The Law of Synergy, a 4 page Complexity Thought Experiment

 

The following is a thought experiment that supplements the recent 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? 

 

The best answer is preferential attachment, explained in Extralogical Complexity Part 1: The Nonlinearity of Nature. The following is an analogy that illustrates how energy propagates through systems with densely connected parts/variables. In Complex networks, variables are highly connected, and their connectivity allows interactivity to multiply, not merely add. Suppose a network of neurons/thinking cells has an average of five hundred direct connections. If a cell connects with another, it increases its secondary connections by five hundred and its tertiary connections by 25,000. In real-life networks, most connections won’t be made or made “strongly” enough to matter, but oftentimes, only a small percentage of potential interactivity can result in significant multiplicative effects.

 

Imagine a higher dimensional lattice of chimes, a concrete representation of the energies of oscillatory nodes. 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, allowing chimes distant in three-D space to be close in others. A few intentional collisions between chimes would lead to vibrations and additional collisions throughout the matrix. A surface collision is analogous to a city influenced by national events, an external input. Alternatively, it could be viewed as an internal action, like a large company investing in others. The larger the system, the less its musical output reflects initial events. Increasing the strength of initial collisions tends to disproportionally increase secondary contacts, making the music even more emergent.       

 

Owing to the growing disproportionality in secondary connections, the disproportionality in secondary effects gives rise to Complexity: synergy, emergence, and the self-organizing SYSTEM (this is explained in ER Complexity part two).

 

Over time, micro damage leads to chimes losing resonance and swinging capacity, increasing energy dissipation. Taking vibrational and kinetic energy away from newer chimes to maintain resonance in more dissipative ones wastes energy and hinders musical output nonlinearly. This is analogous to indiscriminate bailout policies taking resources away from productive entities and into maladaptive ones, which often causes less frequent but larger crashes (when they occur).

 

Minimizing the density of chimes makes energy less transferable by reducing contacts/collisions—thus, hindering propagation and Complexity. Maximizing the density of chimes increases propagation, analogous to how sound travels faster in water. Since Complexity can be defined as the growing dominance of secondary interactions, this increases total Complexity and synergy, but it and the music aren’t “differentiated” enough to be “rich” or “useful.” You’d have loud redundant thrums rather than a symphony. Thus, USEFUL Complexity is the dominance of DIFFERENTIATED secondary effects.

 

The highly nonlinear increase in connections per degree of separation, like in the thinking cell example, makes networks susceptible to runaway effects and outcomes that vastly exceed initiating events. This is why the “The flap of a butterfly’s wing can lead to a typhoon half-way across the World.” The laws of causality and energy conservation are satisfied only after accounting for an arbitrarily large number of intermediary events, events unlikely to be reckoned in any existing network/system. As chimes and collisional strength and numbers grow, the system will tend to become progressively more dominated by these secondary 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 secondary 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 along with 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 the first extralogical Complexity article.