A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 11 of 50)

[This is Part 11 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 10 here.]

As Value and Action are always mingling inseparably, anything which can be considered a basic unit of our reality must in some sense reflect their ongoing dramatic union. That said, some of the units we will discuss tend to emphasize certain domains of that reality—whose absolute first principle, we know, is the Good. And there are other units which could have been included, and in other contexts will certainly still be useful. However, in this discussion of complexity and what it teaches us about how to face a metacrisis and how to be metarevolutionary, these units are highly instructive. Further, we will see if we can find a unit which is most fundamental, in the same way as the Good when compared to other possible first principles.

Our goal, altogether, is to see reality from the most simple (reductionist) perspective, the most complex (holistic) perspective, and from every perspective between the two. A world such as ours, with patterns which are discernible (but nimble in their elusiveness), invites one to take on as many perspectives as possible, and strive with useful futility towards the ultimate synthesis. In that gratifying failure, we are faced with insurmountable complexity—precisely because it forever stays a step ahead of our own complexity as systems attempting to understand other systems. In order to build our view of the “very simple” end, we need units whose combination and dynamic interaction are sufficient to describe all of reality.

We have already said that action is the basis of all physically-quantifiable aspects of this reality. And this action is quantized as Planck’s constant (“h”). We can derive all kinds of other quantities/units from what are called “universal constants” or “physical constants”.

Frank Wilczek: “In 1899 Max Planck proposed what he called a system of absolute units, based on the speed of light (c), Newton’s gravitational constant (G), and his newly minted quantum of action [h]… Upon adopting those units as standards, one can express any physical quantity.”

So, it can be argued that all we truly need are these basic variables. All of the following units could potentially be expressed with just the “constants” of nature. But we are striving to understand every layer of the actuality which is built up from action, and so we will see that there are unique insights in each of the units we will explore. Further, as fundamental as action is, we have argued that the Good is still more fundamental. A quantum of action must, therefore, contain value—and, by extension, there must be a unit of value-in-action.

 a. States

States - in general

States are one of the most straightforward ways to “quantize” complex systems, and to measure complexity. States convey the number of possibilities of a complex system at any given time. This doesn’t make complexity just a quantitative phenomenon—we will see in more detail later that change in quantity leads to change in quality, and change in quality leads to change in quantity. A human brain, quantitatively, has more (neuronal) states than the brain of a fish, but it is also qualitatively different as a coherent whole. The complex system of the mind has properties which the individual neurons do not. 

So when we talk about states, we are expressing a quantitative and qualitative aspect of complex systems. There are many kinds of states composing our web of existence: A person has healthy vital states such as heartbeats-per-minute; the person enters a car which has a range of speed states which it can visit; the car drives down roads which limit the number of geographical states the car can occupy, and the driver acts according to laws which limit the activation of certain states like “speeding”; and the car’s emissions combine with those of other cars and changes the state of the biosphere.

All of these states can also be called “variety”. Greater variety of states means greater complexity. Life happens when variety is dynamically balanced with order; where entropic heat energy is at the extreme end of variety, and a crystal is at the extreme end of order, humans and other living systems operate in the precarious middle.

States, as coexisting units of a complex system, can become “activated” or “deactivated”. In one of the simplest possible examples, a light switch may occupy one of its two states corresponding to “on” and “off”. This is a highly mechanical (deterministic) state-switching process which nonetheless hints at the more complex (spontaneous) state-switching mechanisms of humans, cities, or other complex unities. Later, for example, we will explore a state-switching process known as a Markov chain (or Markov process). 

States - in a metacrisis

When crises are viewed as states or elements of a metacrisis, each individual crisis increases the variety/complexity of that whole system. From the human perspective, complexity in this domain is maladaptive: The presence of any new crisis makes it more difficult to adequately address any other crisis in that system. As the variety of possible states increases in a metacrisis, it becomes more and more likely that those seeking to address any single crisis will do so with unforeseen results rippling through the rest of the system. 

Simply: When the complexity of problems is greater than the complexity of the problem-solvers, problems get worse. This demand on life to overcome potentially life-threatening complexity in its environment was called the “Law of Requisite Variety” by Ross Ashby, and we will attempt to incorporate this as the dictum: Whenever possible, make choices which increase the variety of action-centers in order to match or exceed the variety of the problem being addressed.

States - in a metarevolution

The Law of Requisite Variety (or the metarevolutionary dictum we derive from it) relates to the complexity of any system, and places a demand on actions within that system. Effective action must be more complex (in its available states) than that to which the action is addressed. To achieve a world that does not have collapse built into its design, there must at least be sufficient variety to absorb the variety that destabilizes us. 

Stafford Beer: “What is it that controls variety? The answer is dead simple: variety. Variety absorbs variety, and nothing else can.”

Ross Ashby: “[And] a species continues to exist primarily because its members can block the flow of variety (thought of as disturbance) to the gene-pattern, and this blockage is the species’  most fundamental need.”

Bobby Azarian: “Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety is a principle from cybernetics that tells you something about the computational sophistication of an agent's internal model… An organism must have a repertoire of states that is at least equal to the number of different challenges or disturbances presented by its environment, and it gives us a mathematical explanation of why this principle must also be true… We can describe it in terms of entropy: the more possible states the cognitive system can be in, the higher the entropy, and presumably, the higher the intelligence. In this application, entropy is not a measure of disorder but a measure of cognitive bandwidth.”

As a planet, we have hit an ascending, nonlinear curve in complexity due to the globalization of politics and economics, the abundance of information made possible by the internet, and the ongoing development of artificial intelligence and other technology. Even the amazing human brain can no longer keep up with this complexity, which means that metarevolutionaries are oriented towards the complexification of action-centers (which may include ourselves, our governments, or humanity as a whole), and meeting the demands of the Law of Requisite Variety.

Ross Ashby: “In this matter I do not think enough attention has yet been paid to Shannon’s Tenth Theorem or to the simpler ‘Law of Requisite Variety’ in which I have expressed the same basic idea. Shannon’s theorem says that if a correction-channel has capacity H, then equivocation of amount H can be removed, but no more. Shannon stated his theorem in the context of telephones or similar communication, but the formulation is just as true of a biological regulatory channel trying to exert some sort of corrective control. He thought of the case with a lot of message and a little error; the biologist faces the case where the ‘message’ is small but the disturbing errors are many and large. The theorem can then be applied to the brain (or any other regulatory and selective device), when it says that the amount of regulatory or selective action that the brain can achieve is absolutely bounded by its capacity as a channel… [For example,] a certain insect has an optic nerve of a hundred fibers, each of which can carry twenty bits per second; is this sufficient to enable it to defend itself against ten distinct dangers, each of which may, or may not, independently, be present in each second?”

Anil K. Seth: “[Simply then, the Law of Requisite Variety] states that a successful control system must be capable of entering at least as many states as the system being controlled: ‘only variety can force down variety’ [says Ashby].”

This makes the separation between the revolutionary and metarevolutionary more clear. Revolutionary (or heroic) change is associated with the timely exploration of unknown or repressed domains, whether geographic or psychic, and the effective integration of that content into oneself and one’s society. Coming at just the right moment, as demanded by the crisis at hand, the revolutionary person elicits a moment of nonlinear change, or transformational experience, in the world. To do all this is to take part in the rhythm of life, in which crisis-complexity increases and living beings respond with an ever-expanding complexification, an expansion of consciousness, and a never-ending, imaginative self-overcoming. 

The metarevolutionary domain synthesizes all of these potential revolutionary actions into a coherent new whole—the purpose of which is to have the greatest-possible effect with the smallest amount of energy. A natural result of that endeavor is that we tend towards a maximally efficient use of the value-endowed energy. In other words, given a state-space including possible revolutionary change in various domains, the metarevolutionary orientation involves answering to the Law of Requisite Variety—and other principles of complexity—which tell us we are always in the business of making the most out of the least. We can continue to do this in a number of ways, which we will explore in the second half of the book. These issues lay beneath all political and revolutionary action.

b. Matter

Matter - in general

What we call “matter” is, at present, one of the most common “universal currencies” of reality. And material units such as particles or atoms are some of the familiar ways to quantify matter. They are understood as units which relate to material, graspable objects of the “physical world”. 

Leon Lederman: “What are the ultimate building blocks of matter? The Greek philosopher Democritus called the smallest unit the atomos (literally ‘not able to be cut’).”

The recent history of science tells a tale in which every “fundamental unit” of matter, at one time perceived as “not able to be cut”, was found to be highly complex, and made of something still more basic. 

Edgar Morin: “We realized that the atom was itself a very complex system, composed of a nucleus and electrons. Then the particle became the primary unit. Then we realized that particles were themselves phenomena that could be theoretically divided into quarks.”

Modern physics relies on the idea that there are actual quanta, such as quarks, which compose the universe. 

Jared Hendricks: “Quantum is a Latin word meaning ‘how much’. In quantum physics, the quantum describes the various discrete or distinct units of energy and matter that are predicted by or observed on microscopic level.”

In this paradigm, there is a so-called particle-wave duality. This is really the equivalent of the relative and absolute, or actuality and possibility, being coexisting parts of one reality, rather than “two worlds”. 

Vahid Ranjbar: "Werner Heisenberg, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, argued that the quantum state function for elementary particles should be understood as belonging to the realm of Plato’s idealized Forms."

So we may choose to address individual quanta (such as photons), or fields (like the electromagnetic field)—and would do best to keep both in our view at once. The fields are like the collection of strings on a universe-spanning guitar, and particles are what we call the plucking of exactly one point on a string. Particles, which spring forth as energetic excitations of fields, exist as unique notes played alongside the “music of the spheres”.

The most pressing question as we move forward is how all of these units relate to each other (which can be summarized as the attempt for a Grand Unified Theory), both ontologically and practically. 

Planck’s constant, the quantum of action, and units like quarks relate to our most fundamental understanding of matter—but that still does not tell us about the truly basic, most-fundamental unit of reality, because we are starting from the point of rejecting nihilistic materialism. 

Peter J. Lewis: “If the theory of quantum mechanics by itself doesn’t tell us how to conceive of the world behind the quantum phenomena, then it is up to us to construct such a conception.”

The present book has been written at a turning point in scientifically-informed worldviews. Something new beyond the reductionist-materialist paradigm is coming into view. It is strongly indicated by today’s complexity science that we must broaden our view to find our most fundamental units. And our attempt to overcome our meaning crisis and apply metarevolutionary change will rely on finding some other kinds of units which capture the complete picture of our actuality, which is a plenum whose first principle is the Good. Material units, useful though they are in limited domains, exalt Action and neglect Value.

Next to states (or variety), many people today take the position (with varying degrees of awareness) that there is nothing beyond the fields recognized by physics, or whatever unit is the quantized version of that field. In previous eras, it seemed obvious that the domain of the earthly material must be ontologically second to the domain of God—taken here to symbolize and mythologize the possibility of perfected love between Value and Action—i.e., the Good. So it is not just that people at the dramatic pivot point between the postmodern and metamodern eras are matter-oriented—we are also meaning-starved because we have removed Value from our worldviews and are left with lonely Action.

To understand where we are heading in the course of this book, it is important to see the contributions and limitations of science. Quantum physics and related areas of science like thermodynamics have much to teach us, and the view of reality as a plenum of physical quanta reveals much about our universe. But we will need to keep in mind that “science”, as Einstein once said, “without religion is lame, [and] religion without science is blind.” Or, stated otherwise, physics needs metaphysics, and vice versa; Action needs Value, and Value needs Action. The denial of either or both of these as real is what we have called nihilism. Thus, if we seek optimism, we must affirm the reality of the whole which embraces these parts. And that must include a truly “most basic” unit which is the physical-metaphysical building block of our first principle, the Good.

Matter - in a metacrisis

The material universe, and its units such as quarks, leptons, and bosons, form part of the substrate of any crisis. They exist as units which unite to form complex bodies or objects. They are, in fact, a point of focus in many of the crises which exist at the time of writing, such as those relating to environmental destruction and poverties relating to basic human needs. Matter remains centered in our views because of how it relates to our most basic survival needs as humans. A metacrisis must be approached as a coherent whole for it to make any sense, and so we must address material crises even as we seek to overcome the worldviews which say that material is all there is. Unavoidably, an empty stomach will occupy one’s mind whether one is a committed metaphysical optimist or not.

We can imagine certain trajectories, in our relation to the atomic world, already in progress. There is reason to believe that we will experience times of increasing abundance (as it pertains to material necessities such as food). Largely, the best way to understand what will happen in our relationship to material necessities, such as food and water, is through comparison to our next unit of complexity: “Bits” of information. In anticipation of that, it is enough to point out that information already does not evoke the same feeling of scarcity that material does (even if the real boundaries between the two are blurred). Information is abundant. If one learns a fact, it does not make it any harder for another to learn the same fact. 

And so, we will not get lost in a narrowly-utopian vision of the future as a progression towards material richness. Similarly, we are rejecting the underlying ontological orientation which would make one believe that there is nothing greater than the mastery of matter. At the same time, we can recognize that our current metacrisis contains crises which relate to our physical, material, environmental conditions. The idea behind our metarevolution is that sometimes the best way to resolve one crisis is by shifting our focus towards an even deeper crisis, which, as long as it persists, will fuel many others. Our attention is being directed at our meaning crisis, because it relates to metaphysical first principles, and acts as a deep crisis in relation to all others within our metacrisis. Resolving it will change crucial underlying conditions which would otherwise impede the resolution of other crises, such as the poverty and starvation still being experienced by much of the world. 

Matter - in a metarevolution

A revolutionary approach might absolutize material pursuits—in fact there have been actual revolutions predicated on exactly this. From our current vantage point, we can see how the oversimplified solutions found in typical revolutionary thinking (as part) are a form of violence against metarevolutionary coherence (as whole). 

A metarevolutionary approach would allow for, and conditionally encourage, the sort of abundance which makes it easier to meet our basic needs as humans. But it would place crises relating to poverty or scarcity or starvation within the framework of a metacrisis. Action which addresses any such crisis within a metacrisis must not globally externalize more harm than it reduces locally; and there must be no better use of energy available to the action-centers who may choose between possible energy transformations. Such metarevolutionary stratagems have the potential to guide all revolutionary and political change.

In later parts of our look into complex systems, we will see how evolution leads in the direction of greater complexity. This means that action quanta, as units of action-centers, will tend to become entwined in such a way that their patterns of organization tend to be both maintained and transcended. And we will look into the topic of finitude—i.e. that matter, energy, or other basic features of reality have an “arrow of time” which strictly distinguishes between formerly-possible and presently-possible states. This one-way road is, we will see, the very thing which negates the theory that we are living out a meaningless, blind, and absurd march towards complete disorder.

c. Bits

Bits - in general

A “bit” (a combination of “binary” and “digit”) is a unit of information in complex systems; and entropy, quantified in bits, is the fundamental measure of information. Finally, bits and entropy relate to probability or “surprise” (which has an exact definition, other than its colloquial meaning, that we will explore).

Let’s illustrate the formal idea of “information” and its units through a couple of simple games. Unless you are an unusually precocious kid reading this book, it’s probably been a while since you’ve played the game of “Telephone”, but the rules are simple enough to remember. Kids form a circle, and one of them starts off by thinking of a sentence to whisper in the ear of the next kid over. The goal is to transmit the message all the way around the circle and not have it altered along the way. It’s a fun challenge, because words are more difficult to distinguish when spoken at this low volume. 

The other game to keep in mind is known as “20 Questions”. One person thinks of a secret message—the name of a person, a place, an object, a kind of food, or anything. And a second person must guess, with less than 20 questions, what the message is. These are “yes/no” questions only, and you must carefully craft your inquiry to narrow down the possible messages as quickly as possible.  These two deceptively simple games are a useful starting point for understanding the key ideas of Information Theory, which we will need in order to make our leap from revolution to metarevolution.

Mark C. Taylor: “In their groundbreaking book The Mathematical Theory of Information, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver developed a notion of information that differs significantly from the common sense of the term. ‘The word ‘information’, in this theory,’ Weaver explains, ‘must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused with meaning.’… According to Shannon and Weaver, information, in the strict sense of the term, is inversely proportional to probability: the more probable something is, the less information it conveys; the less probable it is, the more information it conveys.” 

Kenneth M. Sayre: “Although ‘information’ may signify such different matters as notification, knowledge, or simply data, in any case the imparting of information is the reduction of uncertainty. ‘Information’ thus signifies the positive difference between two uncertainty levels.”

Mark C. Taylor: “Gregory Bateson clarifies this notion of information when he explains that ‘information is a difference that makes a difference.’”

This formal understanding of commonly-used words such as information, uncertainty, difference, and surprise is an important step towards understanding the principles of our metacrisis and what distinguishes it from a solitary crisis. 

Part of this view we are building is that information has units and can be measured exactly. As an analogy, imagine the electrical wires and water pipes within the walls of your home. Most of the time, you can go about your day using the lights and faucets without any issues. The house is designed to meet the average needs of the family—the pipes can carry a certain number of gallons-per-second, and the wires can carry a certain number of amps of electricity. Sometimes, however, one might notice that when someone is using the shower, and someone else is using the kitchen sink, and yet another person flushes a toilet, the water pressure at each of these outlets suddenly drops. Similarly, some of their household appliances use a lot of electricity, and occasionally adding just one extra device, like a hair-dryer, can trip the circuit breaker.

These are examples of channel capacity—if you seriously overload these wires and pipes, you’re likely to get fires and floods. And Shannon’s work on the science of information shows us that information channels are bounded in this same way. Whereas a water pipe’s capacity is measured in something like gallons-per-second, information’s channel capacity is measured in bits-per-second. The bandwidth of any information channel is measured by the channel capacity and the signal-to-noise ratio. Or, in other words, if we were speaking of how clean drinking-water reaches a home’s faucet, bandwidth would measure the size of the pipe while considering how many contaminating particles are present relative to the volume of water. Bandwidth is a hard limit for all information technologies—including computers, books, radios, eyes, brains, economic systems, and governments. 

Kenneth M. Sayre: “An information channel consists of two ensembles of statistically related events.  One is the input ensemble, consisting of events emanating from the source, or input. The other set is the output ensemble, consisting of events at the terminus, or output, that are to some extent indicative of occurrences within the input set… The relationship between input and output then may be described by a set of conditional probabilities, specifying for each output event the probability of its occurring in association with each input event… The only requirement for an information channel is the existence of a relationship between input and output by which the latter ensemble of events provides some indication of what occurs in the former. In its most general form, an information channel exists between any two ensembles related by conditional probabilities.”

A bit is a basic unit of measurement in Information Theory, and to ask how many bits of information are contained in a message is the same as asking how many “yes/no” questions it takes to narrow it down from the space of alternatives.

Think of Morse Code, a binary language of dots and dashes (or short and long sounds when the message is in the form of audio). At the start, and at each junction thereafter, the space of possible messages consists of just two choices, like “E” and “T” in this case, because Morse Code is designed to be efficient and these are the most common letters in English. 

So the code is essentially like the game of 20 Questions. The first question is “Is the letter ‘E’?”, to which a dot means “yes”, and a dash means “no” (in which case you know that the first letter is “T” instead of “E”). The  process is repeated to form strings of letters and words. And if you are viewing the image above on your computer or phone screen, the pixels themselves follow this same logic. The first question is: “Is the first pixel white?” If you answer enough of these binary questions, you can display any image imaginable.

So now we have a measure of information, and understand that it is measured in bits and is bounded by channel capacity and a signal-to-noise ratio. As the kids whisper in their game of Telephone, information is passed along multiple channels. Auditory information leaves the mouth of one child as sound waves which travel a short distance through the air before being picked up by the ears of another child. And these channels can inherently only carry a certain number of bits-per-second. The brain processes what it has just received through the ears, which places yet another limitation on the accuracy of the message.

Information channels must simultaneously transmit signal and noise. The more noisy a channel, the less signal it can faithfully transmit, because the two share a single channel capacity. Likewise, because kids playing Telephone are whispering, the ratio of noise tends to be higher due to the low level of that signal—which leads, of course, to a humorous distortion of the original message.

Benoit Mandelbrot: “For the layman, a noise is a sound that is too strong, has no pleasing rhythm or purpose, or interferes with more desirable sounds... The quality of transmission depends on the likelihood of error due to noise distortion, which depends, in turn, on the ratio between the intensities of signal and noise.”

In the context of online information channels, like social media platforms, inaccurate or malicious information is arguably the noise that competes for space with signal. In our current moment, the signal—everything we want to receive most clearly—is being drowned out by economically incentivized noise. And finding a trajectory towards a revitalized information ecosystem is just one of the challenges within our metacrisis.

Another useful measure, hertz (Hz), refers to the possible frequencies of a signal—as in the more familiar context of radio stations which are named for specific frequencies, like “101.5 WPDH—The Home of Rock and Roll”. A radio signal is transmitted at a certain frequency (measured in hertz), and your radio picks up the signal if it is tuned to that same frequency. For another example, computer companies may list the GHz (gigahertz) of their products because more GHz correlates with faster processing of information. Restated, this measure relates to the question: How many yes/no questions can be answered per second?

In the game of Telephone, the information that is transmitted has a high error rate—the comedy of this is really the point of the game. When you whisper, you are weakening the signal in relation to noise, and you are restricting the natural range of frequencies of the human voice. And kids may find through trial and error that the best way to counteract this is to whisper more slowly. Speaking slowly reduces the number of bits-per-second being transmitted, so the message is more likely to remain within the bounds of the channel capacity, and thus be conveyed without error.

Back to the other game, 20 Questions, we arrive at the ideas of entropy and the free-energy principle. With each question in the game, the number of possible messages gets smaller. Entropy tells us different things depending on the perspective we take. Simply, like bits or bits-per-second, it gives us a way to measure information. Unique to this measure, though, is that it is also a measure of the average surprise of a given message source.

Disorder (which can also be called entropy) is the natural direction of our universe, and living systems can only be called so because they are localized reversals of this process. To be alive is to be the embodiment of order, and to thrive is to evolve in the direction of increasing complexity and consciousness.

Bits - in a metacrisis

The ongoing increase of complexity in a complex system of crises means that the information-handling action-centers must continually increase their information channel capacity (or bandwidth, which is a measure of channel capacity + signal-to-noise ratio) or else there will be an information overflow which leads to disorder and likely the collapse of the system. We have already made a similar point through our discussion of Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. 

In both cases this means, for the political or revolutionary person, a certain humility. We may, together, address our biggest crises—but if we continue to use the same modes of perception, thinking, and action from past eras, the future will not gracefully unfold from the present, but rather will violently consume it. One of the key differences between a revolution which addresses a crisis and a metarevolution which addresses a metacrisis is that the latter is explicitly oriented towards greater complexity, consciousness, and coherence within and between action-centers. The former is like the sardonic “shortcut” which reveals itself to be the longest path between any two points: Somehow, charging directly at a crisis turns into a Zeno-esque endeavor where one always halves one’s distance without ever reaching the desired destination. The metarevolutionary “long road”, conversely, seems to entail detours while, in retrospect, it becomes obvious that no shorter path would have sufficed.

Bits - in a metarevolution

The informational entropy (measured in bits) of a metacrisis must be compared to the bandwidth of action-centers; if the complexity of the former exceeds the complexity of the latter, instability and collapse become inevitable. As such, metarevolution is oriented towards meeting the requirements of the Law of Requisite Variety. Or, in other words, we seek actions which increase the complexity (specifically, in this context, as bandwidth) of action-centers. 

In the second half of this book, we will explore a way beyond our meaning crisis which simultaneously demonstrates metarevolutionary principles based on the concept of information as probability or surprisal.