Complexity (Becoming, Part 4)

In the summer of 2009, my wife Sadie was accepted into the prestigious Hudson River Fellowship, a group of classical artists who meet annually to paint the landscapes of the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York, in the traditions of the original Hudson River School painters who worked there nearly a century and a half ago. This was not an opportunity to be passed up, so of course she happily made plans to travel to the East Coast in July and participate in what would be a month-long landscape painting extravaganza, alongside her new artist Fellows.

The question was, what exactly was I going to do with myself for a month without Sadie? I sure wasn't going to stay home alone in San Francisco during what is regularly the most dead month of the visual effects project cycle. Since spouses of the HRF artists were not invited to share their living quarters during their studies, I was forced to do the next best thing- to hang out with Mom and Dad at their house, in my home town of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a four hour drive from Hunter, New York where Sadie would be staying, driving up to visit her whenever possible.

While I missed Sadie enormously, I actually had a pretty great time in Pennsylvania. It was the longest I'd spent away from Sadie, but it was also the longest stretch I'd spent with my parents since I went to college nearly twelve years earlier. During the day I digitized family videos and met up with old friends. At night my dad and I took to watching episodes from the first season of the original Star Trek on Blu Ray. I spent several of my weekends up in New York City, hanging out with friends and drinking far too much. I also took full advantage of the top-notch East Coast cuisine I'd been missing for so many years, including Italian hoagies, cheesesteaks, pastrami sandwiches, meatball subs, scrapple, etc. I think I gained about 10 pounds.

However, among all of the socializing and gorging on fabulous foods, in the background I grasped desperately for a new path in my academic studies. At that point I was more or less completely lost. I was still recoiling from my frustrating encounters with both Quantum Mechanics and the Hard Problem of Consciousness within Philosophy of Mind. Neither had managed to satisfactorily describe my harmonic city encounters that had started over a year and a half before. So I figured the best approach from here was to cast my net wide, branching out and studying a variety of subjects simultaneously. This multi-disciplined mindset provoked the broad consumption of courses from The Teaching Company, covering the works of existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others representing the American Transcendentalist movement, a pan-historical perspective on the various types of political leadership called Power Over People, and finally a small set of lectures I bought on a whim called Understanding Complexity.

Out of the myriad of subjects I was studying, I didn't think for a second that it would be complexity that might tie into the grand scheme of things. I had meant for the course to be a fun little side-study that I snacked on while in bed every night before I went to sleep, while during the day I continued my real research within realms located squarely outside of the sciences. At only twelve lectures, each clocking in at a mere half hour in length, the series seemed less than daunting, as it was much smaller than any of the previous TTC classes I had taken. I was surprised to find not only my expectations exceeded, but also my ass thoroughly kicked. Short as they were, the complexity lectures packed the intellectual density of a granite mountain. After completing the course and repeating many of the lectures for maximum absorption, I found myself blazing a decidedly different path back into science that was completely exhilarating, infusing my efforts with a new sense of purpose and vigor.

So what exactly is complexity, and why should it matter to us in our day to day lives? To begin with, complex systems are much more common than you might imagine. The word "complexity" in the context of scientific analysis refers to the intricate configuration of different parts that serve as a functional layer within a given system. At first glance, this might seem like the most vanilla definition possible, but it makes a few very important points.

First, it states that complexity is defined by configurations of parts within a living system, rather than the nature of the parts themselves. So instead of zooming down to the microscopic level to view specific actions of component parts within a system, studies of complexity focus on the the interactions of component parts and the macroscopic properties that result. Such properties are often referred to as "emergent" phenomena, which I discussed in detail in the previous essay while describing consciousness as an emergent property of higher functions within the human brain. Therefore complexity studies of consciousness are not interested in the functions of individual neurons within the brain per-se, but the properties that arise wholesale as a result of the interactions between the neurons.

Second, the above definition also identifies complexity in terms of "layers", which is crucial to the understanding of how larger complex systems fit together. I also touched on this notion of layered systems in the previous essay when I discussed "emergent layers" within a system, and how a complex system (like a tree) could be entirely described by the functions of each of its separate layers. This is exactly the kind of thing that complexity researchers love to sink their teeth into. They endeavor to create functional computer models that simulate complex behaviors using simple mathematical rules, giving them insight into how a system's component parts interact with one another and how these interactions ultimately serve to build superseding layers of complexity. Researchers can then study the various layers hierarchically, building a more solid understanding of how the system operates as a whole.

Complexity researchers are also interested in the commonalities between vast arrays of living systems. These can range from colonies of bacteria to entire ecosystems- from the cellular functions of the human immune system to the inner workings of much larger social systems, including economies, international political systems and the internet. As researchers discover more and more underlying principles and mathematical algorithms that are held in common between these various systems, a entire new science of complexity starts to emerge. As it stands, the research of complex systems is a formidable movement that only continues to grow in relevance.

So what is it exactly that makes a system complex? Possibly the most important point to understand about complex systems is that by nature, they build themselves automatically from the bottom-up. By this I mean that each component part (or "agent") within a complex system carries within itself a set of instructions that gives it the ability to collaborate with others like itself to create discernible, entirely new structures. These novel configurations cannot be traced to the actions of a single agent; it is only through the flurry of interaction among many different agents that larger patterns emerge and a purposeful, functioning system is created.

The opposing view, that systems are "top-down", sees a system organized with a single authority at the center, which hands instructions directly down to each and every agent of the system. This basically means there is one master entity that runs the whole show, and that lesser agents of the system act as slaves to its every whim. While a top-down view of systems has been common within classical schools of thought for the last several hundred years, whether it's science, politics, or economics, this model doesn't accurately describe any system in nature.

For example, the queen in a bee colony, unlike her nominal counterparts in traditional human aristocracies, does not dictate how worker bees should interact with one other, or how they should react to threats and conditions outside of the hive. The queen's sole purpose is to reproduce en masse, providing the colony with its next generations of bees. So instead of awaiting instructions from the queen bee, worker bees communicate with one another using pheromones and body language. Through these simple chemical and bodily-linguistic interactions, the operations of the hive emerge naturally.

Say an outside force, such as a bear or a skunk, is threatening a hive. Only a few bees might initially notice the attacker and take flight, but this small action might be just enough to catalyze a formidable response. Other workers that see and receive pheromone signals from their local constituents will join in the effort to defend the hive. As more workers take flight, an ever-increasing number of their counterparts also begin to mobilize, creating a cascading response that quickly forms a swarm- a wholly new complex system, that has a much better chance of taking on the attacker than any single bee ever could. The swarm phenomenon is the result of what's called a self-reinforced positive feedback loop.

Feedback in a complex system works very similarly to audio feedback, which might remind you of a botched high school theater performance, where an actor carried his microphone a bit too close to the auditorium speakers. In this situation, the amplified voice of the performer was continually looped from the speakers back into the microphone, making the sound louder with each pass through the system and turning a single word of dialogue into giant roar-causing audience members to clap their hands over their ears in agony.

In the case of the beehive, feedback takes the form of reinforced body language and pheromone signals (as opposed to sound waves) which serve to recruit more and more bees, quickly transforming a hive's nectar-gathering operations into a furious swarm. In both the theater scenario and the beehive, a small signal becomes amplified, pushing outward and then looping back in upon itself. The signal is reinforced again and again until it reaches a massive critical state in which it is capable of causing a large shift within the system.

Another great example of a system that spontaneously emerges due to feedback can be found in sports stadiums around the world. This is the phenomenon known as The Wave. The Wave is formed when spectators spontaneously stand up in succession, section by section, forming a wave-like motion of synchronized crowd movement that ripples in a circular pattern around the the stadium. As it continues, it picks up more and more participants until it reaches a critical mass, where nearly the entire audience is involved in the effort. While they are formed for completely different purposes (entertainment vs survival), the driving principles behind both The Wave and the swarm of bees are identical. Participants in The Wave reinforce the social behavior of their fellow spectators by mimicking their movements, just as bees reinforce each others' actions in a swarm.

Feedback and cascading behavior in the case of The Wave and swarms of bees are generally favorable outcomes of a system (with the exception of some countries where The Wave is illegal). In other systems however, positive feedback loops are not quite so favorable. The word "positive" when referring to feedback within complex systems simply indicates cumulative, compounding actions. It is not necessarily expressive of an amicable outcome for any parties observing or involved. In fact, feedback responses can be downright detrimental to the system.

For instance, in economics, a stock market is created by corporations and individuals who invest in shares of various different companies. The investing entities, through incredibly simple transactions, have the ability to create and sustain the operations of the market. Like the bees in our swarm or spectators participating in The Wave, investors act as the agents within this particular type of economic system. As long as the agents continue to do their jobs (buy and sell stocks in this case) the system continues to propagate.

However, if large factions of investors change their behavior due to shaky external economic conditions and sell all of their holdings in the market, a feedback loop is thus created which could - if conditions were right - trigger a panicked cascade of sell-offs by thousands of additional investors, causing the entire market value to plunge. This is precisely the behavior that ripped through world financial markets in late 2008 and early 2009. It was certainly not a favorable outcome for most of us who were invested in the market, but it was nevertheless the inevitable result of a devastated real estate market and frivolous practices by lending institutions, combined with the natural sensitivity that comes along with every complex economic system.

This is the two-sided coin of complex systems. While a system can yield serious benefits to agents inside and outside of itself, it also has built into it the seeds of its own destruction. It is for this same reason that the cells within the human immune system can quickly change from protecting the body from pathogens, to attacking healthy cells, as is the case with autoimmune diseases like diabetes and multiple sclerosis. It is also why human beings can nationalize and choose to go to war against other nations, while under different circumstances they can choose to defect and revolt against their own governments. The stock market could just as easily have gone the other way and rallied in early 2009, were economic news astoundingly good. This is why we invest in the market at all- the possibility to grow our capital based on the success of the world economic system as a whole. It is however, always a gamble. The success or failure of a system is always subject to external conditions that can turn on a dime.

The general volatility of economic systems is an excellent illustration of the implicit sensitivity and dynamic behavior inherent within all complex systems. The tendency of a system to shift due to feedback loops and cascades, whether beneficial or detrimental to the system, is only possible with a substantial amount of flexibility built into the system, allowing it to adapt to large scale changes. Researchers describe this necessary state of complex systems as the edge of chaos. It is the state where a system is ordered enough to survive a fair amount of damage without collapsing, yet is fluid enough to adapt itself to shifting circumstances.

rival queen beesIn fact, the adaptive, decentralized nature of bottom-up complex systems is so robust that it can tolerate the removal of many agents without failing, even if that agent is one of the most critical players in the system. Let's look again into our beehive. If the queen bee is removed from the hive or is killed, worker bees immediately prepare several chambers already containing new larvae with royal jelly, effectively transforming the newborns into queens. When the multiple queens emerge from their pupal states, they fight each other to the death. The sole-surviving queen becomes the new reproductive center of the hive.

Similarly, human governments (while largely man-made structures) also have complex adaptive components that are set up in such a way that the operations of a given state can continue, even if the most powerful positions within the government are suddenly vacated. In the United States, if the president were to resign or be assassinated, there is a long line of successors set up to retain continuity of government. While shocks would inevitably ripple through the government's constituency - a socially disruptive response to such a drastic change in the nation's political power structure - the basic functions of the government would remain intact. For free democratic nations like the US, which are governed entirely by its own people, the government as a whole could technically be re-elected and re-formed overnight. The only thing that could effectively cause a democratic government to collapse would have to be a large scale popular revolution, a coup d'etat or a crushing military invasion by an external force.

And then there is the internet- a massive global network of computers and users that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If one or even several of these systems, whether home computers, mobile phones, or massive commercial servers were to go offline, chances are that barely anyone would even notice. Each machine on the net is a separate, independent entity, each generally drawing from a separate power source and many times participating from a vastly different geographical location. Only after the loss of a major web-based service or telecommunications network would users really start to notice. Because of this fact, the internet remains one of the most robust and powerful complex adaptive systems of its size and scale on the planet. It is highly decentralized, dynamic, densely interconnected, adaptable to major failures and most importantly of all, it is built on the backs of a multitude of some of the most able complex systems in existence: human beings. The internet is an immaculate expression of human cooperation and solidarity.

Human beings and most other purely natural systems arose over millions of years out of the processes of evolution and natural selection. Evolution is perhaps the clearest example of how natural systems emerge from the bottom up, and how they are able to grow in complexity over time. It is partly the layered nature of complex organisms that allows them to survive and persist through difficult times. However, the organisms who are able to persist the longest are not necessarily the most rigidly built, but are rather the most versatile. Our versatility combined with our ability to participate in and influence other complex systems leaves us with enough flexibility to constantly adapt and to deal with the inevitable change and upset that random natural events constantly provide for us. Thus the innate complexity of our organic human structure - courtesy of evolution and natural selection - is in essence, who we are. It's the reason we are here at all.

It's difficult to view the immense structural complexity of the human organism and not feel awed at its magnificence. We were all once just a few molecules, that through simple interactions managed to coordinate and gradually build ourselves into incredibly complex, self-sustained organic systems. Our bodily systems are a marvel of the complexifying processes of evolution, woven intricately together and acting with enough synchrony to keep our lungs breathing, our blood pumping, our brains thinking and our hands creating.

Yet at the same time we are a complete mess. We fight with one another, we steal, we cheat, we disrupt everything around us. In fact, we're probably the most destructive species to ever walk the face of the Earth. But this all comes with the territory. We are each our own complex adaptive system, and we walk through life on a thin line between order and chaos, constantly brushing up against and trudging directly through other complex systems. If we take any action on the planet at all, we can't help but disrupt it. And at any moment, any number of these other systems could shift drastically, leading to great fortune or an even greater catastrophe for us. Such are the complex lives we bear.

I think what struck me the most during my foray into complexity was the exposure to the idea that we live in a world of sheer dynamism- one where configurations and circumstances, as stable as they may seem, are shifting constantly. When I started my Becoming journey back in January of 2008, many monumental transformations were taking place. There was a large shift in political power occurring within the US government, fuel prices were skyrocketing due to feared supply shortages from the rapid growth of newly industrializing nations, and a massive economic crisis was just getting revved up.

So you might imagine why the rationalist philosophical ideal of a fundamental harmony within a mathematically discernible, stable universe seemed completely absurd, in light of the unpredictable morass I saw rife throughout the world around me. It wasn't until I'd studied complexity that I could effectively banish any remaining hints of the mythical notion of some kind of innate stability and equilibrium within nature from my explorations. I never expected that I could actually be comfortable, let alone be at peace with a world that was fundamentally in flux. This was most likely the reason why rationalism and scientific exactitude was so appealing to me at the beginning of my journey. But with a little help from quantum physics, philosophy of mind and complexity, I could now view the world from a wholly different and much more realistic platform.

So where to go from here? First and foremost I needed to address the implications of a reality that is ceaselessly shifting and fundamentally amorphous. Unfortunately the Ancient Greeks didn't have a whole lot to say on this type of natural configuration, save a few surviving Fragments from my old pal Heraclitus, who was abruptly sidelined early on when I decided to follow Pythagoras and the long procession of rationalists that succeeded him instead. While Heraclitus's works were vindicated by these new discoveries of mine, there wasn't enough depth within The Fragments to form any kind of coherent world view- that is, without supplementing them with a serious amount of speculation.

Luckily there was another entirely different group of philosophers who spoke authoritatively on the subject of a constantly changing, unpredictable, even paradoxical reality, just around the same time as Heraclitus, whose works - quite unlike Heraclitus's - were celebrated and revered in their time, and remain well-preserved to this day. But in order to explore such philosophies, we must leave the Greeks behind and look East- to the thinkers of Ancient China.

Bibliography:

Hofstadter, Douglas R. I Am A Strange Loop Basic Books, 2008

Miller, John H. and Scott E. Page Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life Princeton University Press, 2007

Mitchell, Melanie Complexity: A Guided Tour Oxford University Press, 2009

Simon, Herbert A "The Architecture of Complexity" from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 106, No. 6. (Dec 12, 1962) p. 467-482

Waldrop, M. Mitchell Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos Simon and Shuster, 1992

Philosophy of Mind (Becoming, Part 3)

In the late 1920s, quantum physicist Neils Bohr, alongside some of his closest colleagues, helped to define what came to be called the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. It was developed at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, and was designed specifically to deal with the probabilistic and counterintuitive results from quantum experiments that had been performed throughout the Western world during the previous few decades. The goal of the Interpretation was to define, before the field went any further, how science was to digest such strange experimental results for the future of professional science. The Interpretation therefore dictated the removal of any and all speculation about the "reasons why" of QM, in the interest of "just getting down to the science of it." Observational data drawn from quantum experiments, however paradoxical, stood.

Enter the Quantum (Becoming, Part 2)

I ended 2008 casting skeptical eye on Rationalism, and its ideology of a fundamental, mathematically harmonious universe. Plato's ideal of the mathematician as purveyor of "divine" language just didn't sit well with me. So I was forced to look elsewhere, to perhaps provide a more satisfying explanation for my day-to-day experience of harmony while walking through the city.

I pushed away thoughts of anything "divine" and purely speculative philosophy, and instead focused on modern science, and its studies of time and space. Admittedly I was inspired by the new season of the tv show Lost, and their new plot trajectory, which featured certain members of the cast jumping back and forth through time. The show over the last several seasons had persistent references to Stephen Hawking and his book A Brief History of Time, so I felt it was a good time investigate him further.

It wasn't long after reading bits and pieces of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe in a Nutshell, as well as watching/listening to several interviews with Brian Greene (author of The Elegant Universe), that I encountered String Theory full-force. String Theory attempts to bridge the gap between Quantum Mechanics and Albert Einstein's Theories of Special and General Relativity, which in turn fulfills the ultimate dream of Einstein himself: to formulate a theory that explains all matter that exists in the universe. This is commonly referred to as the Theory of Everything (TOE). The TOE remains the veritable holy grail of the physics community.

String Theory hypothesizes that the fundamental building blocks of matter are tiny vibrating strings of energy, which could explain the strange behaviors behind quantum particles. Fresh off of my Music Listening course, my interest was sparked by string theory's concept that perhaps the universe could be understood through what is essentially "music", created by these theoretical strings vibrating at different frequencies.

But before I could understand string theory fully, and staying loyal to my normal disposition to make things as difficult as possible on myself, I needed to know more about both Einstein's Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, the aforementioned two disciplines within physics that string theory attempts to combine. Luckily the Teaching Company once again had just what I needed: a twenty-four lecture audio course on just those two subjects. 

After about a month of Relativity/Quantum Mechanics lectures, I was already sufficiently fried by Einstein's extreme and historic break away from classical physics as defined by Issac Newton (and all prior assumptions about gravity and the nature of space and time), when the quantum world had swooped in immediately thereafter and pulverized any remaining semblance of the universe as a harmonious or rational/logical place.

Quantum Mechanics attempts to describe the behavior of subatomic particles. The types of subatomic particles that make up the quantum landscape are so numerous, some refer to it as the quantum particle "zoo".

I'm sure you've heard the terms protons, neutrons, and electrons from your basic science classes in junior high school. You may have even heard of Quarks before (a name derived from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Quarks are particles that combine with each other to make up protons and neutrons, the two types of particles that in turn make up the nucleus of the atom. There are not one, but SIX different kinds of Quarks, that are named based on their propensity to behave in certain ways. They are (get ready): Up and Down, Top and Bottom, Charmed and Strange Quarks. Weird names, right? Others you may not have heard about (but do most certainly exist) are Mesons, Leptons, Gluons, Neutrinos, Tau-Neutrinos, Muons, Electron-Neutrinos and on and on. 

The erratic behaviors of this "zoo" of subatomic particles, over the last hundred years or so have been proven by scientists to define most of what are considered to be the fundamental forces in the universe. These include electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear force, and gravity. Gravity is the least understood of the forces on a subatomic level, hence the problem of resolving Einstein's theory of General Relativity with Quantum Theory. If Gravity could be defined by a Quantum particle, it would be called a Graviton, but as of yet, no Gravitons have been discovered. The Higgs-Boson, the so-called "master" or "God Particle" (the search for which is one of the key endeavors of CERN, the multi billion physics facility in Switzerland), is supposedly responsible for determining the masses of all other particles, per what is called the Standard Model of particle physics.

Beyond the comical and sometimes confusing naming conventions of quantum particles, there are certain behaviors that each of these particles perform, that are not only odd, but are so outlandish, even to the point of being paradoxical, and defy our very sense of logical reality. Quantum behavior is so unpredictable it can never be measured with any level of precision.

Normally if you want to measure something's position and velocity, you use a classical Newtonian view of the human-level physical world. The particles in this sense are like billiard balls, bouncing off of each other as well the walls of a billiard table. Their position and velocity are predictable, because the initial energy put into them (say a person hitting the cue ball with a cue) stays constant.

However at the quantum level, these "classical" rules break down. The movement of quantum particles is only probabilistic, meaning their position and velocity are not simultaneously measurable. The more you focused on measuring its position, the less the accurate your measurement would be for its velocity.

Worse, the behavior of particles in quantum mechanics can be paradoxically defined in two different ways, as either a discrete stream of particles or as a wave. Rigorous experiments have proven that our observation of quantum particle behavior, in itself defines whether the behavior is particle-like or a wave-like. Left unobserved, the resulting quantum behavior is wave-like, and observed, it is particle-like, as if somehow it knows we are watching it. Like I said before- rational explanations must be completely thrown out to understand the quantum world.

Below is an excerpt from the film What the Bleep do We Know? However cheese-ball the film's execution might have been, it's a great explanation of the famous two-slit experiment and the resultant mysterious quantum particle/wave conundrum.

If you'd like a better illustration of the quantum paradox on a somewhat more human level, one needs to look no further than the amusing thought experiment known as Schröedinger's Cat, originally devised by Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1933.

As you can see, quantum mechanics doesn't make sense in the face of a logical, causal world we believe ourselves to be in. On the quantum level, all logic breaks down. It is erratic, non-deterministic, and just downright strange.

Just a few years prior to the mainstream study of quantum mechanics, Einstein had defined his theories of Relativity and was already an established legend within the scientific community. He had an extremely difficult time believing the results of quantum experiments, and stated several times that there must be an error in the form of measurement that scientists were using, to produce such absurd and seemingly counter- intuitive results.

Another fascinating quantum behavior is called Quantum Entanglement. With Entanglement, two particles in completely different places, react in the same exact way to modification. So if a scientist were to affect some kind of change on one particle, another "entangled" particle would react as if it were directly influenced, even though it was never technically "touched". Here's another clip from What the Bleep that can further explain this.

Einstein was extremely put off by the experimental data that revealed Quantum Entanglement behavior. He referred to Entanglement as "Spooky action at at distance". To him there was no way that two particles could ever interact with each other without a visible transfer of energy between the two. The explanation would have to be supernatural, if not mystical. Therefore Einstein considered it to be scientifically invalid.

Despite Einstein's gripes, the results stood. Entanglement and other quantum behaviors are some of the most rigorously tested in all of the history of science. Einstein admitted at one point that was had spent approximately 600 times longer trying to resolve quantum theory than time he spent formulating Relativity.

After digesting these lectures (and repeating several of them) I shared Einstein's skepticism. When learning about Relativity Theory, there's a learning curve to be sure, but it was still based on LOGIC. The quantum world as a whole just didn't make any sense in comparison. No matter how many times it was explained to me, I continued to wonder how reality could on a subatomic level be so illogical? It was in complete opposition to everything I'd ever known about science.

In the interest of retaining the momentum of my studies, I decided to brush myself off and push ahead towards string theory, as I had planned before I was assaulted by The Quantum. I was extremely disappointed to discover how simplistic string theory now seemed in its relation to the quantum world. I couldn't help but see the parallels between this situation and how the Rational thinkers of antiquity first looked in the face of Chaos. I felt string theory's attempt to define the behavior of quantum particles with such radical mathematical concepts, using multiple virtual dimensions that rely on undetectable particle partners proved it far too insubstantial to ever be a contender for the Theory of Everything. Useful mathematics to be sure- but incomplete. Too many missing pieces, and too much abstraction. I felt like string theorists had gotten lost in their own equations.

In sum, 2009 began with another swift kick to the gut. Everything I had studied and invested myself in the previous year in an attempt to reinforce the idea that we live in a harmonious or even logical universe, was annihilated in twenty-four, half-hour lectures. I couldn't lie to myself. The game had changed, and needed to be reassessed. But instead of sitting down and writing a thoughtful essay or blog post to more deeply explore these ideas, integrating into the paradigm- I chose to fight against it. There had to be a more meaningful existence than modern science was able to offer us- a complete, logical explanation for the fundamental operations of the universe, as opposed to the random bumping around of oddly-named particles of energy. Or waves. (!)

What I realized is that in the expulsion of metaphysics from my studies and my pursuit of quantum mechanics and string theory at the furthest reaches of modern science, I again found myself in the midst of disciplines that required philosophy to come to terms with them. Not only philosophy, but philosophy completely different than I had yet encountered, with twice as many new questions as the ones I had originally sought to answer, such as: 

• Can something really exist in two places at once?
• Can something behave differently, depending purely on the observation of it?
• Does the question "What is the Theory of Everything?" even make sense???
• Is the world presented by quantum physics the most "fundamental", or is there something different, like string theory, that lies yet beneath?

I was getting nowhere, digging into this seemingly infinite regress of reductionist science. If quantum mechanics is defined by the perception and observation of the human mind- then what exactly is the human "mind" that is so powerful as to define reality itself? For that matter, what is consciousness? Where does it come from? Is it just small bits of electricity surging through a hunk of meat in our heads, or is it something more, something truly "divine" as the Rationalists declared? There was only one place to go from here...

Music of the Spheres - The Journey Begins (Becoming, Part 1)

On one particular sunny weekday in the Fall of 2007 I ascended the subway staircase to the surface of Market Street at Powell and began my daily morning walk through Yerba Buena Gardens to the South of Market district of San Francisco where I work.

Maybe it was Mozart's Requiem blaring in my headphones, or maybe I was in a particularly placid mood that day, but as I walked on the street, it felt like time had slowed down just slightly. There was a light wind in the air and as I walked with my fellow downtown commuters around me, I started to feel this overwhelming peace come over me. I felt like I was part of this great organism that was San Francisco, floating along like a gentle stream. The light was beautiful. The cold air coming into my lungs felt somehow nourishing. I felt like I belonged there, and my whole existence harmonized with the city. It was as if I could feel myself moving through time.

When I got to work I immediately pounded out a quick email to myself describing my experience. I wrote things like "I walked in the sunshine, on stars, in harmony with the city." It was as close as I've ever been to what I guess you could call a "mystical" experience. And it wasn't just once- it started to happen more and more often. I decided to dig deeper.

My first instinct was to do internet searches, typing in things like "city harmony", "universal harmony" and "city symphony". Of course what I found were the usual suspects of bad Youtube video projects as well as squishy new-age message boards, boasting conversations about star constellation alignments and crystal energies, that as a rational person I couldn't bring myself to believe. Nothing I found satisfied me. Fearing that bringing it up in normal conversation would have the same airy backlash as my internet searches, I decided to keep my experiences a secret, and just enjoy them for what they were.

In January of 2008 I stumbled upon my first audio course from The Teaching Company, Intro to Greek Philosophy at the SF Public library. The lectures were fantastic, and totally eye opening for me. The philosophies that stuck out the most were those of Heraclitus of Epheseus, and Pythagoras of Samos, both of whom were philosophers before the time of Socrates, now commonly known as the Presocratics. The basic writings of the two philosophers were the closest I'd heard that could verbally explain the harmony I experienced while walking through the city.

Heraclitus, as I've mentioned many times in past blog posts, believed the fundamental nature of the universe was flux, ever changing and flowing like a river, which reminded me of the liquid-like sensation of my experience. Pythagoras on the other hand talked about something that was even more intriguing to me at the time, what he called "Music of the Spheres". He believed that the stars, the planets (the spheres), and everything on earth was "made of number," meaning the entire universe could be expressed most fundamentally in the language of mathematics, which to him was synonymous with the language of music.

I started checking out library books like "The Pythagorean Sourcebook", "The Music of Pythagoras", and "The Art and Thought of Heraclitus". While all of them were interesting, Pythagoras's studies of music and his experimentation with musical scales was more thoroughly engaging of the two. Most importantly, instead of off-handed metaphysical statements about the nature of the universe, Pythagoras's philosophies figured in directly with modern mathematics and music theory, fields that had developed over the last 2500 years, and were still heavily relevant in our culture and academia.

As the year wore on I started getting up an hour early to listen to the lectures and take notes. Eventually the lectures became a part of my daily morning routine, as regular as my cup of tea or my walk down from Powell Street Station into SoMa. I borrowed more and more from the library; classes on science, ancient history, and music. I eventually ended up exhausting the SF Public Library as a resource and instead had to resort to browsing The Teaching Company's website, and buying the classes directly from them, to quench my ever-growing thirst for knowledge.

As I progressed through the History of Science classes in particular, Pythagoras's ideas about the fundamental mathematical harmony of the universe came up again and again. As I learned, the idea was heavily influential to the philosophies of Plato around 350 BCE, rode the sharp upward and downward trajectories of the Roman Empire through the earliest parts of the 1st Millenium C.E, survived through the Dark Ages, was re-kindled during the Renaissance, and eventually became Rationalism, the base philosophies of Rene Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I ate all of this up, seeing it as the most logical explanation of the experience I'd had. And not only was this idea common- it was a major historical, philosophical, and scientific movement. Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Liebniz and Kant joined Pythagoras as my new league of patron saints. I read everything by them I could find, and even if I had NO IDEA what they were talking about, I was elated to read through and try to decipher them.

In the Fall of 2008, a full year after my first harmonic experience, my renewed interest in popular science led me to WNYC's Radiolab, a science-centric public radio show that "isn't afraid to ask the big questions". I downloaded podcasts about Time, Sleep, Music, Memory, Laughter, and Stress. But the one that really stood out from the rest was one called "Emergence". I'd never heard the term before used to describe a scientific phenomena, but the implications of Emergence really knocked my socks off. The first part of the episode was interview with a man named Steve Strogatz, a mathematics professor from Cornell University, who discussed how fireflies in certain parts of the world were able to somehow blink in synchrony, rather than the random on and off patterns those of us who have seen fireflies in North America are used to.

As the show progressed, the hosts described more and more examples group behaviors within nature that seemed to "emerge" spontaneously from the bottom up, rather than being commanded by some top-down over arching authority. They were like armies without generals. This podcast so profoundly interested me, it diverted me from my other studies of science and philosophy I had going on at the time. Eventually I discovered that Professor Strogatz had not only written an entire book on this spontaneous synchrony, but he had also just released a Teaching Company class on a field that tied in closely to emergent phenomena: Chaos Theory. (for more on my experience with Chaos and Emergence, please refer to my Chaos blog post)

I immediately bought the lectures on Chaos and completed the whole course in only two and a half weeks time. What I derived most from the course was a thorough analysis of various complex phenomena in our ever-noisy world, and the sense that within this seemingly chaotic behavior, discernible patterns tended to emerge. However, in chaos math, as the numbers of variables that describe this behavior increases, the system quickly becomes too complex to follow.

I slowly came to the realization that the natural world in general was far more complex that I had imagined, and that even our most advanced mathematics seemed impotent in the face of such complexity. The champions of Rationalism believed that the universe was built out of more simple things than our senses allowed us to see, and only through the divine language of mathematics could we rationally discover the more essential world that was beyond our perception.

Over the previous months, having closely followed the history of science throughout the ages, and learned of the multiple failures of mathematics to describe the natural world, it became obvious to me that the rational and idealistic philosophies that I was using to support my "harmonic city" theory had quite a few nasty holes in them. Was the experience I'd had the result of inherent mathematical harmony in the universe, or was it something completely different and unrelated? I was leaning more towards the latter, but either way, Pythagoras didn't seem like as sage-like as I had originally believed he was. Whatever my experience was, if mathematics weren't the answer, I still felt strongly that it had something to do with music.

So I rounded out 2008 with a 48-lecture series by the zany Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music called "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music." Oddly enough, in the first lecture of the class, Professor Greenberg clearly made his opinion known, that music and mathematics were unresolvable. To him mathematics was mathematics, and music was music. They were very separate things that took place in different realms, and never the twain shall meet.

This dealt the final blow to Rationalism for me, at least in reference to my experience. I decided to set aside my metaphysical inquiries and just enjoy the class. It was nice to kick back and end the year with such a rewarding introduction to great musical composers like Liszt, Haydn, Brahms, Mahler and Verdi.

As 2008 drew to a close, I was disappointed that I hadn't found my answers, but in the process I had been armed with enough general philosophical and scientific knowledge to continue the journey in the coming year. I felt like any future explorations would be a decidedly more rigorous and educated confrontation of this complex world we live in. But nothing I had learned in the entire previous year could have prepared me for what came next...

Introduction to Becoming

I first heard about the concept of Becoming during my Intro to Greek Philosophy class nearly two years ago. Becoming was provided in contrast to the concept of Being, which has largely pervaded Western culture for the last 2500 years. Two of the famous Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers represented these two separate ideas- Parmenides supporting Being and Heraclitus supporting Becoming.

Parmenides' view of Being posited that everything is static; a single, permanent, unchanging, fundamental reality. Being was later favored by Socrates, followed by Plato and then Aristotle, and by way of Aristotle it was disseminated throughout the ages. The concept of Being has been pondered, debated, challenged, and reaffirmed in its various forms by scientists, philosophers, linguists, and religious thinkers alike. Ultimately, Being is the most common Western (and for a substantial portion, Eastern) view of reality. For example, the statement "The world IS" is a statement of the world as a being or thing, as are the statements "I AM," "The chair IS," and so on.

Heraclitus held the completely opposite philosophical view, Becoming, or what is more modernly referred to as Process Philosophy. As Heraclitus saw it, everything in the universe was in an indeterminate state of flux - always changing - and that this change was inevitable and the only real constant. While Being saw reality as a series of objects and substances, goals and destinations, Becoming saw reality as dynamic, impermanent, chaotic, and ceaseless.

Becoming weaved its way throughout the next two millenia within the Western intellectual canon, in direct parallel with Being, always in the shadows. It eventually became a favored philosophy of such figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, William James, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, and Alfred North Whitehead. Throughout each of these philosophers' respective bodies of work, many of them refer back to Heraclitus as their primary influence for this idea, especially Nietzsche.

Over the last two years, having come across this philosophy again and again in the various academic courses I've taken, or books that I've delved into, I've been made aware of my own process of Becoming. To ask the question "Becoming WHAT?" is to miss the point, and simply exposes our cultural, psychological, possibly even religious marriage to the concept of Being. Nietzsche built upon Heraclitus's assertion of Becoming, saying that we should view this inherent change throughout our lives, not as a difficulty to struggle against, or something that has set out to weaken us, but something we should embrace and use as a means to become more powerful individuals. Each subsequent change is therefore not a detriment, but is rather a meaningful progression of who we are.

So here I will recount for you, in several installments, what has become my great philosophical, scientific, and spiritual journey of the last two years. What started out as a few simple questions of how to better explain my day-to-day human experiences in more meaningful terms, quickly snowballed into a series of profound encounters, all of which have completely changed the way that I look at the world and my life.

Welcome to Becoming. I hope you enjoy!