Supersystems: when your logic is not enough

if you check out the meaning of 'supersystem' you are likely to come up with the definition that it is a system made up of other systems, but this is a back-to-front view. All systems are part of our universe, everything eventually connects with everything else: you sneeze today and it moves the air in front of you and, like the ripples on a pond when you drop a stone in, the effects of your sneeze will reach the limits of the universe, imperceptibly, some time in an unimaginably distant future.

A supersystem is one small corner of the universe that is big enough for us to comprehend that it is a system, but too complex for us to understand its workings. Our brains are a good example of a supersystem, we apply a range of simplifications to try and understand some of its workings, such as 'vision', 'hearing' or 'memory', which makes them sound as if they are separate systems (subsystems) in our brain, while in fact they are interlinked and share many operations. If your memory and vision were separate functions, for example, no one would ever shut their eyes to help them remember something almost forgotten or to hear a recorded message clearer. Vision consumes huge amounts of your brain's resources, and by shutting your eyes or staring into space you free up lots of resources for thinking, and vice versa - if you drive you probably can remember a number of times when thinking about problems has resulted in a delayed reaction to events on the road.

All systems are supersystems in practice, but some are easier to think of as simple systems than others. If you balance a book on the edge of the desk, small road-traffic or wind vibrations on your building are not going to affect it noticeably - you pushing it or putting some other object on top of it are about the only things that will decide whether it remains on your desk or falls to the floor. You already know a lot about balance from a lifetime of experiencing the effects of it, and although it is only a simplification, this assuming that things with small effects can be safely ignored is one of them most important precepts underlying that mathematical subject of calculus.

Better still, our brains our able to analyse supersystems so complex that, if asked to describe them, we would be unable to do so. You can watch the branches of a tree blowing in a wind and understand exactly what you are seeing and what will happen if the wind becomes stronger or weaker, or if someone throws a ball towards you then you have a good chance of catching it even though its flight is effected by gravity, trajectory, spin and wind. We can do this not by learning traditional mathematics, but by accessing a system that is much older, one that is built into our brains.

We do not have direct conscious access to this part of our brain, as it mainly deals with things like coordination, but we can train it and we can access it indirectly in many ways. In our conscious thoughts we generally try to classify everything, so we might say that we are bad at maths and good at languages, and use this to condition our career choices - becoming a translator rather than a mathematician. We use this idea to create our education systems and then, lo and behold, translators all tend to be alike, mathematicians all tend to be alike, and translators and mathematicians tend to be different. However, this situation only happens because we all get used to allowing our initial classifications define our social systems, and as a result we come to believe that the skills required to be a mathematician or translator are different. This, though, is only a social belief, albeit an extremely strong one.

Advanced linguistics (the science of languages) is much like advanced mathematics - mathematics is only another human language that attempts to describe numbers of things, while linguistics is yet another application of mathematics. The more we push forward our understanding of linguistics or mathematics, the more the methods and results we learn in these fields come to resemble the systems already built into our heads, moreover, they come to resemble the same systems.

Thousands of years ago we understood little about the environment that surrounded us, other than as a set of in-built and trained responses to the way we lived in that environment. Sometime in our early experiments to test how the universe worked we decided that we were separate from the universe, and that by gathering more and more knowledge of the outside world we would come to understand it. This has conditioned the way we perceive the world, that mathematics and linguistics are separate fields that perhaps overlap at the edges. Today we are beginning to understand that everything we know are nothing more than variations of the same things - linguistics and mathematics are but two names for the same thing. The only difference between them is that they are two different ways of looking at the same thing, like taking a pumpkin and carving 'mathematics' and 'linguistics' on different sides - while the pumpkin may appear different when viewed from different directions, it is still the same pumpkin.

Linguistics is really the way the brain processes a particular group of information, in this case a vast databank of sounds. The brain is not like a dictionary of words, we only think of it that way because our education presents them that way as a convenient method of dealing with making readable symbols of our language. We are at our most inventive linguistically when we are about the age of eight or nine, when our brains are good enough to conceptualise but not yet old enough to have succumbed fully to common social beliefs about language (such as that of 'vocabulary' and 'grammar'). If you can still find someone intelligent who has not had the 'benefits' of education, their concepts of language are likely to be very different to yours, even though their language use is as rich as yours. Most of our vocabulary is learnt by observation of other people's usage, and we can readily create new words and fit them understandably into the 'pelonia' (I just made that word up, as a replacement for 'language').

So how can we use this to help us think? Ah, well that is the subject of a later blog, I have covered quite enough for one day! Suffice to say that supersystems are those too complex for us to analyse rationally, although our brain can usually figure them out subconsciously. All supersystems are basically the same, as all are by-products of the way our brain understands the world.