Complex Reality
A Complex Reality is one which cannot be accounted for by only one level of description. In fact, no matter how many levels of description we have we can’t account for a complex reality. We could just cut to the chase here therefore and say that if we have a reality that is properly complex then it can’t be accounted for at all. This is the nature of reality — it’s not something that can be ‘explained away’! If the phenomenon we are investigating has the property of complexity then what this means is that it can’t be contained by our explanations or theories. It can’t be contained by our theories no matter how ingenious or impressively sophisticated these they might be — there’s always going to be something ‘left over’, something that we haven’t accounted for in our equations.
That’s one explanation of what is meant by a ‘complex reality’. We ought to follow it up however by adding that there is no such thing as a reality that isn’t complex — a ‘non-complex reality’ doesn’t exist! It can’t exist — such a thing can’t be found. If we’re dealing with a ‘non-complex reality’ then what we’re dealing with is a construct, an artifact of thought and not something that is ‘independently real’. Nothing that is ‘real all by itself’ can be contained by our bland generic explanations (only stuff that is ‘real because we ourselves say it is’ can be exhaustively explained or ‘pinned down’). Explanations and rationalizations aren’t any help to us when it’s complexity that we’re dealing with; it’s like trying to fit the oceans into an eye-dropper — no one’s going to stop us from trying but we’re clearly not going to get anywhere with it…
Trying to come up with a theory or model of ‘what makes reality tick’ (or ‘what principles lie behind it’) isn’t the right road to be going down, therefore. That’s not going help us in the slightest even though we think theories and models are so great. Theories or models are only good for unreal stuff — a map only holds good for the territory it assumes and the territory that it assumes isn’t really there. The territory we assume in constructing a map is a projection of that map, just as the formula that allows us to navigate within a Formal System is that Formal System. It’s all the one closed system. We can however say a few pertinent things about this situation and one thing that we can say is that nothing is obvious. This is an observation made by Heraclitus over two and a half thousand years ago who said ‘Nature loves to hide’; Heraclitus also noted that ‘The hidden connection is stronger than an obvious one’. The element of ‘straightforwardness’ that we automatically tend to assume simply doesn’t exist in the real world — it only exists in our thoughts (which we are constantly confusing with the real world).
We might argue that theories and models and hypotheses CAN tell us about reality — we have lots of theories and formulae in physics after all and so surely this is telling us stuff about reality? Throwing light on reality is not what science is about, however — that’s a big misapprehension, as Sir Arthur Eddington says here,
If today you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the æther or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but not the nature of that which is being symbolised. …this newer outlook has modified the challenge from the material to the spiritual world.
If Arthur Eddington — a top-notch physicist and astronomer of the very greatest renown — doesn’t think that physics has any role whatsoever to play in ‘understanding reality’, then why should we?
A complex reality — we might say — is a nuanced one and when we don’t appreciate the nuance (which can’t be picked up in a formula or equation) then we’re not in touch with reality. We’re not ‘living life’ but only ‘life as we imagine it to be’. We’re living in our imaginations, in other words, and to live in imagination is not to live. Our lack of subtlety when it comes to apprehending what our existential situation is results in us living in ‘a world of obviousness’, which is a world that doesn’t really exist. The obvious is always a lie therefore and it’s a lie that we very rarely get to see beyond. If it isn’t ‘in your face obvious’ then we just don’t think it’s worth paying attention to. If it’s not ‘spelled out for us’ then we don’t see it.
If ‘life is a test’ then we fail it by rushing ahead without properly examining our starting-off point. When we rush ahead with the crowd and live out the course of our lives on the basis of a whole bunch of half-baked thoughts regarding ‘what it’s all about’ (i.e when we live our lives on the basis of what we have been told, on the basis of what everyone else believes because they have been told it too) that is not life we’re living. It’s not life but a game. We’re living a superficial (which is to say, non-nuanced) version of life but a superficial / non-nuanced version of life doesn’t exist. That’s ‘pure imagination’; either we live in reality or we live in our imaginations — we can’t have it both ways.
Complex reality — we might say — is composed of innumerable different facets, innumerable different aspects, and the nature of these facets or aspects is that any one of them cannot be inferred or deduced from any other. Between each facet there exists a discontinuity, in other words. Between each facet there exists a logic gap, a logical abyss that can never be traversed. When we put it like this it sounds as if we’re talking about a fragmented or fractured reality, a reality that is made up of parts, but this isn’t the case. This isn’t the case because the ‘aspects’ or ‘facets’ of which we speak aren’t real. Only the Discontinuity is real and because it’s ‘discontinuous with our thinking’ we can’t say anything about it.
This might sound like a somewhat peculiar thing to say — ‘Why speak of these so-called ‘facets’ if they aren’t real?’ we might quite reasonably object. The point is however that they seem to be real when we are contained within them; they seem to be real because we’ve lost the perspective that we would need to see that they’re not. Instead of talking about the aspects or facets that make up the Whole we could speak in terms of viewpoints and say that’s the Whole is made up of endless different viewpoints, and that the nature of each viewpoint is such that no one viewpoint can be used to infer the existence of any other. When we take up one position then we can’t see any others (which may be said to be a function of entropy or ‘lack of perspective’). There’s no ‘birds-eye view’ to be had, as the Nobel prizing-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine says.
To say ‘when we take up one position then all other positions become invisible to us’ is also another way of talking about the Discontinuity (which in Buddhism is sometimes called the Great Void). We might complain that the Discontinuity doesn’t make any sense to us, that it ‘isn’t logical’. but this is of course the whole point. Logic has no access to the discontinuity — it is unable to penetrate it, unable to approach it in any way. Logic only works where there is a thread of continuity running through everything (‘continuity’ means that something is preserved or continued from one moment to another — things might get modified one way or another, but the underlying thread is never broken. In the words of U.G. Krishnamurti, ‘The future, although indeterminate, is a modified continuity of the past’.
This is of course ‘reality as we normally experience it’ — stuff changes, things come and go, events happen and then get forgotten about again, but there’s always a thread that stays the same, there is always an ‘observer’ or ‘experiencer’ there that doesn’t change at all. The viewpoint stays the same — nothing would make any sense to us otherwise. The thing about this however is that this continuity exists only in our heads, only in our rational picture of the world. We experience a sense of continuity but that is just the way the thinking mind models things — the continuity we experience doesn’t actually exist outside of our conceptual bubble. It’s an artifact. In the flow which is Reality there are no ‘fixed things that continue’, there is simply Universal Flux, Flux in which nothing stays the same. There is no continuity in Heraclitian Flux, no constant in David Bohm’s Holomovement. There is no ‘staying the same’ in Groundless Change…
Again, this doesn’t make any sense at all to the rational mind, but this is because the way the rational mind projects works is by projecting its own brand of order on to the world. Thought can’t see beyond its own terms and its own terms are strictly static ones. The only world we know is the world that has been constructed by thought and this world is virtual not real. The Mind-Created Virtual Reality that we perceive in place of the real thing is a non-complex one — there is only the one viewpoint, there is only the one level of description utilized across the board the board. When there is only the one viewpoint, only the one way to see things or describe things, then we end up with a very particular type of world, a very particular type of world in which ‘the description is equivalent to the thing’ and ‘the thing is equivalent to the description’ and this is a hollow world, a world that is strictly ‘appearances only’. When the description equals the thing and the thing equals the description then what we’re looking at is Baudrillard’s Hyperreality, which is a false and highly virulent form of reality that insidiously replaces the genuine article…
