"The point here is that the original Darwinian model is not a story of survival drives, adaptive pressure, and striving to survive—it is a story about rolling the dice.1 Here, there is no sense in which, for example, the dinosaurs could have done something different to adapt to the meteoric disturbance. A rock fell from the sky and radically altered the planet. The creatures that survived were already engaged in the forms of living that were possible after the impact. Prior to the impact, these forms of living “laid low,” as it were, not especially successful, not especially prolific, and most certainly not dominating the available resources and affordances. After the impact, they were able to continue on, much as before, as the planet changed again, more slowly this time. Genetic drift, the opening of new niches, new opportunities for making a living, resulted in a radial expansion of forms.
The point here is that evolutionary processes are not at all like developmental processes. With development, later forms build up upon the prior, higher (or more complex) form. This is trivial but important. You have to be two feet tall before you are three feet tall, and you don’t go back to being two feet before you grow to four feet. Similarly, you must develop systemic reasoning before you develop meta-systemic reasoning, and in between you don’t drop back into concrete representational modes of reasoning. With evolutionary theory this is assuredly not the case. Time and time again we see in the evolutionary record that the most recent “highest form”—the species best fitted to the existing environment—is not the foundational species for the future forms. We did not descend from the spectacular fishes of the Cambrian explosion, but from the lowly worms who survived the great Ordovician extinction. We did not descend from the mighty dinosaurs, we descended from the lowly shrews who out-lasted them.
The language of complex adaptive systems has usurped the Darwinian model.
Complex adaptive systems (CAS) thinking has replaced the original notion of random mutation and natural selection with the notions of adaptive strivance—strategies designed to address increasing evolutionary pressure, creating vicious cycles of escalating complexity and increasing volatility. To understand how this happened, we need to look at how the underlying mental models of evolution changed.
Darwin’s original model operates much like the invisible hand of the market.2 In both cases, individuals have agency only at local, micro scales. The macro-events, such as population effects and macro-economic events, are inaccessible to the individual agents, from whose actions and behaviors the macro-effects emerge. The wolf has agency with respect to hunting the elk. The elk have agency with respect to fleeing and to fighting back, to participating in herding behaviors, and to migrating to food and breeding places. That these local actions scale up to population and ecological-level outcomes is completely decoupled to the agency of the wolf and elk. In this model, the environment is a macro-level outcome, not an agent or actor in the evolutionary arena".
"At some point the notion of the environment as actor slipped into the evolutionary model. We came to speak about ecological destruction and climate change as exerting evolutionary pressure on populations to adapt. Eventually, evolutionary processes became simultaneously the protagonist and the antagonist of a new collective story. This story functions as a powerful theory-constitutive metaphor for complex adaptive thinking.3 It had led us to “modernist assumptions of securing the human against the world” 4 (Chandler, 2018) and to thinking of ourselves, individually and collectively, as people under siege5 from the very planetary and ecological forces that life depends upon (Roy, 2021).6
More recently, complex adaptive systems thinking has been applied at every scale, and we have come to construe the struggle between individual (or group) and environment as existing at every scale—from the macro down to the micro. Here, in this imaginary world, everyone and everything is adapting to everyone else and everything else".
"At some point the notion of the environment as actor slipped into the evolutionary model. We came to speak about ecological destruction and climate change as exerting evolutionary pressure on populations to adapt. Eventually, evolutionary processes became simultaneously the protagonist and the antagonist of a new collective story. This story functions as a powerful theory-constitutive metaphor for complex adaptive thinking.3 It had led us to “modernist assumptions of securing the human against the world” 4 (Chandler, 2018) and to thinking of ourselves, individually and collectively, as people under siege5 from the very planetary and ecological forces that life depends upon (Roy, 2021).6
More recently, complex adaptive systems thinking has been applied at every scale, and we have come to construe the struggle between individual (or group) and environment as existing at every scale—from the macro down to the micro. Here, in this imaginary world, everyone and everything is adapting to everyone else and everything else.
The notion of complex adaptive systems thinking is epistemically suspect.
While it includes all the individuals as players, it robs them any real agency, since they are caught in a perpetual action-reaction cycle. As a result, we become sufferers of our own actions. The notion of complex adaptive systems thinking is also epistemically futile, because it necessarily implies systemic closure,
[because] every adaptation to pressure simultaneously injects more adaptive pressure into the system. It is a continuously escalating, perpetual motion machine of antibiotics and bacteria, insects and pesticides, markets and trade, nuclear arms and weapons defense, viruses and vaccines.7 Inside complex adaptive systems thinking, closure [is] predicated on the very properties of the model itself.8
Part Two: A Side View Proposition—Alexander, Whitehead, Simondon
I have taken from Christopher Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilbert Simondon first and foremost a certain view that permeates their writings. I have tried to integrate the main principles of this view and applied these principles to “the problem situation”—that complex adaptive systems thinking is both epistemically suspect and yet almost exclusively adopted as a theory of change in complex situations—laid out in part one. This includes Alexander’s view of “the living processes which can, successfully, generate living structure.” Alexander surmises that this view is not substantiated by the world view of biology, complex systems theory, and quantum physics as we know them. The living phenomena are commonly observable features of the world that we can see, sense, and feel. “But they do not fit within any previous explanatory context. They need their own model.”9 It also entails a Whiteheadian view where potentials are also living phenomenon that are causally implicit in generating the actual structures of the world. Both Alexander and Whitehead construed these generative potentials and processes, as having both physical properties and subjective qualities that are entangled at every point and in every event. Alexander writes:
What I call “the I” is that interior element in a work of art, or in a work of nature, which makes one feel related to it. It may occur in a leaf, or in a picture, in a house, in a wave, even in a grain of sand or in an ornament. It is not ego. It is not me. It is not individual at all, having to do with me, or you. It is humble, and enormous: that thing in common which each one of us has in us. It is the spirit which animates each living center.10
Whitehead laid out a view which has come to be known alternatively as panexperiantialism, which also assigns subjective qualities to what we ordinarily consider as physical events; and, like Alexander, he does so without absenting the crucial role of the physical form. This dipolar view is not ordinary dualism—it is a double entanglement, which poses a challenge to our dualistic language. Alexander’s 4-volume work on The Nature of Order took decades to write. He paid close attention to advances in quantum physics and the new sciences of complexity where the individual and the collective, the local and the global, and the subsystems and whole system came to be seen as mutually implicated, where “unexpected and complex behaviors arise in richly interconnected systems” and whose theorems “show how compelling order arises, almost spontaneously, in these systems.”11 He followed the work of Stuart Kaufmann, who had said that order arises naturally and spontaneously through self-organizing processes.12 Yet he found these developments fell short of an adequate view of reality because they leave out the place of the human experience. In other words, they were still based on a metaphysics of substance, rather than, as Whitehead proposed, a metaphysics of experience. For Alexander, this is the central dilemma, what he referred to as “Whitehead’s bifurcation”—the rift that remains:
The personal, the existence of felt “self” in the universe, the presence of consciousness and the vital relation between self and matter—none of these have entered the picture yet, in a practical or scientifically workable way.13
Christopher Alexander’s new vision was of a living world permeated with centers and wholes. Unlike parts, which are members of wholes, centers function like crystals dropped into a super-salient solution, around which the whole cascades into symmetry. This symmetry is complex, itself composed of “whole subsystems,” which in turn are composed of other “whole subsystems.” If you zoomed into any of the subsystems, you would see a fractal ordering, of more centers that had seeded them. It is here, in the supersystem of wholes, that the new sciences have made their remarkable discoveries. But it is in the living center that Alexander identifies how the “I” recognizes its self, the presence of consciousness and its own vitality as a center among other centers. Here there are three key features: (1) the “whole” that pre-exists as an organizing principle, and the center around which structure grows; (2) the centers which are in relation to each other, such that the structure that they express is both effected by and affects all the others; and (3) a strong asymmetrical vector (associated with the arrow of time) which, Alexander concludes, is necessary for ongoing structural transformations which bring about change and novelty, that are requisites for a living system. This he calls the “principle of unfolding wholeness” which says that every structure continues to change its own nature. This suggests that every transformation implies some ambiguity, that every structure is replete but not complete.
Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Cosmological Individuation
A quick google search tells me that Simondon and Whitehead were unaware of each other. Yet it is impossible not to see a common intuition running through their work. Even more uncanny is the way that Simondon’s notion of cosmic individuation resonates with Alexander’s view, only they are mirror images of each other. Where Alexander sees living centers as seeding the crystalline-like lattice structure of the whole, Simondon begins with the cosmological principle—a fundamental metaphysical force—he calls “Individuation.” This force produces “singularities” from the “background field” which is originally a unitary whole, with a signature organizational structure. The singularities are like Alexander’s centers’ imbued with subject-like qualities. Simondon calls them “transdividuals,” to reflect their ambiguous nature (neither objective, nor subjective). This process Simondon calls “transduction” which is an inexhaustible impetus where
an activity of thought or being is born from the propagation of the pre-individual reality little by little, from one problematic region to another, each subsequent region amplifying the one prior to it, producing a transformation, a new phase of reality".14
No comments:
Post a Comment