“It is very likely that never in human history have there been as many treatises, essays, theories and analyses focused on culture as there are today. This fact is even more surprising given that culture, in the meaning traditionally ascribed to the term, is now on the point of disappearing. And perhaps it has already disappeared, discreetly emptied of its content, and replaced by another content that distorts its earlier meaning.” — Mario Vargas Llosa, 2016. From ‘Notes on the Death of Culture. Essays on Spectacle and Society.’

The death of culture seems a mite exaggerated. An opposite view might well be that culture is at an apotheosis. Never in our history has culture been so busy. We certainly could not exist without it – it is part of our fabric, it defines us. Improving it depends on the efforts of most.

Perhaps we should rather come to grips with what culture truly is and how it operates. Any ignorance, and hence confusion, regarding the invisible forces of ‘culture’ could be an obvious source of our many social difficulties and political misadventures. Direct and indirect references to culture are continuously being made in many contexts, leading inevitably to the question: Is there anything in society that is not cultural? Contrary to popular belief, it is being recognized that all of our public activities contribute to ‘culture’, even the vast numbers of trivial pursuits that set the stage for more interesting and controversial ones. We can therefore legitimately ask, do we ever really know what we are talking about when we explicitly reference the concept of our culture, most of which is generated via social interactions? There probably was a naive time when many thought that they did, or at least the educated ones. Even today, politicians and experts fervently work at persuading us that their view of the cultural world is ‘true’, that they hold the key to happiness, and that we should follow them. Caution! One should not expect these ambitious public actors to really know what they are talking about, or to be sufficiently aware and honest enough to admit to the limits of their understanding. The possibility that the average Jan or Jo is as, or even more, aware of their surroundings than their supposed leaders probably never occurs to those leaders. Jan and Jo are indeed ignorant, but so are we all, as we shall see.

It is surprising to note, however, that although culture is such an important part of our conversation, the modern concept of it has only been around since the mid 19th century. The first formal definition, and still one of the most useful, is by Edward B Tylor (1), the ‘first anthropologist’: “Culture or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom (1871). (Emphasis mine.)

At the same time, ca. 1871, Matthew Arnold (2) published Culture and Anarchy wherein a much more aspirational and moralistic view of the goals of society as a whole was articulated, stressing our common humanity. In his universalist view Arnold held common ground with Tylor, but there were many dissenters right from the beginning as one would expect. In the early 20th century, Franz Boas thus gained much support for his particularist view of many cultures, a view that is consistent with what most intuitively still accept today. Scientists, however, seem to prefer the view that all social information passed on to others constitutes culture. (3) Thus the fields of sociology and anthropology have not settled into anything resembling a consensus. In fact, today the very concept of culture is being challenged, battered perhaps by the incomplete renderings and weak defenses of it. (4,5)

It seems clear then that a robust and complete definition of culture would be an essential basis from which to develop a better understanding of the incredibly complex relations of humankind. Ignorance and incomplete understanding, especially of self and others, must necessarily produce conflicting irrational systems of coexistence. Society is composed of self-governing individuals, tasked by fate with having to arrange increasingly complex societies, and learn how to flourish in them. But countering ignorance, error and confusion is hard work and success is not guaranteed. Wars, genocides and mass exploitations are still upon us. Opportunities for improvement all around are therefore great: reducing our inhumanity towards each other; providing for a greater sense of purpose and meaning in the lives of all 8+ billion; inducements for all to be the best that they can be; perhaps most important, we might improbably even acquire the tools by which to guide our future global culture in a more sustainable direction – virtuous evolution!

It would thus seem necessary to formulate a way of finding the keys in the present so that we may solve the problems of the future. The fact that we are here and can talk about these questions means that we have been somewhat successful so far. The task appears immense, yet there is reason for optimism.

The Components of Culture.

1. Global Culture. This is the natural ‘culture medium’, that ineffable totality, within which all people exist while actively participating in Darwin’s “war of nature”, surviving as best they can. (6) Simply put, it is a web of everything: (i) all that is publicly displayed and articulated by all living humans across the globe, en mass or individually. In reality, it also includes all the diverse behaviors, good, bad or indifferent, and all products and possessions, including tools and technologies, of all presently existing humans. Also including, rules, habits, addictions, (mis)understandings, (mis)classifications, (im)moralities, trades, disciplines, etc, etc (An ‘alloverse’*, as opposed to the individual idioverse of Rosenzweig.) (7) (ii) It also includes all the currently accessed stores of historical information about what has been believed, thought, taught, observed, produced and evinced by humanity as a whole: physical and electronic records, books, articles; historic, archeologic and fossil artifacts. (iii) It also includes all the recognized features of nature in the different localities where humans operate, now extending to the bottom of the ocean, miles underground, and to the outer limits of the solar system. Trillions of galaxies have very recently become ‘visible’ outside of our own. (Iv) This intricate, indescribable whole constantly changes from moment to moment, in ways and at a pace that far exceed our individual or collective faculties of apprehension and comprehension. (v) While people, their behaviors, statements, artifacts and environments are real, the corresponding vast body of information and knowledge that is physically transmitted is virtual – i.e., strictly speaking, transmitted signals do not constitute knowledge. If and when such signals are captured by the sense organs of a person, they are processed in the body of that person, mostly within the brain, recreating a real representation of knowledge and awareness in a mind, albeit as an indirect, unique, approximate representation. So, while culture, like language, is public, its meaning is private – a fundamental dualism that affects all our interactions. There are also many physical limitations to our ability to capture signals. The statement that neutrinos are passing through my body is an interesting shareable thought, a phenomenon, a publicly signaled statement, that we can discuss. Actual neutrinos that routinely pass through my body without any interaction, are undetectable signals, not phenomena. The alloverse of cultural information, while immense, thus represents only a very small fraction of all the signals in the physical or material universe. To put all this another way:

Total Global Human Culture is that supercomplex whole consisting of the cumulative totality of all phenomena in nature and society as observed by everyone. This includes reports of phenomena communicated via language or emotion. Nature, human behaviors and artifacts, including all technologies, are the predominant sources of such phenomena, defined here as all events and structures perceptible by humankind. Global culture is therefore synonymous with observable external reality. Every human being is continuously contributing to its maintenance and construction. (8)

2. Effective Personal Culture. The set of all those specific phenomena of global culture that a person, due to their unique situation, has been exposed to and has interacted with, learned from, and responded to, up until the present moment of their life. This represents our small view of a vast panoramic whole, a small evolving slice of the totality of global culture. We directly learn from it and are continuously shaped by it in a seamless dynamic process that to varying degrees becomes somewhat more self-directed and selective with the passage of time (wisdom). Even just observing the routine activities of people passing by teaches us something about the community in which we happen to be. Most importantly, in terms of our personal development, each child starts learning from the moment of their first breath, directly from a completely new and strange sensory and phenomenal world composed mostly of family and its social circle, including teachers. This represents an extraordinary diverse and unpredictable source of information; a private source of diverse signals and stimuli. (There are even suggestions that fetuses start learning to recognize a mother’s particular language while still inside the womb.) Some ‘highly cultured persons’ acquire and become widely known for prodigious amounts of socially interesting information. Even so, fame very often amounts to nothing but a short-lived vanity. All of us directly participate in shaping our immediate environment, thus playing an essential role in the maintenance of culture. Alas, this process of learning, creativity and teaching does not seem to gravitate toward a meaningful consensus or recognizable goal. Rather, differing perspectives and disagreements multiply leading to more disagreement, confusion and even chaos. Despite our extraordinarily productive brains in which hundreds of billions of cells, including almost a 100 billion neurons, are constantly processing ‘information’, we can only partially sample and internally process a small fraction of the whole external cultural reality, that global universe of all cultural phenomena. Therefore, it is thus impossible to accurately describe the whole at any moment in time, or even any significant part of it. Hence the term supercomplex is used in our abstract definitions of global and personal culture.

Effective personal culture is the unique, limited, supercomplex sum of all the phenomena within global culture that the life cycle brings a particular person into direct contact with, providing an evolving supply of learning experiences, feedbacks and opportunities.

3. Personal Theory of Culture. Each person has their own incomplete, mind-view, intuition or narrative ‘theory’ of what culture is, whether they call it that or not. (Prior to the 19th century it was usually called by another name.) This is often what is being referred to when one talks about ‘our culture’. It is an individual intuitive synthesis and understanding of the milieu in which they act out their biological and social imperatives. It is based on our personal effective culture (personal and social history) and shaped by our own unique biologic features – our idioverse (Rosenzweig). This is akin to Theory of Mind, except on a grand scale. A theory/intuition/concept is automatically conjured up in our minds when confronting the thought of society, or related questions such as morals, duties, expectations, choices, actions, meanings, purposes, rewards, punishments, pleasures, and what individuals and groups are up to. This mental construct is a more or less coherent product of all personal experience and can therefore be expected to change with time or situation. It is always personal and subjective, and variably but incompletely corresponds with that held by others, most closely with family and friends. The meaning and use of the word has drastically changed and expanded over the last 150 years, yet global culture itself has changed even more, in a runaway process fueled by our many biological drives, accumulating knowledge and evolving technology. This may be the reason why it has been reported that there are more than 160 published definitions of culture. Investigators apparently hone in on aspects of their effective culture that seems to be most fundamental or meaningful to them, most relevant to their interests. Furthermore, ‘our culture’ or immediate external world is the ultimate complexity that we must consciously deal with – certainly of greater immediacy than the universe and even our bodies. ‘Our culture’ is effectively ‘infinite’ since the reality of it dwarfs our mental and physical abilities. For these reasons, nobody, no polymath, no creative genius, anthropologist, historian, politician, scientist, or philosopher has sufficient sensory awareness or computational wherewithal to fully, accurately and precisely describe or explain all the phenomena as experienced by themselves, or any other person or group. Abstract, very ‘thin’ narrative conceptualizations are the best we can do. Many of us specialize in writing, art, poetry or music, perhaps believing that these aspects are most representative of culture. Others specialize on a particular set of phenomena (e.g. science, history, literature, economics, finance, philosophy etc.), but then becoming perhaps less sure of how it all fits together – a variant of the Heisenberg Principle. We might as well also invoke a variant of Gödel’s Theorem at this point: we all seem to strongly assume certain things to be true even though we do not have specific information to support that view. Thus, waiting for a cultural consensus would be on a par with Waiting for Godot.

A Personal Representation and Theory of Culture is recursively generated in the mind of each biologically unique, evolving person, guiding that individual to better survive and flourish in a challenging, uncertain and changing perceived external phenomenal reality.

3. Community Identities and Traditions. These used to be thought of as fairly easy to recognize. From a distance groups of people from various localities looked, dressed, spoke and behaved in a recognizably different way. This was referred to as ‘their culture’. But the world is changing rapidly and what once seemed to be stable communities are now seen to be rapidly transforming everywhere. They may still communicate in their own language and still have characteristic shared beliefs. Such ‘local culture’ leads to a certain predictability and confidence in interactions with members of such a traditional community or group: locality thus tends to homogenize the effective cultural experiences of local inhabitants, whose theories of culture would then also have more shared features, leading to similar behaviors. This is a powerful source of learning – enculturation. Such local adaptations can even lead to physiological changes: differences have been observed in central nervous system function when comparing distinct populations. E.g., different regions of the brain are used to perform the same task in people from Europe or Asia. In selected Asian-Americans, different regions of the brain of an individual may be used for the same task depending on whether the subject had just been primed with Asian or American associations. Our brains unconsciously switch modes! However, cultural traditions often have rather fuzzy geographical edges and they evolve continuously. Even very isolated population groups learn from other communities with which they intermittently come into contact with, and so none are, nor were, ever completely isolated. Furthermore, individual biological and psychodynamic variation within such traditional communities may be wide and there would always be subgroups, exceptions and outliers. For example, it is inevitable that some members would be conservative, others liberal; some more socially conforming, others more individualistic – such diversity would itself be expected to provide a survival benefit. Dominant, widely established traditions tended to be viewed as ‘civilizations’ that often saw themselves in opposition to lesser civilizations, or even uncivilized barbarians. All this seems to be going out the window as a result of the communications revolution.

Group formation is a fundamental feature of human behavior – our biologically determined social drive. (9) Innumerable local and global, real and virtual groups and communities exist due to changes in technology and the explosion of information and communication. The word culture is often affixed to these as a loose descriptive term: corporate, criminal, drug, police, rural, cosmopolitan, metropolitan, African, Asian, Polynesian, European, etc. In this sense the word at best provides a very general sense of what is being considered, but very little, if any, reliable information is identified by these labels. Not infrequently ‘cultural’ ideas are reified as in when ‘likeminded’ individuals engage in illusory ‘groupthink’ and then decide on group action.

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Going somewhat beyond Tylor, we identify a single ‘infinitely’ large ‘supercomplex’ abstract whole necessitating a multipartite, multi-perspectival approach. It is now obvious that there is just one global culture, albeit extremely diverse. There has been a lot of confusion about this in the past. All peoples on earth have been interconnected by migration, trade or war, but information traveled rather slowly in earlier times. In the ‘good old days’, different ‘cultures’ or ‘civilizations’ were identified by unique features such as language, manners, arts, ceremonies, dress and social arrangements, all the while ignoring the simple fact that most of the basic behaviors and social interactions across all regions were very similar or indistinguishable. Where distinct differences did exist, intermediate instantiations were often found, and the borders were fuzzy. Superficial differences overrode deep commonalities. In this respect, ‘cultural differences’ have much in common with ‘racial differences’. Just as it is now recognized there is only one race, there is just one very diverse culture – there are no biological incompatibilities amongst human groups, there are no hard boundaries of social behavior. The underlying motivations for the categorical, but erroneous, separation along imagined lines of race and culture may, in fact, be very similar: groups tend to form around any idea or behavior that might be associated with a competitive, security or lifestyle advantage. Such groups engage in positive feedback loops of self affirmation, so becoming less concerned about accurate honest evaluation of the evidence – cardinal features of groupthink. (Higher levels of oxytocin may enhance ethnocentric behavior.) Jim Crow laws and the Jewish holocaust are recent extreme examples of this kind of collective ‘thinking’ but it is still very much alive in the polemics of today. (To emphasize, thinking is not a collective activity since the entire process occurs within single isolated brains. The extent to which we can simulate the minds of others is an open question.)

Ontologic ignorance and epistemic confusion cannot be legislated away. Rather, society appears to change as increasing proportions of its members intuitively see themselves and the world differently – innovation occurs at the level of the individual, the evolution of culture is a slow and messy process. There is no evidence to suggest that legislators are in a significantly better position to understand where society needs to go.

Fads rapidly and chaotically come and go nowadays, but global social change appears to be an extremely slow process. The deep convictions seen in the process of ‘othering’ are usually misguided, even though they may be ‘adaptive’. So it has been hard or impossible to identify in real time anything by which ‘progress’ could be measured. Everyone’s personal theory of culture is incomplete, uncertain and often in conflict with others. Today’s undeniable trend might be the key to future success, but, more likely, it will just be tomorrow’s forgotten infatuation. “The inability of the mind to see its own advance is one of the reasons the future will always surprise us.” (Jason Kuznicki, 2018.) We could try to change that.

The problem in a nutshell: First, serious, evidence based public debates founded on a rational analysis of the complex problems of society have been of very limited effectiveness. Profound inherent super-complexities, structural and functional, are involved: different effective cultures, different theories of culture, different or conflicting traditions and groups. Language (narrative) also is an important limiting factor, only a very thin version of reality is communicated. Stories and narratives appeal to intuitions in ways that we do not fully understand. All our true inner feelings on questions of morality, values, fairness, duty or mission are difficult to define and therefore to articulate, and so are opaque to others, and probably to others. What is for me is never exactly for the other. A better approach, therefore, would be to be a little less concerned about what is wrong with the narratives of others – all are incomplete and usually inaccurate anyway – but to be more focused on a self-critical analysis of one’s own gaps in understandings and knowledge, and improving on those. Such a continuously self-improving person could hopefully then act in a more effective manner, leading to a greater influence on others in their community. ‘Progress’ does not appear to be the direct result of our endless polemics. Ignorant self-righteous shouting and screaming across a perceived divide exemplifies the problem. Authentic changes in behavior and attitude that spring from direct personal experience of real, self-identified problems in society have a greater chance of beneficially influencing others: each one of us teaches by example. In so doing we contribute to culture.

Second, learning from our supercomplex history is also a lot more complicated and fraught with more error than commonly realized. Self-affirming biases are the rule and so one might ask whether it is ever possible to discover a solution by delving into the past. The volume of information available to a broad public is now unprecedented, placing more and more people in positions where very sophisticated decisions need to be made all the time. The industrial revolution presented new challenges and brought about great changes in social arrangements. It also brought the most destructive wars in history. We are now in another such period of large scale change. The scary thing is that we again seem to have no clear idea of what is coming. A simple, but reasonable, rule of thumb would be to invest in the diverse talents of all individuals above all else, to prioritize the functionality and competence of each uniquely valuable person. Society should organize around the primary principle of respect for each and every one – maximally inclusive diversity, building on the true successes of the past and trying to avoid previous errors.

Third, the postmodern philosophical critique of ‘Enlightenment Culture’ and its supposedly terminal condition has been quite destructive. Continental ennui infected society with an over-dramatic meme of death: death of the individual, reason, God and even culture itself. It has been devastating but could now be losing steam. We seem to be at an inflection point with Critical Theorists suddenly gaining an undue influence in the US Democratic Party. Reconstruction of virtuous humanism and libertarian aspirations is hopefully in ascendance – a never ending cycle? Evolution is war, entailing the ‘death’ and elimination of obsolete functional and cultural features. However, what is fit survives and so we necessarily evolve. Without change there can be no improvement. Conservatives and liberals just disagree on how cautious we should be.

Fourth. Large corporate structures (bureaucracies, businesses, political movements, etc) to whose interests people defer rather than exercising their own best individual judgements may represent the greatest threat to our happiness. We need to nudge and cajole our fellows into taking greater individual responsibility. We should also heed the lurking dangers of the moment. Politics is an extremely crude and dangerous instrument, but absolutely necessary. If only we could find ways to improve it.

Greater clarity on the frameworks within which we exist and operate would greatly help us in putting disagreements in a more constructive perspective. Greater awareness of the super-complex structures and relationships in ‘our global culture’ may therefore be essential guideposts in our pursuit of happiness, and survival.

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(1) “While a foundational figure in cultural anthropology, Tylor … accepted the premise that all societies develop in the same way and insisted on the universal progression of human civilization from savage to barbarian to civilized. Nowhere in his writing does the plural “cultures” appear. In his view, culture is synonymous with civilization, rather than something particular to unique societies, and, so, his definition refers to “Culture or civilization.” In part, his universalist view stemmed from his Quaker upbringing, which upheld the value of a universal humanity, and indeed Tylor’s refusal to accept the concept of race as scientifically significant in the study of culture was unusual in Victorian science.” Logan, PM; 2012. BRANCH. (http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=peter-logan-on-culture-edward-b-tylors-primitive-culture-1871)

“But in terms of cultural theory, the most important criticism [of Tylorean evolutionary anthropology] was that of the American anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942). A German immigrant to the United States, he was influenced by German Romantic philosophy, including Herder’s insistence on cultural particularity. In 1896, Boas published an influential critique of Tylor’s science, “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,” in which he persuasively challenged the basic notions of psychic unity and independent invention upon which Victorian evolutionary anthropology rested. .… He argued throughout his work for cultural pluralism, for “cultures” in the plural, and with him began the final shift in anthropological thought from the traditional universalism to the new, particular theory of culture that characterized twentieth-century thought.” Ibid.

(2) “Arnold objects to (the Victorian) narrow definition of culture, calling it a combination of “vanity and ignorance,” and attacking its acolytes as people who value culture solely as a form of “class distinction,” a “badge” that separates them “from other people who have not got it”. Instead, he argues, culture is a combination of broad intellectual interests with the goal of social improvement. “There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part”. Culture combines this commitment to “the moral and social passion for doing good” with the ideal of scientific objectivity, “the sheer desire to see things as they are”. Rather than a means to differentiate the elite from the mass, Arnoldian culture assumes the elite and the mass have a shared humanity. This was a novel use of the term at the time and was seen then as the most striking aspect of his new idea, …” Logan, PM; 2012. BRANCH (http://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=peter-logan-on-culture-matthew-arnolds-culture-and-anarchy-1869) 

Arnold, M. from Culture and Anarchy: “The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically.”

(3) Chris Buskes, Nijmegen; 2013: “Hence ‘culture’ can be defined as: all information that is transmitted to next generations by non-genetic means, i.e., through spoken or written language, teaching, or imitation. … Similar definitions of ‘culture’ can be found in Richerson and Boyd (2005); Jablonka and Lamb (2005); Plotkin (2010); Distin (2011), and Mesoudi (2011).” (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-013-9415-8#Fn7)

(4) VandenBroek, AK. 2014: The Culture Concept. “The culture concept — which overtime has been contrasted, combined, and entangled with the related concepts of society, personality, identity, symbolism and practice — weaves together the history and core philosophical and methodological debates of anthropology as a discipline. Yet, today the concept that lies at the center of what anthropology is and does is fragmented and contested, as anthropologists have taken on the challenges put forth by postmodernity to cope with contradiction, borderlessness, constant flux, and the impacts of anthropological and historical biases, such as sexism, orientalism, and othering. This has left some anthropologists reaching back to science to find stability and others plunging into a realm of interpretation and description, while a new generation of anthropologists formed within this milieu must find space to make a discipline, whose central subject is disputed, both relevant and professional.(http://ak.vbroek.org/2014/01/03/the-culture-concept/) Emphases mine.

(5) Vargas Llosa, M. 2012. Notes on the Death of Culture. The realm of culture is “understood not as a mere epiphenomenon of social and economic life, but as an autonomous reality, made up of ideas, aesthetic and ethical values, and works of art and literature that interact with the rest of social existence, and that are often not mere reflections, but rather the wellsprings of social, economic, political and even religious phenomena.” (https://lithub.com/mario-vargas-llosa-how-global-entertainment-killed-culture/)

(6) Darwin, C. Origin of Species, 1859. “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

(7) “Alloverse”, a neologism, refers to an universe composed of all that is outside of the universe that is within. An alloverse, in theory, consists of all the psychic events and behaviors of all members of our global community. This is derived from Saul Rosenzweig’s concept of an idioverse: “The idioverse consists of the population of events experienced by a single unique individual. This conception supersedes that of personality because the idioverse purports to be a more direct and objective formulation.” (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1026063429852) “… the concept of the idioverse, defined as a self-creative and experiential population of events.…” (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327752jpa8203_02) In short, idioverse would then consist of all the psychic experiences (events) during an individual lifetime. The interaction between idioverse and ‘alloverse’ is yet another perspective on understanding our place in the world – the supercomplex relationships between and among individuals and groups.

(8) Supercomplexity. It is becoming apparent that many challenges of life need to be approached from the perspective of supercomplexity: ontologic and epistemic challenges that exceed our ability to conceive or study objectively. Many questions relating to culture easily fall in the supercomplex category since we can not recognize or define all of the components and how they might relate to each other. We do not even know what the measures for success might be. In algebra supercomplex and hypercomplex are terms used to describe ‘fictitious’ numbers that cannot be described in ordinary language. These concepts appear to be necessary to ‘understand’ data related to gravity and quantum physics, etc. (https://youtu.be/E2zUeCK6k-A) In biochemistry it refers to a stable structure formed by the “association of two or more complexes of biological molecules that occur separately elsewhere”. (http://www.yourdictionary.com/supercomplex) The microscopic structure of our bodies similarly are supercomplex because we do not have the tools to ‘visualize’ what is inside of a neuron, for example. By transferring the rules gleaned from the macroscopic world to the microscopic one, we are engaging in a categorical leap of faith – the lack of reason in quantum phenomena illustrates the point. In addressing the complexities of preparing for tomorrow, Barnett (2004) refers to the supercomplexity of life’s learning challenges: “The challenges of complex systems, even if they could not be altogether unravelled, could be dissolved to a significant degree. The challenges of supercomplexity, in contrast, could never be resolved. They are the challenges that arise from the question: what is a university? Or: what is a teacher? Or: what is a doctor? The challenges of such questions could never be dissolved, at least not in ways similar to those of complexity. For such questions, in principle, yield a multiplication of answers and further questions. And some of those answers and further questions spring from perspectives, value positions and even ideologies that are mutually incompatible. To see universities and teachers as consumers of resources, or even as producers of resources on the one hand, and to see universities as sites of open, critical and even transformatory engagement are, in the end, incompatible positions, no matter what compromises and negotiations are sought.” (https://www.hv.se/globalassets/dokument/stodja/paper-theme-2-5.pdf) Many examples of the inability of logic and reason to explain human behavior have been documented. Time, context and order affect outcomes, demonstrating the need for quantum-like theories of cognition and rational behavior – gestalt, query, configurable weight, integration, and fuzzy trace theory. A quantum probability theory model might succeed better at predicting outcomes. (Pothos, Busemeyer. 2013) (https://ppw.kuleuven.be/okp/_pdf/Lee2013QMOCA.pdf)

(9) Weingarten, CP and Chisholm, JS; 2009. Attachment and Cooperation in Religious Groups. An Example of a Mechanism for Cultural Group Selection. “Nowak (2006) modeled the evolution of cooperation via five mechanisms: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. Nowak concluded: “we might add ‘natural cooperation’ as a third fundamental principle of evolution beside mutation and natural selection”. Group-selection models can be mathematically equivalent to models based on individual selection (Boyd 2006; Lehmann and Keller 2006; Nowak 2006).” (https://johanneslubbe.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/06ce5-commenton_attachmentandcooperationinreligiousgroups.pdf)

Emphases mine.