Complexity at lunch | #12

Meandering conversations about science and information at SFI

2023-08-17: Greetings readers. I'm writing after a long diversion into other aspects of my life: raising a toddler, traveling, leading the data team at Arbol, and a literature review journal article I'm working on publishing. Thank you for opening this issue and reading once again. After spending the month of July in upstate NY to visit family I'm back in Santa Fe. It's refreshing to revisit my old routines with a new perspective, and I notice how much headspace is influenced by the nature I'm surrounded by.

I’m working on a few longer form pieces for this newsletter, but want to experiment with shorter, more frequent updates. I find it hard to consistently write the longer, more in depth articles so I’ll start sharing more concise writings about my pattern finding in complexity for business, art, and life. I love to hear from my readers so please, if something I write about interests you particularly let me know. Thanks for coming along with me on the journey.

My small world network led me to conversations over lunch at Santa Fe Institute over the past few months. This week was one of those, and my good friend Alex McCaig who runs Tartle came as well. Carlos Gershenson has been on sabbatical at SFI before joining Binghamton University as a professor in the Systems Science department. I will take his graduate course this fall, Modern Complexity Theory. And so we’ve been in touch while he’s here.

The lunch discussion among a small group of faculty and visitors focused on one paper in particular, but ranged way, way beyond. The World as Evolving Information outlines a framework for modeling systems through the lens of information shared between components. This meandered into a debate, can the human mind alter the physical body? And what are the boundaries, or depths, information can go? Well Vajrayana Buddhism has lessons to guide the paths to answering these questions.

This most abstract understanding of the world is in line with the “highest view” of Vajrayana Buddhism [45]. Implications at this level of description cannot be right or wrong, because there is no context. Everything is contained, but no information is needed to describe it, since it is already there. This “maximum” understanding is also described as vacuity, which leads to bliss

• The World as Evolving Information, Gershenson, C. (2012)

The physicists and biologists at the table denied that human thought can be transformative at the physical level of cellular structure. But if we’re information all the way down, why can’t thought (described as information) influence structural change at the lowest level of our body? Not that it would be easy to do so. But perhaps enough energy can be channeled to make microscopic changes that propagate up to noticeable change at human scale?

The debate became what I might call lively and sort of intense. Several people disbanded inconclusively or even unwilling to go there with the thought of possibility. Blasphemous, or ignorant even, the naysayers claimed. The challenge is that it’s hard to predict what changes at the micro level result in through the pathways of hierarchy that make up the whole.

But to be honest, I still believe it’s possible, maybe even obvious. Provable? I’m not sure. My view was in the minority with this argument. Alex joined me there. So at lunch on that day, I’d say we got to be the scientific renegades up in the towers of complexity science.

What do you think?