Decrypting complexity

Potential Psychosocial Significance of Monstrous Moonshine: an exceptional form of symmetry as a Rosetta stone for cognitive frameworks (Part #5)

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Few would deny the increasingly apparent complexity of the world and the struggle that the strategic challenges constitute for governance. The complexity sciences have been developed in recent decades as one tool of possible relevance.

As noted, it is through the insights of group theory and number theory that the Monster was discovered. These insights are typically applied to the challenges of cryptography in the service of defence and security. The question is whether the application of these skills could be "inverted" in some way (cf From ECHELON to NOLEHCE: enabling a strategic conversion to a faith-based global brain, 2007).

One interesting possibility is the implication of the Monster in service of a form of elegant simplification -- a "decrypting" -- of this complexity, even such as to highlight a degree of inherent "beauty". The symmetry properties of the Monster would be the key to such an operation -- transforming global complexity into a "snowflake". Furthermore it is precisely such properties that are the key to any mnemonic considerations essential to comprehending such simplicity in complexity -- perhaps to be termed "simplexity" (Jeffrey Kluger, Simplexity: the simple rules of a complex world, 2007). These are also essential to any capacity to communicate the significance more widely -- just as they are the key to rendering communications incomprehensible through encryption. This may be understood as an orderly collapsing of complexity, a process of enfolding comparable to folding (or closing) petals in certain types of origami.

Potentially even more significant however is the possibility of using symmetry structures and isomorphisms within the Monster as a means of providing "translations" between the category patterns characteristic of different schools of thought -- namely between different cognitive frameworks. The Monster might then serve as a form of Rosetta stone in interrelating what amounts to different "scripts" represented on distinct "forms" -- in the light of the discussion by Michael Schiltz (Form and Medium: a mathematical reconstruction, Image [&] Narrative, 6, 2003) of how the form/medium is "the image for systemic connectivity and concatenation", as described in the work of Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela.

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