Why do complex systems self-organise? What is cellular uncertainty and stem cell plasticity? Can we create artificial digital life that’s subject to the same creative adaptability that nature and life demonstrate?

Today we have the extraordinary phenomena of self-organisation in Complex Systems to look into. We’re going to be looking into the conditions for a system to be considered complex, how a certain amount of randomness in the system releases the creativity required to permit adaptability, and how the feedback loops within that adaptability lead to a self-correcting organisational principle that keeps the system’s order and randomness in balance as it evolves. We’re going to be seeing how that self-organisation is operative at almost every level of scale in the universe and in life and death, and trying to get our heads around what that means for the nature of reality and consciousness.

So who better to discuss this with than stem cell biologist and diagnostic pathologist Neil Theise. Neil is is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a pioneer of adult stem cell plasticity research. In 2018 the news of his discovery of the interstitial, a vast communication network throughout the human body went viral and was featured in the New York Times and Scientific American among many others. Theise is also a long term student of Zen meditation and Kabbalah. And his studies of complexity theory, summarised in his new book “Notes on Complexity: A scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being”, have led to interdisciplinary collaborations in fields as diverse integrative medicine, consciousness studies and the science-spirituality interface.

Since speaking with biologist Michael Levin on Cellular cognition, and cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on collective intelligence, in the last series; I’ve been keen to speak to Neil about stem cell plasticity and self-organising systems, as their elegant sophistication begs so many questions about the nature of reality and consciousness. So without further ado, let’s go!

00:00 Intro

05:45 Livers have stem cells, Neil’s first of many discoveries

13:50 “Cellular Uncertainty” - Stem-cell plasticity.

17:43 Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle’ analogy.

20:20 Cellular sensitivity

22:00 The TechnoSphere - interacting with virtual creatures

26:20 Emergent bottom-up structure, self-organising inside the game

27:20 Artificial Life.

29:20 Complexity Theory explained by Ants.

34:20 Randomness allows the creativity to adapt to changes: in the environment Divergent ants.

35:20 A minimum of elements are needed over time to become self-organising.

36:50 Cells, ants and humans all self-organise: micro macro phenomena.

38:40 No planning or top-down intelligence managing complex systems.

42:55 ‘Wholarchies’ not hierarchies.

47:50 Living systems and complexity arise at the boundary between perfect order and fractal chaos.

49:55 Extinction is also part of complexity, as much as creative adaptivity.

50:30 “What makes you able to be a living system, inevitably, given enough time will lead you to die. You can’t separate life and death”.

53:10 Self correction

55:50 Cancer, economic crashes, extinction events: Pruning away the corrective negative feedback loops leads to collapse.

57:30 Every scale of nature adheres to complex system behaviours.

59:50 Complementarity exists at all levels of scale - Niels Bohr.

01:01:40 Biological complementarity.

01:04:50 Breaking down the separations between discrete organisms.

01:10:50 Not upward or downward causation but complementarity.

01:35:50 Zen meditation insights which led to scientific insight.

01:18:20 The risk of over-rating our personal experience.

01:23:20 Where you find mind, you find life.

References:

Neil Theise, “Notes on Complexity: A scientific theory of connection, consciousness and being”

Evan Thompson - Deep Continuity (of Life and Mind)

Francisco Varela - (Evan Thompson’s mentor)