Reddit reviews Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life

Well this thread title drew me like a hunk of iron to the world's biggest magnet.

The short answer to the title question is "no, except maybe in some very trivial sense." The longer answer is, well, complicated. Before I ramble a little bit, let me say that we should distinguish between the rhetorical and (for lack of a better word) "metaphysical" interpretations of this question. In many cases, the language used to describe some theory, problem, proposal, or whatever is indeed unnecessarily complicated in a way that makes it difficult to communicate (some parts of the humanities and social sciences are particularly bad offenders here). That is indeed a problem, and we should strive to communicate our ideas in the simplest language that's appropriate for the audience we're talking to. I take your friend's thesis to be a bit more substantive than that, though: he's claiming something like "all big messy systems are really just lots of small simple systems, and we can learn everything we need to know about the world by looking at the small simple systems." That's the viewpoint that I think is mistaken.

I think it's really important to distinguish between complicated and complex, both in the context of this discussion and in general. Lots of things are complicated in the sense of being big, having lots of moving parts, difficult to understand, or exhibiting nuanced behavior. A box of air at thermodynamic equilibrium is complicated: it has lots of parts, and they're all moving around with respect to one another. Not all complicated systems are also complex systems, though, and understanding what "complex" means turns out to be really tricky.

Here are some comparisons that seem intuitively true: a dog’s brain is more complex than an ant’s brain, and a human’s brain is more complex still. The Earth’s ecosystem is complex, and rapidly became significantly more complex during and after the Cambrian explosion 550 million years ago. The Internet as it exists today is more complex than ARPANET—the Internet’s progenitor—was when it was first constructed. A Mozart violin concerto is more complex than a folk tune like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The shape of Ireland’s coastline is more complex than the shape described by the equation x2 + y2 = 1. The economy of the United States in 2016 is more complex than the economy of pre-Industrial Europe. All these cases are relatively uncontroversial. What quantity is actually being tracked here, though? Is it the same quantity in all these cases? That is, is the sense in which a human brain is more complex than an ant brain the same sense in which a Mozart concerto is more complex than a folk tune?

These questions are extremely non-trivial to answer, and a very large number of whole books have been written on the subject already; so far, there's no universally accepted consensus of what makes complex systems special, or how to measure complexity in the natural world. There is, however, a growing consensus that P.W. Anderson was correct when he wrote in 1972 that "more is different": in many cases, systems consisting of a large number of relatively simple components interacting in relatively simple ways can display surprising, novel behavior. That's characteristic of complex systems: they behave in ways that we wouldn't expect them to (or even be able to deduce) based on an examination of their constituent parts in isolation from one another.

Complex systems often show interesting patterns of behavior that cut across scales of analysis, with their dynamics at one scale constraining the dynamics at other scales (and vice-versa). This sort of "multiscale variety" has been used to develop a mathematical theory of strong emergence, demonstrating how it can be the case that more is different. I've called this quality "dynamical complexity," and defined it as a measure of the "pattern richness" of a particular physical system: one system is more dynamically complex than another if (and only if) it occupies a point in configuration space that is at the intersection of regions of interest to more special sciences. For instance, a system for which the patterns of economics, psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics are predictively useful is more dynamically complex than one for which only the patterns of chemistry and physics are predictively useful.

The notion of dynamical complexity is supposed to correspond with (and give a physical interpretation for) the formalism of effective complexity, which is an information-theoretic concept developed by Murray Gell-Mann at the Santa Fe Institute. Effective complexity is grounded in the notion of algorithmic information content, and tracks the "amount of randomness" in a string, and how any non-randomness--information--was produced. A key feature of dynamical complexity is that the total "information content" of a physical system--the total number of interesting patterns in its behavior--may be perspectival, and thus depend on how we choose to individuate systems from their environment, and how we demarcate collections of microstates of the system into "relevantly similar" macrostates. Those choices are pragmatic, value-driven, and lack clear and uncontroversial "best answers" in many cases, contributing to the challenge of studying complex systems.

As an example, consider the task of predicting the future of the global climate. What are the criteria by which we divide the possible futures of the global climate into macrostates such that those macrostates are relevant for the kinds of decisions we need to make? That is, how might we individuate the global climate system so that we can notice the patterns that might help us predict the outcome of various climate policies? The answer to this question depends in part upon what we consider valuable; if we want to maximize long-term economic growth for human society, for instance, our set of macrostates will likely look very different than it would if we wanted to simply ensure that the average global temperature remained below a particular value. Both of those in turn may differ significantly from a set of macrostates informed by a desire to maximize available agricultural land. These different ways of carving possible future states up into distinctive macrostates do not involve changes to the underlying equations of motion describing how the system moves through its state space, nor does the microstructure of the system provide an obvious and uncontroversial answer to the question of which individuation we should choose. There is no clearly "best way" to go about answering this question.

Compare that project to modeling the box of gas I mentioned earlier and you can start to see why modeling complex systems is so difficult, and why complex systems are fundamentally different. In the case of the gas, there are a relatively small number of ways to individuate the system such that the state space we end up with is dynamically interesting (e.g. Newtonian air molecules, thermodynamic states, quantum mechanical fluctuations). In the case of the global climate, there are a tremendous number of potentially interesting individuations, each associated with its own collection of models. The difference between the two systems is not merely one of degree; they are difference in kind, and must be approached with that in mind.

In some cases, this may involve rather large changes in the way we think about the practice of science. As /u/Bonitatis notes below, many of the big unsolved problems in science are those which appear to "transcend" traditional disciplines; they involve drawing conclusions from our knowledge of economics, physics, psychology, political science, biology, and so on. This is because many of the big unsolved problems we're concerned with now involve the study of systems which are highly dynamically complex: things like the global economy, the climate, the brain, and so on. The view that we should (or even can) approach them as mere aggregates of simple systems is, I think, naive and deeply mistaken; moreover, it's likely to actually stymie scientific progress, since insisting on "tractability" or analytically closed models will often lead us to neglect important features of the natural world for the sake of defending those intuitive values.

If you find that interesting I highly recommend reading the book Sync by Brian Strogatz. Nature is full of this stuff, from sleep cycles to quantum effects to the behaviour of fireflies.

> I did and still do believe that an ordered universe that allows science to predict anything at all is evidence of a creator, even if it isn't the one I believe in. I've heard others claim that the universe is chaotic, but I don't agree.

The modern view, backed by evidence, is that order and chaos are not dichotomous as was traditionally believed, but rather they both emerge from each other.

Here are some good links with decent, well produced approaches to teaching this concept while providing concrete examples:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xv1j0n

https://www.amazon.com/Sync-Order-Emerges-Universe-Nature/dp/0786887214

I'll also note that neither of the above even approach the question of whether 'a creator' exists, as it is outside of the scope of the presentation and, I think, irrelevant to the overall point. None of this demonstrates definitively that there is no creator. What it does demonstrate, I believe, is that if you are truly seeking fruitful paths to find evidence or arguments for the existence of a creator, order and chaos is not where you should be looking.

That area of the map has been explored, by hundreds of people undoubtedly more clever and observant than you or me, and we've found no gods there. Or, to use another metaphor, I don't think there's any more meat on that bone.

Seven Life Lessons of Chaos

Though it positions itself somewhat as a self-help book, it's really not -- it touches on many interesting things about nature and humanity. It's short (and maybe enlightening too).

I also enjoyed Sync ... though I'm not sure if some of the findings here have been updated (it's a bit old now).

You might also look at some EO Wilson books.

As far as abiogenesis is concerned, I really enjoyed books such as The Emergence Of Everything, Beginnings Of Cellular Life, Origins Of Life, Genesis, What Is Life?, and Microcosms.

I'm an avid reader of all things abiogenesis, if you hadn't noticed. Considering it and finding ways to simulate it on a computer is one of my hobbies.

Also, Abiogenesis is really part of a larger study of emergence, chaos and order, and how simple things come together to perform complex dances. So on that note, I have a few more books worth reading:

Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life, Emergence: From Chaos to Order, and Creation: Life and How to Make it

Strogatz is my favorite author for complex syst. and non-linear dynamics: http://www.amazon.com/Sync-Order-Emerges-Universe-Nature/dp/0786887214

Watch his TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_strogatz_on_sync.html

My observation and perception is that this natural harmony is fundamentally what causes intelligence and consciousness. It is fractal, and it is spontaneous. In simple terms, our brains are giant musical instruments, like thousands or even millions of orchestras in our head, and our thoughts are songs that play along with stimulus from our environment. There are many songs playing in our brains at any given time. The most coherent songs get other orchestras to play along, until one is the most coherent in our mind and becomes the main song for a bit.

The fractal nature of this on the larger scale can be seen in social interactions where there is a public consciousness -- the collective intelligence. The collective intelligence that we see in society might exactly mirror how our individual intelligence works. The fractal nature on a smaller scale can be seen when for instance we notice a sound, such as a wind chime, and it stimulates a larger thought. This happened to me a few years ago when my neighbor's wind "flute" played a certain note according to which way and how intense the wind was blowing. There I was, unloading groceries from the car when it occurred to me that that's exactly how our brains work, albeit on a far more complex scale. We are more or less blowing around in the winds of existence, receiving stimuli from many sources at once, and our brains spontaneously oscillate in response, just like my neighbor's wind flute.

There is an interesting book on this subject called "Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life". These natural harmonics are how order spontaneously appears in the universe, and it therefore appears to me that our brains and our intelligence are the opposite of disorder.

I had once watched an interview with a lady who was describing a DMT trip. She felt that our brains are "spiritual antennas". That may not be far from the truth when you think about it, since, as I am proposing, our brains naturally oscillate in harmony with stimuli from our environment. What happens when we are asleep, or under the influence of substances such as DMT, is somewhat more of a mystery than being sober and awake. Is some part of our brain sensitive to unseen quantum harmonics perhaps?

If you go to Myanmar or Thailand, you can see them flash in sync. There's a great book that's not really about the phenomenon as much as it's about spontaneous generation of order from chaos. The author was on a fascinating episode of Radiolab that talks about the firefly thing though.

For a really interesting description of the underlying principles at work here I'd highly recommend checking out Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life by Steven Strogatz.

There are some really good suggestions here, but a couple of books that were good entry points for me haven't been mentioned yet:

Sync by Steven Strogatz.

How The Universe Got Its Spots by Janna Levin.

Both of these books are rather specific interest type books, but they're both written so well that they are easy entry points into more reading later.

Edit: Ooh ooh I forgot about Plagues and Peoples. A great read that really makes you rethink global history, along the lines of (and drastically predating) another great book about cultural history Guns, Germs and Steel. Both of these books are kind of a mix of history, sociology and science, so it might not be what you're looking for though.