Thermodynamic Modeling of Complexity

Social complexity as a complex thermodynamic system; networks of potential energy gradients formed by the segregation of material and labor

In my first year at Brown I had a class in Geology taught by Prf. Reid Cooper in which the subject was essentially the forming of complex patterns in a thermodynamic gradient. The way that this can be applied to social structures is relatively straightforward. Energy input to a system is used to do work, which perpetuates the system, and in the case of energy surplus, can be used to make the system more complex.

Complexity was defined in a variety of ways. The most basic (and classic elementary school) example is a jar of red beans and white beans that are sorted apart from each other, forming discreet bodies. It is relatively easy to mix the beans and achieve a cartoonish example of entropic behavior. The separating of the beans into discreet groups requires work. The separation is a ‘high-energy state’ due to the added labour and to the ease of undoing the labour into a low energy state by mixture. Increased complexity results from additional separations of material that create additional energy gradients.

The physical analogy is rather crude at face value, yet in itself contains many social inferences, starting with the human behavior of sorting beans or grains in order to subsist. Some beans are for consumption, some are to be saved for next years planting, and some are spoiled and are to be discarded. This is an arbitrary set of categories that illustrates the input of human work to achieve a basic physical complexity. A system with 10 grades of beans to be sorted has a higher degree of complexity than a 3 bean system. It is the increased amount of work implicit in the additional categories and the potential energy contained in them that actually constitutes the complexity that is signified by the number of variable material stratifications.

This agricultural root to stratified social complexity is common throughout the literature. The story line goes that if there is enough surplus of food, that is surplus of energy, then the system can become more complex. A village with a granary is more complex than a village without. Through surplus available energy, work is used to construct a container that grains may be separated into, giving them a higher potential energy in themselves as well as the basic formation of inside-outside.

The increasing separation of material and energy input into segregated spaces is what seems to define early social complexity. This is discussed as control of staples and control of “luxury goods”. Control can only be evidenced by concentrations of materials in one area in comparison to another, ie the concentration of luxury goods in a supposed elite burial. This concentration of material brings us back to the idea of mixture as low energy and simple as opposed to separation and concentration as high energy and complex.

The relationship between complexity and unequal exercise of power and control by humans is more confusing to me. Why does the concentration of material and energy resources within a social structure necessarily point to its use to the advantage of elite? Perhaps this is human nature or merely a historic view tempered by what is most closely visible to us. Control, power and complexity do not necessarily coinincide in simple ways, as David Wengrow wrote about in his" The evolution of simplicity: Naqada III,".

State formation greatly enlarges the scale of social complexity; even with this notion of making of separate containers for different material and people. It may even seem anti-complexity on close examination. A diversity of crops grown is more complex per se, as each must be processed according to it’s certain needs. However, crop diversity does little to ensure maximum energy retrieval from labor input. The focusing on certain crops by various state institutions is a simplification that can yield more energy and thus the fabled surplus from which complexity may arise, as well as forming an energy-material bloc for manipulating complexity for the gain of the embedded state apparatus.

I will not go into this further at the moment, as the thoughts are just coming to me, but it seems that the state (as well as other ‘stratifications’) are second and third order complex systems feeding off of the energy excess of the basic complex system of agriculture (and the ambiguous ‘kin-relation’).