I was recently gifted a copy of Neil Theise’s “Notes on Complexity,” and I found that everything in this book was new to me. I read the back, saw it was a discussion about complexity theory, and thought it was a basic and uninteresting idea to write about. My own understanding of complexity theory was the notion that life as a whole is made of complex systems, all working together to create something bigger. It is a nice idea, but also an obvious one. However, the author takes complexity theory further to explain larger, more spiritual ramifications. Theise explains himself to be a person living between the scientific world and spiritual world, and this claim is apparent through his use of scientific ideas to prove a more spiritual outlook onto the world to be a valid one.
Theise does this by making sure to break down our already-understood outlooks about ourselves and our world. He challenges our perception about humans and life by presenting his theory that humans might be a biological system of a greater life form. Maybe Earth, but maybe something else. Theise states that all life on earth has one common ancestor that has been replicating itself this entire time. The same way that the human body comes from a single cell that has replicated into working systems that make up the human body (which I think most people believe to be the end goal), there is a single celled organism that has been replicating that we might just be its version of working systems. We might seriously be one part of a larger working whole that we are not aware of.
I found that idea to be fascinating, but the author’s point was more to explain the idea that whatever “thing” you are looking at depends on your scale. For example, we can see the limits of our bodies, but on an atomic scale, where do you end and where does this copy of The Hoot start?
One step further is quantum mechanics, where particles don’t exist in a single place, but rather have a probability of existing in a certain place at a certain time. All of this was to make Theise’s point that on a smaller scale, we only exist as a collection of processes, and on a larger scale, we do not know what the potential processes that we are making are. I think the author succeeds in making his point, but the next steps he takes are more subjective.
While in the first part of the book, I think there is little room to disagree, whereas in the remainder of the book, he discusses his own theory of consciousness. He briefly touches on other theories of consciousness, like that our larger consciousness is some sort of physical matter or accumulated from the smaller consciousness of cells, but mostly starts by breaking down the idea that our consciousness has to be something that comes from ourselves.
The author disagrees with the idea that consciousness has to stem from our brain and claims that correlation is not causation. He argues that there is no proof that brain activity means our brain causes thoughts, but rather that a different phenomenon causes thoughts and also triggers brain activity. He even claims that maybe the brain activity is due to your brain being a transmitter for wherever consciousness comes from. Theise again basis his opinion in logic and science by backing himself up with Gödel’s famous incompleteness theorem that proved that not everything can scientifically be proven by itself.
My lower IQ understanding of the theorem is that you cannot prove the laws of the system using the system. Theise applies this framework to consciousness to say that a consciousness does not have the ability to fully explain how consciousness works. That consciousness is beyond logic, which then opens doors to more ideas. He also backtracks to talk again about perspective and scale to say that maybe consciousness is not something that comes from matter but is something fundamental. Maybe it gives way to the quanta foam that creates matter that creates molecules, then cells, then humans, then whatever is next up.
Thoughts and maybe matter is something that all comes from the same sort of river of consciousness that exists in the universe. The same stream that many religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism talk about. Part of his idea that our consciousness might not be able to fully explain consciousness means that Theise’s theory might be wrong. Nevertheless, he methodically proves that his theory is still a valid one in every way. You might draw a different conclusion than he did, but I think that the author still provided a compelling idea. One that I had never heard explained in this way.
