Towards a New Ontology of Complexity Science

I think that this is a Promethean moment. I think that when we look back on today, we’ll say ‘that was when things became different’. This may sound a bit like King Henry on St Crispin’s day at Agincourt:

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

Now I find this a worry, because aren’t we the inheritors of a tradition that has striven for the last two and a half millennia to demonstrate that most moments are not Promethean, that our time and place in the universe are not special? Isn’t it the politicians and spin-masters, not the scientists, who exhort us to think that now is different and that we are different? But the evidence worries me, and, what is more, the implications worry me. So indulge me while I lay out the evidence that, contrary to the null hypothesis, we really are living in a singular moment in the history of this bit of the universe. And then indulge me further while I unfold some of the consequences.

I think there are two big historical processes intersecting at the moment: the coming into being of a fully connected world, and the coming into being of a new way of doing science. Both only make sense from a complexity point of view, and, at base, that is why ‘we happy few’ matter in all of this. These two processes are going to interact incredibly strongly, I believe, and that will take us into radically new territory. But it is the novelty of each of these two processes that define our moment as Promethean, and it is to these that I will first turn.