Some reflections on uncertainty, politics and communication
21 May 2023
Many decades ago during my undergraduate years, I had a disturbing thought:
If we were a materialistic universe with strict causal determinism the ruling paradigm then the fate of the world AND EVERYTHING IN IT was set in stone from the moment of the big bang to when the world ended - with another bang or a whimper.
The inescapable logical conclusion was that 'free will' was a complete illusion and that every human (and nonhuman) was going through the motions of choice but they had no real say in the matter. That had been established billions of years ago. We were all automatons.
Naturally I looked for holes in the argument but failed to find one. If strict determinism was not true then the assumptions of science were based on a falsehood. If it was true I was a robot with illusions.
It was an extremely depressing idea and I did not share it with anyone at the time1. Even suicide would be a meaningless gesture of defiance as that choice had been predetermined in any case at the moment of creation.
Eventually, thank goodness, I decided to behave as though my argument was mistaken and just get on with my life. Later on I learned I was hardly the first to have that idea. Pierre-Simon Laplace, the French mathematician-physicist postulated hard determinism in 1814.
He was not put out by the idea that he was a robot since now science could be truly exact and mathematical. It takes all types I suppose and Omar Khayyam2 writing in the 11th century put it more poetically (and depressingly):
"With Earth's first Clay They did the Last Man knead,
And there of the Last Harvest sow'd the Seed:
And the first Morning of Creation wrote
What the Last Dawn of Reckoning shall read."
The ordinary working scientist and engineer and professional still works on the basic assumption of causal determinism. That's good for roads, bridges and aeroplanes, but for many other things that really count from matter to brains, from evolution to politics, from AI to climate to culture to innovation, strict determinism no longer has the starring role.
This has enormous implications at a practical level but first let's spell out this fundamental uncertainty a little further.
Taking mathematics as the archetype of a rigorous logic system, it's been established by the likes of Hilbert, Russell, Godel and Turing that "no finite system of axioms can prove its own consistency"3. Which means that even mathematics cannot be defined by its foundational axioms.
Moving from maths to physics, first Einstein and then especially the quantum theorists demonstrated that the physical world was much stranger than envisaged by the explosive development of physics in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Firstly, at the most basic level of reality the apparent clear distinction between energy, matter and information became blurred and to some extent interchangeable. Secondly, from quantum mechanics came the realisation that the simple act of observation could not be divorced from the object observed.
Wave motion could be quantised by the slit experiment and the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is at a distance depends on the collapses of the Schrodinger wave function precipitated by observation. Time itself is not part of the standard model.
If this sounds confusing it's because it is. But the practical consequences, summarised by the pioneering physicist-biologist Paul Davies is:
"Given that undecidability is enshrined in the foundations of mathematics, it will also be a fundamental property of a universe based on mathematical laws...(which) will always be unbounded in its creative potential."
That unbounded potential is especially manifest in the field of biology of which human politics is a small but increasingly important part. Key to understanding biology and politics are the concepts of complexity and emergence. So let's get to it.
A complex system (CS) is one in which the behaviour of the system cannot be predicted by the properties and interactions of its components. In other words its behaviour is emergent.
Since most CSs are hierarchical (multi-layered) emergence appears at each level. The other features of most complex systems studied include: non-linearity, critical transitions, self-organisation and sensitivity to input conditions. In addition, many are nested as well as hierarchical, contain feedback and feed-forward loops and bounded but open.
A simple, rigid definition encompassing all complex systems is not possible since different definitions are useful n different contexts. Many real-world CSs are multi-dimensional: that is they include different categories such as humans, parasites, predators, plants and are embedded in different climatic and geographic environments. These in turn have a profound effect on the composition and behaviour of the living components of the system - and vice versa.
That's an important paragraph and worth rereading and pondering by readers unfamiliar with the concept. The idea of a complex adaptive system(CAS) is an extension of the previous definition, implying that the system appears to adapt to changes in input to stabilise itself or even to achieve goals.
It's not difficult to see where this can hook up to ideas of intelligence, consciousness and even artificial intelligence (AI). It's helpful to see the idea of CSs as a paradigm or metatheory within which many real-world phenomena may be studied such as climate, innovation and economic models, ant societies to human societies, ecosystems, individual minds to collective minds.
Needless to say, given the scope of the concept, it is an on-going project within many disciplines, including politics. Like a good map in the physical world it helps to orientate the explorer in the world of ideas. We will be using it as we proceed further in this column.
Mike Berger
Notes and References for the Interested
1. Actually I did mention this later in a class on the Philosophy of Science but the professor (a very well-known personality) simply dismissed my argument as too 'simplistic'. Grrrr.
2. See 'The Demon in the Machine' by Paul Davis. First published in 2019 it was republished by Penguin in 2020. Don't be misled by soft cover and small size. It's a serious meal for the non-specialist.
3. 'Uncertainty isn’t a human flaw, it’s a feature of the world' Interview between Richard C Sha and Nathan Harshman in Aeon. Edited by Sam Haselby.
4. For a neat introduction to complexity see The Entangled Brain (MIT Press) by Luiz Pessoa, especially Chapter 8 - available FREE. For a deep conversation between a pioneering evolutionary-theorist ((David Sloan Wilson) and a hybrid academic-entrepreneur (Victor Hwang) see "Evolution, Complexity, and the Third Way of Entrepreneurship: A Capstone Conversation with Victor Hwang". The Sante Fe Institute is the pioneer in all matters complex but has spawned clones around the world. But for the specialist the list is endless...
