I admit that I’m no different than the rest of the population of this country when it comes to trying to understand the events of 11 September 2001. It’s almost impossible to fathom why the attacks would occur and what the effect will be on the future. One of the core questions that we want to answer is the one of cause. What was the chain of events that occurred that caused the terrorists to take the actions that they did? As it happens, this discussion relates closely to one of my areas of interest — Complexity Theory.
Complexity theory, rooted on Chaos theory, basically draws from the idea that things are interconnected in such a way that the smallest, seemingly insignificant events can create significant emergent behaviors. Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist, described what is considered the classic example of this — a butterfly’s wings flapping in Brazil can create a tornado in Texas [1]. While that may seem implausible, consider that weather patterns are profoundly complex and events surrounding them have a tremendous degree of interconnectedness that makes weather prediction almost impossible.
Complexity talks about collections of independent, goal-oriented individuals self-organizing into self-consistent systems with emergent behavior. Emergent behavior is the idea that new results can occur while the individuals are doing their own best efforts. In a sense, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. If you think about human beings emerged from dividing and differentiating cells, it becomes quite apparent. If cells divided and differentiated and combined to form a human being from a complete, detailed set of instructions (as most theories held), the incidence of birth defects would be astronomical. That’s because detailed, continuous sets of instructions tend to produce drastic outcomes if anything in the process gets upset. (Think about assembly lines in a factory where one misshapen part of the car destroys the entire car itself, e.g. bad tires.) However, almost all human babies are normal and the incidence of defects is pretty rare. That’s evidence that in fact the system of producing life is about very simple organisms (cells and genes) following very simple instructions that, when brought together, creates that system from which a human emerges. [2] The fact that all humans are constructed in virtually identical fashion, yet we are all distinct, backs up that theory further. This theory is essentially fractal — it works at all levels, from atoms to genes to cells to people.
People in society organize in the same fashion — each of us, with our individual objectives and goals, is connected to each other and the actions that we take affect those around us and the emergent behavior of all of us together. That means that we are all interrelated — our actions affect one another, regardless of how significant that action may seem.
Complex systems self-organize — in effect, you get order for free. Order naturally rises out of complexity and chaos. That’s not to say that bad things can’t happen as an effect of this self-organization, because they certainly can. But it also means that we are actually perfectly at home in this world — the things we do in life are patterned up and down the cosmic ladder. Our society acts in similar fashion to collections of cells or perhaps even collections of stars. The ability for self-consistent, self-organizing systems with emergent behavior from independent actors is a powerful and pervasive concept. The independent actors in the system (cells, genes, people) likely don’t work directly towards the overall goals of the system, if they understand them at all, yet as a collective achieve powerful results.
It’s hard to know if the incidents on 11 September are significant in the overall scheme of things. Even if those incidents are significant, it’s likely that as individuals within the greater complex system, we will fail to understand them because we don’t understand the behavior that is supposed to emerge. But one thing is certain about these events — our individual actions, no matter how large or small, in some way caused those incidents to occur. Just like tornados in Texas, the smallest, seemingly insignificant things that we do in our day-to-day lives have profound effects because of our tremendous degree of interconnectedness. That interconnectedness, however, creates the complexity that makes it impossible to identify the particular causes of these events and, even more so, makes these events impossible to predict.
And that may be as close to understanding 11 September 2001 as we ever get.
[1] Sardar, Ziauddin and Abrams, Iwona, “Introducing Chaos”, Totem Books, 1999, p54.
[2] Waldrop, M. Mitchell, “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos”, Touchstone, 1992, p.106.
p.s. Most entries won’t be this long — I may convert this into an essay and just post the link here. (Is there a rule that says that weblogs can’t be edited once posted? :-)