In complex systems, there are phenomena which arise from the interaction of the system’s elements, phenomena which are not possible for individual elements of the system, and often surprising because of the difficulty of predicting behavior of complex systems. The world we are most familiar with is a layer of social interaction, which emerges from the interplay of neural systems (brains) and ecological systems. Ecological systems emerge from a layer of individual organisms, which emerge from a layer of organs, which, like the brain, emerge from a cellular layer. (Actually, there seem to be several layers between the brain and the cells that we don’t understand.) The layer of cells in turn emerges from a biochemical system, which emerges from a layer of atoms and electric potentials, which emerges from a layer of quantum particles and wavefunctions, which seems to emerge from an odder and more abstract super-string system, which might arise from something even more obscure.

Each level has a set of concepts to describe it, and generally these concepts do a pretty decent job of describing that layer. They are generally pretty useless for describing other layers, however, and sometimes they fail on the level they’re intended for. For example, attempts to describe biochemicals in terms of classical atoms and electric potentials often fail. In order to model protein interactions, you have to use computers to compute the wavefunctions of the electron orbitals. Attempts to describe cosmological processes that involve both quantum masses and speeds near the speed of light are inaccurate, and we need a better understanding of super-string theory to do it right. Attempts to describe the weather are vague and often wrong because the conceptual layer of clouds and temperatures is inadequate to fully predict the behavior. If the relationship between the layers is understood, the concepts from lower layers can make more accurate predictions, but it requires lengthy calculations of the sort only a computer can stand. Even though a quantum description of the room around me is predictively more accurate, it is futile for me to think of it in quantum terms, because I cannot perform the calculations and would get lost in the complexity. The common sense description of the room is fundamentally incorrect, but it’s cognitively simple enough for me to manage and good enough for everyday use.

I think this carries over into our conceptions of identity, ethics and religion. These are the concepts we use to understand the social world we live in. Identity, for example, makes pretty little sense when framed in chemical terms, since the molecules that make me up are replaced quite regularly, and in quantum terms, the particles that make me up are indistinguishable from any other. On the other hand, on the level of human interaction, the difference between self and other (and the difference between other human and non-human) is of huge importance, and if I were ever to have much success in denying my own existence, my ability to negotiate my world would be seriously hampered. Concepts from ethics and religion form a similar function. From the great diversity in ethical and particularly religious frameworks, it appears that there is not as clear a correspondence between concept and system as there is with identity, but nevertheless there is some correspondence or these concepts would not have survived at all.

The ethical and religious conceptual frameworks that the world’s cultures have produced each represent a somewhat stable system for human community. They are each somewhat successful experiments in understanding the human experience and structuring human society, but even the most successful are as imperfect as every other conventional construction and at least as incorrect as classical physics. Many of these frameworks were constructed for people that lived in radically different circumstances and different experiences, and yet each of those cultures was working with the same fundamental human nature. Thus, these many traditions offer many variations of how the human experience can be structured and understood, but much of what we find there is barely relevant to our modern world. Living in global community we are simultaneously extending and losing community. The technological complexity and the scale of the modern social network reach beyond anything the world has ever known. We are developing into a global multicultural hyper-technical society that, building on the foundation of millenia of cultural experimentation, must reframe our understanding to cope accordingly.