The Bell Curve of Complexity

I have been thinking a lot about complexity lately. We live our lives constantly interacting with different systems of varying complexity and scale. These systems are nestled like Russian nesting dolls inside of, and making up, countless other systems. In Gödel Escher Bach, Hofstadter argues that our souls are the result of unimaginably large self-referential systems that fold back upon themselves (which book, I might add, has the most profound things to say on the nature of intelligence that I have ever read).

You can’t delve too deep in the rabbit hole that is looking at the world as an infinite series of systems, for that way lies madness. Or enlightenment. I don’t know which, but both are dangerous. I do think it is good to periodically stop and ponder on how large a role complexity plays in our lives.

I read an article today about a man that has just finished building an 8-bit CPU by hand. His CPU is the equivalent of an Apple IIe or a Commodore 64 (the picture to the left is of his CPU). For most people a computer is the magic box that sends email, surfs the web, balances their checkbook, etc. The more you learn about computers, the greater their complexity grows. Computers become far more complex if you know a little programming. But at some point as your knowledge of a system grows, the complexity of said system starts to decrease.

“Computers can seem like complete black boxes. We understand what they do, but not how they do it, really,” says Chamberlin, the guy that built the CPU. “When I was finally able to mentally connect the dots all the way from the physics of a transistor up to a functioning computer, it was an incredible thrill.”

I am seeing a similar realization in my own life. The primary reason I have been neglecting this blog is because I have been neck deep in planning the Bluegrass Festival. This will be the 36^th year for the festival, which means that I have been a part of this festival since I have been alive (including in the womb). My earliest memories of the bluegrass festival are winning prizes at the vendor that sold kid’s trinkets, the sofas and recliners that were hoisted into the gigantic oak trees at people’s campsites and being shooed out of the store because I was always underfoot.

As I got older, the festival grew in my eyes. I started selling t-shirts at the store and ice off the back of a golf cart. Backstage seemed like a place that I wanted to be, even though I had no business being there. When I turned 12, my friends and I started camping, which made the festival grow by at least an order of magnitude. Suddenly, there were other campsites that we could visit (or at least spy on), beer to sneak out of coolers, tents to pitch and campfires to start. Move forward a few years and you add working gates shifts, organizing the schedules of friends to work, building overly elaborate kitchen areas, etc.

Over the last couple of years, I have been trying to help my grandmother out by taking some of the planning off of her shoulders. The complexity of the festival as an organism in my mind has grown larger than any of the previous jumps. I never imagined the scale of “stuff” involved in planning such a large event.

Here’s the thing though. I think I have reached some kind of plateau where I am realizing that no other person, besides my grandmother, knows the level of detail and complexity of this event but at the same time it is becoming simpler. It is hard to describe but, if I didn’t know better, I would swear that I can hear the heartbeat of the festival. At minimum, I have at least a small understanding of what the CPU guy was talking about when he said it was a thrill to connect the mental dots.

I believe it is good for the soul to understand something so well that its complexity is stripped away not because you have removed its components but because you see it as a whole.

Of course it is far more likely that I just need to eat my bowl of Wheaties in the morning.