If you count the estimated number of seconds since the universe began, then count them all over again, then multiply the result by the estimated number of particles in the universe, and then multiply that result by a million million million - you still have not reached the estimated possible number of moves in a game of chess.

Yet the game of chess is laughably simple in its potential number of moves compared to the game of life. A game of chess starts with 32 pieces on a board of 64 squares. Each piece has a limited range of moves - the most limited being the pawn, the least limited being the queen.

The "piece" that a "knower" starts with is different, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Let's think of a human being as a piece.

From the perspective of knowing, the whole body, of some 75,000,000,000,000 cells, may be considered the "piece." It is silly to separate the brain from the body; the body may be considered as both the expression and the "expressor" of the mind, as indivisible from it. The 25,000,000,000-odd cells that are part of the brain are the most highly sophisticated of any kind of cell known. There are estimated to be about twenty times more molecules in your brain than there are stars in the universe; if all the molecules in your whole body were separated by the distance between your toes and the top of your head, you would, if such were possible, be bigger than the whole universe.

Yet these quantitative considerations pale beside the central qualitative fact: this amazing collection of cells, each cell an amazing collection of molecules, All of this results in a single, organised, coordinated organism! You! Further, many of the molecules inside you are not just from earth: they are from the stars. Literally, we are the stuff that stars are made on. Life involves the organisation of such molecules into a complexity that beggars description.

When we learn the game of chess, we start with the chessboard and what the pieces can do on the chessboard. Yet many go through their entire lives without asking: what is the relationship between the knower and the known? So, what is this knower? Is there knowledge without knowers?

The latter question was addressed from another angle by Rudy Rucker in his book Infinity and the Mind. Therein, he coined the term "mindscape":

 "Our bodies move about in a physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the [infinite] mental space called the mindscape. . . Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same mindscape. . . Just as a rock is already in the Universe, an idea is already in the mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it (p. 36). . . My inclination is to say that the world of mathematics exists outside of, and independently of, the physical world and the actions of human beings" (p. 296).

Descartes, the 17th century European philosopher and mathematician, started with the premise "I think, therefore I am," thereby avoiding addressing the former question - "what is the knower?" To quote from the book "Sophie's World"(Gaarder, 1995, p.184) - "one thing had to be true, and that was that he doubted. When he doubted, he had to be thinking, and because he was thinking, it had to be certain that he was a thinking being." Descartes' whole philosophy was built from that questionable premise. Most philosophies are built from questionable premises - for example, those of Marx and Freud. For one, the Buddha does not agree with Descartes. If your premises aren't right, it is unlikely that your conclusion will be right, but often a lot more can be learned by pursuing a flawed premises than with pursuing none at all. For example, the Cartesian dualistic mind-set and its corollaries of objectification and reductionism have provided, and will continue to provide, extraordinarily rich rewards to understanding how things are. In a debate on his book Consilience (the book: published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. The debate: The Wilson Quarterly, Winter, 1998. The word "consilience": "a jumping together of various branches of knowledge') E.O. Wilson rightly defends reductionism as:

"the driving wedge of the natural sciences, by which they have already broken apart many hypercomplex systems. Reductionistic analysis typically proceeds from more complex and specific phenomena and the disciplines addressing them to underlying phenomena that are less complex and specific. For example, the living cell has been opened clear view by biochemistry and molecular biology, and mental processes are beginning to yield to cellular biology and neurophysiology. Both are among the hypercomplex phenomena that have so far proved congenial to consilient explanation, and both are directly relevant to human social behavior. . .

"Moreover, the scientific method is equally concerned with synthesis, and thereby holism. The most successful research has always been cyclical. It begins with the description of a complex entity or process. It proceeds by reduction to the main components, then reassembly of the components in vitro or by abstract modeling to the original whole, followed by correction through testing, further reduction, and reassembly. And so on around, until understanding is considered satisfactory by even the most demanding critics" (Wilson's Quarterly, p.25).

This is a realistic claim that provides a glimpse of both the enormous power and the enormous limitations of the scientific method as a means of addressing life as a whole (for example, I call Humpty Dumpty as my witness that, in spite of all my admiration for Wilson, I would not like his methods to be applied to me. Further, Kurt Gödel and many others may have had some difficulties with Wilson's defence of logical positivism which - to oversimplify my own view- is an often useful but ultimately ostrich philosophy of anti-complexity).

There is a fundamental difference between science and life. As Edward Teller asserts, science is "The Pursuit Of Simplicity;" but in his book of that title, he points out that "complication is a fundamental property of life," and that "life is a little matter endowed with an enormous purposeful complexity." So science and life are to some extent heading in opposite directions - one pursuing simplicity, the other complexity. Scientist such as Wilson's rejoinder that the pursuit of simplicity has already given us material for a far deeper insight into life - especially its very complexity - than has been obtained by any other method is overwhelmingly justified, but still more partial than our pursuit of truth needs to be. Louis Pasteur said "Science advances through tentative answers to a series of more and more subtle questions which reach deeper and deeper into the essence of natural phenomena" (quoted in Capra, 1997, p. 42); such a process cannot always provide survival answers in time, but certainly has a major role in providing fundamental premises about reality. But then you get comments such as the famous one by Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking closed his book "A Brief History of Time" with the words:

 "If we do discover a complete [quantum gravitation] theory...we...shall all...be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we would know the mind of God" (Hawking, 1988. p.175).

Surely you are joking, Mr Hawking! Hawking is either mistaken, or - far more likely as he is both brilliant and an atheist - speaking metaphorically/tendentiously. Can the scientific method ever get us within sight of "the mind of God?" Or, to put it another way - will it ever be able to explain all of life's complexities?

As long ago as 1965, Gregory Chaitin proved that:

If "T" is a theory of mathematics, and "T" is

1.   Finitely given, and
2.   Consistent, then
3.   There is a number t such that "T" cannot prove that any specific bit string has a complexity greater than t (Rucker, 1987).

This means that it cannot be ever proven that anything has a complexity much greater than the complexity of the premises, nor can it ever be proven that anything of such complexity has a simple explanation. "The complexity of a system is the difference between the amount of information needed to describe the system in its present state and the amount needed to describe all the states it may have been in at the point at which it changed from the last previous state" (Heinz Pagels, quoted in Csikszentmihalyi, 1992, p.280). This places one limitation upon the universal application of the approach so succinctly recommended by Wilson.

Two extremes of order are the crystal and the gas. Crystals have ordered atoms; gas has disordered atoms. Life is about halfway between in its order, but if we regard it as a running programme, we come across the concept of logical depth. Chaitin's colleague at IBM, Charles Bennett, defines logical depth as the number of steps required to compute a string of information from its shortest programme. Bennett argues that it may be possible to characterise living organisms as physical structures that code up as bit strings much larger than their depths. To quote from Professor Rudy Rucker's book "Mind Tools":

 "Bennett's motivation for this conjecture is the fact that a fertilised egg's genetic DNA is a kind of 'program' that generates a complex organism by a process not unlike calculation. Computer-stimulating the way in which a human fetus grows from its DNA is an inconceivably difficult problem, runtimewise. Length (baby), the presentation information of a newborn child, is certainly very high, but depth (baby), the number of individual steps involved in growing a baby from its DNA, is quite a bit larger."

Later, Rucker quantifies "quite a bit" by the example of Bennett's results proving that some strings have length three billion (3 x 10⁹, about the number of synapses in the human brain), complexity under one million (10⁶, a quite low level of complexity in organic terms), and a logical depth of 10,000,000,000^{1,000,000,000,000}! Yet a cell has thousands of genes. "The number of genetic states available to a cell is 2^10,000 or more"(Goodwin, p. 171). Certain practical difficulties may also thereby be encountered in Wilson's approach, and perhaps Hawking's conclusion could be considered a few billion years premature.

Stephen Hawking was referring to an emerging theory of Quantum Gravitation, which applied when the whole Universe was so tiny as to be subject to the effects of Quantum Physics - that is, when the really big was really small.

But both the really big and the really small are, as the universe goes, really simple. Many of humanity's greatest minds are baffled at the frontiers of the really big and the really small, but it must be remembered that the really small things that they are exploring make up everything else, and everything else enfolds them and is therefore more complex than they are. Further, when one gets to the really large, things more complex than atoms, molecules and gravity are not of much relevance in understanding cosmic behaviour. For example, if two stars collide it makes not a whit of difference to the observation if one star or both had planets with intelligent life forms upon them. At the scale those observations are taken the observations, life forms existing or not, would be identical.

Stephen Hawking's explorations are largely confined to the simplest of structures - sub-atomic particles and atoms - elemental, in fact. Within that confine, his mind spans the Universe. This observation is in no way meant to impugn the view that Hawking's mind - or any other mind capable of working at the frontiers of behaviour of the elemental - is amongst the finest minds in the world. It is their field which is, of necessity, the simplest in nature. The ultimate Aristotle - quantitative, not qualitative, but within that confine, it has a literally universal vastness of scale.

But what happens if you introduce quality? If, instead of just size, particles in the universe are viewed in terms of their complexity and their size? Then, you can start talking about a less fundamental, but a far more significant, matter; life.

Life has created patterns of order out of staggering levels of complexity and chaos. The famous monkey has not only typed out the complete works of Shakespeare, but of Tolstoy, Balzac and all great art and literature. We living things have already done it. How?

A new paradigm of biology is emerging which could contribute towards an explanation. Called "qualitative biology", it points out that Darwinian theory "fails in a basic objective - to explain the origins of the qualitative differences of structure between species." An organism is seen as "a dynamic self-organising process that obeys certain principles of order...particular forms emerge and persist in different types of organisms: examples include the leaf and flower patterns and the origins of limbs and eyes. Once the basic principles of development are understood, these particular forms become self-explanatory"(Goodwin, intro.). "Natural selection is in no sense a generator of biological form, but an aspect of life cycle dynamics"(ibid., p.119). "Generative principles provide a better foundation for understanding structure than do historical lineages"(ibid., p.140). There is an inherent rationality to life that makes it intelligible at a much deeper level than functional utility and historical accident"(ibid., p. 105)."Life doesn't [just] need DNA to get started...genes don't control; they cooperate in producing variations on generic themes...[life] needs a rich network of facilitating relationships"(ibid., pp. 128 & 174). "Autocatalytic sets emerge spontaneously [within polymers - compounds such as RNA and proteins] which can speed up the rates of chemical reactions, including those involved in making the polymers themselves...that is, sets of polymers with the capacity to catalyse one another's production so that the whole system functions as a closed set" (Stuart Kauffman, quoted in Waldrop, 1992).

These insights from Qualitative Biology can inform an emerging theory of knowledge, based upon the premise that the mind works the way that life works - along the razor's edge between stasis and chaos in life, and boredom and anxiety in the mind. A person is a pattern maker and reality inhibitor. From the beginning to the end of the brain's existence it:

"orchestrates [its] experience through:
-     Excluding information or impulses which are 'unnecessary';
-     Handling some of these impulses on an unconscious level, so that our conscious mind is not flooded with too much information;
-     And forming patterns so that we do not need to use excessive time and effort to decide each moment what to do, say or feel, or how to do things" (Grove, p.3).

"The brain orchestrates experience." That is, we create our perceptions of reality that in turn affect our actions in reality. To me music, an emergent quality of mind, provides an expression; it, too, can be "a dynamic self-organising process that obeys certain principles of order". To quote the legendary violinist Lord Yehudi Menuhin:
 
"Music creates order out of chaos; for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent; melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous" ( quoted in Storr, p.33).

Storr further submits that:

 "Music activates tendencies, inhibits them, and provides meaningful resolutions... This...can be related to the underlying pattern of a story...Meyer applies information theory to music, affirming that information and meaning go hand in hand. Conventional forms in both literature and music are based on archetypical patterns of a simple kind which are probably encoded in the brain. Symmetry is one such pattern; stories are another [variation a third]. I venture to suggest that the popularity of variation in world music is due to its psychic symbolism; the preservation, development of, and reinstatement of the identity of the self during the passage through life" (Storr, p.83).

What music does, life does, too. "Human beings may be manifesting a particular form of behaviour in creative activity that shares basic dynamic properties with life in general, so that our creativity is essentially similar to the creativity that is the stuff of evolution"(Goodwin, p.187). For example, "rhythmic activity is an emergent property that arises spontaneously in ant colonies [including computer models] and gives them opportunities for dynamic action"(ibid., p.178). Our minds work that way. "Making sense of anything depends upon relating one thing with another, upon discovering or imposing order"(Storr, p. 180). "A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns...the mathematicians patterns, like the painters or the poets, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no place in the world for ugly mathematics"(G.H. Hardy, quoted in Storr, p.178). (Incidentally, without such a perception - the beauty and pervasiveness of symmetry - quarks may never have been posited)."The aim of all intellectual pursuits, including science, philosophy and art, is to seek unity in the midst of diversity or order in the midst of complexity. Their ultimate task is to fit multifarious elements into some kind of compact, cohesive, apprehensible scheme "(Berlyne, quoted in Storr, p.168). Which, in the case of my life, is my sense of me; in your life, your sense of you. And it was the task of life itself in building our bodies, including our brains. As Whitehead, the philosopher of process, put it, evolution as "a creative advance into novelty."

To address this assertion, let's return to information theory. Rucker (1987) realises the limitations of serial computations in making real-life models; parallel computations - calculating many things at once - present as a much better model (although still, inevitably, incomplete). And the best model we have for this parallel computation process is the cellular automata (CA).

These usually begin with a very short program, which is used at each cell site. These quickly lead to "irreducible computations. This means that we can have simple starting conditions whose consequences we are unable to predict...the great vision among present-day information theorists is that it may be possible to regard the world as a huge CA carrying out irreducible computations."

Rucker then states that it "may be better to think of the world as being structured on a hierarchy of levels...in a society each "cell" is a person. In an organism each cell is a cell. In a very small region a " cell" is an atom." I would add - and so on in both directions. His tentative conclusions about the Universe are as follows:

1)   the world can be resolved into digital bits, with each bit made of smaller bits.
2)   these bits form a fractal pattern in fact-space.
3)   the pattern behaves like a cellular automaton.
4)   the pattern is inconceivably large in size and dimensions.
5)   although the world started very simply, its computation is irreducibly complex.

He refers to computer programme "the Game of Life" in which CA form patterns. These "simple rules and components...necessarily combine to make a vastly complicated whole!" Will, therefore, that lead to more complicated wholes with longer CA runtime? Does that explain us? The Neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker", the best explanation of evolution I have ever read, does not to the best of my memory address this question. Evolution, though, would be a subset of this world view, and possibly of necessity a subset with an innate propensity (but not an inevitability) for direction the same as CA's runtime - of increasingly greater complexity. "It begins to look as though the Universe couldn't exist without a mysterious tendency to organise" (Ferguson, 1994, p. 275, and "evolution is chaos with feedback; life forms not, only survive, they improve, probability one" (Ford, 1989, quoted in Ferguson, p. 276). There is evidence is in the fossil record; brains have "gotten bigger with time. . . not just in the human line, but also in fish and lizards and birds and carnivores, and in elephants as well as dolphins" (Wrangham & Peterson, 1997, p. 256).

As Paul Davies observes, "the steady unfolding of organised complexity in the universe is a fundamental property of nature"(Davies, p.140). What is more, that increasing complexity is hierarchical. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear...when carbon, hydrogen and oxygen become combined, innumerable compounds can originate with new characteristics like alcohols, sugars, fatty acids, and so on (Davies, pp 145-46). "There's nothing very complicated about a water molecule: it's just one big oxygen atom with two little hydrogen atoms stuck to it like Mickey Mouse ears" (Waldrop, p.82); together, though, as the Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson pointed out, they acquire emergent properties - liquidity, for example, which can go through a phase transition into crystals of ice or snow. If you take two paper clips, each "has its own set of individual characteristics. Yet now the assembly has a further characteristic - an electric current can flow through it and generate an electromagnetic field. This field will be an emergent property of the assembly; it was not there in either of the two individual paper clips. It is a potentiality in each clip that is evoked only when they relate to each other"(Zohar, p.286). (Communication of meaning is the same. You can deconstruct, examine each word atomistically ad nauseam; but the meaning of words is a product of words in relationship, not just in isolation).

Life itself can be seen as probably an emergent property, the product of matter and energy in proportional relationships. Complexity is not limited to span, it also engenders depth, with higher levels being identifiable by their emergent properties. Our minds can be seen as emergent properties of several billion neurons obeying the biological laws of the living cell or, as D.H. Lawrence more poetically put it, "the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the waters." Goodwin points out that "form as a quality [quality - the expression of an integrated whole: quantity - the sum of separately existing parts] cannot exist without quantities that constitute the fundamental means of its expression...a science of qualities is a science of holistic emergent order that in no sense ignores quantities, but sees them as conditioning rather than determinative aspects of emergent process...quantities without qualities give us a world without [either] beauty [or] health"( Goodwin, pp.183 & 185). About fifty years before this, Aldous Huxley had written "beauty arises when the parts of a whole are related to one another and to the totality in a manner which we apprehend as orderly and significant" (Isherwood, 1963, p.131).

Goodwin further points out that Goethe was a dynamic organocentric biologist, a believer in a science of wholes. Two hundred years later, the rest of us are beginning to catch up on this point (Goodwin, p.123). In 1972, Anderson noted that you can think of the whole universe as a sort of hierarchy. "At each level of complexity, entirely new properties appear [and] at each stage, entirely new laws, concepts and generalisations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry"(quoted in Waldrop, p.82). To put it mildly, given the complexities of life, emergent properties may not always be accounted for by the process described by Wilson. More practical approaches for dealing with the inevitable complexities of real-life exigencies are suggested within Torbert's table in Chapter Five.