A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 14 of 50)

[This is Part 14 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 13 here.]

b. Synergy & emergence

Synergy & emergence - in general

Both synergy and emergence are properties of a whole system that are different from those of the parts or elements or subsystems. Let’s briefly explore the difference between them, their impact on the science of complexity, and their place within the metarevolutionary worldview. In this book we will use the following distinction:

Synergy: A quantitative difference in the whole compared to the parts.

Emergence: A qualitative difference in the whole compared to the parts.

Beginning with synergy, we observe that when multiple elements/systems come together to form a new system, some of the variables which define that system have changed: The whole is in some way greater than the sum of the parts. The measure stays the same, but the quantity of the measure is a product of the synergistic effects of the unified complex system. Synergy is found in the dynamic relationship of two or more holons. Even a relatively “simple” system, like two horses connected to a carriage, can produce synergy. A single horse connected to a carriage may be able to pull 5000 pounds on its own. Meanwhile, two horses connected to the same carriage can pull 15,000 pounds—as much as three horses individually. The combination of a cart and two horses into a connected whole has produced synergy. 

Buckminster Fuller: “Synergy alone explains metals increasing their strengths. All alloys are synergetic. Chrome-nickel-steel has an extraordinary total behavior. In fact, it is the high cohesive strength and structural stability of chrome-nickel-steel at enormous temperatures that has made possible the jet engine. The principle of the jet was invented by the squid and the jellyfish long ago. What made possible man's use of the jet principle was his ability to concentrate enough energy and to release it suddenly enough to give him tremendous thrust. The kinds of heat that accompany the amount of energies necessary for a jet to fly would have melted all the engines of yesterday. Not until you had chrome-nickel-steel was it possible to make a successful jet engine, stable at the heats involved.”

Emergence, on the other hand, describes properties of a whole which are not present in its individual parts—in other words, qualitatively different.

Francis Heylighen: “Complexification can be understood as an increase in both differentiation (greater diversity of components) and integration (greater connectivity between components). We see this in the origin of multicellularity, where the cooperation between cells makes them more dependent on others (integration). Yet, because they can rely on others for common functions (such as provision of food), they can now specialize in particular functions (e.g. reproduction), thus becoming more differentiated.”

Daniel Schmachtenberger: “A cell respirates, even though none of the molecules on their own that make up the cell respirate… And so there is an advantage to those molecules being together from even a thermodynamic perspective.”

Erwin Schrödinger: “How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism… What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening—call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy—or, as you may say, produces positive entropy—and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy—which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.”

Daniel Schmachtenberger: “So we can say that biologic evolution is a special case of this larger principle by which subatomic particles come into atoms, into molecules... There is a process of increasing complexity, but specifically complexity that doesn’t have emergent property doesn't get selected for... So we can say that evolution is defined by these kinds of synergies and increasing complexity.”

Rod Swenson: “Galaxies, main-sequence stars, cells, ecosystems, civilizations, hydrodynamic structures, and cognitive states in brains are all examples of coherent macroscopic states of matter in motion that come into being by the progressive attraction of some subset of accessible microstates from some much larger set of initially accessible microstates. In fact, the progressive complexification of the visible universe from a homogeneous plasma, the emergence of increasingly more highly specified states of matter through the transformation of the incoherent into the coherent, of which bioevolution and cultural evolution are clearly a part, is perhaps the most diagnostic feature of its evolution; it is…what Morowitz has called the ‘ascendancy’ to increasingly complex levels. Spencer, more than 130 years ago, recognized progressive universal complexification (the creation of new space-time scales of dynamical behavior from the emergence of new levels of macroscopic constraints) as what he called the ‘law of evolution’.”

The question now becomes: Where will complexification, synergy and emergence lead us? Will they stoke the turbulence of our metacrisis, or be our salvation as metarevolutionaries?

Synergy & emergence - in a metacrisis

Picture fish in a pond and you will be able to understand how the crises in a metacrisis interact as a complex system. They share the water, the sunlight, the food; every movement ripples out and touches other fish. They permeate each other’s existence. Our whole world, now expansed by people, societies and global information-communication technologies, is in quite a similar situation. A crisis acts upon itself with circularity (such as positive and negative feedbacks), and interacts with every other crisis to a greater or lesser degree. 

In a metacrisis, we witness negative (devaluing) synergies and emergent properties: a new crisis can enter the “pond” of crises; complex systems, once formed, are not reducible to a reductive analysis of its parts, and instead must include the synthetic (holistic) view of the whole; synthesis reveals synergies and emergent properties of the whole which are unique to any specific “mixture” of elements (or subsystems); therefore, the addition or subtraction of any crisis within a metacrisis will potentially lead to a change in its composition of synergistic/emergent properties. 

A deep crisis, like our meaning crisis, can be responsible for extremely undesirable synergies with other crises, or even propagate new crises which emerge through crisis interaction. A revolution makes it its task to point to the source of a crisis and take exactly the right action which is needed at that moment to avoid the catastrophe which may accompany either misplaced attention or simply inaction. A metarevolution makes it its task to discover the synergistic and emergent properties in the between-space of crises—knowing that the complex interaction of crises within a metacrisis inevitably leads that unified whole to be different from its holons.

Synergy & emergence - in a metarevolution

We’ve already begun to see, in contrast to the grim reality of “dark” synergy and emergence within our metacrisis, that these features of complexity are a fundamental part of evolution, and we owe our receptivity to beauty, reason, and love to the ubiquitous presence of these properties in all complex systems. We will return to the evolution of complexity in a later section. For now, it should be sufficient to refer back to what we said about the variety of “states” as a measure for complexity. That consideration led to the Law of Requisite Variety as its conclusion, which stated that for a system to be viable (i.e. to live, in the case of humans and other living systems) it must have a sufficient variety of internal states to absorb the variety of its external states (environment). 

Synergy and emergence can be understood, respectively, as the amplification of quantities which exist in individual states, and the creation of new macrostates from the complex interaction of microstates. In other words, synergy can act as an amplifier for variety, making the system-of-systems more likely to thrive relative to the systems composing it. And an emergent property, flowering from new actualizations of value-in-action, may provide a bridge to a better future when, without it, the path would be impassable. 

c. Nonlinearity

Nonlinearity - in general

Complex systems are unities that are highly determined by interaction—i.e. the relationship of elements which compose the system. Through interaction, as we’ve said so far, feedback loops, synergy, and emergent properties arise. Another striking feature is nonlinearity, which may be understood in more than one way. In one sense, it refers to how a change in one state/variable may create a much larger (or smaller) change in another. This can occur in a single instance or over a period of related events. 

Consider whether you would rather fall ten times from a height of ten feet, or one time from a height of 100 feet? It’s the same total distance, so does it matter? Of course, most people intuitively choose the first option, sensing that a fall from that height might be painful, but that one from 100 feet is a death-sentence. If we increase the number of feet from 10 to 11 to 12 and up to 100, the distance is scaling linearly, but the damage from a fall at each of those heights scales nonlinearly. The same principle informs driving speed limits—where a pedestrian has a less than 20 percent chance of dying from being struck at any speed between 1 and 30 miles per hour, but a grim 80 percent chance of dying when making the relatively smaller jump to 40 miles per hour. Similarly, an earthquake of magnitude-10 is unbelievably more destructive than two earthquakes of magnitude-5. This is the first sense in which we may add nonlinearity to our repertoire of understanding.

The other, related sense, is in a series of events. This is where nonlinearity has been called sensitivity to initial conditions or, more popularly, the “butterfly effect”. 

Henri Poincaré: “Small differences in the initial conditions produce very great ones in the final phenomena.”

We have been quite interested in this aspect of nonlinear interactions as we investigated our metacrisis and meaning crisis. A crisis being “deeper” within a metacrisis can now also be understood as relating to its status as an initial condition to which a given metacrisis is nonlinearly sensitive.

To briefly give one other salient example of nonlinear features in our current world, consider the pace of technology’s development. Computers help us develop better computers, which help us develop even better computers and so on—and that positive feedback loop produces a nonlinear journey which starts off slow and then jolts into superspeed. Increasingly powerful technologies like artificial intelligence and biotechnology are poised to radically complement or wholly consume humanity.

Nonlinearity - in a metacrisis

Nonlinearity in the relationships between crises in a metacrisis means that a small change in one can produce a large change in another (or multiple others). It can also mean that as a series of linear changes occur in certain states of a complex system, it can create nonlinear changes in other states. These are yet more reasons we are concerned with deeper rather than more shallow crises. It is supposed that the deepness of a crisis is correlated with the production of larger “shock waves”, from changes to that crisis, through the complex system of crises within which it lives. And, as a corollary, certain crises are points of leverage for metarevolutionaries—i.e. to resolve the right crisis at the right time is to maximize one’s impact. When this metarevolutionary orientation towards deep crises within a metacrisis is paired with the kind of optimism we discussed, our actions become wed to the most moral, meaningful, and beautiful first principle: the Good.

Nonlinearity - in a metarevolution

Quite simply, revolution is nonlinearity. Often, it is used in the context of political nonlinearity: A radical new law; a new constitution; a coup; war. Yet we hear of technological, scientific, and economic revolutions—and all of these are (at least in theory) valid uses of the word. There is a danger in overusing it, where it essentially becomes a marketing strategy to create excitement or fear, or perhaps both. But there is also a certain danger in underusing it, where it is squeezed into the overly-narrow meaning of “violent, fast-paced political change”. 

A metarevolution, if nonlinearity is nearly synonymous with revolution, is simply a moment of nonlinear change applied to the underlying conditions of nonlinear change. If the forming of a new government is a political revolution, then a radical change in the metaphysical basis of constitutional law is a political metarevolution—i.e. something with an initial sensitivity which, if modified, drastically alters all present and future revolutions.

Metarevolutionary theory, then, is applied to a metacrisis in order to understand the “leverage points” within that system. Our question is: What is the smallest change which will produce the largest effect? The answer to this, while not the whole of moral striving, is correlated with moral action. The energy with which we perform any actions is finite; our lives are finite; we must make the most of both.

A metarevolution is directed at all crises and revolutions simultaneously—attempting to take in the whole picture in order to understand the significance of every individual element within it. Arriving at actions which produce nonlinear reverberations—through a metacrisis linked by hierarchical feedback loops—is a straightforward consequence of this kind of metarevolutionary behavior.