Pushing

There exists an entity that I call “I” and others call “Craig”. Within this entity called Craig, there exist individual, constituent parts—systems and organs with names like “cardiovascular system” and “stomach”. Craig, then, is said to be made up wholly of these systems and organs and all of these systems and organs together make up Craig.

The question I propose is: which exerts more influence and control on the other? Is it the individual systems and organs over the whole or the whole over the individual systems and organs? Hopefully it's clear to you that both are exerting at least some influence and control on the other. For example, on the one hand, my stomach may have a bad reaction to my previous meal and begin sending pain signals to the rest of me with the effect that I curl up into a ball on the floor for the remainder of the day. On the other hand, I can will myself up a steep hill on my bicycle as fast as I can with the effect that my cardiovascular system will greatly increase its productivity. It's a two-way street with the bigger affecting the smaller and the smaller affecting the bigger. But which way is most of the traffic flowing?

In I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter, quoting Roger Sperry, asks this question of “who pushes whom” of the human mind and brain. The mind, the topmost level of abstraction where consciousness lies, pushes around the various, layered physiological substrates all the way down to the neurons. But it is those same neurons and other brain structures that create the mind. Who's pushing whom?

The phenomenon of a higher-complexity structure pushing around a constituent, lower-complexity structure is pushing down. A lower-complexity structure pushing around its containing, higher-complexity structure is pushing up. I find this an intriguing question to ask of complex systems in general: how much of the control is pushed down and how much is pushed up?.

My earliest memory of meeting some form of this question head on comes from high school world history class and preparing for its final exam. A week or so before the exam, we students were given a list of many possible essay questions, from which a few essay questions would be selected for the final. (So, as Yogi Berra might say, we knew what was on the test without knowing what was on the test.) Being a world history class that breezed through a few thousand years of human history over the course of the school year, there were many of these potential questions, yet one in particular interested me greatly: “Does man make the times or do the times make the man?” We were supposed to answer the question with examples from history. And, no, that did not end up being one of the questions on the test. Good thing too, because it's now about seventeen years later, and I continue to spend a lot of time thinking of new ways to approach this question.

Though, to be frank, ever since those teenage years my position is that the times make the man. I'm a natural push-down kinda guy. I suppose a lot of my philosophic education since then, both formal and self-taught, could be said to be an exercise in confirmation bias for this idea.

Many people see it the other way. They are as hopelessly push-up as I am push-down. These are people who are likely to subscribe to conspiracy theories and paradigms that squarely place individuals in control of humanity. They believe that the man makes the times and that nearly any social effect we observe in the world must necessarily be the result of an orchestrated effort undertaken by one or a few individuals. Ironically, it's the push-up thinkers who are most apt to believe in top-down power structures where most effects have planned causes and little is left to chance. Inversely, I'm apt to discredit most top-down power structures as being largely illusory in that attempts at wielding power in directions against the “will” of the system are about as productive as spitting into the wind.

My experience as a push-down kinda guy has made me realize an important meta thing about push-down versus push-up: push-down people and push-up people speak different languages when discussing philosophical matters. You can't convince a push-up, conspiracy-believing individual that conspiracies exist in no greater frequency than would be expected by a statistically random distribution of the emergent behavior of the system. It's not only because the conspiracy-believing individual will think that you too have been suckered into the conspiracy's web of control. Rather, a person who is apt to believe in conspiracies cannot imagine a world in which it is the world that is bossing us individuals around rather than the other way around. There isn't even a good word—in the English language, at least—that connotes the opposite of a conspiracy. The closest word I think of is opportunity. That is, the system emerges behaviors and properties unpredictable according to its constituent parts alone; some constituent parts quickly adapt to take advantage of these behaviors and properties. They are opportunists. I believe that opportunists greatly outnumber and outweigh conspirators.

Back to this entity I call “I” and you call “Craig”. Who's pushing whom, here? This is a systems question. It's a question of complexity, and this is to say that we don't yet have a science for answering it. But some people are trying to formulate one. Some of them are push-uppers, and some of them are push-downers. My guess is that the push-downers will have the best say in the matter and that mathematical models of the parts will ultimately tell us less about the whole than mathematical models of the whole will tell us about the parts. In a future post, I'd like to describe what I've so far discovered to be the most intriguing idea to quantify complexity.