Feedback Loop
By KINSLEY SLIFE
On Connectivity & Effervescence
Even in this present, connectivity is hardly a stranger— in fact, each time it reveals itself to us, it’s cloaked in our very own memories. Sounds, scents, feelings, pictures, patterns. Though at times it feels we are much more akin to its shadow.
Output from the feedback loop at large would rightfully protest to having spent much time in the company of connectivity lately, and disconnection and disorder seem perpetual visitors bidding global ill-health, governances in direct disservice of their people, and the familiarity of uncertainty based on distance. Distance from information, distance from access, and distance from others. Together, the earth suffers these tiny, undulating fragments of chaos and more needn’t be said on items so universally felt. One will, at some point or another, find themselves stuck at the window--peering out over the weather--alert to the approach of relentless visitors and hopeful that instead they will see a friend or family member. However, our search for belonging lends the opportunity to turn our gaze from the window to the relative space between us and our visitors as we await the inevitable arrival of them both.
Entropy can be named the hungry decomposition urged forward by time’s kinetic energy. The same decomposition promises that all automobiles will rust, trees will bare--and subsequently bear fruit--our bodies will decay back into the earth, and what was given will be reclaimed. This recycling process is symbiotic to its more creational counterpart, connectivity. Still the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Look from any vantage point and in any direction, including inward, and find the world’s complex systems on display. The original architect of regeneration, mycelium, courses underground as tons of interconnected components, completing sophisticated cycles from beginning to end and so on to infinity. To name a modest few, the global climate and the nervous system, human economies, cellular networks (both kinds), and starlings operate as separate components of an asynchronous structure.(1)
If at any time these remarkable entanglements go unseen, they can be heard in the murmurs of the earth and its inhabitants. Some natural murmurations, however, present more boldly than others. Their collaboration calls us home.
On Murmurations & Homing Calls
On a very lucky and likely frigid day, far out of the city, one may look up and happen upon a brilliant sea of birds that pulsate against the sky en masse, so ornate a system that its three-dimensional shapeshifting nature is misinterpreted by a two-dimensional view.(2) This magic is called a murmuration, and individual starlings vivaciously participate by imitating the direction and speed of the seven or so nearest birds during flight.
It’s through excavations in naturalism, biology, and physics where we encounter answers in causation for starling murmurations to find that it’s really a unique geometry behind survival. Roosting starlings congregate for warmth and protection, providing moving parts with a far less vulnerable position in the presence of attackers, namely peregrine falcons(3), who are of course operating within a larger natural complex system themselves; one of predator and prey. What’s more awestriking about murmurations is the data suggesting that their existence is also a means of speaking. Language is taking place. Free and open means of communication are vital when survival is an eminent collective driver. Starlings murmur gently to discuss places to feed, roost, and remain comfortably under a blanket of their collective safety. If starlings don’t murmur in complex primordial bliss, they will die.(4) (information center hypothesis)
This link between connectivity and survival is the very place where we relate, on a cellular level, to the starling’s instinctive desire to murmur. Suppose the nature of a complex system is as pervasive in its journey towards harmony--or safety--as it claims to be. It makes sense then that as humans, we are profoundly magnetized to connectivity and will pull all kinds of levers to reap the rewards of participating in collective effervescence. On occasion, we will even break societal rules to experience its glory.
Collective effervescence is the robust synchrony that arises between components of a group based on intense emotions and shared communal experiences. First observed by Emile Durkheim in a study on Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the vibrant mutual energy of group ritual was found to be a powerful indicator of human health. Durkheim uncovered that shared purpose and individual experiences of euphoria will merge when in group flow, and experiencing harmony has the ability to heal.
Where one microcosmic view of connectivity paints a picture of humans amidst rite or ritual, and another depicts an image of fluttering starlings, it’s clear that effervescence in all forms springs from a biological well. More familiar visuals can be found in a unified bounce to the same beat or babies who find the rhythm of their clapping mother--you know the kind.
This genetic familiarity with the euphoria of ritual urges us deeper towards our pre-existing longing for tribal identity, regardless of connectivity’s everchanging form. We hunger for a group that generally moves freely but ultimately towards the same style of preservation, a place to feel safe and see ourselves amongst the fragments of our system, a murmuration of our own.
From peregrine falcons to pandemics (and various other predators not to be named here for time’s sake), beating hearts are inclined to gather tighter in the face of danger. So what then, when the assailant at hand imposes a literal distance between the individual parts of our complex system? Or when our elemental genetic memories persist against their ability to actualize in real-time?
We do as we know best and as every process above, below, and inside of us urges forward. We look to art, we look to nature--the two are of course dear friends! We glance into the interim for the relative positioning of connective memory and dissonance. We look to things like murmurations and mycelium to remind us that any marginal space between inverses is essential for moving the whole system forward. We join the recycling process and double down on the idea that our distance will embolden our eventual connection— meditating on the balance.
Where entropy decays, connectivity births. And in matters of both individual and communal health, collective effervescence is the brightest beacon of well-being.
On the Big Picture, Fungus & Relativity
Tug another thread of collective effervescence, and more ineffable properties will emerge. It’s clear that plenty of complex natural phenomena observed on a macroscopic scale (like consciousness, aliveness) cannot be reduced to microscopic physical rules that drive the system’s overall behavior.(6) Our barometer of senses can certainly notify us that a particular grouping of matter is alive, however it can be difficult to alchemically explain why. There is only deep familiarity. Connectivity and collective effervescence cross categories and forms during output, as matter dons many faces while it’s pushing forward.
Take horses and humans, for example, who will synchronize heartbeats and experience cardiac coherence in the presence of one another.(7) The intelligence of the heart’s electromagnetic field reaches further than that of the brain, stretching out beyond the bounds of our physical body--about 8 to 10 feet around us in all directions(8). All year round, horses possess the ‘coherent’ heart rhythms that humans typically only observe during times of immensely positive emotion and collective effervescence. Here, one heart feels the other, and they sync.
When we witness the material makeup of complex systems cross category and form without losing innate purpose, it begs us to explore the role of the observer in this quantum reality. In the early nineteenth century, the physicist Thomas Young did just that when he decided to send tiny particles of matter through a screen with two slits to observe their reactions as they moved through--known widely across quantum physics as the Two-Slit experiment.
There, Young discovered a coupling between the properties of a quantum object and the observation of those properties, meaning any attempt to measure the subatomic particles disturbed and changed their energy and positioning entirely. (9) (measurement problem) Herein lies a fantastical relationship between observer and phenomenon--one that urges us deeper into the breakdown of objective reality.
Matter observed is matter changed, and quantum entities possess potential dual properties that actualize if and when they are witnessed.(10) What we witness is then further determined largely by the relative positioning of ourselves to the other fragments of our system, suggesting less emphasis on social boundaries, species and tribal identity as the only means for collective effervescence and more potential to access effervescence through perspective, closeness and scale.
Scale down from macrocosmic connectivity, glance away from the window and turn from the starlings in the sky to the earth beneath your feet. Mushrooms bloom like flower buds from fungal roots that fibrously meander and weave amongst each other.
Single cell-wide organisms, or hyphae, are made when mushrooms spore, creating the intricate structures that collectively makeup what we know as mycelium.(11) Exceeding the limitations of its linguistic origin by far, the word mycelium means more than one.
Mycelium whispers to us the faint secrets of a complex system, and they are not of one, but many. Within a single complex system lies another, and together they can form a network of cells. Like all information, cells enter the feedback loop and spit themselves out in many forms and patterns based on observation (or lack thereof).
Some patterns, like that of recycling, are more recognizable, but it seems a microcosmic system like mycelium exists to equally serve entropy and connectivity at once. It is a simultaneous embodiment of decomposition and creation. Order and disorder. It reminds us that even when it feels we are physically disassembled in the face of our enemies, connectivity is still taking place in the threadwork.
Do with your individual relativity what you will, as that is the freedom of the singular entity... but a look in any new direction provides a key for small spatial changes that affect the whole system and could ultimately help make the interim between synchrony and distance more comfortable. You may even find yourself a little sooner closing that gap in the company of an old, familiar friend.
