A complex adaptive system (CAS) is a system that exists within an environment in such a way that it can act to maintain its existence. Every living system is a CAS. It creates its own boundaries and maintains them despite the influences of the outside environment. Since things tend to wear out over time, a CAS must take matter, energy, and information from the outside to sustain itself.
The Necessity of Adaptation
As the environment changes, living systems must adapt to cope. It might be a single-celled creature that can recognise when the glucose concentration in its environment increases. It will continue in the same direction or move randomly if it notices the gradient is reducing.
That is enough to make it more fit for its environment than a similar one that can’t recognise the glucose concentration. At the other end, a human being adapts at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels in far more complex ways.
Sensing and Selecting Information
A living creature that can accurately predict what will happen next is more likely to survive than one that does not. First comes sensing. We receive more information in our senses than we can possibly make sense of. To cope we must select what is most relevant to focus on.
A person wearing a red jacket walking down the street is not usually relevant, but a red traffic light is. We pay more attention to things that we predict will be more relevant. Sometimes, we seek out relevant information we don’t have. I poke my head into a room to see if I left my phone there.
The Role of Prediction in Survival
To predict, a creature must recognise relevant environmental patterns and determine what they mean for survival. The creature can never gain all the information available in the world, so when it feels it has enough information, it must make sense of it. Sometimes, they correctly identify the patterns; sometimes, they might not be correct or useful. When we make an accurate prediction, we can act to avoid a harmful situation. I do not wait until I fall into a hole before acting. I predict the outcome of falling into the hole and act to avoid it. Predicting is a risk that most usually pays off.
The Three Constraints of Adaptive Systems
Living systems can only work within the limits that constrain them. They must respond fast enough, or events in the world will overtake them. This might involve recognising a predator and immediately acting or measuring changes over centuries that feed climate change. The response must be accurate and effective in the situation. If I sense a predator, I must escape as soon as possible. If my response is inadequate, I get eaten.
Living creatures must decide the optimal time to stop gathering information and start acting. If it acts too soon, it will likely do the wrong thing. If it takes too long, the delay might be fatal.
The third constraint is the amount of energy available. Any creature that can fulfil a task using less energy gains an advantage. An animal catching its prey using less energy can go out hunting again. It is not worth hunting if it takes more energy to catch the animal than is gained by eating it. Making an incorrect decision costs valuable energy. If a building project comes in under budget, extra funds are available to support another project.
The Role of Habits and Cognitive Mapping
Living systems use shortcuts wherever possible, but there is always a risk. We make assumptions based on the information we have. Small things are usually further away. We assume a car indicating to the right is actually going to turn right. I risk not having a flu injection because I am typically healthy enough not to get the flu.
We constantly take risks. Ideally, they are calculated risks so that if things do go wrong, the damage is not too great. We try to take risks that leave us better off overall. So, the advantages of the assumption, not having to wait for an oncoming car or saving the cost of the flu injection, outweigh the likelihood of the oncoming vehicle crashing into us or getting the flu. The damage done when things go wrong occasionally needs to be less than the benefit of all the times things went as predicted.
The brain conserves energy by creating habit patterns. If a situation is simple, predictable, and non-critical, then a habit pattern can be formed to generate adequate responses to general situations. Simple everyday tasks like tying shoelaces, making coffee, and finding your way home are made simpler and more energy efficient by running the action as a habit. This leaves energy to cope with any complex, critical and unpredictable situations that arise now and then. It does create the risk that sometimes we initiate a habit when slow, deliberate thinking is required. We spend far more time each day on autopilot, going through the motions that we would like to think.
Precision Weighting: Calculating Certainty
We also engage in precision weighting. How certain are we of our predictions? If the weather forecast is 99% certain that it will not rain today, I might leave my raincoat behind, but if it is only 45% certain, I am more likely to bring it. The more certain we are of our predictions, the more confident we are to act.
Building Cognitive Maps of the World
As part of the process of making sense, living systems create cognitive maps of themselves and their world. A newborn baby essentially has no map. Every new experience is added to the map. It links the mother to warmth and comfort, the cold to unpleasant. Layer upon layer of connections are made, mapping how the baby thinks the world is. They will form a map of who they think they are, who the people in their lives are, and what it is like to be alive.
Every time we do something that seems to work, it is written into our map. We get a squirt of dopamine to make us feel good and want to repeat what seems to work. Our map gets filled with what seems to work, and things that don’t work drop off the map.
The map compares the present situation to the store of assumptions mapped to make sense of the experience. If a dog comes into the room. The baby recalls past experiences with dogs to know what to do.
The Challenge of Changing Our Mental Maps
Laying down our map takes a lot of energy, so we tend not to change it unless there is no choice. Sometimes, this leads to hanging on to old beliefs that do not work anymore, but making those changes to fit the new way of doing things is hard and expensive. We like to believe we are right because it bolsters our sense of identity and makes life simple and predictable, but we are never always right, and life is always more complex than we can know, so we have no choice but to keep updating our map so it fits the territory.
Final Thoughts: Adapting for Growth
Survival depends on predicting, conserving energy, and updating mental models when necessary. A balance is needed—too little adaptation leads to stagnation, but too much change can be overwhelming. Our ability to navigate this balance determines how effectively we evolve in an ever-changing world.
How often do you challenge and update your own mental map to better align with reality?
