☀ Aggregate.
Imagine a very large, well-lit room. No shadows obscure any corner. Every surface is smooth and within easy reach. You’ve been usered in alone with nothing but a small can of paint and a brush. You can do anything you like while you’re in here, but in a short time you’ll be removed, never to see it again. Within a moment you realize you’re not the first person to have been in this position. While there is plenty of blank space left, everywhere there are clusters and clusters of brushstokes, smudges, drips and streaks and prints of paint, all by different hands. The variety is staggering.
Many have chosen to use their time creatively, loading the walls with images of every sort — some simple and elegant, some rough and ribald, others of intricate detail and still others of great broad strokes. Scribbles have grown into huge murals by small additions, and somehow the same theme runs through the hands of fifty disparate artists. There is not shortage of words among this gallery, either. Empty spaces are packed with friendly greetings, advice, personal histories, and even bursts of poetry and prose have found their place. There are philosophic arguments, competeing accounts of events, explanations of mathematic proofs, and throughout all are wit and humor in every written tounge.
A few of the previous occupants of the room have not settled for the standard experience of creative expression and contented themselves with destruction. Beautiful brushstrokes are marred with crude additions, slashed away quickly by incurious hands. Long poetry cycles built slowly by dozens of authors are obscured by huge, hateful words, slogans reducing fear into rough, easily-remembered thoughts. And even though the supply of paint to each visitor is small, plenty have put it to use covering whole swaths of work — creations buried utterly under angry splatters of paint, gone forever.
What next becomes obvious is that the overwhelming majority of those who have stood where you now do are not represented. Through the walls are a crowd of painters hands, a look at the floor shows wearing from legions and legions of feet. For some that came to the room it was enough to be known by name. Initials and signitures abound, some with dates and names of places, hometowns and far regions. But not even all of them combined could account for the shape of the floor. For every work of art, every hateful word, every story or explantion, vandalism, attribution or confession, there must have been a hundred people who thought that they had nothing whatsoever to contribute.
You return to yourself. How much time has past since the door closed behind you? How much time remains? It could take days to look at everything that was made or unmade in here, yet the paint and the brush are still in your hands. Do you try to make sense of everything you see and add a summary for others to keep them from wasting their time getting lost on these walls? Do you focus your energy into creating the very best thing that you know how to, or do you leave a message for other visitors, an instruction or memory or simple record of your existence? How many people will you be able to talk to through this room, how many of them could understand who you are? Or do you simply look, taking it all in and feeling the intense privilege of being here in this moment?
If I was asked to describe what I thought was the dominant theme in human experience, it would probably go something like what I just wrote. I like this explanation, that everything we do in our short lives is effected by those who occupied this space before us, because I think it has a quality that mathematicians like to call “elegance”, that is, it is both simple and it applies to a great many disparate questions. But I think I like it more because it points at a bigger idea, one that is useful in understanding more than human culture and history.
☀
The shape of a riverbed transcribes the movements of a very complex system of energy. It is not simply the byproduct of a liquid making the minimal required amount of effort to be in compliance with the laws of gravitation – it is a complete record of trillions and trillions of atomic interactions over tens millennia. The causality of a river’s ever-changing path through a landscape does not arise from a single body of water interacting with a single body of rock. There is no single description of the behavior of a river, only the description of a single molecule of water or a single atom of sand. Complex systems and complex events arise from the aggregate effects of simple systems and simple events. There is no native complexity, only iteration. The repeating dance of going back to the same fork in the road and making an independent choice each time puts down the probablistic layers of a system’s texture. It is the same paint applied with a thousand varying brushstrokes — no single one is responsible for the overall feel.
On any scale in which you might examine the physical universe, the explanations which will best fit what you observe are the ones which describe the behaviors of the smallest components, because these will dictate what the macro scale will look like. Small, repeating causes with tiny variations will, over time, have large and complex effects. What we call complexity does not require will or thought, it is the picture of a million different paths of the same simplicity. The large grows from the small, but never the reverse.
The visual language of complexity isn’t straight lines and solid colors, it’s sketchy curves and stipple shading. There’s no hard boundaries, just clouds. Non-uniform density, a topographic map of probability where even the highest peaks still don’t touch concrete certainty. It’s no coincidence that the descriptions of both electrons and storm systems are in terms of likelihood — they’re both products of countless simple forces colliding. The fuzzy shape of a system is just the outer boundary that the inner turmoil describes; a reductive view for illustration, like a projection of a five-dimensional shape in a two-dimensional space. The universe doesn’t exist in terms of always and never, just likely and unlikely.
☀
Being able to see human history as qualitative instead of quantitative is just the beginning. Once you have absorbed these ideas you start seeing things that were once difficult to understand. Thinking in terms of iteration and aggregate action makes the unfathomable accessible. You worry less about agency because conscious intent is no longer a necessary precursor to complex behavior. You focus on the elemental to better understand the whole. You stop looking for reasons why and see the shape of everything around you. There is no predetermination, only probability.
