Complexity and Human Life

For this post (and hopefully several future posts), I'm going to focus on the relation between the ideas of chaos and complexity and human life, looking at how the principles of the former are manifested in the latter. I aim to show that the essence of adaptive, living systems is most easily seen in this relationship.

To start off, complexity and chaos will be talked about here in a slightly simplified and non-mathematical way that is most in line with my own understanding. While a more thorough understanding may allow for more analytical possibilities, the types of things I want to look at here are at a basic level and don't require this in depth analysis. I'm going to be looking at the ideas of chaos and complexity as exemplified by the phenomena of sensitivity to initial conditions. This is commonly understood with examples like the "butterfly effect."

If we take a look at human life, we get some validation for the butterfly effect. Small events that happen to each of us can have very large consequences. There is a multitude of examples of this, from a chance lottery win, to getting stuck in traffic and missing a flight that would later crash, and so on. Yet, these sequences of small event>huge consequence are not all the same. On one hand there are those examples like the one's just mentioned in which a drastic consequence is the result of seemingly arbitrary conditions. Yet there are just as many events in our lives that follow the small event>drastic outcome pattern which are less arbitrary. A man who happens to see his wife doing something that implies infidelity divorces his wife and breaks up a family. Or the president of one country makes a brief highly offensive remark to another leader, sparking a war. In these two examples, huge consequences follow small events, but their unfolding is not arbitrary, but rather an understandable sequence of human action.

This shows that human beings (and this is certainly true for other animals) incorporate the chaotic dynamics of complex systems into the processes of daily life. While this is not surprising since organisms are complex chaotic systems, it is impressive that living systems are able to make sense of and then utilize the complex chaotic processes for their own gain.

Making sense of a chaotic system is not an easy task, and in most situations in which people try to do this, they fail. Predicting the stock market, the weather, or international affairs is only possible in the short term, and sometimes not even then. Our failures in doing this seem to suggest that in those situations in which we are able to predict the complex dynamics of chaotic systems, the dynamics of these systems must be set up in a predictable way that at least partially makes sense to us.

The situations in which human beings and other animals do make sense of the behavior of complex chaotic systems all involve the prediction of one's own or another animal's behavior (or they are trivial short term predictions like predicting a thunderstorm based on approaching clouds). The basis for such prediction lies in the experientially derived logic of one's own experience. From living in the world, an organism is affected by a range of emotional states coupled to their acts. The unfolding of this coupled affective>active>affective>active sequence yields patterns over time that the animal uses to know itself, or to know others (in those cases when an animal can know others, as humans can). In other words, there are patterns in this affective>active sequence that comprise the "logic of experience." The logic of experience comprises a predictive schema for understanding the interlinking between the affective, motivational, and active dimensions of experience.

The logic of experience is learned from firsthand experience, and although it makes sense of physical processes in the world (along with their affective dimensions), it is a different logic than the logic of physical processes, or "folk physics" (which is also learned from experience, but lacks an affective dimension). The logic of experience allows us to predict processes in systems that are so complex that they would endlessly baffle our capacity for folk physics (imagine trying to predict another's actions, even in the most trivial of circumstances based solely on the interaction of physical particles in their body and the surrounding environment). This logic is, in essence, an evolved mechanism of making sense of chaos.