Complexity and Coherence

In complexity theory, it is observed that when a simplified and idealised population reaches a certain threshold of component complexity, a system of negentropic novelty emerges spontaneously and sustains itself at a higher frequency of order, auto-catalysing and self-organising. These newly emerged systems then go on to manifest further non-linear emergences at progressively higher levels of complexity, held away from equilibrium and dissolution by autopoesis. Many of these elucidations are congruent with observable chemical and biological processes and offer a tantalising glimpse into how Life has been making similar, interminable emergent steps of accumulating complexity; an unbroken developmental chain running from diffuse energies and cosmological bodies to cognitive molecular interactions and the vast sophistication of conscious multi-cellular organisms. Certainly some important new ideas, not least those of complexity theory and emergence and their ilk, substantiate these observations and seem just on the cusp of societal bloom, at least in the minds of them that are keen to motion.

If we consider that what has been called mind, or consciousness, is an emergent property of the 'material' brain (not that I necessarily consider it to be), we can also then consider language as an emergent property of mind, and that the dense aggregations of information that construe ideas i.e. words and symbols to ideologies, paradigms etc. (however valid), will share the same emergent properties, emerging albeit in a kind of imaginal space, a noospace. This space was first articulated so by Teilhard de Chardin and to me seems notionally equivalent to what Alan Moore has termed ‘ideaspace’ and what Karl Popper called ‘World 3’; the world of objective contents of thought. It then becomes interesting to speculate what can and will manifest in this noospace, on the 'substance' it is made from, and the way in which it feedbacks onto the 'material' world proper.

Some have suggested that when informational complexity, like Terence McKenna’s novelty, is graphed against time, albeit with a tentative x-axis, the graph’s general curve is exponential, meaning that its steepness increases logarithmically over time, and essentially throughout history. Others have also noticed that at our current point of history we are tending very close to the vertical of this curve, at which point informational complexity increases so rapidly as to confound. Theories of singularities and transitional apocalyptic cusps therefore abound, or as Alan Moore articulates information doubling; water sublimates into steam. Regardless of the veracity or meaning of these propositions, ones which I am inclined to intuitively sympathise with, we, as self-reflective language generators, are witnessing what it is like to be on the accelerating wave-front of this emergence, the effervescing limen of novelty; of evolution. Pay attention to it.