Cultural Complexification and Gödelian Incompleteness
A Presentation to Michael Levin's Research Lab
I was recently invited to present alongside Cory David Barker and Bobby Azarian to world-class biologist Michael Levin’s research lab at Tufts University. The title of the 3-part presentation was “The Relevance of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem for Models of Hierarchical Complexity in Life and Mind.” While Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is often cited as proof that there can be no proper “theory of everything”—since no system can be both complete and internally consistent, but must always rely on axioms outside the system itself—this is actually not the case. Rather, what it demonstrates is that incompleteness must be an aspect of all theories of everything. More than that, it reveals transcendent dynamics to such incompleteness—specifically, its process of recursive transformation. Far from undermining the search for theories of everything, then, Gödel's insights about incompleteness teach us something essential about how any such successful theory must operate.
In the presentation, Cory David Barker began with a consideration of what he calls “fractal phase transformations,” an archtheoretical analysis of the elegant patterns describing how all systems emerge and then transcend themselves. Then, before Bobby Azarian concluded with a consideration of how this idea relates to the “recursive emergence” of phenomena across all scales of complexifying nature, I offered a look at how the dynamic appears at the socio-cultural level. Those reading my new book Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics will recognize the line of argumentation here, as it is similar to what I lay out in Chapter 1 of that book. Here I relate it to Gödelian incompleteness as well as Levin’s notion of “cognitive light cones,” which expand in their scope of intention and causal power as complexity increases. Below is my portion of the presentation.
Sky Meadow Institute is an organization dedicated to promoting relational, processual, and systems-based perspectives on the things that matter most. Stay tuned to this Substack for posts about developing research. And if you are interested in this discussion as it pertains to metamodernism, you can buy my just-released book on the topic Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics HERE. All proceeds go to the Archdisciplinary Research Center (ARC), of which Cory, Bobby, and I are members.