Insights from the Event Horizon of Complex Systems Research
"Patrolling the event horizon between the known and the unknown"
Lead Story: Early CAMS research tested whether societies behave like neural networks — and the answer was illuminating precisely because the hypothesis did not hold in its original form. The neural network metaphor captured something real about institutional interaction, but the deeper mechanism turned out to be thermodynamic: societies are dissipative physical systems governed by energy surplus, entropy flows, and phase transitions.
The falsification of the neural network hypothesis was the breakthrough. It forced a more rigorous foundation: CAMS v2.3 now treats societal dynamics as far-from-equilibrium thermodynamic processes, with institutional nodes as metabolic actors and collapse as a physical phase transition — not a political choice.
Grounding CAMS in thermodynamics rather than neuroscience makes the model falsifiable against physical data — energy return ratios, entropy export, free energy budgets — rather than behavioural analogy. This is what allows it to make quantitative predictions about war, revolution, and institutional collapse as phase transitions with measurable preconditions.
We've developed a powerful new diagnostic: the Public Commitment Index (PCI) - a universal measure of civilizational health through information commons analysis.
PCI = (Priests_Coherence + Priests_Capacity + StateMemory_Coherence + StateMemory_Capacity) / 4
This test reveals how societies treat knowledge as a public good versus private commodity - a critical indicator of long-term civilizational viability.
A profound realization: if societies are neural networks, then individual humans are also complex adaptive neural networks at the cognitive level. This creates a nested hierarchy:
This insight opens revolutionary possibilities: Can we apply CAMS principles to personal development? Do individual "coherence," "capacity," "stress," and "abstraction" levels predict institutional effectiveness? The framework may extend from civilizational analysis to therapeutic interventions.
Our 2025 analysis reveals concerning trends:
Real-Time Monitoring: We're now tracking NS (Network Synchronization) and API (Adaptive Plasticity Index) across multiple nations. Early indicators suggest borderline CTD risks for some vulnerable societies in 2025.
Complex Adaptive Humans is published by Kari McKern on LinkedIn, exploring the intersection of complexity science, geopolitics, and technology policy. Each issue delivers insights from the "event horizon between the known and the unknown."
Kari McKern
Retired Career Public Servant | Librarian & IT Specialist | Geopolitical Analyst
Former ILANET Network Services | Sydney, Australia
Specializing in: Asian Affairs • Geopolitics • Technology Policy • Complex Systems