This Christmas I was so sad to see Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, a ghost town due to the Israel-Gaza conflict. With the UN High Commissioner for Refugees warning of the ‘world’s current extreme disorder’, it came as no surprise when I came across the book End Times (2023) by Peter Turchin.
Turchin, a professor at the University of Connecticut and leader of the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna, has established a databank called Seshat (named after the Egyptian goddess of archives), with a project involving experts building the world’s largest collection of data on the rise and fall of societies.
This has identified trends associated with societal collapse, such as increasing inequality leading to stagnating/declining wellbeing of the majority of the population. Turchin found collapse can be minimised by institutional reform, but most often is not, and he notes collapse trends right now in the West. Should we be worried?
According to another data-crunching book (this one written by two professors) The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone (2009), whether or not there is impending doom, those in power should take notice.
Turchin describes his predictions as ‘science-based forecast’, not ‘prophecy’. Complex systems (like the weather) are difficult to accurately predict long-term.
Unlike traditional science, which focuses on individual components and linear cause and effect ( ‘A’ causes ‘B’), complexity science observes overall behaviours arise out of interactions, via relationships that may be amplifying or balancing. Previously known as circular causality, in its simplest form, ‘A’ affects ‘B’ and this causes ‘B’ to affect ‘A’, either amplifying A’s effect or balancing it. A small disturbance amplified cyclically over and over, can have an exponentially large effect in time.
While not particularly intuitive, such mechanisms are fundamental to many systems. Body temperature is kept at a steady state by biological balancing loops, while contractions of childbirth involve amplifying loops which cease once the child is born.
Amplifying loops with no brakes (i.e. not enough counteracting balancing loops) tend to lead to system instability, increases in chaotic behaviour, and system parameters accelerating to extreme values. Unchecked, such a system would destroy itself. More often, at a critical point the system resets to a new updated state, incorporating information of the initial disturbance. Many natural systems evolve in a chaotic way under certain conditions (2).
Where chaos begins, classical science stops.
James Gleick. Chaos: Making a New Science.
Chaotic states arising from amplifying loops may manifest as dream phase of sleep. New research suggests extreme altered states such as psychosis may be rooted in the evolutionary role of dreams, where dreaming is thought to have emerged to enable early humans to rehearse responses to dangers they faced in real life (‘threat simulation theory’). Researchers looked at the idea that paranoia and hallucinations can occur when the dreaming state is carried through into the waking state (3,4).
A related idea proposed by neuroscientist Erik Hoel views dreaming as a biological form of chaotic data that evolved to help us explore and connect new patterns and scenarios outside our limited data set (5). These theories may offer insight into how in the short-term even extreme altered mental states may have adaptive value, as has been suggested (6,7,8,9). How then, can they become harmful? Perhaps a physical analogy is that healing inflammation when overwhelmed, can become damaging.
Amplifying loops have been implicated in financial market collapse, as well as making the issue of climate change more urgent (2023 is confirmed as the world’s hottest year on record) such as when global warming melts Arctic ice, which causes release of gases that further accelerate warming.
Latin
complexus = entwined
Complexity science studies systems of many interdependent parts that interact and adapt to one another with global outcomes in our world.
Chaos theory came before, but there was catastrophe theory before that. The concept of catastrophe – abrupt breakdown of a system with transition to a new state of balance or collapse – became key to complexity science.
As for rising ‘inequality’, the most obvious amplifier is that those with most money are able to influence elections and lawmaking to further increase their wealth, via large political donations and promises of future careers to politicians. Another example is one I mentioned in my original Raw Vision post, whereby stigma and discrimination towards those with extreme mental crisis in Western societies can amplify inequalities that may have often led to mental crisis in the first place. (A recent debate about social/political inequality causing mental health crisis from the Institute of Art and Ideas here).
I’m therefore pleased to have been recently able to replace the copyrighted material in my film Raw Vision and belatedly send it off to film festivals, as a small attempt to reduce stigma towards those with extreme altered mental states.
I’m currently writing a script for a feature film. Initially I thought to produce it as a short ‘proof-of-concept’ film, but it was difficult to do that without a full script as a guide. There have already been films made using some of these ideas, such as The Butterfly Effect (2004), but not in the way I’m attempting.
We have always lived in a complex world. Increased connectivity has created strong and often unknown interdependencies. Can understanding complexity reduce our suffering, or are there too many forces that overwhelm us?
References
1) Turchin, Peter; Brennan, Rob; Currie, Thomas; Feeney, Kevin; Francois, Pieter; Hoyer, Daniel; Manning, Joseph (2015). Seshat: The Global History Databank. Cliodynamics . Volume 6, Issue 1
2) Nicoli G, Prigogine I (1989). Exploring Complexity. WH Freeman Ltd.
3) Park S, Weber F (2020). Neural and homeostatic regulation of REM sleep. Frontiers in Psychology. Volume 11
4) D’Agostino A, Scarone S (2011). From dreams to psychosis: a European Science Foundation exploratory workshop. Editorial. Consciousness and Cognition 20(4):985-6
5) Hoel, Erik (2021). The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalisation. Patterns. Volume 2, Issue 5
6) Scheepers FE, Mul J, Boer F, Hoogendijk WJ (2018). Psychosis as an Evolutionary Adaptive Mechanism to Changing Environments. Frontiers in Psychiatry 9: 237
7) Gunn R, Bortolotti L (2018). Can delusions play a protective role? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17, 813-833
8) Boyle M, Johnstone L (2018). The Power Threat Meaning Framework, Overview. The British Psychological Society.
9) Shields, G (2014). Psychosis as a Mechanism For Coping With Existential Distress. Existential Analysis 25(1)