In an epileptic seizure, the complexity of the neural EEG signal decreases rapidly just before onset and during the attack. [1,2] Moreover, there is high frequency pathological syncrhonization of neurons during the seizure showing a great loss in aggregate complexity.
In the cardiac system, dimensionality decreases prior to onset and during a heart attack [3] in a similar way. It has been remarked by James Lovelock that the earth behaves as if the earth's biosphere and climate were a connected living organism and perhaps this similarity is not mere coincidence but instead the result of similar underlying mathematical principles of self-organization that apply in a much broader sense than we have heretofore considered.
Taking a broader view, we may imagine the entire planet one large interconnected network of species. A high degree of biodiversity is the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem [4] and in fact monoculture exacerbates a great many agricultural plagues such as the mosaic virii. Each species extinction event also represents a degree of freedom forever lost in the global system and therefore a decrease in complexity overall.
Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that as we wreak ecological damage across the planet, each lost species represents a loss of complexity and a step closer, in an information theoretic sense, towards the spasmodic convulsions of a system in total dysfunction. It seems that any attempts to understand how things "should" work in this context based on prior principles of economics would have as much utility as predictions of a body about to enter convulsion and come up against the intractable problem of predicting a chaotic system through simulation.
It is not just in ecological terms that we may understand the similarities. In the intellectual sphere, there seems a neverending supply of echo-chamber like sychronization. The most effective political organizations, paradoxically, are also the most homogenizing, and therefore get selected and empowered through our politicosocial Darwinism until finally the most oversimplified modes of thought become the dominant, controlling, and defining ones. This happens within nations as politicians use increasingly simplified rhetoric to appeal to voter's increasingly simplified criteria for choice. Each mind converted to a form of fundamentalism also represents a loss of dimension or freedom overall, but locally each convert gains a great deal by converting, and thus each one is individually walking the path of least resistance towards a more homogenized, unmodulated and unrefined state for all. We might also understand this collapse to absolute polarities not to be simply religious in nature, but instead the result of a simplified needs-based calculus for all those living in a place changing from more-than-enough to less.
On general mathematical principles, therefore, it seems a good guess to strive globally to maintain diversity and "complicated (modulated, civilized) freedom" as much as practicable, for it alone expresses the complex statistical robustness that large interacting networks enjoy.
Dr. Rudi Cilibrasi
cilibrar@cilibrar.com