The rarely understood role of humans within complex systems

According to the citation, the 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics, for “unprecedented contributions to our understanding of complex systems”, and “physical modeling of the Earth’s climate, for measuring variability” goes to Tsukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi. Has been provided. and reliably predicting global warming, and exploring the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales”. Nobel Prize in Economics Joshua for improving economists’ tools for understanding complex systems Angrist and Guido Imbens and David Card for their insights into wage and labor markets using those tools. Thus, the prizes in both physics and economics are for contributions to methods for modeling complex systems.

Complex systems fall into three broad categories. The first is ‘Engineerable Complex Systems’ which can be understood objectively. An engineer looks at a system from the outside. He improves its design and cleverly finds levers in the system to make it more efficient at converting inputs to outputs. Systems models developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other engineering schools are suitable for mathematical calculations because they do not involve vague, qualitative forces such as human emotion.

The second category of systems is ‘complex adaptive systems’. Engineers can design systems on a clean sheet of paper. They can predict what the system they design will do because they can control its initial conditions. In addition, their models are tied; They are limited to the machine they are designing. On the other hand, the process of biological and ecological development does not start with clean sheets of paper. They are ‘path dependent’: what was there before determines what is next. Farmers should understand the potential of their land and its surroundings so that its productivity can be improved in a sustainable manner. Furthermore, natural systems are not tightly bound: what is around any subsystem affects what is in it. Plants and pests in neighboring fields affect the conditions of one farm. Weather is an even more open system, the weather in nearby areas dynamically affects the weather in our region. Also, how will the weather be in a few hours, it also depends on what is the weather like now. To an engineer, weather and climate are dynamically adaptive (and potentially chaotic) systems.

A common feature of both, engineerable complex systems and complex adaptive systems, is the exclusion of human intent as the primary force of change within them. Climate change has been caused by misguided human interventions. Humankind’s “little jokes” are having an adverse effect on the existence of humans themselves. An accurate model of climate change must include human agency as a force within the model.

A hundred years ago, pioneers pushed physics out of its Newtonian paradigm, which had ruled this academic discipline for two centuries. In the Newtonian world-view, the universe is a machine made up of individual parts. Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg and Bohr took physics into the realms of relativity, uncertainty, and the unknowable. While these pioneers pointed to the need to understand the relationship between the various parts, including the human mind, a larger current within physics continues to seek the ‘ultimate explanation’ of the universe within the structure of its tiniest particles ( Wonder if they are subtle knots, waves or strings).

The quest for the ultimate explanation of how humans think in the physics of the brain and the flow of chemicals and pulses within it has also infected the science of the mind. A century ago, the paradigm-changing winners of the Nobel Prizes in Physics proved that the human mind can never fully comprehend reality. Because it is a very small part of a vast system that shapes it. The way we think is created by our history—they ‘depend on the path’. They are also shaped by events happening around us: such as the ‘cultures’ in which they live.

The third category of systems is ‘complex self-adaptive systems’, within which human agency is a major force. Humans have self-consciousness and the ability to take deliberate action. With human agency come the complexities of ego and morality. Man wants to control nature and other human beings as well. Even when their tasks are done well, they are still misinformed because they don’t understand the system. This is the problem of ‘scientific’ solutions to climate change based only on models of the physical and biological worlds.

Macro-economists view economies as machines, with inputs and outputs, and with nature and human labor as resources, and by pulling these with levers (like the cost of finance) to drive economic growth. However, complex socio-economic-ecological systems are not machines whose overall well-being can be easily improved by setting a universal goal of carbon reduction and, for example, a carbon price. Policies to solve systemic problems and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals should be guided by the model of self-adaptive systems that affect the limits of human ego and morality as well as our mind.

New insights into physics, as the Nobel laureates noted over 100 years ago, had already been expressed in the ancient Vedic and Buddhist wisdom traditions. Humans are only one part of a complex ecosystem; Human attitudes are always subjective; And it is never possible for humans to be separate observers. The time has come for another modern Enlightenment based on ancient wisdom to save the world from scientific apocalypse.

Arun Mara is President of HelpAge International and author of ‘Transforming Systems: Why the World Needs a New Ethical Toolkit’.