One of the most important insights from chaos theory is that complex
systems of interacting actors can exhibit patterns of behavior that
seem designed but are not, the details of which are the result of
self-organization, and which are not predictable in principle. Patterns
like the spots on a leopard, the stripes on a zebra, human
fingerprints, a beating heart or intelligent brain, the movements of
flocks of birds, schools of fish, or termites building a castle of mud,
are all broadly constrained in general by genes, but genes without
sufficient information, by typically 11 or more orders of magnitude, to
specify the details of swarm or herd behavior by elementary actors of
limited intelligence, each responding to its local environment using
fairly simple rules.
These insights have implications for public policy and constitutional
design. Too often public discourse makes a presumption of determinacy,
as though society, the economic system, and our system of government
and laws, are fundamentally mechanical, and can be modeled and managed
in principle using sufficiently complicated simulations. That is the
systems dynamics approach that produced the classic paper, The Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems,
by Jay Forrester (1970). However, it is not just that human mental
models are inadequate. Our computer models, while they might improve
our odds of making wise decisions a little, they cannot in principle
guarantee desired outcomes. The underlying systems are chaotic, subject
like the weather to butterfly effects, and a policy intervention that
might have no appreciable result if applied today, can yield mass
extinction if applied the day after, and heaven on Earth if applied the
day after that.
Electoral candidates and lawmakers win support with appeals to "support
me and everything will get better". It is an open question how many
people are fooled by such appeals, but it only takes a few to swing an
election or a vote on the floor of a legislative body. Most such
decisions are made emotionally, not rationally, and we could probably
get results as good through a lottery. We must bear in mind that humans
evolved for making decisions in a paleolithic hunter-gatherer society
grouped into small tribes or villages, not a modern, global,
technological civilization. We are barely adequate to live together in
a ward republic, much
less a global urban world-state.
This has implications for constitutional design. Just as
undifferentiated human stem cells might form a heart if they find
themselves in a local environment that provokes them to "form a heart
here", and the same cells would form a liver or a lung if placed
somewhere else, so human individuals can be organized into structures
that constrain them to function in a way that serves the health of the
system as a whole. Constitutions and laws are attempts to provide such
structure, but there are limits to the adequacy of human intelligence,
even at its best, to design political and economic systems with an
expectation of intended behavior. Nature shows us that such structural
designs are generally the result of evolutionary trial-and-error, not
intelligent design. When we find a design that works fairly well, it is
best to avoid large departures from it, and to stick to small,
incremental changes, with some time to observe the consequences.
One of the things we can conclude with some confidence is that humans
cannot manage large organizations, even in principle. the best they can
do is organize themselves into many small organizations that can then
interact in what might be called a marketplace, for which occasional
disasters may be unavoidable, but which have enough resiliency to allow
some to survive.
The foundations of indeterminacy
The Newtonian view of the physical Universe was as a clockwork, perhaps
complex but fundamentally deterministic, in the sense that if one had
complete information about the behavior of its components, and
sufficient computational power, one could in principle predict its
behavior in detail as far into the future as one might wish.
That view was shattered by the emergence in the 20th century of quantum
mechanics, which fit observation well but consisted of wave functions
that could only be interpreted as probabilities, not as deterministic
causation, and were not local but spread over the entire Universe.
Some, like Einstein, could not accept this view. He said "God does not
play dice with the Universe." They sought "hidden variables" that while
they might be forever beyond reach of measurement, would at least
explain the Universe as a deterministic system. Further work on this
question, however, seems to establish that an underlying determinacy
is not consistent with empirical observation. The Universe really is
fundamentally probabilistic and indeterminate. If you could run it
multiple times from the same initial conditions, it would turn out
differently every time.
Yet many large-scale phenomena, like the movement of astronomical
objects, seems deterministic to a high degree of precision. How can
such phenomena be so predictable when their basic constituents are not?
It was the attempt to model astronomical phenomena that led Newton to
his physics, by examining the behavior of pairs of masses interacting
gravitationally, called 2-body mechanics. Such pairs can be
sufficiently replicative in their behavior to make reasonably precise
prediction practical, but that only goes so far until the perturbative
influences of other bodies becomes significant, and we encounter the
n-body problem. There is no general solution to that problem possible,
we are left with only approximation methods that may work well enough
in restricted situations, by avoiding "singularities" that would defeat
computational predictions, but even in those situations are fraught
with uncertainties and may require more computing power than can stay
ahead of real-time trajectories.
For chaotic systems small perturbations can be significant. It has been
estimated that perturbation from the gravitational influence of the
dwarf companion of the star Sirius can affect the outcome of a game of
billiards, where small changes can have large effects. No matter how
skillful the players, there will always be an element of randomness in
the course of the game. And while the orbits of planets of the Solar
System may have been fairly stable for the last 4 billion years, we can
computationally predict that the system is also chaotic over a longer
time span, and that eventually the Earth or other planets may be flung
out of their current orbits, perhaps out of the Solar System or into
the Sun.
In biology we have come to the realization that the amount of
information carried in the coding of our genes falls short of being
enough to specify the details of our bodies or our minds. We are all randomly self-organized systems, for
which genes and environmental influences may have had some impact, but
which are fundamentally indeterminate, even in principle. Our genes may
make it likely that we will have fingerprints, but they do not specify
the patterns in detail. Genes may make it likely that a leopard will
have spots, or a zebra will have strips, but identical twins will not
have the same fingerprints, the same spots, the same stripes.
Within our bodies, our hearts are chaotic systems. Our genes may
constrain the self-organizing of stem cells into a heart that beats,
albeit somewhat irregularly, and can respond to increased demand for it
to pump faster, but without a master control mechanism like the
pacemakers we install when the function begins to falter. We have
brains, but evolution has not attempted to enable our brains to command
every detail of our bodily functions. Social insects function using
simple rules for each member of the colony with no command structure.
Evolution has produced designs that allow for leadership but not
command, and there is a deep reason for that. It is not just that
command management of complex systems is unnecessary or inefficient. It
is that such command management is impossible in principle. We will
never be able to redesign our genomes by computationally predicting the
effects of genetic changes on the chaotic structures and behaviors that
unfold. We can borrow genes with known effects and apply them
elsewhere, but we are doomed to having to rely on trial and error for
real innovations. We can redesign ourselves as a species, but we must
accept there will be many bad outcomes.
Some unsettling insights
The Universe is rational only to first
approximation.
—
Roland's
First Corollary to Finagle's Law.
From all this one can come to understand that all large scale phenomena
are chaotic systems. They may seem predictable under certain
circumstances, which we may call islands of stability, and we may even
be able to so structure complex phenomena that they self-organize into
replicative patterns, but we must expect the unexpected when we push
the boundaries of those islands of stability, and we can never be
certain how any design change will work out as the self-organizing
system emerges.
But it is not just large scale phenomena. How does it seem that some
quantum systems are "entangled" and some are not, when theory suggests
the entire Universe is entangled? The answer that now seems apparent is
that those subsystems that seem more entangled are actually islands of
stability in chaotic processes, that, like beating hearts,
self-organize into predictable patterns for a while, until they are
perturbed and the patterns dissipate.
For constitutional design, what does not work, except for a
few things like going to war, is command management. The impulse to
resort to hierarchical command systems arises from the mental tools we
evolved for leading men into combat, but as Helmuth
von
Moltke said, "no plan survives contact with the enemy", and the
outcomes of combat depend less on command management than on the
ability
of troops to self-organize in real time. Yet the instinctive impulse
persists and leads to authoritarian attempts to do things like manage
human behavior and the economy in ways that are fundamentally beyond
the possibility of such control, even if it were desirable. We will
never become able to prevent all human depravities or ward off all
economic collapses, any more than we can do so for storms, earthquakes,
or volcanic eruptions (although we might for asteroid impacts). All we
can do is to try to prepare ourselves for surviving the calamities and
emerging in some order after they have subsided.
However, we don't have to wait for authoritarian methods to fail before
we abandon them. That is the wisdom of the libertarian impulse,
understood by our constitutional founders. A constitution can and must
structure how we self-organize, even if we cannot be sure what clauses
will work or how, or how to change them to produce better outcomes. the
same design change that has no effect if applied today might cause mass
extinction of the human race if applied tomorrow, and heaven on Earth
if applied the day after.
So the wisest rule is likely to be a conservative one: Avoid changes
that are simple, direct, obvious, and large, because they are almost
certainly a bad idea. That cannot be avoided for a new constitution,
but sound design of further changes should proceed carefully, and make
no move toward micromanaging society and the economy. The best that
can work is structuring self-organization, and for that we can learn
from experience to make some outcomes more likely, while swimming in a
sea of intrinsic unpredictability.