alone with my thoughts. Time had stood still yet externally had passed as it does every day. My biological clock reminded me I was hungry. I needed food. The mind needs food too. I was running on empty. I picked myself up off the heather and rubbed my eyes which had not yet trained to the bright glare of the afternoon sun. The sky was cloudless and I marvelled at the good weather. It was like being on a Greek island. The sea was an azure calm mirror and the submerged rocks along the coastline were clearly visible in their chalky whiteness. The darker depths looked inviting but first I needed to eat. I would swim again later.
As I munched on my cheese sandwich, squatting like an Indian in front of the tent, I let my eyes patrol the cliffs and sea, searching for movement, for interest. The view was as beautiful as you could get - the sea a cool blue with the odd white wavelet breaking over exposed rocks, the framing effect of the cliffs with their deep greens and browns cast darker shadows at the water's edge, the sky now had white frumpy clouds slowly sailing across the infinite of space. Yet for all the beauty I was searching for something more. I realised I was searching for signs of life. Catching sight of some terns swooping around the base of the cliffs and diving into the cold water completed the scene. The scene needed life to link my living sensation to it. Life seeks out life.
I thought back over my musings of the morning. I felt how cold they were when compared with the vitality of life, of nature. Logic at its best does not excite and invite the intellect. Philosophy, at its barest, dries up the interest of the person living in the real world. Science and mathematics are mechanical routines applied to the chaotic beauty of nature. Nature cannot be captured by formulae that short-circuit its beauty and complexity. The beauty of the scene before me cannot be captured by partial differential equations. At best these equations can mimic a few particles in very simple processes. But the elements of the scene before me is anything but simple. It contains sea, rock, air, vegetation and living organisms. It is a complex mishmash of substances and movements that have evolved over long periods of time and whose current state enters my field of vision. Mathematical equations, no matter how convoluted, cannot avoid following each minute step in the evolution of the scene. Modern scientists try to define the initial conditions and then find formulae and models that in effect try to short circuit the ins and outs of the evolutionary process. This is where science has lost its way. It doesn't realise that its much heralded schemes are really only applicable to the simplest of systems - ones that are deterministic. Complexity isn't deterministic. The weather is not deterministic. The only way to treat it as such is to restrict the size of the domain to a manageable minute fraction and to define precisely the initial conditions. Then the laws work well and are deterministic. Determinism applies only at the very local level. Once we zoom out to the wider world complexity takes over and the laws we so successfully applied in the local domain are now meaningless. To model complexity we can't short-circuit any step - each step must be enacted individually. This means in effect that complexity can never be modelled other than by itself. Does this mean that we give up on complexity? Has science no role in the complex domain of ordinary nature? At least it must change its perspective and scope. It can recognise its deficiencies and focus on what it can achieve at the local level and at the broader statistical level. Because when very complex systems are being considered, it is to a statistical approach that the scientist must defer. In effect modern quantum theory is totally statistical. The deterministic laws of Schr?dinger only apply for infinitesimal times between interactions and the resulting chaos generated has to be treated statistically. Outcomes of interactions are only probabilistic. But on what does the scientist base his probability estimates - on inductive data based on macro behaviour of the system. Taking this approach there is no problem with the famous conundrum of Schr?dinger's cat because the cat and the box are an infinitely complex system not subject to Schr?dinger's deterministic equation. The cat is either alive or dead but not both! Science gets confused if it mixes up its domains of application.
Complexity can still have a basis in scientific law in that at the very beginning certain rules had to apply. At the beginning things were not complex but simple so the rules of science hold sway. These rules could be the rules of quantum theory as it stands today but it is unlikely that they were that complex. Quantum theory is complex because the current state of the world it tries to model is complex albeit to no great effect. At the beginning simplicity reigns as is implied by the second law of thermodynamics - entropy or disorder had to be at a minimum from which it has increased over time to its present day level. This fact is reflected in current Big Bang theory where it is postulated that at Planck times all symmetry was unbroken and the colour force binding quarks, the strong force of the nucleus, the weak force of radioactive decay, the electromagnetic force and the force of gravity were all one. The number of different members of the set of life was at a minimum. When you have few members the rules of interaction can be very simple. It is possible that the rules of the universe could be written on the back of a postage stamp. It is the evolution over thousands of millions of years that has led to the incredible beauty and complexity of life on earth and the wondrous backdrop of the heavens.
Is such complexity possible from such simple beginnings? We have only to look at nature to see examples. Biological growth appears to be quite complex but can be modelled by quite simple cellular automata whose evolution is determined by the simplest of rules. The whorly skeletons of shellfish display the same capacity to be modelled by very simple cellular automata rules. The rules could be as simple as a sequence of instructions containing such trivial statements as - replace white cell by a black and white cell. These trivial rules can, surprisingly, generate quite complex behaviour when repeated billions of times. There is no way of predicting by a mathematical model what the billionth array of cells will be like - each step must be passed through. It is computationally irreducible. Nature is computationally irreducible but science has not accepted this. It brings us back to wholeness. Nature must be looked at in its entirety. We cannot short-circuit its complexity. Rather we must accept it.
Had computers been around for Descartes and Newton the differential calculus would not have been invented. It was introduced as a way of dealing with the necessary locality of analysis that was needed to work out the dynamical laws that were being derived. The calculus put science on a wayward track even though it led to great forward strides at the time. It introduced the paradigm of looking at the particular rather than the whole and it has driven science in that mould since. In focusing on the small or the deconstructed, the bigger picture was lost. Modern computers can model a wave function much better than the second order partial differential equations of science. Better still powerful computer technology does not need to short circuit or model through vast portions of complex systems. Supercomputers can now go through each step sequentially and can open up the history of complex systems we see before us in our present epoch. If that history can, in the future, trace back to the very beginning then it may reveal the simple laws that underpin all of the cosmos and perhaps of life itself.
All that is so far removed from the elegant grace of the small tern gliding on a waft of warm air at the base of the limestone cliffs. I can just make out its slender head and bayonet-like beak. I know that all the mathematical formulae in the world could not create such beauty, no matter how many supercomputers worked on the job. This was the supreme mystery - the huge gulf between man's sense of knowledge of nature and what nature creates so effortlessly.
Having finished my modest meal I felt very energetic and set off down to the sea at a fast pace. By the time I had reached the water's edge I was sweating and the dive into the cold sea was cleansing and refreshing. The pain of the water on my skin was incredibly vital. It not alone washed my body but blanked my mind to all but the water. I stroked my way out from the rocky shore and having had a good workout turned on my back and relaxed. I was enjoying the feeling
of weightlessness and of having been enfolded into this primal liquid that had been the source of first life. We grow in our mother's womb surrounded by water. How little we remember of that long nine months of contented life. But what life is it? Since we have no memory we cannot have perception except a primitive instantaneous reaction to external stimuli. We are that blank slate that contains the program of life but a program that has not yet booted up.
I close my eyes and strain my memory to see how far back in time I can go. At best I can remember back to when I was two or three. The first years of my life along with the time in the womb are a complete blank. Why has my memory refused to record those glorious first few moments of life? Maybe it hadn't the ability to record because I had no language in which to store events or feelings. The learning of speech seems to be a prerequisite for memory. The foetus can't record the womb experience because the brain does not record feelings - it seems to prefer word associations. Even now I find it hard to