I love New Years resolutions. A ritual opportunity to adjust the choices that make up life. Like everyone, I struggle (read: give up frequently) on them, but part of the joy is to understand that process and resolve better.

I’m expecting a big semester, starting soon: my Complexity Science course, bigger and better; finishing my thesis; being substantively involved in three large projects and several small ones; and getting a job. My theory of organization this time is to schedule– my work days are specified to the hour on the projects I hope to finish by the end of the semester:

My resolutions are mostly following the same idea, recognizing time less as a limiting factor than as an organizing principle:

• Additional morning exercise (15 min. / week)
• Personal or professional blogging (30 min. / week)
• Review my colleagues interests and activities (30 min. / week) [next year follow-up: usefully encode my network]
• Write to distant friends (30 min. / week)
• Deep reflection on goals and activities (1 hr. / week)
• Go for a hike outside the city in every month [next year follow-up: hike the same trail every month of the year]
• Read a journal cover-to-cover every week [next year follow-up: become a regular reader of one journal]

Mad Libs edition: PDF

I made this animated beaker of words for a new initiative of Flame’s. Well, I didn’t make the beaker itself– that was the work of Moran Goldstein. And the words themselves are from a story of Flame’s (but it’s set up to take words from any bucket).

Also see the live version.

I don’t understand how ISIS has instilled so much fear in so many people. ISIS is not a danger to us– at least, compared to anything from heart disease to climate change-induced hurricanes. Is there a word for recognizing a danger, but choosing not to dwell on it?

Even in the sphere of international relations (and outside of environmental governance), I think there are far more important things to be concerned about. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its implications, for example.

The narrative around ISIS seems to have everyone believing that military action is imperative. I don’t know if there’s a “solution” to ISIS, but I think that military action against terrorist groups needs to be very carefully tempered with non-military relation-building.

Jeff Sachs wrote a recent op-ed on the use of military in the Middle East, titled “Let the Middle East Govern Itself”. The message is,

The US cannot stop the spiral of violence in the Middle East. The damage in Libya, Gaza, Syria, and Iraq demands that a political solution be found within the region, not imposed from the outside. The UN Security Council should provide an international framework in which the major powers pull back, lift crippling economic sanctions, and abide by political agreements reached by the region’s own governments and factions.

Military action has not worked in the past. Why do we turn to it when we have nothing to fear?

I love listening to pop music when I work, but I can’t listen to anything with words when I’m reading or writing. And my life is supposed to be including a lot of that right now. At a time when I hoped to be building my Great Food Model, placing all my projects in a diorama with spotlights, I have been told instead to publish or perish. A man with many interests is not appreciated in academia, I’m told, without some beans to count.

I won’t recite the litany of projects and goals, but a couple highlights might give a gist. First, I’m really excited because my proposal to research coffee has been accepted for funding, in the time it took me to read three books on the subject to fall in and out of love with the beverage. My paper on marine reserves went through a three week crisis, during which all the results seemed like mirages, but it was resolved yesterday. I keep promising one professor that his project is now my top priority, but the processing to generate its data has taken all summer, and now I wonder if one of the inputs invalidated the whole thing.

I’ve been trying to keep a strong boundary between my work and home lives, but as work picks up pace, as occupation turns preoccupation, and the success feed on themselves, it’s been consuming more and more. I’m relying more on Flame to orchestrate our social life, and feeling more at a loss on the weekends. I’ve been learning a lot about relationships from the first self-help book I’ve read in years– Models by Mark Manson– and the January Scientific American Mind edition on relationships.

The summer is over too soon, and leaves are falling when I still haven’t worn all my shorts. I organized a soccer group, but haven’t gotten them together to actually play, or purchased a soccer ball. I have been finding time to do more climbing at the Brooklyn gym. The pain in my arms feels good, even as demons in my blood lash out at the change.

A vast leading edge of a new gestalt has begun to upset and encompass mathematics, philosophy, computers and the Internet, psychology, art, and science. It will change how we understand our world and ourselves, and what we believe is possible.

This new gestalt is the culmination of threads that have been developing in many different areas, and they intersect in the emerging understanding of complexity and its connection with computers. Here are a few thoughts of how historical developments have brought us to this point.

Within mathematics, the rise of formalism upended the very nature of mathematics, making math about the creation of math, only to see this approach run up against fundamental flaws (Incompleteness and Halting problems). However, that process of realization itself led to the creation of computer.

Within physics, linear models gave rise to systems understandings (the inadequacy of causality, overdeterminacy), paralleling the evolution of mathematics away from the simple mechanics of truth. This process of exploration is now giving rise to models of out-of-equilibrium processes and entropy, possible only to study through simulation.

These processes in academics were connected to what happened in art, with the transition from the importance of technique (like physics’s former focus on formulas), to an exploration into the nature of painting itself (formalism), to a re-engagement with society (systems). Now new media (computers) are breaking open the possibilities of experience (simulation).

Within philosophy, the trench warfare that has shown a slow receding of absolutism to the forces of relativism is giving way to a new philosophy of multiple perspectives.

Within psychology, early neurobiology combined with the opportunities of technology produced positive psychology, but now more modern views are developing an idea of the emergent self.

It is no mistake the study of complexity is arising at this moment in history, nor that complexity science is so closely tied to developments in computational approaches. Another society-wide driver is also inextricably connected: the rise of big data. Big data lays out complexity for us to see, and demands a new fundamental theory of physics which combines thermodynamics with information theory.

The process of formalism changed the way that people thought about what they were doing, and computers are changing the way we think about everything again. The new gestalt recognizes multiple realities, and it recognizes the importance of simulation. In fact, it ties these two together: simulation and reality are linked. When you make a simulation, you create a new reality. It isn’t this reality, but this reality isn’t a well-defined thing either.

Like art, there was a time when philosophy eschewed any direct relevance to ordinary life. Like mathematics, it was built-up by a new kind of formalization. In math, that process was inspired by set theory; in philosophy, it was called logical positivism. When Godel’s theory showed that such formalisms ultimately eat themselves, both math and philosophy had a wake up call. Of course, by then all their friends had moved away.

Philosophy is going through a renaissance right now, for the same reasons that math is. It’s computers. Computers aren’t just changing society, how we think about ourselves, and what we can know. They are breaking open the notion of truth itself.

Godel’s theorem tore down the notion that formal languages can embody all of truth. But it had a much more important consequence, which had nothing to do with its result. As speech by Chaitin argues:

[Formalization] failed in that precise technical sense. But in fact it succeeded magnificently, not formalization of reasoning, but formalization of algorithms has been the great technological success of our time—computer programming languages!

So if you look back at the history of the beginning of this century you’ll see papers by logicians studying the foundations of mathematics in which they had programming languages. Now you look back and you say this is clearly a programming language! If you look at Turing’s paper of course there’s a machine language. If you look at papers by Alonzo Church you see the lambda calculus, which is a functional programming language. If you look at Gödel’s original paper you see what to me looks like LISP, it’s very close to LISP, the paper begs to be rewritten in LISP!

I was recently working on my Research Statement, for the impending academic job market, and dusting off some thoughts I put into my essay to get into grad school. I said, “Philosophy is grappling to find a life-affirming and ethics-motivating way to acknowledge the advances of technology and science. It has been driven by both them and worldwide clashes of culture to search for a more inclusive world view.”

It’s obvious now that one result of this search has been positive psychology (which I’ve ranted about before). But I think there’s more brewing.

I study complexity, which is ripe with connections both to science and technology. It’s not a mistake that complexity as a set of models is so closely associated with computational techniques like agent-based modeling. I happen to think that it’s also ripe with connections to philosophy– to the nature of reality and our relationship to it.

Complexity has been called the study of “little programs that never halt”: there’s a core of simplicity to any complex model, but there’s also a level of unknowability. Formalizing complexity just doesn’t work, in the traditional sense. Turning a complex model into a simple model loses essential elements, just like if you were to remove recursion from a programming language.

Ancient philosophy was content with irreducible mystery, but modern philosophy always wants to explain the foundation. It accepts that the explanation is infinitely complex, even if the foundation itself is not. But for a long time, it has been trying to explain itself to a world that wants simple models.

Computers give us a new paradigm. The world isn’t like the number zero or the number infinity. It’s like Twitter. We are creating new realities all the time now. And we can get to the bottom of our realities. We’ll never know what reality has to say, as both philosophy and science once tried to do. But we can still study why and how it says it.

Here’s the first of 2-3 picture entries of pictures from my work trip to Australia and Vietnam. I give you– Brisbane!

A view across the river	Artificial beach	Park pond with Ibises	Fig trees in the city Botanical garden

Local tropical forest section	Overlooked by restaurant	Impecable landscaping	View of Brisbane from the top

See more in my Australia and Vietnam album.

This was sent by accident to a list I’m on:

Also, I’ve been reading way too much of the SMBC webcomic recently. Here are my favorite three:

Two dimensions of time

Parliaments of tissues

How academics say “I’m single”

Vietnam is officially one of my new favorite countries.  Between lively cities, casual lushness, delicious food, and kind folk, I need to come back here.

I'd hoped to see the natural wonder (UNESCO'd) of Halong Bay, but a category high-3-or-4 typhoon was headed straight for it.  I'd expected Hanoi to be similarly drenched, but the nonchalance of everyone I asked turned out to be justified: all that reached Hanoi was a steady (if at times heavy) sprinkle all day.

So instead I saw Ho Chi Minh's body, in the vast mausoleum complex that includes a museum, old house, new house, and botanical garden.  His pale face was no less iconic for being on such a short body.  The line filed by him too quickly to feel much of the weight of the nearness, but there he was a few feet away.

Other observations from Hanoi: The city has a thing for turtles.  They claim that the one turtle that they didn't eat in the Old Quarter lake is over 500 years old, and the stone slabs raised in 1484 to honor Vietnam's best scholars (at the Temple of Literature– a university from 1070) are placed each on a unique-looking turtle.  A lot of the pagodas feature turtles too.

The Old Quarter is a blast to get lots in.  Each street specializes in a different kind of ware (at least historically), from shoes to tin boxes.  But all have street food, coffee shops, fruit-sellers, and sidewalks that have been turned into motorcycle parking lots so everyone shares the street.

Also, my real purpose for being here– peppering people at all levels of hydropower plant decision-making with questions– was totally successful.  Each meeting filled in more of the picture, and identified more of what others weren't saying.