Self-Organized Criticality is one of the most prevalent theories of complexity and a model for how nature works. It seems that nature is not really in an equilibrium, like one easily might assume. Important things like evolution don't happen in an orderly, gradual fashion. Rather, nature tends to organize itself in such a way that small changes might trigger a chain reaction, an avalanche, an explosion. Most of those are small, but it is from the big ones that large changes come. What looks chaotic and haphazard at first is anything but. The complexity of nature is typically poised at the edge. Not the edge of chaos, but the edge of unpredictable evolutionary change. The state of rest is not stability or equilibrium. Rather, the dominos are all lined up, so that if you tip one of them over, lots of things will happen. What happens depends on which domino you push. Different things happen, depending on where you touch the system. And the cool thing is that once it changes, it will again end up in a complex state of self-organized criticality.
What does complexity have to do with freedom? Most theories of complexity manage to describe statistically what happens in complex systems, and to give some general guidelines for how they're structured, but science seems to not be able to predict the details. Because, in a critical complexity, very small changes might have big effects, and everything is connected, so it becomes next to impossible to calculate what exactly will happen that will trigger something. And because the elements of complex systems must have considerable degrees of freedom for the system to work. I.e. the behavior of the individual elements can not be predicted in a deterministic way, and they might go one way or another, and widely different things might happen depending on what they do.
We normally consider freedom to be when we can do whatever we want. And we consider that we get something for free when it is given to us for no payment. But we want more than that. It is not fun to be free if there's nothing useful to do. It is no fun getting something for free if you can't do anything with it.
Somebody says: "Hey, I'm going to give you 10 million tons of sand for free. It is right here in this desert, and you can do whatever you please with it". That probably won't do it for you, even though you get a lot for free, and you have total freedom as to what to do with it. Because, practically speaking, you probably can't do much with it, and it isn't worth much to you.
What we really want to get for free is stuff that's already wound up, fully charged up, ready to go, ready to make big things happen with a small effort. What we really want the freedom to do are the things that are ready to happen, where the dominos already are lined up and you just need to push the button. It doesn't do you any good that I tell you that you're free to travel into space right now, because you wouldn't know how. But if you have your own spaceplane parked in your driveway, fully tanked up, and you just need to turn the keys and grab the steering wheel, that's something that feels like freedom.
So, what does that have to do with self-organized criticality again? Quite a bit. Because that's essentially a state of complexity where everything is already wound up and ready to go. Where you might actually getting something if you get it for free, and where you actually might accomplish something with your freedom.
The cool thing is that it is exeedingly difficult to know what anybody will do and what exactly it will accomplish. That's sort of the nature of complexity. It isn't deterministic. It all depends. On you, for one thing.
Think about the state of being "in the flow". You get a brand new idea, you call a friend and he happens to have a key piece that could help implement it. The next day the business plan comes together. Then you run into somebody in the elevator who decides to finance it, the moment he hears about it. Everything just happens, bang, bang, bang. None of it happens from scratch. Everything and everybody are already wound up and ready to go. You just need to trigger them, and they get going, and in turn trigger somebody else, etc. Living in a complex system will in no way guarantee that you'll be in flow, but you'll have a much better chance of finding the flow than in a system that is less complex. There has to be some waves before you can catch a good one.
Slides
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