The Philosophy of Complexity: Are Complex Systems Inherently Tyrannical?

The philosophy of complexity is developing as a field of philosophical inquiry to accompany, support, and question advances in the science of complex systems. This is warranted given that the issues surfaced by science findings signal a full slate of philosophical questions in the three main areas of ontology (existence), epistemology (knowledge), and axiology (valorization and ethics). The fast pace of technological innovation has been substantiating the need for various new philosophies explicitly examining these issues in technology, information, cognition, cognitive enhancement, big data, and complexity.

How much total Liberty is in the System?
A philosophy of complexity would operate both internally and externally to the practice of complexity science, at the level of the theory of the practice, and at the abstraction of the impact and meaning of the practice more broadly in society. One issue for investigation is a philosophical characterization of complex systems themselves, including parameterizing different features such as range-boundedness. For example, in French politics, there was the revolution and the subsequent process of republics starting, failing, and enduring. The question is measuring the total liberty available in the system, how has this changed over time, and what predictions can be made, or, more importantly, what improved changes might be catalyzed for the future?

Persistent Mathematical Behavior across Complex Systems
Fifteen or so criteria that are mathematically persistent across complex systems (fat tails, power laws, high coefficients, degrees of correlation, fractal behavior, etc.) have been identified. However, it seems that even while expanding and contracting over time, complex systems may be displaying cyclic and range-bound behavior. This could be inherently mean-regressing, and potentially tyrannizing or at least limiting to system participants, and this should be measured and evaluated. Is there a fixed amount of liberty available in the French political system? To what degree do complex systems as a format have limitations, and is this a block to progress? Both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of complex systems need to be measured, with an identification of where and how these limits can be and have been broken (beyond traditional symmetry-breaking).

Bergsonian Information, Illiberty, and Rethinking Thinking
The philosophical questions concern the ontology, epistemology, and axiology of complex systems. For example, does complexity have a qualitative side? There is a need to investigate the idea of ‘Bergsonian information,’ the extension of duration-as-time and duration-as-consciousness/self to the internal doubled experience of information, in the context of complexity. Likewise, liberty, illiberty (the absence of liberty), and potentiality in complex systems should be explored, especially in cognition, neuroscience, and connectome-mapping, areas which are just starting to be accessible to the complexity discipline. There can be an examination of how we can rethink thinking and intelligence (biological and artificial) per deep learning, symbolic systems methods, and the philosophy of complexity.

Bergson, Free Will, and the Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement

Bergson claims that free will exists. It occurs in moments when a living being experiences duration, which is tuning into the internal sense of an experience, and a freely-determined action flows from this state. His reasoning is that “if duration is heterogeneous [if we are tuned into the internal sense of experience], the relation of the psychic state to act is unique, and the act is rightly judged free.” An act is free if it flows from an internal qualitative experience. He suggests we understand this by considering an example in our lives of having made a serious decision; where even searching for such an example already starts to evoke the qualitative aspects, unique psychic states, and then the free-action undertaken as a result. The crux is that “We should see that, if our action was pronounced by us to be free, it is because the relation of this action to the state from which it issued could not be expressed by a law, this psychic state being unique of its kind and unable to ever to occur again.” Turning inward to our unique experience causes freely undertaken action to flow as a result, even if this action is a formulation of our mental state.

Philosophy of Cognitive Enhancement
The reason that Bergson is useful for the philosophy of cognitive enhancement is that he provides a reasonable ontological explanation for free will with prescriptive recommendations for its achievement. He draws our attention to the qualitative and characterizes it in usable detail instead of dismissing it as inaccessible due to being subjective (as did Kierkegaard). This could help in developing a philosophy of cognitive enhancement by articulating some of the goals and experience of what it might mean for humans to engage in such practices. It is not necessary to agree with Bergson's claim in favor of free will to implement some of the underlying ideas. What is important to us in cognitive enhancement (the targeted improvement of natural human cognitive abilities) is not just better memories, but accelerated subjectivation - the ability to extend our capacity by becoming ‘more’ of who we are and can be more quickly.

Cognitive Enhancement Tools
One first cognitive enhancement application of Bergson might be in having greater activation of free will; catalyzing more ‘living now’ moments where free will could be realized. Our everyday acts are quantitative and undoubled but cognitive enhancement tools might be able to help with greater activation of the qualitative experience of life. Another application could be exploring the emergence of freedom as a property of internal experience. Bergson does not discuss whether we are free to perceive our inner states in different ways, or just one default way. It would seem that qualitative multiplicity could extend to having discretion over experience. This could inspire an ethics of perception, and an ethics of reality, as topics of cognitive enhancement philosophy. Another application area could be quantitative-qualitative transitions; tracing how the quantitative becomes the qualitative, as this might be a way into a richer, ongoing, free will-activated experience of life. There could be many applications trying to help improve our psychic states, both in their quality and accessibility, and in our awareness and perception of them.

Reference: Bergson, Henri. (2001, 1889). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience). London UK: Dover Publications. Bergson, Free Will, and Cognitive Enhancement

Bitcoin 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0: Currency, Contracts, and Applications, beyond Financial Markets

Bitcoin 1.0 is currency - the deployment of cryptocurrencies in applications related to cash such as currency transfer, remittance, and digital payment systems. Bitcoin 2.0 is contracts - the whole slate of economic, market, and financial applications using the blockchain that are more extensive than simple cash transactions like stocks, bonds, futures, loans, mortgages, titles, smart property, and smart contracts. Bitcoin 3.0 is blockchain applications beyond currency, finance, and markets, particularly in the areas of government, health, science, literacy, culture, and art. 

Bitcoin and blockchain technology is much more than a digital currency, the blockchain is an information technology, potentially on the order of the Internet (‘the next Internet’), but even more pervasive and quickly-configuring. 

Prevalence of Decentralized Models 
Even if the currently developing models of Bitcoin and blockchain technology are not the final paradigm (there are many problematic flaws), the bigger trend, decentralized models as a class, could have a pronounced impact. If not the blockchain industry, there would probably be something else, and in fact there probably will be other complements to the blockchain industry anyway. It is just that the blockchain industry is one of the first identifiable large-scale implementations of decentralization models, conceived and executed at a new and more complex level of human activity.

Decentralized models have the potential to reorganize all manner of human activity, and quickly, because they are trustless, the friction of the search and trust-establishment process in previous models of human interaction is eliminated. This could mean greatly accelerated rates and levels of activity, on a much greater humanity-level scale. The blockchain (decentralized network coordination technology) could emerge as a fundamental infrastructure element in the model to scale humanity to its next levels of orders-of-magnitude-larger progress.