My model of capacities needed to cope with complexity
Nobel chemist and pioneer complexity expert Ilya Prigogine is cited by my friend Andrew Campbell
as saying that nature has no secrets -- everything we want or need to
know in the world is waiting to be discovered. That means it is waiting
for us to be ready to learn it, which presupposes that we have:
- Capacity to understand:
That's not just a function of brain capacity, but also the ability to
pay attention and to be open to new ideas and possibilities, and to
imagine;
- Need to understand: Either an urgent adaptive/survival need, or intellectual curiosity to discover; and
- Tools to understand:
The toolkit with which we were endowed by nature is comparatively poor
(consider our relatively feeble eyesight, dim sense of smell, slow
speed and inability to fly), but we have compensated for it with our
ingenuity, especially at biomimicry -- inventing new tools that mimic the best nature provides.
We have a need to understand -- the challenges we face as a society have never been greater. And although our man-made tools are fragile and clumsy by nature's standards, they give us what we need.
What we are lacking, I think, is capacity. Despite (or perhaps because of)
our large brains we are inattentive, prone to erroneous prejudgement,
distrustful of our intuitions and our subconscious knowledge, and we
suffer from dreadful and growing imaginative poverty. We are seemingly
unable to grasp complex issues and concepts well -- we are so
left-brain heavy that we over-analyze and over-simplify, and we are
driven (I suspect because of our increasingly poor learning habits) to
create mechanistic, complicated explanations for organic, complex
phenomena. Then, when these explanations fail, we add further levels of
complication, until we have thirteen-dimensional universes with
vibrating strings.
We try to deduce when we should induce. We
analyze when we should be synthesizing. We look for root causes when we
should be looking for patterns. We try to impose order when we should
let it emerge and study why it emerged as it did. We try to change and
control our environments when we should change ourselves to adapt to
them.
So what we should do now is build our capacity to
understand -- capacity of attentiveness, openness, imagination,
intuition, subconscious awareness, appreciation of complexity, ability
to learn and intuit and induce and synthesize and see patterns and
adapt and let come and let go. And then show others in our communities
why this capacity is so important and help engender it in them, too.
Then
we will be ready, together, to discover what nature has been waiting to
show us and tell us. No grand unifying theory of everything -- just an
understanding of how the world really works, and why our current way of
living is unsustainable, unhealthy and unnatural. And what to do to
make it better.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
