Law of Complexity/Consciousness

The Law of Complexity/Consciousness is the tendency in matter to complexify upon itself and at the same time to increase in consciousness. The law was first formulated by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Teilhard holds that at all times and everywhere, matter is endeavoring to complexify upon itself, as observed in the evolutionary history of the earth. Matter complexified from inanimate matter, to plant-life, to animal-life, to human-life. Or, from the geosphere, to the biosphere, to the noosphere (of which humans represented, because of their possession of a consciousness which reflects upon themselves). As evolution rises through the biosphere, geosphere and noosphere, matter continues to rise in a continual increase of both complexity and consciousness.

For Teilhard, the Law of Complexity/Consciousness continues to run today in the form of the socialization of mankind. The closed and circular surface of the earth contributes to the increased compression (socialization) of mankind. As human beings continue to come into closer contact with one another, their methods of interaction continue to complexify in the form of better organized social networks, which contributes to an overall increase in consciousness, or the noosphere.

Teilhard imagines a critical threshold, Omega Point, in which mankind will have reached its highest point of complexification (socialization) and thus its highest point of consciousness. At this point consciousness will rupture through time and space and assert itself on a higher plane of existence from which it can not come back.

Interestingly, for Teilhard, because the Law of Complexity/Consciousness runs everywhere and at all times, and because of the immensity of both time and space in outer space, and the immensity of the chances for matter to find the right conditions to complexify upon itself, it is highly probable that life exists, has existed, and will exist in the universe apart from our earth.

Quotes

"The more complex a being is, so our Scale of Complexity tells us, the more it is centered upon itself and therefore the more "aware" does it become. In other words, the higher the degree of complexity in a living creature, the higher its consciousness; and vice versa. The two properties vary in parallel and simultaneously. If we depict them in diagrammatic form, they are equivalent and interchangeable."
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Future of Man", p.111

"For its reflective and inventive forward spring it is in some sort necessary that Life, duplicating its evolutionary motive center, should henceforth be sustained by "two" centers of action, separate and conjoined, one of consciousness and the other of complexity.... In hominised evolution the Physical and the Psychic, the Without and the Within, Matter and Consciousness, are all found to be functionally linked in one tangible process."
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Future of Man", p.209