Peering into our complexities

I have been reading the substack Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon since late 2024. It’s J.N. Nielsen’s more recently used platform as his work is available on tumblr and there is a newsletter or two. I have been educated by all this and is my go to read on substack. Especially for the generalist reader (as opposed the general reader) with a weakness in and for (philosophy of history | history of philosophy) nexus.

By generalist reader I include myself and use the term to indicate an interdisciplinary approach which is as yet… not fully formed (see Problems of Interdisciplinarity ). 

This type of reading is broad, regardless of the reader’s own skills, trades, or specialties. The reading includes a lot of history, science, popular mathematics, deep dives into psychological pathologies, all within a framework that admits of evolution and the causal mysteries of emergence within a chaos/systems/cybernetic/complexity. It will often circle back to social theory, at least by way of letters and literature. One framework of use here is the idea of Big History, if not to unify or to interdisciplinate, then to platform a nod towards more fertile discussion where specialties get less in the way (even interdisciplinary specialties.) If big history just becomes specialty then its expertise maybe of no use.

I first heard of Big History a decade ago, but never followed up on it very much, and I tended to think of it as about life on earth (as the last paragraph illustrates). Especially our recent long ages of the paleolithic where humans domesticated themselves with meetings. About 15 years years ago I did some catch-up study on Homo evolution, as it was something I had not chased up since the early 80s, so I whacked Big History in there.

The Journal of Big History is a publication of the International Big History Association. The mission of the International Big History Association is to promote Big History. Big History Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life, and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods.

Then, this context was bedded down for me as my first notice of Big History occurred in a second wave of reading on Human evolution with literature from palaeontologists and primatologists on the egalitarian revolution of the paleolithic (see why we should essay), so it is interesting now, in my current reading to read a “return to social theory” by anthropologists which accepts that paleolithic revolution as the consensus view in such books as Jospeh Patrick Henrich’s The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter and The weirdest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. These have come out since I wrote that essay. It is good I do not have to do that work, I can just point at those books (posts on these are upcoming).

So the next stage of this expanding circle of Big History notice is cosmology and I was educated on this by the following paper also by J. N. Nielsen.

Nielsen, J. N. 2025a. ‘Peer Complexity in Big History’, Journal of Big History 8(1): 83–98. [via https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/3080]

In saying I would read this paper in a comment for their substack post in February 2025 ‘Emergent Complexity Pluralism’, I wondered aloud why 'peer' was chosen and not 'sibling' as a term for those classes of entity arising in the same type or series of events as a kind of emergence in that chaos theory way. (The primary example in the paper being stelliferous ontogeny as a series of increasingly complex suns births as they re-consumed atoms from previous stars, or their nuclei at least. Electrons are like flies.)

I say "kind of emergence “ when I wish the word emergency itself was not so saturated with usages that are not quite what is meant here.

The term 'peer' makes sense, but it is still a very human term, and assumes some sort of ground or terrain, if not arena, where peers can meet and nod in recognition. Something families have no reason to do. But what other words do we have?

And here I do but wonder if we had a better name for that which I claim is best called the world, and which we hint at when we part-labelled the blur of [Social-arena/dialectic/lek/noyaux/meetings/conflict]habitus/world/marketplace/downtown/court/polity/…] as ‘prosociality’ then we might see ‘peer’ as a very human way to make sense of the universe which long precedes us and our ways in the world.

I guess we will never know if we are idiots or the norm. And then, are we idiots for worrying about it, or the norm?

Is everyone stranger than anyone can imagine?

None of this commentary reaches towards the insight that Peer Complexity in Big History directs us to. The paper begins to answer the the worries I've had about emergence as an explanation, even in general terms, was it all handwaving "emergence all the way down" ?

I do like nodes where I had thought phase change in the past. Stars are the example the paper uses to illustrate this ladder for the generalist.

Crossposted on substack.com