OptionalBooks

Umm, I've got some notes of my own, buddy

This thin book is divided into three parts: Complexity, Complementarity and Holarchy, and Consciousness. This might be the first hint, that this book does veer away from the topic of complexity as an academic field of study quite quickly. But let's take it step by step.

In the first section, “Complexity,” the author tells us a lot of anecdotes. Stories, on one hand, of intelligent people making revolutionary discoveries that sound interesting, but are never explained here. On the other hand, we get stories of how the author himself got into the field of complexity and how cool and important it is. In the end, this section reads like an extended, badly told ad for actually learning about complexity, which I thought I was going to do by reading this book! It could be forgiven as a longwinded introduction before we get to the meat of it, but that's not the case either.

Section two, “Complementarity and Holarchy,” wants to sell the idea that “all is one”. Not only in a New Age woo kind of way, but really, scientifically! Going down through cells, atoms and the quantum level, and back up to planetary and universal scale, we are told how everything interlinks and separation is an illusion. This isn't wrong per se, but the way it's written does read very unpleasant. First, it's long winded, with very specific details at each level being highlighted and explained in full. The general point could surely have been made without going as deeply into these arbitrary particulars. The second reason this section reads unpleasant, is that the author has a very maladjusted sense of how much to explain certain things. Sometimes, a great many words are spent on explaining the simplest concepts, while other times a difficult idea will be inadequately presented in just a few words. Lastly, in this section, and the following, the author presents his banal and clichéd philosophical ideas (“We're all one”, “Isn't life beautiful?”) in such an arrogant and self-important way, that it becomes very difficult to fairly consider that little new, which he adds to the conversation.

All these problems continue into section three, “Consciousness.” A whole chapter is devoted to retelling the biography of Kurt Gödel, another few pages are spent explaining that correlation does not equal causation—in agonizing detail. And finally, the author presents his theory, that there's one “big-C Consciousness” that our own individual “small-c consciousness” taps into to get our thoughts from.

It's quite the achievement to stack this many non-sequiturs onto each other to arrive at a conclusion that somehow still feels like the whole point of the book. I cannot judge whether this grand conclusion is correct, interesting, or helpful, because I simply did not understand any of it. And not for lack of trying, but due to the aforementioned problems in the author's writing.

In conclusion, the title is misleading as this book talks little of complexity, and the eclectic and patronizing writing make it a chore, even to those open to its New Age ponderings.

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