Nature's and Life's Complexity: Time to Learn Non-Linear Thinking!

How far and how well will the human mind be able to cope with life’s complexity?

Scientists and philosophers, like Descartes and Laplace, once thought that the day would come when everything would be described by elementary particles—in the sense of minute material pieces of matter—bouncing around as in a huge billiard. This may not have allowed us to predict everything, but at least it would have been a description of the world reducible to simple elements of matter, sort of like marbles zigzagging all over the place and uncomplicated few elementary processes. The truth of the matter (no pun intended) is that this naïve worldview had to give way to the modern standard model of particle physics, which is one of the most complicated intellectual and mathematical abstract theories the human mind ever conceived. In particle physics, one works with the so-called ‘Lagrangian functional’–an equation that describes the dynamics of a system of particles and its energy states. Below is a snapshot of the full Lagrangian that contains the interactions of the nuclear forces and the electromagnetic forces, the Higgs boson—that is, the quantum field that gives particles a mass—and several other mathematical corrections.

The full Lagrangian equation of the standard model of particle physics. (For more details, see here.)

Of course, I won’t bother you by trying to explain it. In the context of what we are discussing here, I believe it to be self-explanatory.

Biology met a not-too-dissimilar destiny. During the past hundred years, the extent of organization biologists discovered in living things has increased exponentially. We now know that organisms are zillions of times more organized and functionally complex and information-rich than Darwin ever dreamed. There is no sign of this trend slowing, and we have every reason to suspect that each decade will continue to reveal ever-more-astonishing levels of organization and dynamic functional wizardry in living things.

The model of a living cell being a simple cytoplasmatic bubble containing a nucleus with a DNA molecule supposedly containing all the information about what we are with mitochondria and a few other organelles performing some energetic and functional task also had to give way to a much more complicated picture. Nowadays, the sciences of biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, and cell biology have become such a complicated discipline that probably few, if any, can master it in all its intricacies. Moreover, the more we examine the single constituents of life, the more exhaustingly difficult it becomes to overview and assess its structure, functions, and processes.

The already complicate enough reductionist gene-centric view of life survives in the collective mind but is no longer tenable. As Denis Noble writes: “It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life. The view of biology often presented to the public is oversimplified and out of date.”

We are far away not only from mastering the terrifying complexity of life at the microscopic scale but, to a large degree, also from being aware of it. The modern delusion in biology and medicine was the idea that the more we dig into the microscopic structure of living things, the more we will understand and potentially gain control over it.^[1] But in too many instances, the contrary turned out to be true. Our discoveries reveal a complexity of Nature that increases much faster than our ability to fathom it. The structure and organization of Nature are much more complicated than we can imagine and simulate. Consequently, our sciences are also becoming exponentially complicated, leading to a compartmentalization that passionate appeals to multidisciplinarity won’t overcome. We are quickly losing control over our own models of Nature’s immense organization and processes. But the predominant culture continues to believe that it is only a matter of time, more mappings, more microscopic magnification, more computing power, more AI or, eventually, AGI, before we will get to the bottom of things and finally understand and grasp the functions and processes of Life.

Computer-generated artistic rendering of the cellular landscape cross-section through a eukaryotic cell, by Evan Ingersoll & Gael McGill - Cell Signaling Technology, Inc., The image is modeled according to X-ray, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and cryo-electron microscopy datasets.

I believe this is only wishful thinking that is constantly dismissed by further evidence and discoveries. Every scientist knows that life is complicated but we still have no idea how complicated.

We regularly read of seemingly spectacular breakthroughs in this field. For example, in July 2022 Google announced that its AI program AlphaFold can ‘predict’ all the 200 million protein structures from 1 million species. This is, indeed, an impressive achievement. In a sense, we consider it an example of what AI really could be useful for: Not so much to create humanoids or sci-fi-conscious computers, but rather to fathom the complexity that the human mind can’t. The announcement made headlines everywhere and provided for much excitement. But, in most cases, the headlines didn’t tell the whole story. ‘Predicting’ means what it means: We have predictions, not real protein structures. A couple of years later the hype faded away and scientists began to have some doubts: “More than ten studies have found AlphaFold’s predictions to be less useful than protein structures obtained with experimental methods."

A general trend becomes visible. We always underestimate Nature’s and life’s complexity.

I contend that it is the investigation tool—namely, mind—that is unable to cope with the full structure and the network of the process of Nature. It is not just about a lack of knowledge or progress; it is the very essence of our way of seeing that can’t and will never be able to fathom the full complexity of life’s origin, from the molecular to the biochemical, structural dynamics of a cell, let alone the workings of a brain. It is beyond the natural cognitive abilities of the human mind itself.

And this might well be true for the increasing complexity of our society and technologically driven world. The rapid pace of modern life, fueled by technological advancements and globalization, the constant influx of information, the interconnected nature of the global economic dynamics, migration, and potential catastrophes like climate change, cyberthreats, societal turmoil, etc., combined with the relentless pursuit of efficiency, introduce new layers of complexity. Managing this ever-expanding complex landscape requires continual adaptation and, especially, non-linear complex thinking skills.

Ascending higher states of consciousness can lead us a step further instead. Once we see the world from a higher perspective where reductionism and holism, multiplicity and unity, the One and the many are not contrary, but the two aspects of that which transcends the One and the many, we might have more of a chance at coming to grips with Nature’s and life’s complexity. The little scientific physical mind is a much too primitive tool, as it can’t deal with such a huge atomized but interconnected and entangled reality.

Meanwhile, what could bring us closer to such a cognitive leap, is the acquisition of complex systemic thinking skills. A too-simplistic linear thought still dominates our culture. From schools to research centers, or in politics, finance, and sciences, a nonlinear complex systemic view of reality still struggles to become the default paradigm.

For example, there is an intrinsic and paradigmatic fundamental difference between whatever complex machinery of a car engine, and the dynamics of a living organism or the challenges posed by a globalized society. The former is a structure whose functions and workings can still be described by a linear relationship of causes and effects; the latter are beyond any possible predictability because even a small change in only one of its parts triggers a sequence of effects that cascade throughout the whole system with many internal feedback processes complicating further the forecast of its behavior, let alone allow for its control. We still are dominated by a linear reductionist thought pattern that believes that modifying a system in point A will lead to result B. But reality doesn’t work like that. If we modify point A, this will cascade a plethora of effects B, C, D, E, F..., which in turn will trigger other modifications themselves throughout the whole system and eventually loop back to point A, and so on. That’s why our idea to ‘control Nature’ or to establish an ‘ecological balance’ or ‘help the environment to recover’ by intervening in its processes only betrays our childish naivety and ignorance. The same naivety with which we would like to control society, finance, politics, education, and all the complexity of human psychology. It is time to learn to become aware of our systemic ignorance first and then enter into the mentality of a nonlinear self-organizing interconnected complex system dynamics, eventually augmented by a holistic seeing. Once we can enter into this cognitive dimension, the solutions to our current worldwide and global issues will present themselves much more naturally.

Thus, theories of self-organizing complex systems and supercomputer simulation, AI, the coming AGI revolution, or whatever machinery, might help us, but that won’t lead us to the real understanding, as neither these technological means nor these intellectual, theoretical constructs, as complicated and detailed as they might be, are not even in principle able to seize the Real-Idea standing behind all this fantastically complex natural machinery.

This is another aspect of the state of denial in which the modern scientific and materialistic mindset finds itself, and that can only postpone—and not avoid—an inevitable evolutionary impetus. We will have to recognize the narrowminded paradigm we are working with. It is this mechanistic view of life, Nature, and reality as a whole, that is leading to a sense of stagnation. The change of paradigm will come from within and then manifest externally. This change from a unidimensional, linear, strictly reductionist, and material view of life to a multidimensional non-linear, holistic, and post-material apprehension and comprehension, is not a mere question of theoretical metaphysics but about down-to-earth, very concrete, and pragmatic issues that can decide between life and death.

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[1] This was also the delusion of physics in the past centuries. The above-mentioned complexity of the standard model of particle physics and the spectacular failure of hugely complicated theories that were supposed to extend it to a theory of quantum gravity, eloquently showed how reductionism and simplicity do not at all go hand in hand.