A critical review of Notes on Complexity by Neil Theise.

The goal of this book seems to be twofold:

  1. to expose the lay reader to the world of complexity theory and science

  2. to argue that the true nature of reality is, in some sense, “consciousness” and that this is somehow realted to complexity theory

It achieves the first goal, and comes nowhere close the second.

Overall I found the book to be engaging and well-written, if poorly argued at some of its most important points. I am bothering to write up these reflections because I think it is a good representative of the late 20th, early 21st century flavour of “let’s show how some surprising discoveries from Western science like quantum mechanics actually jive in a postmodern way with a pastiche of religious and pseudo-religious wisdom”. I am using wisdom not in quotes here and non-ironically, in that I do think religious traditions can be sources of wisdom. But the rest of that quote gives an accurate sense as to how generally non-rigorous I think these approaches are.

I am all for attempting to bridge religion and sicence in a vaguely CP Snow’s “Two Cultures” kind of way, but I can’t presently recall ever having encountered the fruits of such an effort that didn’t fall almost completely flat.

The book starts out well, providing a lucid introduction to complexity theory. The part I found most interesting was the idea that some amount of randomness or unpredictability was key to complex systems. Theise introduces the term “quenched disorder” as a level of randomness that is sufficiently in between extremes that it permits for adaptibilty through random discovery of new paths/behaviours, while not collapsing into chaos due to lack of structure or predictabiltiy.

Next Theise brings us into the world of cells, which as a pathologist is his area of expertise. He asks us to consider looking at a body, then zooming into its cells; or looking at an ant colony from afar, then zooming into a single ant, and the futher still to its cells. At each level we encounter a complex self-organizing system, and there is no real answer to the question of which is the “right” level. Whether you’re looking at a single thing or a phenomenon is a matter of perspective, it is both at once.

This doubling Niese argues is related to what physicists call complementarity. This is most familiar to us from the wave-partical duality demonstrated by the slit experiment.

Bohr, however, went further, asserting that complentarity was fundamental not just for describing existence at the incredibly minute scales of the quantum realm but for describing living beings at our normal everyday scale as well.

At this point in the text a footnote references an article by Theise in Nature vol 435. Curiously the single-page essay (not a peer-reviewd article) doesn’t mention Bohr at all. Not clear if this is an editing error or what, but a brief foray into some secondary literature on the web (most of it admittedly not high quality) suggests that Bohr was indeed taken with the idea that the principle of complementarity was not only relevant at the quantum scale. At this point this isn’t a direct “appeal to authority” fallacy, though it is sort of skirting close to that.

Theise elaborates from this

The realization that one’s body is a unitary entity by itself, but also, equally, not, has important implications. One is that the boundary of one’s body starts to become indistinct. At the everyday scale, my boundary is my skin and your boundary is your skin. Close your eyes and feel how your fingers meet this book or the device on which you are reading it. You feel a sharp, distinct edge between you and the not-you where skin meets object. But at the microscopic level, just how sharp and distinct is the surface of your skin? Not very distinct at all. Cells from the top layer are constantly shedding as they die. Much of the dust of our homes, in fact, consists of sloughed off cells from our skin… At the microscopic level, we are thus not actually bounded by the top of our skins. Our boundaries are at least as broad as the spaces we inhabit. (p 48)

Here is where I begin to take issue with Theise’s argument.

Boundaries, boundaries everywhere, as far as the eye can see… or not at all

Simply because our skin cells slough off and coagulate into dust bunnies, how does that mean the boundary of my body has somehow extended to behind my dresser? This is absurd. It’s about as cogent as when my daughter says that because she has touched her finger to her tongue and then her finger to the floor, her tongue is therefore on the floor.

Maybe Theise could have argued that the microorganisms living on our skin and hair can have physical interactions with the world beyond us that then somehow influence our own bodies’ perceptive ability or homeostatic state–this may well be the case, and would be a stronger point in his favour, but still results in the boundary of our body basically being exactly what we thought it was, plus a couple micrometers here and there to accommodate the volume of these microorganisms.

There may well be other more compelling arguments for how the boundaries of our bodies are less rigid than we usually think (and I am generally open to arguments from the extended mind/extended cognition world that our minds may be fruitfully considered to have a fuzzier and wider boundary than we think), but that is not the argument Thesis makes here. The argument he does make is entirely unconvincing so far.

Theise attempts to expand this argument via the bacterial microbiomes that inhabit our guts and reside on the surface of our skin.

The microbiome doesn’t only colonize us; it is integral to our living, healthy bodies… These organisms… travel from us whenever we touch something. Doornobs, cell phones, counteropts, pens, each other. Every time you shake hands with, kiss, or hug someone else, some of ‘you’ gets left behind and some of the person you touched travels away with you. This process of bacterial exchange is so pronounced that the microbiomes of people (and pets) who live together become one giant shared microbiome, an continuous multcellular entity enveloping the human (and dog and cat) islands… if we keep this fact about or shared microbiomes in mind, the boundaries between ourselves and what’s outside our skin start to look even blurrier

Does one giant, shared, boundary-less microbiome really emerge in this case? Going back to Theise’s earlier arguments about perspective, I would agree that it is possible to imagine a perspective in which that is the case. From a certain, distant point of view, one might look at some cohabitating humans, dogs, etc and say “wow that’s a bunch of mixed up bacteria”. But note that this doesn’t fit into the “zooming out” metaphor Theise used earlier: we can’t both “zoom out” to see humans, pets and bacteria all at the same time, since they are only perceptible on vastly different scales. If we “zoom in” close enough that we see bacteria, we would in fact not see a shared, unitary, boundary-less microbiome at all, but rather one full of fairly sharp discontinuities. E coli in the intestines, but basically nowhere else, Staphylococcus on the skin but basically nowhere else, minimal bacteria in the air between bodies, and so on. We would see boundaries everywhere.

Is there a scientific perspective according to which it is particularly useful to see this situation as a single, boundaryless microbiome? Theise has certainly not given us any reason to think so. Even if he could, this doesn’t mean that the boundaries of our skin or bodies have suddenly evaporated, it simply means there are ways of exchanging parts of our bodies across those boundaries. Just because a medieval fortification could permit egress and ingress through gates in its walls does’t mean those walls don’t exist all of a sudden. If attackers discovered that every block in the wall could be passed through simply as if it did not exist, then it would make sense to say there is no boundary. And if biologists discovered that our skin permitted every particle and microorganism to move through it, then we’d say “wow there really is no boundary” but of course that is not remotely the case.

Everything is everything

Theise attempts a similar argument across time: how can we draw a boundary between our selves now, and yesterday, and back to an embryo, and then back to our parents as embryos, ad infinitum. Hegel rightly criticized this sort of muddled thiking about 2 centuries ago as the “night in which all cows are black”. In this vein of thought, I guess we’d say that desks and spoons and wooden jewelry carved from the lumber from a single tree really just are that tree which is a fun way of thinking when you’re high but if you try eating your soup with a toothpick or sitting down to study with your books on your ladle you will find that accepting the reality of these boundaries is a much more useful way of thinking. It is of course possible to think in the other “everything is one” way, and doing so can provide valuable ethical motivation and contemplative satisfaction, but in most everyday cases is is not a useful way of looking at the world, and is certainly not “truer” than any other way.

In the next chapter, Theise attempts to provide some scientific motivation for complementarity from his own area of expertise. He imagines a world in which rather than microscopes having first revealed to us cells with their walls separating them from each other, some alternate microscope technology in which we first see the nucleii floating in an undivided fluid, and only later discover cell walls.

In this alternate history, the fluid doctrine would have been born as the foundational paradigm of Western medicine and biology. In the years that followed, after applying special stains and seeing cell membranes for the first time, these scientists wouldn’t have backtracked, saying, “Oh, we were wrong, the body is made of cells.” They would have instead said something like, “Oh look, there is a semipermeable membrande partitioning of the body’s fluid continuum.”

So which is it? Is the body made of discrete cells or is it a fluid continuum? Yet again, we find a complementarity. The two different views illumiante different truths of our bodies. Each view captures aspects that are hidden by the other, while at the same time concealing details the other view reveals. Once more, a complete understanding of the whole depends on both views, equally, even though they seem contradictory.

First of all, it is entirely possible that scientists would have backtracked in this hypothetical scenario. Scientists once held to various fluid theories of heat, which were later rejected in favour of mechanical theories that better explained experimental observations.

Theise here makes the claim that the fluid view captures something hidden by the other view, but doesn’t tell us what this is, nor why whatever insights it reveals couldn’t be equally adequately expressed in the cell model. This is of course a book for a lay audience and Theise is an expert, so we can grant him some benefit of the doubt that there are such facts or insights.

But we should at least expect an argument that these views are incompatible in the same way that the wave/particle duality shows an incompatibility: the wave behaviour is literally impossible if the light were behaving as a particle, and yet it is both. In this case though, there is no assertion that some observed behaviour or property is completely inexplicable and physically mystifying from one point of view and only explicable from the other point of view.

As some evidence in support something like a fluid model, Theise offers us acupuncture which has effects that are “testable and reproducible” but have not been sufficiently explained by standard anatomy or by the cell doctrine.

Anatomically, those acupoints do not correspond to any nerves, blood vessels, lymphatics, or any other apparent anatomic structure… The cell doctrine seems unable to explain acupuncture then, but thinking of the body as a fluid might provide useful insights.

Contrariwise, there is a surfeit of researching attempting to, and claming some success with, explaining the effectiveness of acpuncture on the basis of Western biology, e.g. Understandings of acupuncture application and mechanisms.

Nothing is anything

Somewhat subtly, but without sufficient justification, Theise eventually moves from a discussion of complementarity and alternate perspectives to absolute claims like:

We have searched deep into the smallest recesses of existence–down into the quantum foam and space-time itself–and nowhere could we find an object with inherent existence in and of itself.

What would it mean for something to exist “in and of itself”? Theise doesn’t tell us, and I’d rather not blame him for not being a philosopher, except that he has now transitioned firmly into the realm of metaphysics, making sweeping claims about the nature of reality. His brand of metaphysics is, perhaps surprisingly, not particularly post-modern or new agey, it is the old claim that only the fundamental entities (perhaps he would rather say phenomena) of physics are real, and everything else is a sort of mirage based upon them. From this point of view it is also not surprising that he finds sufficient overlap between his theses and ancient religious wisdom, which also sees everyday objects and concerns as unreal shadows of an underlying, fundamental (usually mystical) reality.

The book is not done at this point, but I am done arguing with it.

I suppose my main gripes with this book could be condensed to

  • I believe with George Box that “all models are wrong, some are useful”, and that this should be the stance of the scientist and generally is unless they are waylaid by the (reasonable, and probably unavoidable) temptation to make claims for the absolute truth of their preferred models

  • Theise believes instead that he has discovered the true model of reality

  • But all of his arguments along the way to this conclusion fall apart quickly under any sort of scrutiny