How All this Complexity is Unified with Francis Heylighen (Part 1)

How All this Complexity is Unified with Francis Heylighen (Part 1)

Ilia Delio talks with cyberneticist Francis Heylighen. In part one of their conversation, Ilia asks Francis about his interest in complexity theory, and the basics of complex systems as they appear in our society and world. How does complexity theory inform the big problems of our age? Ilia and Francis discuss whether this school of thought can help us develop unifying principles to help organize our complex planet.

ABOUT FRANCIS HEYLIGHEN

“The ever-faster evolution of science, technology and culture appears to herald a new metasystem transition. This will lead to a system with as yet unpredictable capacities for adaptation, creativity, thought, consciousness and action. Probably the best metaphor for this is the ‘global brain,’ the thinking system that arises through the integration of all individuals on this planet via an intelligent computer network.”

Prof. Francis Heylighen is the research director of the Center Leo Apostel for transdisciplinary studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He investigates the self-organization and evolution of complex systems from a cybernetic perspective, with applications to the emerging information society. His over 200 scientific publications have received thousands of citations.

Transcript

Episode Transcript

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. We are excited to kick off our latest season with a conversation between Ilia Delio and cyberneticist Francis Heylighen. To begin, Ilia asks Francis about his interest in complexity theory and the basics of complex systems as they appear in our society and our world.

Ilia: Today we are with Dr. Francis Heylighen from the Free University in Brussels. I met Francis at the Human Energy Conference last November in Berkeley, California, and I've been fascinated by your work ever since. I was not familiar with it prior to then, and now I see that I've really missed a number of years of incredible work, so I'm catching up quickly. Can you tell us, Francis, a little bit about your background? What led you to the science of complexity? And we'll start there, your own background into the field of complexity.

Francis: Well, I started by studying mathematical physics here at the Free University of Vessels. From the beginning I was a little bit skeptical about what is known as the Newtonian worldview or the clockwork universe, which sees the universe as something very simple actually with which follows the terministic rules and everything is just particles of matter moving to space. So I was looking for alternatives and there was already something going on in those days. It was in the beginning of 1980s because we had, at the neighboring university, we had Ilya Prigogine who is a Nobel Prize winner and who is famous precisely for working all self-organizing systems. And he was one of the pioneer, you might say, of the complex systems science and who was very critical of this new turning worldview. So that was part of the inspiration. But then later I got into the domain of cybernetics and systems theory, which was even farther away from the physicalist mechanistic paradigm. And from there then late in the 1980s there was the work of the Santa Fe Institute and the work on chaos, the work of John Holland in particular, so I kind of try to indicate all that.

Ilia: Yeah, great. Super. So we're moving, you know, science certainly has since the 20th century been moving away from this Newtonian paradigm and into a movement of life that is much more dynamic and self-organizing. Can you tell me complexity itself, the term, does it cover a number of things? I mean, what exactly is complexity?

Francis: Well, it all depends on which people you ask. Quite a lot of people who call themselves complexity scientists come from this physics background, so they still have a bit of this kind of reductionistic point of view. These are people, for example, working in chaos theory who work with equations that when you stimulate them on the computer, do all complex things, but they're complex only in the way that they give you all these nice fractal images and all these weird behaviors. But the assumptions behind them are still simple. You start with an equation, you simulate how things move according to this equation and you see all these weird things happening. So, that is not what I would call “the complexity science.” In complexity science. I would rather position myself on the side of what is called complex adaptive systems, which is a term that was virtually proposed by John Holland who is a computer scientist, but also somebody inspired by evolution, who is the father of the genetic algorithms. And these ideas that complex systems are really what are sometimes called multi-agent systems. There are lots of agents that are independent of each other, they don't know each other. They cannot in say be very simple, but when once they start interacting, all kind of things happen—self-organization adaptation, mutual interactions. And that you cannot no longer capture it in any kind of an equation. You can potentially capture it in a computer simulation. But the real world, of course, is always more complex than even the computer simulations.

Ilia: Mathematics is in a sense understanding these relationships that are in a sense identified in nature on various levels of biological life. What is interesting, however, is what accounts for shifts in relationships. In other words, if complexity is sort of accounting for, shall we say, the rise or the increase in the intensity of relationships, would you say it's that or what exactly complexifies? Maybe that's my question.

Francis: Well, complexity is a combination of distinction and connection. Distinction means that you have distinguishable things, many different things—collection, these things are interacting, they have relationships. And the combination of the two then leads to differentiation and integration. So differentiation means that when the things start interacting, typically the differences become louder. The differences become more diverse, but at the same time they integrate, meaning they make stronger connections. So you have this, at first sight, paradoxical view that when a complex system starts to solve, organizing it both differently here means becomes more different in its part and more integrated, meaning that the parts are more dependent on each other. And that is something that we see, for example, in society, you can start with a simple society where everybody is a farmer and people are basically all doing the same thing. And then you get to a more modern society where there are a huge number of different types of professions. There's a very great differentiation. People have very different backgrounds, but that also means that they are much more dependent on each other because a farmer in principle can survive on his own, can just use his own products. While in a modern society, you can be a not, or you can be a scientist or you can be an electrician, you need all the other people to provide for all the things you need to survive. So that is this idea, differentiation and integration.

Ilia: Interesting. So complexity really accounts for the increase in specialization as well. In other words, as things become more complexified, it allows, as you say, for differentiation—or you might say becoming differentiated is becoming more in a sense distinct in, you know, the usefulness. What one of the papers that I've always been influenced by is by the philosopher Alicia Guerrero, on complexity and identity. I found that a very helpful paper Because as a theologian, I'm very interested in “what is the human person.” And so, this notion of personhood and identity led me to her work. And she makes some interesting statements and I think your work supports this as well. And that is, the more complexified something is the greater resilience it has precisely because of the greater interdependence of the parts. And so while there's an increase in specialization of those parts, there's also at the same time a greater integration, like you said, they need one another and therefore there's resilience, a greater resilience to outside forces. So say the lone farmer trying to defend his land or his property, has a harder time than say the collective of farmers or this kind of web or complexity of a farm association that can then lobby for increased rights or something like this. So is that correct to say that complexity evokes a greater resilience in the complexified unit or the whole and that allows for greater sustainability in the face of environmental pressures?

Francis: Yes. It's the differentiation that makes it, you have a much wider variety, much greater diversity of different ways of solving a problem. Let's say a problem like energy supply. You can say, well, the best way to produce energy is via solar panels, but when the sun doesn't shine, there's energy and then you can say, no, but let's say good wind, but the wind doesn't always blow. Or if you include let's say nuclear energy or you include water, hydro energy, the wider the diversity of different sources, the less the probability that none of them would be functioning. But of course that also assumes that all these different sources of energy are part of one big network, that there is an electricity network that whenever there is, let's say no sun but there is wind, then the wind energy will be captured. And at other moments when there’s not the sun or wind, there may be nuclear energy or there may be other forms of energy. It's indeed, on the one hand, you need to have this very diversity of different ways of producing energy. On the other hand, you need to have a system of integration that makes it, they can flow from the one to the other. And that's also what we see in society. There are many different flows because there are many different connections.

Ilia: We're still coming out of the Newtonian world. I don't think we have really fully embraced complexity as what some people have called “the new factor to Darwinian evolution.” You know, I don't know if you would agree with that, but I've seen an article that complexity may be a new spin on Darwin's evolution to account for increased diversity in nature and some of the features of evolution that move us towards greater unified life basically. Now, I don't know what your position is on that, but quite honestly, just looking or experiencing our world today, which is highly specialized, on one hand. We have all sorts of scientists and philosophers and a myriad of specialties, and yet we don't have the necessary—it seems we don't have the necessary integration of these. And so if these two factors, these two components comprise complexity, I think we're missing one component, and that is our systems do not let the present systems do not allow or support integration of the various entities. In other words, if we're more highly specialized, we would need different systems of organization to really support this higher level of complexified life. Would you agree with that or do you see things differently?

Francis: Well, another example I often use is an example of an ecosystem. So when we're speaking about biological evolution, we're speaking about different organisms that are all trying to adapt to the environment. But of course, that environment consists of all the other organisms. So whenever one organism evolves by becoming fitter in some way in exploiting resources, it changes the environment for all the others. So all the others will also need to adapt. And the result is indeed differentiation. They tend to more specialize, but also integrate because the resources they produce together become more available. And what you see in this ecosystem is that typically they are able to manage more resources, to mobilize more resources. Now, what we don't have in an ecosystem is some kind of a high level view, and that is something which in society we would like to have, we would like to have, let's say politicians who have a long-term view and who can make arrangements so let's say that different specialized groups would collaborate more effectively, but that in nature, that doesn't exist in nature.

Well, if two groups of organisms really don't collaborate well together, what typically happens is that one of them disappears from the environment and maybe settles in a different environment that they just separate. In society we can't afford that. In society, we would need some kind of a higher level of integration. And that higher level integration requires a high level view of the whole system. And that is, some people have called it a global-system science. We would ideally have a kind of a disciplinary science that can describe all these different specialized systems, economic, social, biological, cultural, psychological, physical, chemical, geological to see how all these systems interact and use that understanding to make these interactions more effective. Remove the conflicts, remove the fictions.

Ilia: Yes, that makes a lot of sense actually. And reminds me of the notion of the holonom or this whole movement where he's looking at these various sectors of ecology, environment, politics, et cetera, as a kind of interactive systems within systems within systems, so to speak, or integrative systems, and then developing organizations that can support that kind of integrated systemic outlook. What that would look like politically—I mean I've often wondered quite honestly, even politically, if we were to move beyond our individual nation states, instead of Europe and the US and China and Russia, what if we were to rethink, and probably people are thinking this already, maybe as you indicate in the global sciences. What if we were to rethink the globe as systems within systems within systems, what might that look like even politically?

Robert: Can science alone advance the unification of life or will it require a greater integration between science and religion? Next, Ilia asks Francis how complexity theory informs the big problems of our age. And whether this school of thought can help us develop unifying principles that could ultimately organize our complex planet.

Ilia: Science is a little bit ahead of the curve to where culture and society is. I mean, I think in societies today we're still getting at. I mean honestly where I live, it's still very Newtonian, quite honestly. People live in individual houses, they have individual concerns, they're little atoms in driving in individual cars with individual jobs. So in my view, people do not have a sense of belonging to a system or a whole, or being part of an organizing web of life that is simply not in our consciousness, you know? So I think we have here, biology is holding out lessons for us that can lead to sustainable life, but we have resistance quite honestly. And I think what we have is deep resistance too, precisely the whole idea of being integrated or being part of a system, because systemic living, if we were to really be biological about it, is a whole different way of living in relationship to one another.

Ilia: It requires a whole different set of values, right? It can't be just like looking out for number one or accumulating as much wealth as possible to secure my position here. So, I think it's very interesting that we have the science and I wonder how we can move from what we now understand from the science of complexity and the way it's modeling on biological life. And we move from that into the real world where life is quickly moving as we know with artificial intelligence, computer technology. So what are your thoughts on where we stand today?

Francis: Yeah, I think that the consciousness of that interdependence is growing very fast. And in a sense the big problems of our age, climate change pollution, loss of biodiversity at the moment have become sufficiently acute that people have understood that they need to think at this global level. But of course, political and economic institutions have an inertia. It takes a while. And I also must say that the science is not yet really up to the point where you can give recipes for dealing with these problems globally. Part problems like climate change, climate change is from a scientific point of view, it's a simple problem. We know which are the gasses that create the greenhouse effects. We know that we should try to reduce the production of these gasses and possibly to capture them. That's the easy part. The difficult part is how does that interact with the society, with the economy, with development, with poverty, then it gets much more tricky.

And yeah, we don't really have this kind of global-system side that would do that. Now, I think it is possible and one of the scientific approaches I have been working on recently, it's called Chemical Organization Theory. It's a bit of a strange term because it's origin comes from ideas of chemistry, but it's the idea that everything consists of processes, processes that we call reactions. A reaction means you have a number of things that come together, they react with each other and they produce a number of other things. Now, if you have many reactions, you get a network of reactions and then you can model a network of reactions and see how it evolves. You can do that via computer simulation, for example. And the interesting thing is that it doesn't matter what the things are that react; they could be physical things, they could be bodies, they could be people, they could be ideas; you can in principle model all these and then look at the emergence of what we call organization. So an organization in this particular framework, it's a self-sustaining system. It's a system where all the reactions are such that whatever is consumed is produced again by some other reaction. So, you can use it in principle to model how a global sustainable system would work, but of course it would be a huge model. And yeah, it doesn't exist.

Ilia: I am going to invoke here some poetic descriptions because I think nature has not just simply resilience, it has a surrendering. In other words, there are qualities of nature. It doesn't have, for example, free will, it doesn't have the ability to reject. I mean, if it rejects anything, it's due to either environmental forces that are destructive or antagonistic. But there's elements of nature that in my view are about life. And a very simple model that I have is life seeks more life. Life is always seeking to optimize life. Life itself doesn't have built within it a will for destruction. Destruction comes about in life. But it's amazing that after such a very long period of time, biological evolution and then even cosmic evolution, you know, 13.8 billion years, so to speak, of this universe and about what, 4.2 billion years of earth life, that's an amazingly long period of time, amazingly long.

And yet here we are, you know, to me the very fact that we could be talking about these very matters coming out of the soup of primordial life, the bacterial life, mycelium life, all different levels of life, complexifying throughout the ages. It's just fascinating. It's just almost, if I can use the word, if you don't mind, almost miraculous, right, that we're here, we can think about this and then, you know, see some patterns that might be helpful to us. But here's my dilemma. While we are fully nature, we're really something just slightly distinct from nature. There's something about us that can be so unnatural. In fact, I've often said the human person can be the most unnatural species alive today. We do things that not only counter nature, but that destroy nature.

And I guess that's one of my wonderings. You know, we are fully nature and yet, you know, there's something about the human person that's open to a capacity for, let me just say it, divinity or transcendence or super abundance or something completely much more than ourselves. And that puts us just in a very slightly different position. And I think that that very slight disposition can make a significant difference in how we appropriate what otherwise from your work and others, what we're learning from science, we have the needs to build a much better world, but there's something about us that is resisting it, that is fearful of it, and that in some ways is rejecting it. I don't know your thoughts on this, but these are my thoughts. You know, the human person, fully nature and fully what, fully a Christian would say, divine, someone else would say Budha-like, you know, whatever it is, there's something about this consciousness of ours, this nature of ours that's open to the infinite.

Francis: I have just recently started to collaborate with a French philosopher, Raphaël Liogier, who has a very nice concept. He calls it “raw transcend”. Usually transcendence is kind of defined within a particular religious or metaphysical framework. While he says raw transcend is this natural instinct we all have to want to be more than ourselves to go beyond the boundaries, beyond the limits of what we now have. And I had been thinking in a similar vein earlier, one of the concepts that I learned in cybernetics and systems theory is a concept of a metasystem transition. It's a transition to a higher level of system, a system that kind of is a, you might say, at a higher level of consciousness or a higher level of intelligence, or a higher level of reasoning. So humans, you might say, are at a meta system level above animals. We can think about things that animals can think about.

But now my idea is that we are undergoing another metasystem transition to an even higher level, and that is a metasystem transition towards what I have called the global brain, or to what AI has called the north sphere or the Omega point. But I think it is part of our nature that we indeed want to go beyond what we have now. But at the same time, as you say, we are afraid of it because yes, you are jumping into the unknown. You have to abandon lots of things that you know well and that you tend to want to rely on. And we know at the moment we are undergoing a transition, but lots of the aspects don't seem very nice. While the nice aspects people tend to ignore them. So, I want to emphasize more the positive aspects of the transition. We are indeed learning to understand things that we never understood before.

Ilia: Yeah, no, I really like that idea Francis, the meta system, the transcendence, there's a drive. And Teilhard writes about this actually in his human phenomenon when he describes the Omega principle as a principle, and I would put it as a principle of moreness. There's something that's centered within that in a sense is accounting for the more, the more in the cell, the more in the molecule, the more in the person. So, we do have this longing for something more than ourselves. And you know, that's, that's the question of what is the more, you know, what is that more that we long for? When is enough enough? And why is enough never enough? Because there's something even deeper than the enoughness that's always striving for, then beyond that.

Robert: Thanks for listening and returning for our latest season. Tune in next week for the conclusion of i's Conversation with Francis Heylighen when she asks, what are the values we need to focus on to start building and directing larger planetary systems like a global brain? A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.