THE BAD BOYS OF COMPLEXITY AND EMERGENCE: I’ve taken some interest in the scientific discussion regarding complexity and emergence over the past few years. It’s interesting, because it might be one of those “paradigm shifts” that philosopher Thomas Kuhn speaks of. It could be one of those revolutions of thought, like what Newton did to classical thinking in the 16th Century, and what Einstein did to Newtonian physics in the early 20th Century. If you’re not familiar with complexity and emergence, there are plenty of books about it written at the layman’s level (the only level that I can understand it). If you don’t want to shell out for the books, you can still find various web sites that give you a “Complexity 101” summary (hmmm, Complexity 101, sort of an oxymoron). Just do a search on . . . complexity and emergence.

In a nutshell, the “complexity and emergence” movement started out with computer simulations of reality. These computer runs showed that a relatively simple set of calculation rules carried out by large number of interacting agents (a.k.a. “cellular autonoma”) can produce very complex results that sometimes look amazingly like real life. For example, with some fairly simple programming, most any high school geek can easily simulate a flight of geese or the growth of a tree or a traffic jam right there on the screen.

This gave scientists new insights about how to do things; instead of designing machines and systems that take their commands from a centralized brain that is supposed to have all the answers (and goes tilt when it actually doesn’t), we can instead design things that are broken up into simple and decentralized components. If designed right, those components will inter-act in a way that unintentionally gets the job done. Imagine trying to run a symphony orchestra without a conductor. If every musician had only a simple piece to play and only had to coordinate with the three or four musicians nearest to him or her, well . . . OK, maybe this wouldn’t work for an orchestra. But as to mining minerals under the sea, or cleaning up a major oil spill, it could well be the better mousetrap. (If you saw the robot guy in the movie Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, you know what I mean).

Most of the scientists and mathematicians in the complexity field have been fairly modest and reasonable about just what their “thought revolution” can or can’t do. Complexity may well give us some profound insights as to how life emerged in the universe, but it can’t explain where the Big Bang came from, nor can it untie the knots that quantum theory and gravitational physics get themselves into. Or can it? There are a couple of guys who are making noises in that direction. Their names are Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram. They both seem to think that complexity and digital analysis is the best way to look at life, the universe and everything. They want to throw out empirical science as we know it, and understand everything thru “object-oriented” computer simulations.

Well, obviously the mainstream scientists don’t think this is such a good idea. And to be honest, I don’t think we’re ready for it either. It’s awfully interesting to come up with computer programs that do things on the screen which look like real life. But it’s a whole ‘nuther thing to conclude that real life operates the way that you’ve programmed your computer. Can we really feel comfortable deciding what to do about AIDS or cancer or war based on a computer simulation that appears to mimic these things? What if there are several possible ways to simulate a complex real-life phenomenon on a computer; how would we know that we’ve got the right one, and that it accurately predicts how that phenomenon will respond to changes?

Nonetheless, Fredkin and Wolfram can’t be swept away and forgotten. They’re awfully smart cookies, and they got rich using their smarts. You’ve got to respect that. Maybe in a hundred years or two, this is the way that the world is going to think. For now, I’ll stick with the continuous and fuzzy view of reality that I was born with (which gets fuzzier and fuzzier every year as my eyes get worse). But I’ll be keeping a myopic eye on the complexity thing, and I’ll also keep the names Fredkin and Wolfram in the back of my mind. I’d recommend you doing the same.

Just a picture of a tree in late autumn, for your contemplation.

The tsunami disaster in Southern Asia makes it quite difficult to believe in God. Well, at least in the kind of God that we liberals would like God to be. I use the word “liberal” in the sense that philosopher Richard Rorty uses it, i.e. someone concerned about cruelty, humiliation and human suffering. And let’s face it, that wave inflicted a whole lot of cruelty, humiliation and human suffering . . . ironically, on the day after a major religious celebration. Sure, I wouldn’t expect an all-knowing God to give us life without challenges, but to just crush and destroy so many lives, to just toss them about like pieces of trash . . . . what kind of God can that be?

To the degree that there can be a God of liberality, such liberalism would best be seen in the humane response that people would have to such tragedy. So, you might ask me, just what the heck am I doing about what happened over there? How can I bitch about God if I’m not helping?

Up to now, I haven’t done a darn thing. My financial situation has a lot of uncertainties these days, so I don’t like to throw my money around if I don’t have to (especially right after the holiday gift rituals). But in thinking about this blog, I realized that I had no right to complain about the lack of a liberal God in the world unless I acted (at least to some small degree) as though there were such a God. So I got out the checkbook last night and scribbled a few buckeroos out to one of the front-line agencies. It’s just a tiny drop in the bucket; but thankfully, there have been a whole lot of other drops in response to this.

I don’t know . . . maybe God is a work in process. The universe is way too grand and beautiful for me to believe that there ain’t something behind it. But when things go as badly as they did in Asia last week, I can’t help but think that God ain’t as Godly as God should be. Perhaps that’s why there are such things as time and process in our universe. Perhaps in some crazy metaphysical way, our positive response to one of God’s imperfections helps to perfect an otherwise imperfect God. Yea, that certainly ain’t orthodox theology. But in the face of a huge disaster like this, it works just about as well.

DISINSPIRING: Those air-bag Santas and snowmen out on the lawns of America are nice, but eventually they lose their inflation and start sagging and drooping. Then they look so sad. It’s even worse when they deflate completely. It then looks like a melted snowman (recall the melancholy ending to “Frosty The Snowman”); or even worse, as though someone mugged Santa and left his clothes out by the bushes.

INSPIRING: I saw a short article in a religious magazine about the wonder of the Hubble Deep Field image. Yes, that picture is indeed a wonderful thing. It was taken by the Hubble orbiting observatory back around 1996 and was able to detect over a thousand galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars – – even though the picture only represents a tiny sliver of the sky. Because light takes so long to reach us from the far corners of the universe, some of the galaxies seen on the picture were very young, only around a billion years after the Big Bang (we’re now about 14 billion years from the Bang). Yea, some huge numbers at work here. It’s amazing and quite inspiring what humankind has been able to figure out about the universe . . . even though the astrophysicists say that almost everything they learn points to a new mystery (e.g., the accelerating expansion rate of the universe). Just when they think they understand it pretty well, it turns out to be even more complicated than they first thought. Nonetheless, humankind’s efforts to understand the universe, and indeed the universe itself, are some of the most inspiring things out there these days.

It’s time to start a new year; but a “new year” is really an old figment of the imagination. The year 2005, like any other year, is something that exists only in the mind. It’s mainly an accounting convention. Today is hardly any different from yesterday. Despite the new year, it’s just another day.

However, one thing did set today apart for me. The weather here in the northeast was awfully nice. By mid-afternoon, the sun was shining and the temps were pushing 60. People were outside wandering about, as if it were mid-May. A sense of life was in the air.

But death has also been in the air for me lately. Of course, I’ve seen the reports about the terrible tragedy in south Asia where that killer wave hit unexpectedly. Over 100,000 dead, homes and villages washed away. Nature shows once again just how powerful and fickle it can be, despite humankind’s impression that we’ve tamed it, that it’s our kind and gentle friend.

Closer to home, my last living aunt passed away two days ago, at the age of 84. She died more-or-less peacefully after a life that was well lived. Her death, while sad, was not a tragedy at all. Still, for me it was another reminder of the inevitability of life’s decay and ending, the apparent victory of the darkness.

So we’re in a new year, but with the same old struggles between life and death. We face the same fears that death is the ultimate principal of our universe, and we entertain the same hopes that perhaps it is not. It’s as though we are perched on the edge of a fence. But actually, you can’t live your life on the fence. You either give in to one side or the other. “Faith”, in its truest sense, is the act of falling off the fence and onto the side of life. That sounds easy, but it means going the distance to act morally and kindly to everyone and everything that you encounter. Too often, I drift back into the backyard of death. Perhaps the idea of “new” in New Year can have some meaning after all, if it reminds us that it’s never too late to keep struggling to find our way back to the side of life and hope. Where we belong.