Unweaving Complexity
[October 12, 2001 3:33 AM ]

It seems that we humans have a certain affinity with processes and interaction – understanding the ‘inscape’ of a process (apologies to Manley Hopkins) leads to a greater appreciation of that system. A kind of 21st century sublime, where there is a new focus on systems and processes rather than objects and things. A kind of theology of actions or spiritual materialism, as I like to call it.

Of course, processes are not just around to be admired over. The study of complexity mimics our continuing obsession with deconstructing the world, but not in the sense of pure reductionism, which is now of course a dirty word. This is deconstruction with a view to reconstruction – synthesis and formation. Understand the process and you now have the ability to ‘rewind the tape’ as the biologists say, and rebuild, possibly creating new and exciting recombination if you modify the rules or initial conditions. I should stress that the “new and exciting” is only a slim possibility because the majority of rebuilds will probably not develop into anything that we would know as interesting. Like the books in Borges’ library, not everything will be a work of great literature. It also raises the more subtle, but important issue, of rebuilding for human purposes and desires. By rebuilding or changing processes for our own interest, we risk making the results of those processes mirrors of our own limitations.

It was Charles Sherrington, Nobel Prize winning scientist researching the mind and nervous system at the beginning of the 20th century who called the mind “an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one.” Sherrington’s oft-quoted line reveals so succinctly how this notion of process has become woven into the fabric of our contemporary understanding of the world. It also hints at the contentious phenomenon of emergence – the property of simple, interacting things to acquire characteristics and form beyond those directly attributable to the sum of the individual components. Just as the weaver’s simple actions at the loom, repeated over and over, give rise to the complex structure of the fabric.

What weaving also asks us to consider is the important relationship between physicality and process. The weaver has an intimate relation to a physical process, something the computer boffins might consider more often. It’s fine to consider processes in isolation or in the abstract from the point of view of theory, but any practical implementation requires physicality (even the theorizing about them as abstract!). This is equally true of Sherrington’s enchanted loom of flashing shuttles – neural processes are physically grounded in the chemical, physical and electrical media they are deployed in, not to mentions bodies in environments.

From the somewhat unnatural point of analysis, it is inevitable to inquire about reversibility when considering these issues. Simplicity builds complexity, but can complexity be deconstructed or broken down back into the constituent simple components or rules? We might naively think of this as reductionism, the cardinal sin of science as modernism is to art. Zoologist, Richard Dawkin’s recent book Unweaving the Rainbow takes up on a criticism of science by Ketes: Isaac Newton destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by breaking white light into the visible spectrum of colours with a prism. He addresses the perception among many that science somehow diminishes our appreciation of the world. By unweaving the rainbow – opening up the weavers work and finding out the processes involved – is our appreciation of the finished product enhanced or diminished? As Dawkins quotes in his book, “You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsatisfied by the wonder of it.”

[extract of a talk presented at the opening of the "Loom" exhibition for Craft Victoria]

[created: October 11, 2001 5:00 PM, last modified: October 12, 2001 3:33 AM]