Konstantin Tovstiadi

There are many ways to learn about a new city or a country. You could look at its GDP data, or the exchange rate, or the atmospheric pressure and dew point, or any other point estimates and indicators. You could read a Lonely Planet guide about it. Or you could go spend a week there. If somebody asked you about it later and all you had was the GDP data, you could simply tell them what the number was. They would have the same information as you then. But you can't share your travels with them the same way. Your impressions are complex, multifaceted, irreducible to stories and pictures.

Complex phenomena are all around us - snowflakes, tornadoes, ant colonies, stock markets. Studying them requires a new approach. Converting them to point estimates - size of the flake, speed of the wind inside the tornado, number of ants, Dow Jones - doesn't give them justice. The simplifications are too crude, too much data is lost. One solution to that is to have multiple point estimates. We can map the snow flake configuration with 1 micron accuracy - and if that is not enough, even greater detail.

But it is never going to be enough. The map can never be the territory. The measurements are imprecise; initial imprecision translates into greater and greater errors as we model the reality over time using point estimates. Eventually we have to admit that some of these problems - even the seemingly simple ones - are transcomputational - we cannot know what the weather will be two weeks from now, what the stock market will do in a month, or what would be the in-thing at the Milan fashion show next year.

Stuart Kauffman tackles the issue in his new book, Reinventing the sacred. Kauffman is one of the most respected scholars in the study of complex systems. This is his fourth book, and it builds on the first three. His earliest book, Origins of order, published in 1993, is a rigorous academic account of order-for-free, bottom-up emergence of high level order from the actions of lower level agents - such as the water molecules forming a snowflake. It was followed by At home in the universe, a brilliant translation of the first book into language comprehensible to the non-academic audiences. In 2000, Kauffman published Investigations - although it would be more accurate to call it Musings or Ramblings. It reads like a notebook - powerful raw ideas in need of better argumentation and cleaner style.

Reinventing the sacred resembles all three. It has some hardcore theory that many will hard to follow (such as the discussion of quantum decoherence). It has some excellent explanations of what these concepts mean in layman terms. And it has oodles of speculation and conjecture.

But there is also a new element - one that has to do with religion, ethics, philosophy, and the emergence of a global society and culture. Emergent order is the quality of the universe. Life emerges naturally. Human consciousness emerges naturally. Culture, language, society, economies all follow similar paths - unpredictable, irreducible, forever changing, forever creating. There is no need to invent a creator God to explain it all. But there is something that can be revered - the endless creativity of the universe itself. Worshipping this creativity is the suggested foundation for a new global culture, global ethic, global religion.

It is a beautiful idea, but one that is not easy to argue. The argument annoys the hard scientists (and anyone who wants to defend reductionism), philosophers (and anyone who finds Kauffman's foray into epistemology amateurish), complexity scientists (why can't Kauffman talk about biology and leave the rest out), and last but not least, the believers in a Creator God.

The task is enormous, and it is also enormously important. Kauffman's book isn't flawless - but on a subject as daunting and broad as world ethics, no argument can be. The book suffers from occasional repetitiveness and uneven style. It oscillates between barely understandable discussions of quantum physics and bar-style down-to-earth real life examples delivered with excessive nonchalance and camaraderie. But most of the time the book stays right in the middle, and despite redundancies and style issues, it delivers a strong argument - an argument that is not only thought-provoking, but timely and important as well. I have thoroughly enjoyed it - how can you dislike a book where a scientist who understands biology, mathematics, and quantum physics devotes several pages to praising rhetoric?

But this is a reductionist narrative about the book. The book is a lot more complex than my ramblings about it. You should read it yourself, or at the very least, listen to Stuart Kauffman talk about it himself. You can also read some of his most recent thoughts on this NPR blog.

In the 1990s, all books in intercultural communication started with "we have never seen so much international travel / globalization". In the 2000s, all computer mediated communication books went on about never-before-seen ways to interact online. And in the first week of the 2010s (that The Economist suggests we call "teens", "decadents" or "debtcade") I managed to screw up in an entirely new, novel, never-before-possible way.

I have been talking about the software stack; and how depending on your geekiness you either live at the very top of it or you can actually penetrate its murky depths. The stack situation, in the great scheme of things, is a consequence of the division of labor and specialization. Even the geekiest nerds don't know every element of the stack. Generally, any modern household, vehicle, appliance, is a stack where the user knows only the top layer. It used to be that a peasant could fix the tools of his trade himself. There was nothing mysterious about a sickle. A John Deere tractor is a different story.

So armed with a minimal knowledge of server technology, I spent the last week of the "oughts" setting up a Mac OS X server - all the way from network connections and DNS records to remote administration, databases, and active PHP applications. And then I managed to lock myself out of one of my accounts; and decided to re-install everything.

It was all going well in the beginning - faster than before, because now I knew what I was doing. But it all went to hell in a hand basket when it was time to set up the database server. You start the MySQL daemon with a click of a mouse; but then you have to use a third party program like Navicat to create users and databases. The first time I was doing the server setup, I looked it up online, found an answer that worked, and was creating databases in five minutes. But the second time was different. I still didn't know how to set up the database server; but I knew more about the whole process - enough to be doing the Google search for instructions with different terms, enough to not be able to find the solution that had worked before. So knowing more about the process was actually counterproductive.