The Law of Synergy, a 3 page Complexity Thought Experiment

 

The following several pages are a thought experiment that’s a supplement to the two Extralogical Complexity articles, not an essay. Much more concrete explanations and examples of the following concepts are given in those posts. 

 

 

Emergence and self-organization are the heart of Nature, and it beats with awesome power. Novelties bootstrap themselves out of randomness and into existence. But they must obey the laws of causality and energy conservation. Emergence and self-organization aren’t, by definition, driven by any directed, conscious agency—so what empowers them? Synergy. In addition to being a more figurative notion, synergy is, in a way, the opposite of energy: It can emerge, but it is not conserved. Then how does it emerge? 

 

Consider a system of 26 highly interactive but still independent variables/parts/or subsystems, A-Z. They can be anything from businesses in an economy to lifeforms in a biosphere to the cells of a thinking organ—all of which are highly interactive in real-life, as well. How two variables interact is often influenced by the other variables they’re connected to. The total number of possible interactions grows nonlinearly faster than the number of variables due to what’s called combinatorial explosion: ten variables undergo over a thousand possible interactions; eleven over two thousand; twenty a million; thirty a billion. In most systems, the overwhelming majority of hypothetical interactions will be feeble or nonexistent; but based on the numbers, a small percentage obviously represents a rather large total. 

 

Suppose certain effects occur between variables N and M. Being an interactive system, the effects (can) “reverberate” up, down, and back the alphabet. Here, a single input “disperses” throughout the network, leading to additional effects and generating the synergy that allows outcomes to “outgrow” initiating events. Synergy is characterized by inputs that, through self-organized nonlinear feedback, create unforeseeable yet often desirable outputs.

The system could be imagined as a higher dimensional arrangement of chimes. I call this the Complexity matrix. Owing to myriad interactions, the arrangement wouldn’t be in one, two, or three dimensions, but perhaps thousands or millions. A few intentional collisions between chimes would lead to vibrations and additional collisions thoughout the matrix, and the system’s musical output would become less and less a reflection of initial inputs as it grew.

 

It unfolds…

The system receives a “desirable” input; e.g., an import price drops; environmental conditions improve in an ecosystem. Positive results occur, are reinforced, and build; e.g., profits or species populations increase. Some feedback merges with other feedback; e.g., a business acquires a new product, store, or invests profits successfully; e.g., an animal expands to a new region and acquires new food sources, possibly enhanced by physiological changes. Some merged feedback leads to “oscillations”; i.e., they take on elements of periodicity like seasonal or macro or micro-economic cycles. With enough overall growth and development, some oscillations lead to macro-patterns; e.g., major trends, the rise of a new species or industry, etc. Ultimately, novelties emerge that “exceed” initial events, owing to nonlinear processes. 

 

Complex feedback is what allows initial events to outgrow final outcomes. Complex causation refers to the disparity between them. Both explain, in the simplest case, why “the flap of a butterfly’s wing can lead to a typhoon half-way across the World.” The laws of causality and energy conversation are satisfied only after accounting for an arbitrarily large number of intermediary events, events unlikely to be reckoned in any existing network/system. As the system of variables grows, it will tend to become progressively more dominated by these indirect, “oscillatory” effects. Collectively, they give rise to a Complex emergence: a self-organized system unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts. 

 

Both unforeseeable and easily restrained “oscillatory effects” are responsible for a system/network’s disproportional outputs. The result is that synergy is easier to suppress than enhance, making Complex networks easier to harm than help. Due to sensitivity to perturbations and initial conditions and the predominance of indirect effects, their mid to long-term behaviors are nonpredictable. But because they obey certain laws and maintain their approximate identities for extended periods, they are guessable—or possess guess-ability.  

 

ER’s law of Complex synergy: From the tangible component’s interacting known, unknown, and unidentifiable variables, a self-organizing system emerges that’s unpredictably different and more powerful than the sum of its parts, making the most powerful components the least understood. Because this applies to everything in Nature from ecosystems to economies to the brain, this synergetic phenomenon is what governs the whole of the human World, not their tangible components. This is further explained in the articles on extralogical Complexity.

 

 

The above illustrates the origins of Complex networks/systems. Because all the mentioned systems are all those involved in life, including the puzzle of life, life-related thinking must be modeled on Complex systems thinking. See Extralogical Complexity Part 1: The nonlinearity of Nature.