Can We Create Order in the World?

It is undeniable that we transform the world and create order

On a first-order observation of human intervention, we transform materials from nature into things like rudimentary knives, chairs and aeroplanes. Each of them is made to perform a function that does not necessarily result from what we had previously intended. If you look around, many of those human-made creations have acquired value because we took unordered pieces and put them together in a particular way.

On a second-order observation, we also create the expectation of order in some of our invented processes or collective agreements. In the UK, everybody drives on the left, which comes from an agreement that is based not only on driving on a specific side of the road but also on the expectation that everybody else will. Order is created by the expectation of how the general peer will behave.

We will look at those two ways of observing the world, first and second-order, to explore our agency in creating order.

First-order observations and order

If you look at human first-order intervention in the world, given that no natural laws are defied, we can assemble materials in some order and do it well so we can use them, just for the time until nature un-orders them again. This was the norm for all things: entropy will make disorder out of order.

At some point in science, we learned that some structures worked differently and that order could naturally come out of chaos and not just the other way around. The possibility of “self-organisation” broke new ground in the natural sciences.

For the social sciences, those new grounds created an opportunity for an analogy update: from a mechanistic and industrialist way of looking at social systems to a more biological, emergent and self-organised one.

Although beneficial for making sense of human systems’ perceived increased complexity, the assumption that those particular complex structures behave like natural systems is exactly that—an assumption.

It is appealing to relate human organisations to systems that emerge and maintain themselves through self-organisation, at least much more than organisations as machines.

What we can’t do is say societal and organisational structures are far-from-equilibrium systems, dissipative structures, etc. The central reason is that human systems are not first-order observation systems; we don’t observe them as humans observe convection cells or oscillating chemical reactions [1].

That does not invalidate the process of making sense of human systems by analogy – it only invalidates the claims that forget to mention the scientific transposition and call human organisation self-organising systems or complex adaptive systems. It is a tremendous simplification to transpose a first-order observation of nature to society and organisations.

The science of human biology and the brain

What we can observe about our own biology is a first-order observation. Advancements in neuroscience have also highlighted the limits of human perception and attention, such as cognitive biases and cognitive load.

Those studies sometimes confirmed what was empirically observed in the past. Inattention blindness, like in the experiment of doctors not seeing a monkey on an X-ray and many others [2], is a constant theme on the factory floor during scientific management.

However, given that those findings impact how we perceive the world around us and place us in our rightful place as biological beings, they are all first-order observations.

So, when we talk about human systems, we can distinguish our biological selves, which we observe first-order, from our social selves, which are always the result of second-order observation.

Note that this does not disembody our social beings. A distinction is not a separation. Our social relations and everyday interactions are embodied and relate to our cognition as much as our body, emotions, etc.

The point here is that we can’t be without our biology, but how we observe it is different from how we observe the social aspects of our existence.

Second-order observation and order

In social systems like societies and organisations, we create order by making declarations and agreements that are accepted and expected by the general peer.

This created order is not like ordering the natural world as in the first-order manipulation of wood to make a chair, for example. In the same way, we can’t unthinkingly transpose the way we order nature (or that nature orders itself) into human systems.

For the creation and constant re-creation of society and organisation, we create order by declaring a difference that lives in the realm of language. Those differences, like choices, determine how we coordinate our actions (and sometimes how we coordinate the coordination of actions!).

To use our example, the decision to drive on the left is not an individual one, nor is the decision to collaborate on a supposedly common project. This collective decision, when made and accepted, generates not only action but also the expectation of action from the other.

We create order when we set up a time for dinner with family tonight. The expectation that people will fulfil the previously coordinated action makes it orderly. The expectation that others will uphold the agreement to drive on the left makes sane driving in the UK possible.

Unlike natural constraints, agreements can be broken at any time, which makes family dinners and transit in the UK as complex as any other human activity.

If you decide to drive on the right, you can. You might be in big trouble, and there will be a sanction for non-compliance. Or sometimes you must: if you see a police officer indicating you should drive on the other side of the road – even if you don’t know the reason – you still would because we had agreed that their authority trumps road convention.

Bérnard cells (convection cells that form stable emergent patterns) can self-organise, but they do not agree on what to expect from one another and, most importantly, they can’t choose otherwise.

So, even if we transform the world by creating order, when we talk about human systems and, therefore, a second-order observation of that creation, this order does not make the world ordered.

Even sustaining such order in a social system is complex.

Some Things to Read

[1] The Self Organisation of Intentional Action – https://www.jstor.org/stable/23955624

[2] Inattentional blindness in medicine – https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-024-00537-x