The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole,” quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger wrote as he bridged his young science with ancient Eastern philosophy to reckon with the ongoing mystery of what we are.

A century later — a century in the course of which we unraveled the double helix, detected the Higgs boson, decoded the human genome, heard a gravitational wave and saw a black hole for the first time, and discovered thousands of other possible worlds beyond our Solar System — the mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. Each day, we eat food that becomes us, its molecules metabolized into our own as we move through the world with the illusion of a self. Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced. Each day, we find ourselves restless miniatures of a vast universe we are only just beginning to fathom.

In Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being (public library), the Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.”

Murmuration by Maria Popova

Theise defines the core scientific premise of his inquiry:

Complexity theory is the study of how complex systems manifest in the world… Complexity in this context refers to a class of patterns of interactions: open-ended, evolving, unpredictable, yet adaptive and self-sustaining… how life self-organizes from the substance of our universe, from interactions within the quantum foam to the formation of atoms and molecules, cells, human beings, social structures, ecosystems, and beyond.

[…]

Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.

A century after Schrödinger made his haunting assertion that “the over-all number of minds is just one,” Theise considers the ultimate reward of this lens on reality:

Complexity theory can foster an invaluable flexibility of perspectives and awaken us to our true, deep intimacy with the larger whole, so that we might return to what we once had: our birthright of being one with all.

Central to complexity theory is the notion of emergent phenomena like ant colonies, like crowds, like consciousness. Theise writes:

A distinguishing feature of life’s complexity is that, in every single instance, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Even if one knows the characteristics and behaviors of all the individual elements of a living system (a cell, a body, an ecosystem), one cannot predict the extraordinary properties that emerge from their interactions.

[…]

The emergent phenomena of ant colonies do not arise because some leader in the colony is planning things. While emergence often looks planned from the top down, it is not. A simple ant line provides a good example. Ants take food from wherever they find it and bring it back to the colony. Back and forth the ants go, so efficient and well ordered it seems as though someone must certainly have set it all up. But no one did. The queen ant doesn’t perform an administrative function; she does not monitor the status of the colony as a whole. She serves only a reproductive function. There is no single ant or group of ants at the top planning the food line or any other aspect of the colony. The organization arises only from the local interactions between each ant and any other ant it encounters.

Zooming out to the planetary scale, he argues that all living beings on Earth are a single organism animated by a single consciousness that permeates the universe. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile this view with our overwhelming subjective experience as autonomous selves, distinct in space and time — an experience magnified by the vanity of free will, which keeps on keeping us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a self-organizing whole.

To allay the paradox, Theise leans on a centerpiece of quantum theory: Neils Bohr’s notion of complementarity — the idea that because two different reads on reality can both be true but not at the same time, to describe reality we must choose between the two in order to keep the internal validity and coherence of one from interfering with that of the other. Inviting such a complementarity of perspectives, he writes:

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

This is more than a metaphysical orientation to reality — it is a profoundly physical fact, of which cells themselves are the living proof. Furnishing the scientific affirmation of Whitman’s timeless poetic insistence that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Theise writes:

Most of the body’s cells are continually turning over. Some cells renew over a period of years, while other types of cells are replaced every few days. So, most of the molecules (and therefore atoms) of our bodies return to the planet as well, in an endless atomic recycling and replacement. From this perspective, then, are we living beings moving around upon this rock we call Earth? Or are we in fact the Earth itself, whose atoms have self-organized to form these transitory beings that think of themselves as self-sufficient and separate from each other, even though they only ever arose from and will inevitably return to the atomic substance of the planet?

Art by Lia Halloran

This holds true across the scale of matter, on the molecular level above atoms and below cells:

We breathe out molecules (carbon dioxide) and perspire molecules (water, pheromones) and excrete molecules (urine, feces) into the environments around us, and in turn, we eat food that we break down into absorbable molecules (proteins, carbohydrates, fats), breathe in oxygen molecules from the planetary plant mass, and absorb molecules through our skin… since every surface we touch potentially has absorbable molecules on it. While you might say that molecules are only your own when they are within your body, complementarily, there are no real distinctions between “our own” molecules and the molecules of the world around us. They move from us, outward, and come into us from the outside. At the molecular level, just as at the cellular level, each of us is in perpetual, direct continuity with the entire biomass of the planet.

An epoch after Max Planck discovered the minutest scales of existence — energy quanta — then contemplated the limits of science given the fact that “we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve,” Theise adds:

At the smallest, Planck scales, the very smallest creations of all are wholes without parts that merely emanate from space-time and dissolve back into it like phantoms — there but not there, real but not real. Everything only looks like a thing from its own particular vantage point, the level of scale at which it can be seen as “itself,” as a whole. Above that level of scale, it is hidden from view by the higher-level emergent properties it gives rise to. Below that level, it disappears from view into the active phenomena from which it emerged.

It is difficult to consider this perspective without trembling with the question of what it even means to exist — and to cease existing. With his particular life-focused lens on mortality — as the child of two Holocaust survivors, as a gay man who survived the AIDS epidemic that killed many of his friends — Theise offers a redemptive answer:

While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.

[…]

You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge, Planck moment by Planck moment.

Throughout the rest of his lucid and luminous Notes on Complexity, Theise goes on to intertwine the discoveries of Western science — from particle physics to neuroscience to chaos theory — with Eastern metaphysical traditions and his own longtime Zen Buddhist practice. Couple it with physicist David Bohm on wholeness and the implicate order, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s exquisite epiphany about the totality of being.

BP

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

“If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning eighty, “if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”

Seven years earlier, the great British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) considered the same abiding question at the same life-stage in a wonderful short essay titled “How to Grow Old,” penned in his eighty-first year and later published in Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (public library).

bertrandrussell3
Bertrand Russell

Russell places at the heart of a fulfilling life the dissolution of the personal ego into something larger. Drawing on the longstanding allure of rivers as existential metaphors, he writes:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

In a sentiment which philosopher and comedian Emily Levine would echo in her stirring reflection on facing her own death with equanimity, Russell builds on the legacy of Darwin and Freud, who jointly established death as an organizing principle of modern life, and concludes:

The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.

Portraits from Memory and Other Essays is an uncommonly potent packet of wisdom in its totality. Complement this particular fragment with Nobel laureate André Gide on how happiness increases with age, Ursula K. Le Guin on aging and what beauty really means, and Grace Paley on the art of growing older — the loveliest thing I’ve ever read on the subject — then revisit Russell on critical thinking, power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.

BP

Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living

Anaïs Nin on How Reading Awakens Us from the Slumber of Almost-Living

Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was “proof that humans are capable of working magic.” Proust considered the end of a book’s wisdom the beginning of our own. For Mary Oliver, books did nothing less than save her life. The social function of great literature, the poet Denise Levertov insisted, is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

The transcendent mechanism of the awakening that books furnish in us is what Anaïs Nin (February 21, 1903–January 14, 1977) explores in a beautiful entry from The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 (public library).

A generation after Kafka wrote to his best friend that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,” 28-year-old Nin writes in December of 1931:

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with [someone], and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.

With a thankful eye to D.H. Lawrence — whose writing, she believed, first awakened her in this fashion and whom, in a gesture of gratitude, she made the subject of her first book — Nin adds:

Some never awaken. They are like the people who go to sleep in the snow and never awaken. But I am not in danger because my home, my garden, my beautiful life do not lull me. I am aware of being in a beautiful prison, from which I can only escape by writing.

Complement this particular portion of the wholly numinous The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Vol. 1 with Nin on why emotional excess is essential for writing, the creative benefits of keeping a diary, the elusive nature of joy, and how to truly unplug during vacation, then revisit Neil Gaiman on why we read, Rebecca Solnit on the life-saving power of books, and James Baldwin on how reading changed his destiny.

BP

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing

Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing

In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different, complementary lens on the art of seeing through his now-famous monologue known as “Ode to a Flower.”

Before Feynman, before Woolf, another titan of the creative spirit found a powerful metaphor for how we experience the world — how we see it, and how we don’t — in a flower.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Canna, 1924 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

“I found that I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way things that I had no words for,” Georgia O’Keeffe (November 15, 1887–March 6, 1986) wrote in the foreword to a catalog for an exhibition of her work two decades before she became the first female artist honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art — a triumph largely predicated on her arresting large-scale paintings of flowers, magnified and abstracted to radiate uncommon emotional intensity haloed by awe. Although art critics consistently insisted that O’Keeffe’s depictions of flowers were her commentary on women’s sexuality, the artist herself resolutely denied these interpretations. For her, they were her commentary on seeing — a magnifying lens for the attention. Painting these close-ups was a way of learning to look, a way of removing the blinders with which we gallop through the world, slowing down, shedding our notions and concepts of things, and taking things in as they really are.

Georgia O’Keeffe by Rufus Holsinger, 1915 (Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library)

In a passage originally published in the exhibition catalog An American Place — which also gave us O’Keeffe’s serenade to blue — and later cited in Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things (public library), she writes:

A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Still — in a way — nobody sees a flower — really — it is so small — we haven’t time — and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. If I could paint the flower exactly as I see it no one would see what I see because I would paint it small like the flower is small.

So I said to myself — I’ll paint what I see — what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it — I will make even busy New-Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

Well — I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower, you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower — and I don’t.

Georgia O’Keeffe, Grey Lines with Black, Blue and Yellow, 1923 (Georgia O’Keeffe Museum)

Complement with O’Keeffe on setting priorities, success, public opinion, and what it means to be an artist, and her passionate love letters to Alfred Stieglitz, then revisit cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz on the art of looking, Annie Dillard on the secret to seeing, philosopher Martin Buber on what a tree can teach us about seeing others as they truly are, John Ruskin on how drawing trains you to see more clearly and live with greater presence, and Emily Dickinson’s astounding herbarium — a forgotten masterpiece of attention at the intersection of poetry and science.

BP

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