They Go Together

They go together – the rocks and the water and the dissolved oxygen and the insects and the swallows. Two Cairns ago I wrote of a spring kayak run where the swallows were incredibly abundant. I did that run again in November and passed cliffs where the mud nests of cliff swallows were thick beneath the sheltering overhangs of a lower strata and the holes of bank swallows were thick in a higher, softer stratum. And I realized that, of course, the swallows are going to be thick where the river has cut into bedrock. Not only will the cliffs provide nesting sites, the turbulent, channel-cutting flow will stir and dissolve oxygen into the water so that billions of insects can thrive there, enough to support all the swallows and their young.

Then I went kayaking in Ahjumawi, a lake fed by massive, underground springs. Most of the lake is shallow, warm, and green. But whenever I approach one of the springs, the water cools and clears and I gaze down at thousands of fingerling trout swirling around the cold inflow. They go together – the springs and the preceding lava flows and the productivity of the water column and the trout.

I found myself thinking back on the Law of Requisite Variety which I learned from a systems thinking book I read a long time ago. It read something like ‘a system of less variety can not understand a system of greater variety – unless there is constraint.’ As I understood it then, our minds, even though they are incredibly complex (variety of neuronal connections), can not understand the universe – which is even far more complex (has even more variety). However, this universe has constraints which limit how the complexity of the universe can express itself. These constraints allow us to understand more of the universe than we could if the universe had no constraints. Science is the discovery and exploration of these constraints. Law of Universal Gravitation, Laws of Thermodynamics, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Boyle’s Law, etc. Part of the joy of science is that each discovery of a constraint allows our limited minds to understand more of the universe around us.

But the Law of Requisite Variety cuts both ways. We can constrain our own minds, limiting the variety we bring to a new situation. I remember hiking in the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon shortly after taking a college geology course. I came upon a rock wall that I could “understand.” With that understanding, I could extrapolate its “story” to the surrounding rock. Except when I did, it didn’t work. Within a few yards, the rocks had been faulted or intruded or folded by some other story. I didn’t like that. I wanted the entire wall to fit into the simple story I understood. The simplified story I wanted to impose on that rock face is an example of a constraint arising within my mind, limiting the variety within my mind even more. The universe is so much vaster than the capabilities of our mind that we need to keep our mind as unconstrained as possible in order to grasp it. It’s a great challenge, striving to dance with the world in a way that understands the world’s constraints to the maximum extent possible without constraining and reducing the variety in one’s own understanding of the world.