Koby’s Kaos

Contemporary science is reductionist. The idea is that everything that happens can ultimately be explained as the interactions of fundamental particles. According to “Breaking the Galilean Spell,” an essay by Dr. Stuart Kauffman (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html), Simon Pierre Laplace described reductionism as “a sufficient intelligence, if given the positions and velocities of all the particles in the universe, could compute the universe’s entire future and past.” What does that mean? Well, Dr. Kaufman also quoted Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Weinberg as saying “The more we know of the universe, the more meaningless it appears.”

In other words, if you know enough of everything, you can work backward to explain the origins, or forward to lay out the future. Bingo! Game over. Reductionism as a world view has been very good to science. Dr. Kaufman points to Einstein’s general relativity, much of quantum physics, and molecular biology as products of reductionism. It is also profoundly depressing.

It describes a worldview where Surprise is only a product of ignorance. If you know then…. you’d know. For example, how can there be freewill? How can there be good or evil? “Guilty? No one is guilty, Judge. Don’t you see? I’m the victim. It was the photons that made me do it.”

For his part, Dr. Kauffman maintains that reductionism, while very useful, also forms a straight jacket on how we think and what we do. He believes instead that many things are also partially indescribable by natural law. And there in that indescribable cloud, for me, lies the excitement of life.

Dr. Kaufman was in Portland last week giving a talk for the Institute for Science, Engineering and Public Policy. The institute brings in experts from around the world to give challenging lectures and to hold informal talks in the local schools. These events are sponsored by area schools and technology companies and especially by Mentor Graphics, which has been kind enough to invite science journalists such as myself along for the ride.

One of Dr. Kaufman’s ideas I pulled from his lecture (and I’m sorry if I’m misstating this) is that events can lead to more events—unpredictably more events. He sees evolution as coming in part from systems poised at the edge of the “adjacent possible.”

Our current economic downturn comes to my mind as a parallel. The more I read economics writers, the more I suspect that not only don’t we know what’s going on, but we still don’t know how the Great Depression worked—or how we got out of that. And that part of our problem comes from thinking we knew what was going on more recently (or thinking that our experts did). Yes, there were doubters, though not necessarily understanders. Simply saying we were in a bubble gets you some points, but not a prize. (If Chicken Little keeps clucking, he’s going to be singing opera at least some of the time.)

As I think I understand Dr. Kaufman, evolution is self-organizing as much as anything. It’s not that any change makes a big difference. However each change makes possible so many other things, that these exploding (adjacent) possibilities lure life into making more changes. Change begets change, but in a self-organizing way, as if by an agent.

His hope is that in this view of possibilities there is room for affirmation and love. It can be a world of mutual gain instead of locked in zero sum conflict. He thinks there is room there for both the theist and the atheist to celebrate. It does not have to be one way or the other to explain the universe. We don’t have to fight to live.

Now I have my own laws for the organization of the universe, but I’ll spare you for now. I will say that the Adjacent Possible puts a rather hopeful spin on where we are now. Many of the models we have depended on, from real estate to venture funding, are in disarray. But we aren’t broken, so much as the straight jackets that restrict how we look on our goals, our worth, and our future have been ripped off.

Yes, I’m wracked with worry about our world too, but that is not going to help me find solutions. You don’t have to understand the music to begin to dance. You need to make mistakes to grow. There are surprises ahead and choices to enjoy.