual influence is inherent in the system operation itself. In a driving test, for example, we are expected to take account of local circumstances before acting, yet educationally the social value of our knowledge is ignored - we should ask why we are learning this, ask how should it affect our lives and our world ? The need to incorporate such notions into our educational system is obvious, especially in our internet-based global society where the cross-planet interconnections between people and economies are made explicit (as seen in global TV coverage) and can no longer be conveniently ignored. Our every action now potentially has worldwide consequences, yet the idea of process, that systems are dynamic co-operative events not static 'things' and that they have contextual emergent values, is still as far from most peoples thinking today as it ever was.
One of the tenets of systems thought is the prevalence of feedback, the idea that our actions do not exist in isolation but have consequences that find their way back to us. This modern formulation of the idea of 'karma' is nothing mystical, it simply relates to what we see in everyday life. If I hurt you then you will try to hurt me in turn, if I love you then you will tend to be helpful to me. These self-reinforcing effects pervade our lives and we ignore them at our peril. Such positive feedback effects show us clearly that to gain an overall improvement needs all parties to behave such that the cumulative effect will be constructive and not destructive.
The second form of feedback is called negative, and acts to stabilise a situation. This is the ability to absorb a perturbation or stress and still behave normally, what is sometimes called cybernetic control. In human terms this relates to tolerance, the ability to avoid over-reaction, to act in an appropriate manner. In Eastern thought this is called the "Way of the Tao" and means going with the flow of life, recognising our limitations and not getting into situations beyond our abilities. Again this form of wisdom avoids wasteful conflict, it achieves by subtlety, by using our natural allies - and this includes our supposed opponents ! This principle of 'least action' contrasts strangely with the behaviour of companies and governments whose massive interference policies cause untold negative side effects. Being 'civil' or civilised means minimising such socially damaging effects, a wisdom forgotten it seems in modern times.
Like many such words (e.g. soul, life, consciousness) it is almost impossible to define, yet we can say that "we know it when we see it". Philosophy itself derives from the Greek word for "lover of wisdom" so this gives us a clue, and we can say that wisdom relates to knowledge. Yet this is not the accumulation of abstract knowledge so loved by academics (knowledge obtained for its own sake), but that form of knowledge that helps us to lead better lives, that helps to remove our prejudices and limitations. In other words it is our experience of life, the understanding of what options lead to good solutions and which will prove disadvantageous, a sensitivity to circumstances, a learning from our social mistakes. This includes the ability to see what is important in any situation, what will actually improve our quality of life, and a resistance to being sidetracked by meaningless detail or trivial disagreements.
In the complexity field the value of a solution relates to what we call fitness, and this evolutionary term permits us to say that wisdom is fitness-enhancing knowledge. This does not relate to selfish gain, the sort so prevalent during the last millennium, but to the ability to foresee overall coevolutionary results, integrated in individual, family, company, society and global environmental terms. Thus wisdom relates to cutting through small-minded views of the world and getting to the heart of the matter, the ability to see the wider picture and to put things in a correct perspective. It is usually presented, when recognised at all, in small doses, in proverbs, aphorisms, rules of thumb or quotations. These often seem to contradict each other, yet each is valid for part of our lives, for some circumstances or contexts. It is the sensitivity to how these various circumstances or viewpoints inter-relate in our modern world that we can now call 'wisdom', the recognition that life is not one-dimensional and cannot be regulated by any single, context free, rule - there is no 'Universal Truth', opposites can be true at different times.
In the chaotic world of today we can be forgiven for imagining that we, as individuals, are irrelevant. In a world dominated by power structures, big business, vested interests, it seems that one person can achieve nothing. Yet this is quite untrue. Big changes will take big resources if we try to implement them instantly, but these also have big side effects - which are usually socially and economically undesirable. Small changes on the other hand are easy to instigate and to control, eminently suited to individual achievement. A thousand small changes, each beneficial, is far preferable to one large one with destructive consequences. Tomorrow's world requires small incremental evolution, focused on maximising positive benefits whilst preventing negative side-effects - a mode of behaviour alien to the "boss knows best" and instant solution culture endemic to industrial or political might.
In an interconnected world things constantly change, thus the idea that we can make global changes and then stand back and enjoy them is completely wrong. Long before such a plan has been implemented it will have started to decay, the component parts getting out of step as the world changes around them. Such Utopian plans are an anachronism of the static thinking of the past, the fixed (watch like) mechanical universe of scientific and religious myths both. In our real world of living systems, coevolutionary change and adaptation occur constantly, and thus our behaviours must reflect this reality - it is here that the individual ideas count. The communication of ideas and actions is what propagates change, and each of us instigates numerous such perturbations every day of our lives. We, collectively, make our tomorrows, the final power is ours.
With power however comes responsibility, but we have seen that power is not the prerogative of the 'powerful', we all have power in everything we do, touch and say. The responsibility for the global results of our actions is ours, nobody else's. We cannot blame the government, our teachers, our bosses or our genes. When we act we must bear full responsibility for the results. Only by so doing can we claim to be human beings, only by control over ourselves do we deserve any of the benefits we reap. We are not passive machines, being driven by others, but innovators, unpredictable generators of active change, each day doing something new, reading something new, hearing something new - growing into different, hopefully better, people.
Our experience thus is an open ended resource, not a set of fixed behaviours. None of us can opt out of the world, we cannot avoid having an effect on those around us, our slightest action (even breathing itself) has innumerable effects on our biosphere. We should act therefore (as act we must) in a way conducive to positive results, to improvements in the fitness of the world of which we form a part. Sadly much of our education ignores this vital point, taking static facts to be important whilst neglecting our internal processes in which these facts occur and have future effects. If we are to improve our lives and our world we need to re-invent our values, to restore the relationship between facts and values, to understand how new facts change our behaviour, and to evaluate if these changes are beneficial - and if not, to demand why not ?
With the demise of religion in the modern world, and the removal of the associated value systems from our schools, we have created a void that has left life meaningless for many, filled only by a futile pursuit of material riches. Yet values are not themselves religious, nor are they moral or ethical in the traditional sense. From an evolutionary and complexity viewpoint we can say that values relate to our overall 'quality of life', the benefits of being human. This is a multidimensional viewpoint, and can only be evaluated by an individual, since this is based on their local fitness. A person's fitness relates contextually to their own situation, no one else can impose these values since they cannot, even in theory, know an individual's circumstances in sufficient detail (e.g. in the evaluation of what they find beautiful).
However this does not mean that values are always relative, those that affect other people and the environment certainly are not and it is here that we can create social value systems. Any proposed action will have fitness effects on others, so we can evaluate these wider implications as part of our value judgment. In this way we are able to break down values into those that are positive-sum, in other words they help every one (e.g. new knowledge); those that are negative-sum, in which unacceptable consequences predominate (e.g. pollution); and those zero-sum, where the social effect is neutral (e.g. personal behaviours that affect nobody else). It seems clear that any social justice system should reward positive-sum actions, punish negative-sum ones, and avoid interference in ones socially neutral. Thus we can derive a scientifically valid value system based on complexity considerations that can maximise quality of life for all whilst minimising control. The 'Good Life' is thus the pursuance of positive-sum actions in any form.
Most of this essay has highlighted subjects and ideas that go back thousands of years, we have only put a complexity twist to some of them. Yet complex systems science is much more than just a new twist on old ideas, it is a way of both justifying our criticisms of outdated ways in a scientific manner and of providing new concepts with which to understand organic systems and our social world. It can be proved (mathematically if you are daft enough) that the traditional way of dealing with such issues is invalid. For, say, a hundred variable system, keeping 99 constant and seeing how the 100th behaves is called scientific experimentation. It is assumed that if we do this for each variable and then combine them all we have successfully modelled the system in all its detail. But such a model will bear no relationship at all to the real world behaviour !
This is because of non-linearity, the interference between the value of one variable and the others, a phenomenum that pervades all reality, if not our mathematics. A true study of such systems requires additional complexity concepts, like attractors, fractals and self-organised criticality, which we outline in more detail in our Introductions. The study of such multi-variable dynamical systems is still quite new, yet we find that we can apply these ideas quite easily to almost all the problematical areas of our lives, with beneficial results. These insights show us just how far ahead of its time much ancient thought was, and just how much wisdom has been lost in the abuse of people and the environment resulting from the inadequate scientific, political and religious dogmas of recent centuries. We are now in a position to challenge these dogmas on their own terms, with hard hitting scientific facts, and with experimental demonstrations that show that current lifestyles and beliefs are diametrically opposed to those which would gain the best fitness for our species and planet. Some of our other Essays pursue this theme in more depth.
From a complexity viewpoint we can try to formulate some guidance for the thinking, feeling and sharing person that may help us divorce the next thousand years from the repetitive and cummulative mistakes of the last. Each of these is individually simple, yet taken together they create a lifestyle very different to the one with which most of us are familiar.
Analysis
Values
Activism
In our new look for the millennium we must recognise that the systems of which we are a part are themselves complex. Simple solutions to any problem can only go so far, and if we ignore their effects on all those other aspects that our simplifications have left out, then our 'solutions' will prove only to be new problems. To be wise we must be thoughtful, we must consider the wider effects of our actions. We must educate ourselves to understand contextual consequences. Only by gradually building upon what is good can we be said to be enhancing our fitness, arbitrarily replacing one thing by another will not do this, since it is likely that any good will be replaced by bad, leaving us worst-off in overall lifestyle - thus reducing fitness or quality of life.
Our message here replaces the exclusion behaviour of the past by a modern science-based inclusion behaviour. The excessive minimalisation so prevalent in late 20th Century art and design echoes the same thought patterns prevalent in science and philosophy, as well as in corporate boardrooms and bureaucracies - the ideas that simplification and standardisation are themselves good, the mass conformity mentality. For our new world, the world of tomorrow, we can throw off our shackles, discard these one-dimensional blinkers and walk instead into a shared world of diversity, richness and freedom. Only in this world will each individual be able to develop their full potential, not by reducing that of others by competition but by the mutual fitness enhancement made possible by stressless co-operation and the active welcoming of difference.