## Metadata - Author: [[Neil Theise]] - Full Title: Notes on Complexity - Category: #books ## Highlights - Look at your finger and bend its joints. Notice the creases in your skin. The creases are lined by bacteria with functions that are specific to skin creases. These bacteria, in caring for their own needs, take in dead cell fragments and molecular components of the topmost layer of the skin and produce lubrication that moisturizes, softens, and protects the skin at the crease. That is why your skin doesn’t crack from the constant wear and tear of your joints bending. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=581)) - The word holarchy, coined by author and polymath Arthur Koestler, has been used to capture what we intend here.3 A holarchy is a system of elements that do not relate to each other in terms of higher or lower, top or bottom, left to right, or right to left. The members of a holarchy (holons) are always equivalent to all other members. When we say that light is both a wave and a particle, we are not privileging one aspect of light over the other. Moreover, at our everyday scale we experience light as neither of these—we experience it merely as light! ([Location 1035](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=1035)) - Our best foot forward is to think of the brain not as a producer of mind but rather a transducer of mind. Transducers take one kind of input and turn it into a different kind of output. A light bulb transduces electricity into light. A thermometer transduces heat into a number. ([Location 1227](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=1227)) - By weaving together aspects of all three important methods of human exploration of the nature of reality—empirical science (complexity theory), philosophy (idealism), and metaphysics (Buddhism, Kabbalah, Vedanta, Saivism)—we find that the realm of the Platonic ideal is nothing other than this nondual realm of pure awareness, a fundamental awareness before any split into subject-object duality. ([Location 1733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=1733)) - Across all levels of scale we find these recursive aspects arising from a steady, enduring flow of processes: differentiation (within fundamental awareness), emanation (of space-time and the quantum foam), and self-organization (at all higher levels of scale), by which all of existence comes into being. Through these processes, complementarities arise. It seems almost as if flow,24 complementarity, and recursion form a trinity of global characteristics, of universal “laws,” if you will. These would be the truly primary features of how existence comes into being out of Consciousness, every element of the world recursively linked in parallel ascending and descending spirals. ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=1766)) - Despite our routine sensory evidence that our day-to-day world is solid and wholly independent of us, in spite of Einstein’s confidence that this must be so, and in contrast to the privilege given in our society to the empirical sciences, which reinforce this “commonsense” view, everything only looks like a thing. It is our perceptions and intuitions that cocreate this illusion that material objects exist independently and that they are separate from each other. The parts are not, cannot be, separate from the whole. It is our misapprehension that each of us is an unimportant cog in an unfeeling, nonliving universe. It is our collective delusion that we are separate and alone. It is our training—by neurodevelopment, by instinct, by teaching—that causes us to forget the innocent, but not naive, sense of connection we carry with us from the womb before we enter into a seemingly independent life. But what can be unlearned can be relearned. What can be lost can be found. Whatever our misunderstandings, in every moment, we are ready to awaken to our true natures, fresh and new. ([Location 1797](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B74STY6H&location=1797))