Systems
The universe is a system of systems.
The universe you and I inhabit is a system of systems. At the individual level, you are a collection of different systems: your nervous system, your digestive system, respiratory system, and so on. Within those systems are systems of cells, and you can go all the way down to the atomic level with this analysis. Each of these systems provides some kind of function, such as breathing, digesting food, and so on.
You can go the other direction to see how everything is a collection of systems at large scales as well: your household is a system of people and things, your household exists within a city, the city is part of a regional system of some kind, and the regional system is part of a country. You can take that all the way out into space: the planet’s biosphere is a collection of ecosystems, and the planet itself is in a solar system, which is within a system of stars known as a galaxy, which is part of a system of galaxies—and so on.
Deterministic Systems
What’s a system? A collection of things that work together to do something.
An everyday example of a system you interact with daily is your car: it’s built out of a bunch of different components, none of which on their own can get you from point A to point B on a road. Your engine in isolation is just a block of useless metal, and the same can be said for everything else in the car. But combined, all these parts generate a function we call “driving.”
Your car is a particular type of system called a deterministic system: it operates on predictable principles and simply does what it’s designed to do. You put fuel in it, start the engine and press the gas pedal, and you know what to expect from there. When you’re in motion, you press the brake pedal and you expect to slow down. As long as it’s maintained and nothing breaks, what you see is what you get. This is how deterministic systems work. They’re linear and have predictable input-output relationships, which makes them very easy to think about and create models around.
We Want Deterministic Everything
While deterministic systems provide quite a bit of value to our world, our stupid ape brains want everything to work this way. We interact with machines that do what we want them to do in a predictable way, and we think to ourselves, “I bet I can make everything in my life to be like this.” And much of human history is about this drive to make the world into one big, deterministic system, usually for the benefit of a small group of people.
This is a particularly common impulse for entrepreneurs and executives, who always seem to be looking for ways to make the next quarter more predictable. If only they could get their employees and markets to behave like deterministic machines, everything would be so much easier!
If this is you, you are chasing something that doesn’t exist. While there are ways to find and create pockets of deterministic behavior, it’s a far better strategy to recognize that the systems around you are, in most cases, not predictable.
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