#55 Dr. Neil Theise - COMPLEXITY THEORY & SELF ORGANISING SYSTEMS

Why do complex systems self-organise? What is cellular uncertainty and stem cell plasticity? Can we create artificial digital life that’s subject to the same creative adaptability that nature and life demonstrate?

Today we have the extraordinary phenomena of self-organisation in Complex Systems to look into. We’re going to be looking into the conditions for a system to be considered complex, how a certain amount of randomness in the system releases the creativity required to permit adaptability, and how the feedback loops within that adaptability lead to a self-correcting organisational principle that keeps the system’s order and randomness in balance as it evolves. We’re going to be seeing how that self-organisation is operative at almost every level of scale in the universe and in life and death, and trying to get our heads around what that means for the nature of reality and consciousness.

So who better to discuss this with than stem cell biologist and diagnostic pathologist Neil Theise. Neil is is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity research. In 2018 the news of his discovery of the interstitial, a vast communication network throughout the human body went viral and was featured in the New York Times and Scientific American among many others. Theise is also a long term student of Zen meditation and Kabbalah. And his studies of complexity theory, summarised in his new book “Notes on Complexity: A scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being”, have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields as diverse integrative medicine, consciousness studies and the science-spirituality interface.

Since speaking with biologist Michael Levin on Cellular cognition, and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on collective intelligence, in the last series; I’ve been keen to speak to Neil about stem cell plasticity and self-organising systems, as their elegant sophistication begs so many questions about the nature of reality and consciousness. So without further ado, let’s go!

00:00 Intro
05:45 Livers have stem cells, Neil’s first discovery
08:10 The Canals of Hering - Liver-Bile ducts, Neil’s next discovery.
11:20 Diane Krause collaboration - Bone marrow stem cell migration discovery.
13:50 “Cellular Uncertainty” - Stem-cell plasticity.
16:00 Bio-electricity, cellular intelligence and cell programmability.
17:43 The experimenter effect influencing cell plasticity - Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle’ analogy.
19:20 It’s impossible to interact with a cell and not change it.
20:20 Cellular sensitivity and ‘entanglement’ between all living cells.
32:00 The TechnoSphere - interacting with virtual creatures: British artist Jane Prophet.
26:20 Emergent bottom-up structure, self-organising inside the game, not previously programmed.
27:20 Artificial Life.
29:20 Complexity Theory explained by Ants.
34:20 Randomness allows the creativity to adapt to changes: in the environment Divergent ants.
35:20 A minimum of elements are needed over time to become self-organising.
38:40 No planning or top-down intelligence managing complex systems.
42:55 ‘Wholarchies’ not hierarchies.
47:50 Living systems and complexity arise at the boundary between perfect order and fractal chaos.
49:55 Extinction is also part of complexity, as much as creative adaptivity.
50:30 “What makes you able to be a living system, inevitably, given enough time will lead you to die. You can’t separate life and death”.
53:10 Self correction: Negativity Feedback loops VS positive feedback loops.
55:50 Cancer, economic crashes, extinction events
57:30 Every scale of nature adheres to complex system behaviours.
59:50 Complementarity exists at all levels of scale - Niels Bohr.
01:01:40 Biological complementarity.
01:04:50 Breaking down the separations between discrete organisms.
01:10:50 Not upward or downward causation but complementarity.
01:35:50 Zen meditation insights which led to scientific insight.
01:18:20 The risk of over-rating our personal experience.
01:23:20 Where you find mind, you find life.
References:
Neil Theise, “Notes on Complexity: A scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being”
https://g.co/kgs/s2dX3mz
The TechnoSphere
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TechnoSphere_(virtual_environment)
Game of Life
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life
The Quantum foam - John Wheeler
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam
Evan Thompson - Deep Continuity (of Life and Mind)
https://philpapers.org/rec/THOPOM-8
Francisco Varela - (Evan Thompson’s mentor)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Varela
Mind and Life Institute- Dali Lama and ‘Contemplative’ Science
https://www.mindandlife.org/
Niels Bohr “Complementarity” Principle (in Physics)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementarity_(physics)
Godel’s incompleteness theorems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems

Видео #55 Dr. Neil Theise - COMPLEXITY THEORY & SELF ORGANISING SYSTEMS канала Chasing Consciousness Podcast