how i came to complexity
everything is connected
1 - Turkey
people often ask me to talk more about complexity theory. to share what it is, why i care about it, and how i’ve come to learn what i know. i never know how to answer these questions because to me, understanding complexity does not come from knowing a certain set of facts, but experiencing a certain essence.
the truth is that all of my formal knowledge of complexity comes from my mother. she teaches architecture and urban design at an American university, with a special focus on complex adaptive systems. when i was 17 we returned to Istanbul together where she was conducting research on the Grand Bazaar, and she told me about her work.
the bazaar is located in the centre of the city on the west bank, by the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya, at the bottleneck of where the silk road married Asia and Europe, creating a hotbed of culture and trade. it is one of the oldest and largest shopping centres in the world, containing thousands of vendors and hosting hundreds of thousands of daily visitors. tourists and locals alike will crowd into the seemingly endless corridors of the covered market, where you can buy anything from bottles of perfume to Turkish carpets and lokum.
as you walk through the bazaar you will be greeted by strangers selling spices and chai, urging you to take a sniff or try a sip. a little further on and you may find yourself surrounded by rings of golden jewellery stores or walls of hanging lanterns. throughout the centuries, without any central planning, the shops have self-organized into districts; distinct areas where vendors of a certain variety tend to congregate.
how this process unfolds is what the study of complexity is all about, how seemingly random decisions made by individual actors compound into emergent order. once you understand how these dynamics work, you start to see them everywhere. you acquire an analytical toolkit that can be used to make sense of the world and the role you play in it. i want more people to have these tools, i think they are valuable.
it goes like this: when a new spot for a shop opens up, a merchant will have a better likelihood of securing sales if they know there is already a market for their product in that area. if the spice shop next door doesn’t have the item or price that a customer wants, they will come and get it from you instead. yes, you will have to compete with your neighbours for customers, but there is also security in the knowledge that this is where the customers are. the competing businesses do not impoverish one another, they strengthen each other. and once the customers come to learn that this is where the businesses are, more customers will come.
throughout the centuries, as the presences of tourists outpaced the need for towels or leather goods, huge swaths of the bazaar were gradually replaced by souvenir shops and candy stores. there are certain tipping points which usher in new kinds of commerce as the external environment changes. the market as a whole is constantly shifting and evolving, reordering itself in accordance with the needs of its clientele.
this is what Nassim Taleb refers to as antifragility, or how variance and uncertainty in a system can cause it to grow stronger rather than weaker. if the market mandated what merchandise was sold where, it would grow stagnant and unable to adapt to an ever-changing world. complexity is the secret to the bazaar’s longevity, and the same can be said of financial markets, ant colonies, and entire ecosystems.
2 - Taiji
complex systems abide by Pareto, or Power Law distributions. meaning that, on average, 80% of the systems activity will be concentrated in only 20% of its agents. the majority of sales in the bazaar will be made by a minority of the vendors, just as most book sales come from a few bestsellers. this is due to a simple principle of gravity—that which has, gains. the planets in our galaxy emerged out of microscopic particles, and as one clump of space-dust grows larger than the rest it will subsequently attract more of the same, creating a compounding effect. once a shopkeeper has a slight competitive edge he can lower his prices and subsequently gain even more customers; a popular book that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list is guaranteed to get more sales.
this 80/20 rule can also be understood in terms of order and variance. a majority of shops in the bazaar will stick around year after year, while the remaining 20% will open and close in a continuous cycle. this dynamic, exploratory minority is necessary to keep the majority alive; without risk and variance the system is unable to adapt and adjust to new demands. most new restaurants will close their doors after only a few years, but the longer one remains open the more likely it is it will continue to survive—it becomes Lindy.
the longer we read Shakespeare or use chopsticks or drink Coca-Cola, the longer we can anticipate these practices to stick around. they become static patterns of culture which form a foundation of stability and predictability. introduce too much change too rapidly and the system falls apart, but too little leads to stagnancy, which is its own form of decay. our flourishing relies upon two contradictory yet complimentary forces: stasis and change.
the Yin-Yang is a symbolic representation of this eternal dance. the black chaos gives way to the white order, and each contains the seed of its opposite. every revolution brings about a new regime, and every great institution eventually returns to dust. what is dynamic in one moment becomes static the next, the dance is the only certainty.
cybernetics is the name of the dance; the process through which tension between two opposing forces pulls something along a straighter path. a cybernetic system uses feedback from its environment to make decisions. a shopkeeper will stock more of the products that customers are buying and less of the ones that they don’t. in doing so, his shop comes be to closer in alignment with the needs of his clientele. the bazaar then mimics this process on a macro-scale, and will produce more of the stores that receive the most business, adjusting its internal structure in reaction to new demand. through this exchange between input and output, the system learns to operate in harmony with its environment and is strengthened over time.
3 - Transformation
growing up we had two coffee table books that captivated me and i still remember vividly. one contained the art of M.C. Escher, the other was a collection of images from the 1977 film Powers of Ten.
Escher’s artwork is rooted in patterns and geometry. often working entirely in black and white, he depicts impossible scenes; images that loop in on themselves and seem to defy reality. or he creates intricate patterns, interwoven images that evolve as they move across the page, iterating in new and unexpected directions. the resulting complex images can be studied for ages because they invoke something interesting about the nature of relationship. every line brings sharp attention to both figure and ground—the logic of each depending upon the existence of the other.
Powers of Ten is a series of images which zoom in and out along a consistent degree of magnitude, depicting everything from subatomic particles to supermassive galaxies. the book was my first introduction to notions of scale and self-similarity. the images oscillate between patterns of activity and inactivity; there are phases of static and periods of consistency. as you turn the pages you watch collections of stars turn into a single galaxy. zooming into a human hand reveals clusters of cells which give way to a single nucleus. the book has a fractal quality, allowing you to observe the recursive structure of DNA folding in upon itself. the black emptiness of the universe from 100 million light years away looks strikingly similar to the vast degrees of space found between electrons and protons at 0.1 ångströms. there are certain patterns which consistently emerge.
4 - Tiles
when i was six years old my family spent two months backpacking through Turkey. ruins are so prevalent there that you can often find ancient buildings crumbling by the side of the road, completely neglected. my mother showed me how using a stick, you can chip away at the top layer of dirt covering the ground, revealing beautiful mosaics hidden just beneath the surface.
the mosques in Turkey are similarly patterned, as are the Oriental carpets that hang in the bazaars. these geometric designs are a form of ornament that the Islamic faith is famous for. because the religion forbids the depiction of idols, mathematically-based decoration is instead employed to invoke feelings of the divine. the detailed patterns are constructed out of simple rules which interact to form complex and intricate outcomes. the awe inspired by these tessellated patterns acts as its own form of worship; a testimony to greatness from simplicity.
a Jacquard loom weaves complex patterns using information encoded into a single punch card, the first use of an analog algorithm. from carpet making to computer code to tile laying, relationships are fundamental, and the fractal patterns they produce are inescapable.
the reason you see similar imagery when you take psychedelics or enter Turkish carpet shops is because reality is composed of patterns of relation. psychedelics simply shed the scales from your eyes. suddenly all you experience is connection; the flows from this to that; the dependency between here and there. the congruousness of the energy which courses through both you and your surroundings, mutually constructing and transforming one another. LSD causes leaves and trees to turn to fractals, which they are. suddenly the mess of mud on the ground or shading of moss makes sense; the underlying logic of the universe becomes all too apparent.
i care about complexity because understanding its dynamics provides you with insight to the fundamental nature of reality, the totalizing forces which shape our universe, influencing everything from how plants grow to the rise and fall of financial markets and entire civilizations. at its root, complexity is about flows of information and energy. it sheds light upon the consistent processes which give rise to all of the phenomena we experience in our daily lives. the specific manifestations, be that the crowning of temple tops or the adornment of the floor beneath your feet, it makes no difference. there is a consistent thread which runs through this myriad of systems and gives them their shape. music comes from the tension between the bow and string; the interplay between two forms produces a third that sings. the bazaar is neither the shops nor the customers, but an organism that is brought to life by their interaction. everything we experience is a product of complex patterns acting upon and informing one another. the essence is the energy that pervades throughout.
“We thread our way along streets, drifting deeper into the market, when yet another merchant startles us as he smiles and states, ‘Hello, Canadian mother and daughter from Taş Konak! Please, come in to take a look.’
Who is this man? We have never seen him before, nor he us. But he knows who we are, the nature of our relationship, and where we are from. In a city of more than 10 million people, amid a throng of tourists, and within a few hours of landing, our presence has been noted, transmitted, and successfully deployed to draw us into this particular shop, with this particular merchandise…
This dance of knowledge, flow and traditions that extends throughout the labyrinth of the Bazaar is part of a weave of complex relations that unfolds in and through the urban fabric. My mother and I enter into this weave and our flow is quickly directed and modified by complex forces on the ground, bringing us to this particular juncture of site, meaning and culture.”
— My mother’s thesis: The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul: The Emergent Unfolding of A Complex Adaptive System, 2015
To learn more about complex adaptive systems, read/listen to my Wonderland episode.
Excellent read. I can’t help but fixate on the verbiage your mother used: “a weave of complex relations that unfolds in and through the [urban] fabric”. It seems to me that this captures your own thesis that the essence of complexity is the dynamic flux of its relations. The fabric that is reality is precisely constructed by the relations between entities, that although fixed, can be shifted and changed to create a different, novel world.
This was a real ‘mind trip’. New to me but easy to understand. And, I’ll have to admit I have envy at your early exposure to a complex world. We just ‘got by’ at my house although my mother did have a bit of the ‘think bigger’ about her.