Have you ever been overwhelmed by the complexity surrounding your life? Busy with upcoming tasks, requests, inquiries, and a constant pile-up of pending items, I believe almost all of us have experienced this kind of chaotic situation in one way or another. How can we address it? Should we seek to simplify and instill more order so that we can attain and maintain peace of mind? Perhaps for a certain moment, you feel relieved. By minimizing everything around you, you might discover the beauty of simplicity where you can rest in peace. But is that what we truly want? God forbid.
Let’s step outside and observe nature. What do you see? Do you perceive a tranquil simplicity or a boring order? Certainly not. Consider a tree; what do you see? If the tree is large and thriving, the more you observe, the more complexity you might perceive. Countless leaves wave constantly, sunlight filtering through them, creating a kaleidoscopic effect on your vision. Undoubtedly, numerous birds and insects inhabit it. The tree before you is indeed their world. Zooming in on the microscopic level, there’s an abundance of fungi, bacteria, and more. For them, this tree is like the universe. Do they feel overwhelmed? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t — just as we do or don’t in our lives.
Of course, this tree doesn’t stand alone. Groups of trees form woods, forests, and mountains. Expanding our view, we can see that this single tree is akin to a bacterium from the perspective of the entire planet. Similarly, our planet is but a speck in the vastness of our solar system, which, in turn, is a minute part of countless galaxies. Who’s to say the entire universe isn’t akin to a single bacterium? Both the macro and microcosms are indeed interchangeably the same on a fractal scale. The part reflects the whole, and the whole reflects the part, infinitely.
Returning to our human scale, how do we confront the overwhelming complexity of everyday life? Perhaps the “edge of chaos” is the key concept. When facing complex situations, we tend to feel defeated, labeling them as chaotic. In chaos, confusion and helplessness often prevail. We’re uncertain about how to navigate it. Chaotic situations are frequently viewed as negative outcomes due to increased entropy, one of the universe’s fundamental principles. From the Big Bang to the present, the cosmos appears to transition from order to disorder, much like the aftermath of a dynamite explosion. What do we see in the result? A messy, chaotic field akin to a dirty dump site. Is that the destination our universe is heading towards?
While entropy is a fundamental universal rule, it’s not entirely destructive, as we might superficially imagine. One aspect of entropy is chaos, but another is emergence, a key concept in complexity theory. Without maintenance or human intervention, everything becomes disoriented, messy, and eventually chaotic. Abandoned houses grow dirty and dusty, stagnating into what we often call hoarding houses, devoid of life’s flow. Yet, even such places may represent a form of biodiversity for various insects and animals, though it may seem like dead chaos to humans. Here, perspective matters. In this delayed chaos, a new type of biodiversity emerges. This is emergence.
We often speculate about what would happen to our cities and metropolises if humans suddenly went extinct. Will skyscrapers remain as legacies of past civilizations thousands of years from now? Unlikely. Within a hundred years, perhaps a thousand, signs of human civilization would vanish, at least on the surface. Cities would return to forests and jungles, places of non-anthropocentric biodiversity, potentially heavens for other species. This, too, is emergence.
From birth, life maintains a delicate homeostatic balance between order and disorder. As long as our human bodies are alive, complex immune systems control this balance to prevent invasions of other forms of biodiversity. Once we die, this balance is no longer sustainable, allowing our bodies to become thriving sites for various creatures before returning to the soil. But we are more than just bodies; we are minds, souls, and spirits. From birth, our minds evolve, fostering intelligence that contributes to the sustenance of human societies and civilizations. This intelligence, though seemingly chaotic like the complex trees and forests mentioned earlier, is its own domain, or “noosphere,” using Teilhard de Chardin’s term. It propels human cultures, societies, and civilizations forward. This, too, is emergence.
Due to entropy, everything tends towards disorder. We get overwhelmed by the chaos of our lives, societies, cultures, civilizations, and, fundamentally, our relationships. If we leave these chaotic elements unattended, which isn’t necessarily destructive from a broader perspective, even the extinction of human civilizations could lead to the emergence of post-civilization jungles, potential paradises for other species. However, there’s also another approach: embracing this chaos. At the edge of chaos, we have a choice. This brink is a sweet spot or tipping point where a new type of emergence can occur, leading to further invention, innovation, and evolution, or possibly our end, allowing something else to arise. The choice is ours.
If you’re overwhelmed by life’s complexity, you’re at the edge of chaos, the moment of emergence. Chaos is an indispensable condition for emergence; without it, there’s no transformation. We can’t witness any emergence unless we confront the edge of chaos. Let’s embrace and welcome chaos, for in doing so, we can experience genuine emergence. This is the secret of life, indeed.
Image by Joe
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