C. Veress is a philosophy teacher at a Swiss high school and at the same time he is a passionate musician. In our conversation about where he faces complexity in his life and how he deals with it many interesting topics were discussed. Following is an extract of some questions we discussed.

Where in your occupational field do you encounter complexity?

For me as a teacher the single processes in my profession are manageable and easy to cope with. The complexity arises with the multitude of all duties. As a teacher’s duties I see correcting exams, teaching classes, preparing lessons, reading and grading homework.

A repetitively occurring phenomenon is that during the academic year all single tasks accumulate and in the end the whole organisational system is near the total collapse. There is a saturation occurring, vacation would be highly appreciated but is not possible. As a teacher, being a human, psychic entity I am in contact with other psychic entities. Humans as thinking creatures are often non-predictable and are even after years able to astonish me. This is where I see complexity emerging, thinking creatures being part of a variable organisational structure.

How do you deal with this complexity, can we and should we simplify it?

For my own wellbeing I have found a way of dealing with this complexity. Most of it is related to carefully planning my daily life. I had to learn to define working hours for the sake of my privacy and relaxation time. It has not always been obvious to me that I need to listen to my body and take care of my vegetative duties such as sleeping and eating. When I am neglecting those fundamental things, I am not able to perform 100% at school and I think only these 100% is what my students deserve.

Could you formulate a universal principle to deal with complexity?

A concept that has been followed in empirical science for the last years is trying to reduce complexity to simple circumstances.

What do you think of the approach of reductionism?

In empirical sciences up to now this approach can register success. The approach has two sides. One of them is top down, the reductionism. There we reduce a phenomenon to a simple fact. We assume that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.

This is followed by bottom-up where we try to explain the complex phenomenon sufficiently. If the bottom-up and the top-down approaches are in harmony a phenomenon is acceptably explained.

In the past this model has proven itself in technological implementations. We came from a simple model of communication to mobile phones, computers and even airplanes flying. The strategy has worked as long as the human consciousness has not been part of the scientific investigation. Here the book “The view from nowhere” written by Thomas Nagel in 1989 comes to my mind. There he discusses Objectivity, Subjectivity, and how they relate. Already the philosopher René Descartes has dealt with the problem of subject and object. If we want to get the most adequate image of an object we have to remove all the subjectivity from our description.

Do you see a correlation between increasing experience of life and complexity?

For me personally the privilege of being young is the ability to be unbiased und open-minded. There is plenty of time and many occasions to be taken by surprise by the world. Becoming older means having already encountered more situations, having more experience, one starts to observe reoccurring motifs. Motifs in actions as well as motifs of thoughts. You become more aware that multiple factors might be responsible for the outcome of a situation.

Where in your leisure time do you encounter complexity?

I have been dealing with the famous body-mind problem for a long time now. On one hand we have scientific facts about the brain and its development and the communication within complex processes delivered by neurobiology. On the other hand we have the subjective way of describing processes occurring in our mind. The latter leads to a description in the first form singular where we have the means of language to describe processes of the mind. For me there exists a gap between the science of neurobiology and the subjective way of describing phenomena of our minds.

Can you please give us a citation or personal definition of complexity?

What comes into my mind are two of four theses in John Searle’s book ‘Mind: a brief introduction’. #

1. Conscious states, with their subjective, first-person ontology, are real phenomena in the real world. We cannot do an eliminative reduction of consciousness, showing that it is just an illusion. Nor can we reduce consciousness to its neurobiological basis, because such a third-person reduction would leave out the first-person ontology of consciousness.
2. Conscious states are entirely caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain. Conscious states are thus causally reducible to neurobiological processes. They have absolutely no life of their own, independent of the neurobiology. Causally speaking, they are not something “over and above” neurobiological processes.

Source: John R. Searle, Oxford university press; Mind: a brief introduction, 2004

I am here citing Searle because in my opinion a correct description of the world includes a ‘weak’ form of dualism, we simply cannot deal without it. With this weak dualism I do not mean the dualism described by Descartes with res extensa and res cogitans. Moreover I am talking about the comprehension that temporarily we do not have the measurement categories to create a theoretical continuum between first-person descriptions of phenomena of consciousness and third-person descriptions of neuronal processes delivered by neurosciences. At this moment we have the situation of incommensurability and it is not clear to which extent we will be able to overcome this in theory.