There’s been a demanding relationship between the study of substance and the study of form all through history — be it philosophy, or science. Well, if the study of substance began in Greek antiquity, we’ve come a long way — from the idea of four fundamental elements, earth, air, fire and water to atoms, cells, enzymes, proteins, amino acids, and so on.
You’d call them the study of patterns, to be precise. For one simple reason — the study of patterns is fundamental to understanding living systems. More so, because systemic properties tend to often emerge from a configuration of ‘ordered’ relationships. This is, indeed, the simplest of truths. Because, there’s something about life, something non-material, even irreducible — a pattern of organisation.
The human brain, to highlight a fascinating example, is probably the most complex structure in the universe — it encompasses our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world. The brain, which is more intricate than the galaxy, weighs just around 1.4 kg, and yet it contains an astounding one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. Each neuron can make contact with thousands, or tens of thousands of other entities, by means of minuscule structures called synapses. As Dr Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology, Stanford University, US, says, “One synapse may contain 1,000 molecular-scale switches; a single human brain has more switches than all the computers, routers and Internet connections on earth.”
To accentuate the metaphor, you’d imagine the brain as a complex area covered by a ‘similar’ number of house bricks covering about 600 sq km in size. The complexity of the connectivity between brain cells, you’d agree, is no less astonishing. The best part is our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives, while the pattern and strength of such connections is all the time changing. More importantly, no two brains are alike — they are as distinctive, or unique, as our fingerprint, or signature. It is precisely in such changing connections that memories are also made of and stored, habits learned and personalities shaped, while reinforcing, or ‘ringing-in’ certain patterns of brain activity and ‘ringing-out’ others.
The view of living systems as self-organising networks, whose components are all interconnected and interdependent, has been well expressed since the beginning of time. However, precise, detailed models of such systems came to be formulated, in the recent past, thanks to new mathematical tools. This novel ‘mathematics of complexity’ has allowed scientists to model non-linear interconnectedness — that epitomise characteristics of networks — with the help of high-speed computers. This could have made good, old Galileo Galilei proud; so also Plato, or Descartes, the initiator of modern, now modified, Western philosophy.
The process of living is not the world, but a world — one that is always dependent on interdependent structures — be it human beings, language, thought, emotions, or consciousness, including the genetic information encoded in our DNA. The most important point is we can understand human consciousness primarily through semantics and the whole social context in which it is embedded in its Latin root, ‘consilience.’ Consilience, a word coined by the late biologist Dr Edward O Wilson, signifies the idea of ‘knowing together.’ It connotes the interconnectedness of all things in the universe — with consciousness, in essence, being a social phenomenon.
To highlight another context. “All biological objects,” as Dr Victor Shcherbakov, a Russian chemical-physicist, observes, “are artifacts and life is artifact-making. Coding and instructions involve the use of symbols, but a symbol is connected to the symbolised subject semantically, not physico-chemically. The DNA sequence cannot be deduced from the physico-chemistry of the nucleotides as the text cannot be deduced from the alphabet. Moreover, this non-deductibility is a necessary stipulation for the capability of DNA to code genetic information. The ambition and hope of molecular biology was to explain the phenomenon of life via some new sophisticated physics, in particular, and via non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Inadequacy of this approach in explanation of life becomes more and more evident. Living entities survive not because of some special physics, or chemistry, but owing to their sensible behaviour.”
What does this signify? That to be human is to be endowed with reflective consciousness — of body movements which become tightly linked in a complex dance of behavioural co-ordination. Of a multitude of forms that we perceive, brought forth by a myriad of factors, tangible and intangible. This sums up the essence of complexity, a new vision of reality — a pragmatic web of life, with living systems, that envelops us all.
— First published in India First
