The System of the World

How the basic mechanics of the universe drive natural and human systems.

?

It is possible, if you are careful, to chill pure water to below freezing and for it to stay liquid. But any disturbance, no matter how tiny, will cause it immediately to turn to ice.

Something which has been constant changes completely in the blink of an eye.

Things don’t always behave as we might expect. But when we look to our path ahead and what it might hold for us, as species, as individuals, on this planet we call home, we can benefit from understanding a little better the inner clockworks of our universe.

What is the rhythm of our world?

What is its underlying cadence, its pitch?

And can developing a better sense of this help us understand what the future might hold?

Hints of it, the system of things, are all around us and, indeed, within us.

It is manifest in the living world; the biosphere. We might see glimpses of it in the lines on a page. The sawtooth pattern in graphs of increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is a representation of the annual growing and dying of great masses of vegetation across the world – in effect, the planet breathing. Or you might see it in front of you, in the pulsing of a flock of starlings, a giant ball kneaded into changing shapes seemingly by some intelligence.

It is manifest in our human world, at every kind of timescale, in the daily inhalation and exhalation of commuters into cities, over years in our political cycles, or centuries and millennia in the rise and fall of empires.

Rhythms might be found in what we perceive as beautiful – the essence of music is not only its beat, but the relationship between notes. A melody has a mathematical underpinning to its patterns.?

The beat of our world is at times characterised by continuity and repetition, and sometimes by extraordinarily rapid transformation. These rhythms are the orchestration of masses of components; the collective actions of individual agents.

It is, as the physicist and author Philip Ball has put it, how one thing leads to another. [1]

A system behaves the way it does because of the nature of connectivity between its underlying components. In the nineteenth century the German polymath Alexander von Humboldt articulated this, building a picture of a deeply interconnected natural world: “In this great chain of causes and effects … no single fact can be considered in isolation”. [2] With this insight he “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today”. [3]

In fact, the nature of this connectivitiy goes deeper, beyond interconnection to interdependency. The relationship between agents doesn’t just link then, it shapes them, fundamentally. On planet earth systems consist of components that have co-evolved and are entirely mutually dependent: “flowers shape bees as much as bees shape flowers”. [4]

Systems of interdependent components span the natural world and ourselves. The gut and the soil, for instance, are emerging in our understanding as crucial systems for our life in ways we didn’t previously appreciate. The two are connected at such as level that they are perhaps best seen as a single system.

Understanding how things are connected is one way in which we can start to get clues about how the systems in our world work. How things repeat, why sometimes things stay as they are and why sometimes they change.

Consider systems that strongly embed themselves. An example here is the QWERTY keyboard. Designed in the nineteenth century to prevent typewriters jamming by keeping commonly used letters apart, it became “locked in” as people learned to use it. Now that typewriters are confined to museums and decorations in hipster cafes there is no particular merit for its layout, but there is no going back now.? Alternatively, consider the emergence of an autocratic state out of a democracy – this might start gradually, as institutions are eroded and power, based on fear, coalesces around an individual. This momentum becomes self-reinforcing – more fear within the system facilitates the ability to impose more control, often however connected with a rise in paranoia on behalf of the autocrat.

But when they change, locked-in systems can change very fast. The example of supercooled water illustrates this – below freezing pure water can stay liquid because the freezing has to start somewhere, with the emergence of some tiny ice crystals. These can be triggered by irregularities such as particles of dust or scratches on the containing vessel. In the absence of these freezing may not occur, but the water becomes metastable – a state of being that is somehow beyond, or next to, stability. It is not the same as unstable; systems in metastability can exist in a continuous state for an indefinite period of time. [5] But, to put this in metaphorical terms, metastable systems pulse with a kind of potential energy; any tiny intervention, or random molecular event, and they change suddenly and dramatically via a phase transition.

The metastable supercooled water freezes instantly when a spoon or finger is dipped in. Traffic on a motorway can get heavier and heavier but still flow smoothly until one driver switches lanes and causes a ripple which triggers a traffic seize-up. The Soviet Union, a transcontinental giant a year short of its seventieth birthday, imploded overnight.

Such events can occur in our political and physical worlds when structures and feedback loops which have kept a system locked in flip around.

*

These are questions of our physical world and our human world.

There are no easy answers to them. Indeed, at some level there are no answers.

Yet there is great value in making the effort to at least have an awareness of some of the basic forces that influence things. We can build a scaffolding; a framework to better understand the base components of this human physical world.

To see something of the nature of this interconnected, interdependent world.

A world characterised by complex, adaptive systems.

What do we mean by this? By complex, adaptive systems?

·?????? “complex” means something different to “complicated” – the latter refers to something hard, but ultimately solvable. Something with a finite, though possibly very large, number of potential options - like possible moves in a game of chess. “Complex” systems by contrast have infinite possible pathways and so we cannot model their future patterns with any accuracy and; all we can do is try to understand their nature and the broad outlines of the potential different pathways ahead. As George Monbiot has put it: “A complex system is not the same as a merely complicated system, such as an engine, which is designed to behave in a certain way, and responds to stimulus (like putting your foot on the accelerator) in a linear and predictable fashion. The properties of a complicated system cannot be determined only by looking at its parts. Its components form a self-organised network, which responds to pressure in spontaneous and non-linear ways”[6]

·?????? “adaptive” refers to a system which is in a state of continual potential change, reacting to a alterations in the context within which it sits.

Seeing the Earth and its physical systems, as well human society and ourselves as individuals as complex, adaptive system, composed of infinite sub-systems, enables us to see the world more clearly. At a deeper level.

It helps us make more sense of, or at least be less surprised by, the way things change. Complex adaptive systems can take radically different paths depending on their initial conditions.? Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, stumbled across this in the winter of 1961 when modelling weather using 12 simple variables. For a particular run of his Royal McBee LGP-30, an early computer, he set the initial conditions from an earlier printout in order to match a prior program of weather conditions. “Then he walked down the hall to get away from the noise and drink a cup of coffee. When he returned an hour later, he saw something unexpected, something that planted a seed for a new science.” [7]

In the new run the weather diverged from the old pattern, such that in a few months it has lost all resemblance. It should have completely matched. It transpired the Lorenz had made one rounding change in setting the initial conditions, one part in a thousand, which should have been completely inconsequential but in fact over time was catastrophic.

?

Lorenz went on to become one of the driving forces behind chaos theory. The diverging weather patterns on his computer foretold its central metaphor of the butterfly effect – the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world might changing the weather on the other a month later.

If even a hugely simplified system modelled on an early computer exhibit this level of complexity it would seem we would have no chance of being able to predict events in the real universe.? Yet by understanding the concept of complex, adaptive systems we can foster an awareness of the underlying drivers of our world.

We can start to see the shape of things.

To understand our world we need to appreciate systems. What influences them. How they emerge. How they survive and perpetuate. How they unravel.

This is of profound relevance to our world right now.

It is fundamental to our understanding of climate change. The Earth’s climate fluctuates, it has periods of relative stability, and it can be pushed into new states. This has happened in the past and it will happen again in the future. Human activity may play a role in activating tipping points in the climate.?

The human world is a constellation of systems. Systems that are power blocks, that are nations, economies, tribes, corporations, families, government and friendship groups.

And we ourselves are a collection of systems which work together to keep us alive – as much an interdependent collective of trillions of organisms as a single human.

But perhaps the most important system of all for us to consider in the world today is our own thoughts.

Our thinking, if you can conceive of it as single flow, is itself a complex adaptive system. It consists of constituent parts which interact with each other. Which are interdependent. It hums with a certain frequency for extremely prolonged periods; perhaps our entire lives. We might react the same way to things, day in, day out. Perhaps with anger or frustration because of the way things happen, or don’t happen, when we look at them in isolation.

And yet, just with a nudge, our thinking might profoundly alter. ?

Perhaps seeing the world in terms of complex, adaptive systems is that change.

Reading recommendations:

·?????? Chaos; Making a New Science, James Gleick, 1988, William Heinemann Ltd

A highly readable overview of the background to chaos theory, and its real-world applications.

?

·?????? Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Philip Ball, 2004, Arrow Books

A wide-ranging explanation of how to look at the world in terms of the interaction between things both in physical and human system.

?

·?????? The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, Andrea Wulf, 2015, John Murray (Publishers)

The story of the man who gave us our concept of an interconnected natural world, who first outlined some of the key drivers of the biosphere such as the ability of forests to enrich and cool the atmosphere, as well as the dangers of deforestation and human meddling in the climate.

?

[1] Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, 2004, Philip Ball.

[2] Quoted in The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, Andrea Wulf, 2016, page 5.

[3] The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World, Andrea Wulf, 2016, page 5

[4] Quoted from The Overstory, Richard Powers, Vintage, 2018, page 567.

[5] Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, Philip Ball, 2004 pages 201-202

[6] Regenesis – Feeding the world without devouring the planet, 2023, paperback edition page 27 (footnote).

[7] Chaos, James Gleick, 1988, William Heinemann Ltd, page 16.