“This life you live is not just a part of your whole life, but in a sense it is complete,” wrote quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger as he combined his micro-science with ancient Eastern philosophy to explore the ongoing mystery of who we are.
After a century – a century during which we discovered the double helix, discovered the Higgs boson, sequenced the human genome, felt a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds outside our Solar System – the mystery has deepened only for us “knowledgeable atoms,” who know music and murder. Each day, we eat the food that becomes us, the molecules of which are digested into our own as we walk through the world through personal illusion. Every day, we live with the confusion of what makes us and our friends the “same” person, even though most of our cells and dreams have been changed. Day by day, we find ourselves as small, restless images of a larger universe that we are only just beginning to understand.
In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Communication, Consciousness, and Life (public library), Buddhist scientist Neil Theise trying to cover the mystery out there with our mystery, we combine our three main tools of real research – empirical science (focused on complex doctrine), philosophy (focused on Western perspective), and metaphysics (focused on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) – but drawing its empty parts “self-organization, complex system, emerging aspects of … everything.”
This explains the scientific context of his investigation:
Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems appear in the world… Complexity in this context refers to the category of interaction patterns: open, flexible, unpredictable, but flexible and self-sustaining… how life organizes itself from the matter of our universe, from the interaction between the quantum foam to the formation of atoms, molecules, atoms, atoms, atoms, human particles and biological particles. over here.
[…]
Neither we nor our universe are like machines. The machine has no option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes dynamic. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behavior in the face of unpredictability. That intelligence is the core of the difficulty.
A century after Schrödinger made his startling assertion that “the greatest value of all minds is one thing,” these consider the lens' true reward:
Complex theory can encourage an unparalleled flexibility of perspective and awaken us to our true, deep relationship with the greater essence, to return to what we had: our birthright being one with all.
Central to complexity theory is the idea of contingencies like ants, like crowds, like consciousness. They write:
The distinguishing feature of life's complexity is that, in all cases, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if one knows the characteristics and behavior of all the individual elements of a living system (cell, body, ecosystem), one cannot predict the unusual characteristics that arise from their interactions.
[…]
The emerging situations of ants do not arise because some leader in the colony organizes things. Although evolution often appears to be organized from top to bottom, it is not. A simple ant colony provides a good example. Ants take food wherever they find it and bring it back to the colony. The ants are going back and forth, efficient and well organized it looks like someone must have fixed everything. But no one did. The queen ant does not do administrative work; he is not aware of the state of the colony as a whole. He works only for reproduction. No single ant or group of ants at the top organizes the food line or other aspect of the colony. Association arises only from the spatial interaction between each ancestor and any other ant it encounters.
Approaching the scale of the planet, he says that all living things on Earth are a single life opposed to a single consciousness that pervades the universe. The challenge, of course, is to reconcile this idea with our greater experience of self-responsibility as independent human beings, distinct in space and time – an experience heightened by the emptiness of free will, which ultimately prevents us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a complete self-organization.
To alleviate the paradox, Theise relies on a core of quantum theory: Neils Bohr's theory of complementarity – the idea that because two different readings of reality can be true both but not simultaneously, to define reality we must choose between the two in order to preserve the internal validity and coherence of one to the detriment of the other. Inviting such a convergence of ideas, he writes:
The multitudes of organisms on Earth, not only in space but over time, are in fact all one big body, just as each of us (in our minds) appears to be a different person during our limited life time… From this point of view, the passage of human generations, in peace or chaos, is nothing more than the shedding of cells in the human skin.
This is more than a metaphysical tendency to reality – it is a deep physical reality, of which the cells themselves are living evidence. Giving scientific confirmation to Whitman's timeless poetic insistence that “every atom that is mine as good is yours,” Theises wrote:
Most of the body's cells are constantly turning over. Some cells are regenerated over a period of years, while other types of cells are replaced every few days. Therefore, many of the molecules (and therefore atoms) in our bodies return to the earth again, through endless atomic renewal and replacement. From this point of view, are we living creatures that move around on this rock we call Earth? Or are we actually the Earth itself, whose atoms have arranged themselves to form these transitory beings who think they are independent and separate from each other, even though they have evolved and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?
This is true in every measure of matter, at the molecular level above atoms and below cells:
We breathe molecules (carbon dioxide) and sweat molecules (water, pheromones) and excrete molecules (urine, feces) into our environment, and, we eat food that we break down into absorbable molecules (proteins, carbohydrates, fats), we breathe oxygen molecules from the plant planet, and the skin can absorb our molecules from all molecules. Although you may say that molecules are only yours if they are inside your body, correspondingly, there is no real difference between “our” molecules and the molecules of the world around us. They go from us, go outside, and enter us from outside. At the molecular level, as at the cellular level, each of us is in constant, direct continuity with the entire biomass of the planet.
The period after Max Planck discovered the smallest scales of life – energy quanta – then he thought about the limits of science given the fact that “we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery we are trying to solve,” He adds:
At the smallest scales, for Planck, the smallest creations are wholes without parts that just appear in spacetime and dissolve in it like phantoms – there but not there, real but not real. Everything looks like something from its own particular place, a level of scale where it can't be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Beyond that level of scale, it's hidden from view by the high-quality emerging areas it offers. Below that level, it disappears from view to the active object from which it appeared.
It's hard to consider this idea without cringing at the question of what it means to exist – and to cease to exist. Through his lens that focuses on a certain life about death – as the child of two Holocaust survivors, as a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic that killed many of his friends – He offers a redemptive answer:
Although we feel like we are thinking, living beings with independent lives within the universe, the parallel view is also true: we do not live in a universe; we put it together. It is similar to how we often think of ourselves as living on earth even as, in a parallel way, we are a planet.
[…]
You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum particles, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the dynamic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the basic consciousness that emerges from all of this, Planck moment by Planck moment.
In every part of him is clear and bright Notes on ComplexityThese continue to combine the discoveries of Western science – from particle physics to neuroscience to chaos theory – with Eastern Metaphysical traditions and his long-standing Zen Buddhist practice. Connect with physicist David Bohm on perfection and exact order, then revisit Virginia Woolf's epic epiphany about the essence of existence.
