Theseus' ship and Quantum realm. Love and Governance.

"There's an old story from Greek legend often told as a paradox. It's the story of Theseus' ship. Theseus, it seems, is a sailor and shipbuilder. He owns a ship that he maintains regularly. Whenever he sees a board or some other part starting to wear out, he removes it and replaces it. Over the years, he eventually replaces every single piece of the ship until none of the original parts remained. Now the question: is the ship he has then still his ship? If every single piece had been replaced, is it the same old ship or an entirely new one? Where does the identity of the thing, the “ship-ness,” reside?

To add a further wrinkle, suppose Helen is on the beach near Theseus, watching him closely. Every time Theseus takes off a piece of his ship and tosses it away to be replaced, Helen picks up the old piece (they're still in good shape because Theseus always replaces them early). With these, she builds another ship. So one day, Theseus replaces the last old part on his ship with a new one. He steps back to admire his now completely refurbished ship and bumps into Helen. She's just stepped back to admire her handiwork too, since she's just added the final part to her ship.

The question is, which one is Theseus' ship? Does he have two ships or no ship at all, or is one his and one Helen's? What is the essential quality that makes a ship a ship? What is it that gives it its identity as a ship and its sense of integrity and wholeness?

This is the kind of paradoxical question that has worried philosophers for millennia. We'll return to Theseus and Helen and the question of the identity of Theseus' ship with a new way to view the question. Before we do, we're going to go on a bit of an odd journey. We're going to take a new look at things – beyond the metaphorical – and see what they actually are. This strange journey will take us down to the very smallest levels of reality and then back up again to our world of things. This will mean getting down to the smallest structures we know of, right down to atoms and even the unfamiliar – but, as we'll see, entirely relevant – world inside the atom. From there we will come back up to the scale of the familiar world and beyond.

So what makes a thing a thing? What is stuff? These may seem like simple (or even silly) questions. After all, this seems obvious: things are what you can see or touch; they have mass, heft, and substance. You can pick up a pen, rap your knuckles on a desk, or drink a glass of water. At least macroscopic things seem to be pretty well behaved as things. But what's the real structure? What's inside that makes a thing a thing? Moving down in scale to the microscopic world, we understand that this eventually leads us down in scale to molecules and atoms.

Let's look at water. As you probably know, it's one of the most common substances there is made of small molecules containing two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. If you stop to think about it, though, those three atoms don't look like what you know as water. What is it that enables these hydrogens and oxygens to have the properties of water – to slosh around as liquid, freeze as clear ice, or form clouds in the sky?

That's a question that will require us to think in systems to answer. We'll come back to it on our way back up in scale. For now let's go even smaller, into the hydrogen atoms that exist as part of every molecule of water.

Hydrogen is the smallest atom. It consists of a single proton surrounded by a single electron. But the electron and proton are so small that the atom is almost entirely empty. Specifically, “almost entirely empty” means the atom is 99.9999999999996% empty. That's not an approximation but a figure chemists and physicists have worked very hard to calculate.

So a hydrogen atom is almost entirely empty – made of nothing at all. That empty space isn't filled with air but just empty space. With that much emptiness, it's difficult to see how an atom amounts to anything.

Hydrogen is also by far the most common element in the universe. It makes up about 74% of all elemental matter, and the hydrogen atoms inside you account for about 10% of your body weight.

But how can something that is so close to being completely empty – completely nothing – also be so much of everything? How can it account for so much of the mass of you and other things? The electron in the atom contributes only a miniscule amount of its substance (about 0.05% of the hydrogen atom's already tiny mass), so the vast majority of the mass comes from the tiny proton at its infinitesimal heart.

Now, here is where the story starts to become a little weird. We often see pictures in textbooks that show atoms as little spheres. Within these spheres the protons and neutrons that make up the atomic nuclei typically appear as even smaller spheres, little hard nuggets of reality at the heart of the atom. It's a convenient view, but one that also leads us completely astray from how reality, things and systems – actually work.

Atoms aren't little balls. Electrons don't orbit in clean paths, and there is no defined spherical wrapper around the atom. The nature of an electron in a hydrogen atom is more complex than we need to dig into here, but the fact is that it's more accurate to think of the atom as having a fuzzy, nebulous border region defined by where the electron can be found – insofar as anything that is almost entirely nothing can have a boundary at all!

At the center of the hydrogen atom is its proton. This too is something we often envision as being a hard little sphere, an essential if tiny bit of solid stuff. This is what makes up most of the mass of the hydrogen atom, and yet, just like the atom itself, it's not actually anything like a concentrated little lump of anything. In order to really find out what things are, we need to continue our journey to dip into the proton at the atom's heart and see what that tells us.

Protons are one of the two main parts of the atomic nucleus, the other being the neutron. Together these are responsible for very nearly all of the mass of the atom, and atoms add up to being all the mass and solidity we experience. They are essential to things being things as we experience them with substance and heft. While protons and neutrons are essential, they are not fundamental: it turns out that they are made up of even smaller particles called quarks. As far as we know, quarks are fundamental particles with no internal structure, and they are in many ways as strange as their name implies.

It's often taught that a proton is made of three quarks. These quarks aren't "inside" the proton; they are the proton. That may be a bit confusing, but remember that the proton doesn't have a wrapper or spherical shape hiding quarks inside it. The quarks are simply what the proton is when viewed in more detail.

Each of the quarks that make up a proton (or neutron) has a little bit of mass, though strangely the amount of mass of all three put together amounts to only about 1% of the total mass we find when we measure the mass of the proton. But if the quarks are the proton, how is that possible? Where does the rest of the mass come from?

You saw earlier that we need to discard the convenient idea that atoms or even protons are hard little balls of matter. Atoms are "fuzzy" and made mostly of nothing. Protons can be said to have a size and shape, though they too are best described as fuzzy (or indeterminate within bounds, to be more precise). Just as the atom gets its size and shape from the volume where its electrons may be found, the proton's size and shape come from where its quarks may be found.

The three quarks that make up the proton are tightly bound to each other: they zoom around in a very, very small space and never get very far from each other. But at this small scale, physics operates differently than we're used to, and even the difference that we see between matter and energy essentially vanishes. (Fortunately, Einstein's succinct equation E = mc2 allows us, and subatomic particles, to convert from one to the other easily.) In addition to the energy of the three bound quarks, in the same very small volume, there are innumerable pairs of quarks and anti-quarks always popping in and out of existence. These pairs appear and disappear almost instantly, out of nothing and into nothing but nevertheless adding their energy to the proton. This creates a stable but constantly changing environment in a very small space, based on the relationships between these small eruptions of energy.

What this means is that the combination of the kinetic energy of the quarks and their binding relationship to each other (known in physics as the “gluon field”) and the momentary but continually fizzing existence of the virtual quark pairs popping in and out around them, altogether create the other 99% of the observed mass of their aggregate whole – the stable-but-always-changing particles that we call protons and neutrons.

Strange as it sounds, this is the root of what things are. This is what makes up everything around you, everything you've ever seen or touched. Despite our typical experience of solidity and stability, everyday things are actually “less like a table, more like a tornado" as Simler aptly noted. Understanding things this way will also help us understand more clearly what systems are.

Looking at quarks and the protons they make up, we can see that at their most essential, things (whether atoms or ships) aren't what we typically consider them to be: they aren't in fact well-defined, primly bounded objects that stand on their own, clearly separate from everything else. At the smallest levels of reality, they aren't anything like little nuggets of matter. They're energy, forces, and relationships. As difficult as it may be to understand at first, the networks of relationships are what allow protons and everything else to exist.

Going back to protons and neutrons for a moment, these exist because of the energetic stable-but-always-changing relationships between quarks. A quark itself is a stable-but-always-changing effect. Together, three bound quarks and zillions of “virtual” (real but very-short-lived) pairs of quarks are related to each other in space and time in a way that makes up stable-but-always-changing protons and neutrons. The same is true of atomic nuclei (containing protons and neutrons) and electrons: it is by the relationships between them that they become stable-but-always-changing atoms.

This concept of stable-but-always-changing is called metastability. Something that is metastable exists in a stable form across time (typically) but is nevertheless always changing at a lower level of organization. The outwardly stable proton is actually a teeming swarm of smaller particles at the next lower level of organization. Likewise, the atom is stable in itself but inside is made from the constantly changing relationships between its nucleus and its electrons. In addition to protons and atoms, there are many other examples of metastable structures, such as a flock of birds, a hurricane, or a stream of water.

To continue our climb back up from the subatomic realm, just as an atom is a metastable structure, so too is a molecule. The simple molecule of water we looked at earlier is a thing every bit as much as a proton or an atom is a thing. It, too, is metastable, as the atoms within the molecule undergo changes, sharing electrons between them and changing their positions relative to each other.

Just as a hydrogen atom is made up of a proton and an electron, a water molecule is made up of two hydrogens and one oxygen atom. The water molecule doesn't "contain" these, it simply is these. And yet, while there's no skin or hard boundary around it, when considering the ways in which water molecules interact with each other, it often makes sense to think of them as being "one level up" in organization from their atoms.

That is, the water molecule exists because of the synergistic relationship between the atoms that constitute it, just as the hydrogen atom exists because of the synergy between the proton and electron, and the proton exists because of the synergy between quarks. The word synergy means "working together." It has been used in many contexts in recent decades, especially in business, but was originally brought into modern usage by Buckminster Fuller, who described it as "behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately" (Fuller 1975). This is another way of describing metastability, where some new thing arises from the combination of parts at a lower level of organization, often resulting in properties not found in the parts themselves. Like the proton and the atom, the molecule at its level of organization possesses the qualities of stability and integrity: it cannot be divided without changing its essential nature.

The idea that systems are metastable things with their own properties and that they contain other, lower-level metastable things within them is one of the key points to understand systems thinking. We will see this again when we discuss the phenomenon of emergence.

As things with their own identity, water molecules can be thought of as somewhat lumpy spheres, more like a potato than an orange in shape. This lumpy shape is made from the relationships between the constituent oxygen and hydrogen atoms. The relationships between the atoms in a molecule govern the metastability of the molecule and its overall electrical attributes. The quarks inside the proton and neutron determine their respective electrical charges, and the protons and electrons in the hydrogen and oxygen atoms determine the water molecule's overall charge. The oxygen atom partially pulls the electrons off the hydrogen atoms, sort of like stealing the covers from the poor hydrogens. This leaves the protons that make up the nuclei of the hydrogen atom somewhat exposed and gives their lumpy end of the molecule a partial positive charge. In the same way, the other side of the molecule, closest to the oxygen and away from the hydrogens, takes on about 10 times more of a negative electrical charge as the hydrogens' electrons now spend some of their time by the oxygen.

As a result, the water molecule as a whole, as a thing, has electrical polarity, with some parts more positive and some parts more negative. Understanding this – and understanding how things are built out of the relationships between components at a lower level of organization – allows us to answer the question of how it is that water molecules become the water we recognize. D. H. Lawrence (1972, p. 515) wrote about this in his poem “The Third Thing":

“Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing, that makes it water and nobody knows what that is.”

This “third thing” is at the heart of this discussion. This is the independently existing whole that Aristotle thought of more than 2,000 years ago, echoed by Smuts and Koffka in their fields in the early 20th century. This “third thing” is vitally important, but it's not a separate element or object: it is the whole that arises out of the relationships between the things we already know about from a lower level, creating a new independent thing at a higher level. To quote Lawrence again, saying virtually the same thing in a different context, in his 1915 novel The Rainbow, he writes:

“Between two peoples, the love itself is the important thing, and that is neither you nor him. It is a third thing you must create.”

This creation of a “third thing” that emerges from the relationship of lower-level components is what makes everything – atoms, water, love, interactivity, games, life – possible. In the case of water, as H2O molecules form loose but metastable clusters, these groups begin to slide past each other. As this happens, large number of these molecules and clusters begin to take on the properties of fluidity that we recognize as being liquid water – properties not found in the molecules or their atoms but that arise as entirely new from the relationships between the constituent parts.

(As Kurt Koffka says “the whole is other than the sum of its parts”, this “two-plus-two-equals-five” conception notes that it's the relationships/interactions within a system that make up the system. Building two “systems” with just the same elemental components will create two entirely different systems. The nature of the interactions/connections is important. Connecting a bunch of parts without behaviors that affect each other's states and behaviors is a collection and not a system: a heap of bricks as Poincaré said, or a bowl of fruit is a collection. In systems language, this assemblage is more complicated than complex. The interactions in a complicated process are essentially linear and/or random. This kind of process is typically amenable to linear, reductionist thinking in looking back from one part to the previous one to find a root cause. In a complex system, this reductionist thinking starts to break down, because a complex system cannot easily be broken down to be turned into a merely complicated one: "unwinding the loop/feedback" destroys its essential nature by breaking the final connection, in which parts affect their own future states and behaviors. This complexity quality allows systems to remain adaptive and robust to external changes over time and create organized/coordinated behavior and emergent properties.)

As we move back up in scale from looking at molecules to looking at things we can see around us, metastable structures are evident all around. Continuing with water as an example – whether in a drop, a stream, or a wave – it creates additional metastable structures at much larger levels of organization. Keep in mind that water molecules are very small. They're many thousands of times bigger than the protons we talked about earlier but still unimaginably small. So anything from a drop of water that hangs on the end of your eyelash to the largest hurricane is one of many metastable structures formed by water.

As far as things go, that's it: everything you know as a “thing” is made out of the relationships between smaller components within them. Each component is a metastable level of organization of its subparts, all the way down to the fundamental sub-basement of the universe, where quark/anti-quark pairs continually fizz in and out of existence, creating protons and neutrons (and their mass – and your mass) in the process.

Understanding this enables us to go back to where we started. We can now take another look at Theseus and Helen and their ships. Just as a proton, an atom, and a molecule are all metastable structures, so too is a ship: a ship isn't just a bunch of planks of wood; it's the synergistic relationships between those planks, and they exist in a particular metastable relationship to each other. So if Theseus removes a plank and replaces it with a new one, he has changed not only that one physical component but even, more importantly, its relationship to all the other physical components in the ship. He has removed the plank from the system that is the ship, but the ship itself remains (as long as it retains enough components to retain its metastability and function as a ship). For her part, Helen has created a new metastable structure, a new ship, by gradually creating new relationships with old parts. It's important to remember that just as we said earlier that the two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms aren't “inside” the water molecule, the planks aren't “inside” the ship: they are, by virtue of their relationship to each other, what creates the ship as a thing itself.

The philosopher and scientist Henri Poincaré (1901) said that “science is built of facts the way a house is built of bricks; but an accumulation of facts is no more science than a pile of bricks is a house.” Recall too Aristotle's statement that “in the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something beside the parts, there is a cause.” The cause he speaks of is the structural and functional relationship between things. In the case of the house described by Poincaré, it is the bricks and their relationships – their position, physicality, and support for each other. This is what separates it from "a mere heap” and creates the organized system we call a house, just as the structural and functional relations between facts that create organized theory and models constitute what we call science. Without these inter-elemental effects that transcend the elements themselves, there is no house, and there is no science.

Complementing this are two more observations, both from architect Christopher Alexander. Consider the preceding discussion about water molecules, quarks, and ships in this light:

“In short, no pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the world, only to the extent that it is supported by other patterns: the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns which are embedded in it.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at the one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.” (Alexander et al. 1977, p. xiii)

Where Alexander says "pattern," we would say "system." The essential overall pattern-of-patterns is that this systemic organization exists in the real world from quarks to hurricanes (and onward to the unimaginably immense structures in the universe); in creating the architecture of homes and kitchens and cities; and even in “systems” as designed experiences.

The second thought is what Alexender calls the "quality without a name" that he believes must be infused in all architecture and indeed in anything designed. Taken together, Alexander asserts that as a unified pattern containing these subpatterns, it cannot be contained in a name. As Alexander says,

“A system has this quality when it is at one with itself; it lacks it when it is divided....This oneness, or the lack of it, is the fundamental quality for anything. Whether it is in a poem, or a man, or a building full of people, or in a forest, or a city, everything that matters stems from it. It embodies everything. Yet still this quality cannot be named.” (Alexander 1979, p. 28)

Alexander's "quality without a name" resonates with Aristotle's unnamed "cause" found in an organized system and with Lawrence's “third thing” that makes water wet. It has had no name, perhaps, because naming it also flattens it in our minds, moving our perspective from that of a complex, dynamic pattern-of-patterns to a reductionist view of a stable, inert thing. With the understanding we have now, we can refer to this as the quality of some thing or process being “systemic”.

This systems perspective is crucial: you must learn to see the animated tornado in the apparently motionless table. Keeping all this in mind, not giving in to the vagueness and mysticism of overly holistic thinking nor the linearity of greedy reductionist thinking, you will be able to see the world systemically."