Balancing A System of Systems

It is a rare pleasure to have the luxury of blogging on a Friday evening. Usually, I would be spending the time coding, but since I've been doing that for the greater part of the week, today I decided I needed a bit more balance. So, blogging it is—an activity I usually reserve for Saturday.

This sense of balance—where does it come from? Everything needs balance. Work-life balance is one popular aspect of 'balance' which many of us try to maintain.  The more health-conscious would also try to maintain a balanced diet. The human body also needs to maintain homeostasis, constantly sensing its internal state and making the necessary adjustments to keep temperature, sugar levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels within an optimal range.  Illnesses are usually caused by an imbalance. 

What causes imbalance? You see, the human body consists of many semi-independent systems that are locked in perpetual symbiosis—the respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, and lymphatic systems among them. These are the physical systems, or our hardware, if you will. Then we have an even more complex psychological system layer, which is the equivalent of software, running on top of this hardware.

We go about our lives driven primarily by the software in our heads.  The architecture of our hardware determines the operating system software running on top of it. For example, we are all multicellular organisms that reproduce sexually. The basic purpose of our existence is to find one or more partners to reproduce. That is in our firmware. No matter how poor we are, we take it as a given that we have the right to get married and have kids. Procreation is the most basic purpose of our existence. We procreate because our genes are 'selfish'; the information embedded within our genes wants to persist, and to do so, needs to make more copies of itself. 

But the human animal is also complicated by the fact that it has other higher-level goals, besides reproducing themselves sexually. These are the 'nobler' software goals--of seeking purpose and meaning in life; of having ambitions and a need to establish an image and name for itself, in the society of other human animals. At the outset, this may appear peculiar—why are they even important at all to the organism? 

But on closer scrutiny, we find that it is an inevitable consequence of dynamic systems. The software stack running on top of the biological hardware is another series of systems that seeks its own 'homeostasis'—a state of persistent balance and stability. Every level of abstraction has its attractor states that determine its system dynamics. If we are conscious human beings with minds, interacting with other human beings in a society, then we will seek to maintain an image of ourselves. The ego is a natural consequence of our software stack.

This system of systems is one that is extremely complex. It is endlessly seeking equilibrium. The body breathes, the mind dreams, the ego asserts—and yet all of it is simply the universe balancing itself through us. To live wisely is to simply recognise this dynamic dance between systems—hardware and software, body and mind, instinct and ego—and to skillfully ease them into balance.