Beyond Reductionism
Stuart Kauffman's Page
Profile Information
- Why do you want to join this Network?
- I shall, in May 2008, publish my fourth book, Reinventing the Sacred, by Basic Books, New York. I do so with hope, but am aware that even the title is bound to generate controversy. About 3 billion of us believe in an Abrahamic God, millions more in Hindu and other gods, many millions are members of wisdom traditions such as Buddhism, and about a billion of us, myself included, do not believe in God or are agnostics. As our civilizations are crushed together by globalization, there is an emerging retreat into fundamentalisms. Often these are religious, intolerant, and hostile. A number of books have emerged attacking religion. For the secular, the very terms "sacred" and "God" are despoiled by the evils that religions have done. For the religious, the very concept of "reinventing" the sacred implies that the sacred is "invented". My book is bound to anger both sides, yet it seeks a new way to try to be one path to heal this shism in society as a global civilization, I hope forever diverse and creative, emerges. I discuss reductionism, its inadequacies, emergence, the non-reducibilityof biology, economics, and human history to physics, the natural emergence in ev0lution of life, agency, value, meaning, doing, acting, and perhaps even consciousness. Most startlingly, I find grounds in what are called Darwinian preadaptations in the biosphere, and their analogues in the economy and culture, to say that there is no natural law that sufficiently describes the reglarities of these processes. If the Galilean spell is the wonderful belief started in the West that all in the universe is describable by natural law, these phenomena seem to be beyond natural law. But this has profound implications. First, it opens a vast new freedom and creativity in the universe, not mystical, but how the real universe unfolds. I want to say that we can find a safe sense of God in this creativity, and more, in both the law describable universe, and the creative universe beyond the Galilean spell. Thus, I hope, we can find a safe place for our spirituality, whether we believe in a Creator God or not, that we can share, as we seek to build a global ethic and help guide the emergence of a global civilization.
In addition, Darwinian preadaptations in human life, such as the economy and culture, means that we really do not know, often, what will happen. But then reason is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward. With the metaphysical poets such as John Donne, stated T.S. Eliot, the Western mind began to split reason from the rest of our sensibilities. Hence the split between C.P. Snows "The Two Cultures", Science and the Humanities. But if we cannot know what will happen much of the time, reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward. We must seek to reunite our entire humanity.
All this is a very large challenge. While I fear the anger that my book may generate, I do believe that we must start a broad conversation on these subjects, and welcome that conversation.
- About Me:
- I am trained in medicine with a background in philosophy and have been a scientist for some forty years involved in developmental biology, evolutionary biology, theoretical biology, the origin of life and the sciences of complexity. I have held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, The University of Pennsylvania, The Santa Fe Institute, and am now Founding Director of the Institute of Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, (IBI). The IBI is focused on Systems Biology, Atoms to Cells, Origin of Life, with cross cutting themes of "the processing of matter, energy and information in non-equilibrium cells" and "A physics of life". My own work is most focused on high throughput high content screening of chemical libraries to try to induce cancer stem cells to differentiate into non-proliferating cells, the structure, logic and dynamics of genetic regulatory networks, and steering cell fates.
About
Badge
© 2009 Created by Ulrike Reinhard on Ning. Create Your Own Social Network
Comment Wall (13 comments)
You need to be a member of Reinventing the Sacred to add comments!
Join this social network
I have to apologize for posting the same stuff twice, I am not an experienced blogger, and I thought I had made a mistake, because the first time, as a comment, it did not show up for quite some time.
On the issue at hand, my questions is: why would any law-like regularities in the universe not be more awsome than the non-law-like regularities (such as 'creativity of the universe'). After all, without lawlike processes operating at some level (like how molecules combine, reaction equilibria) such creativity would not be possible - preadaptations could not last to become adaptations with suitable contingencies arising. Actually, there would just be some sort of chaos - in the popular sense of the word. (creativity exists in the non-biological universe, not two galaxies are exactly the same, not two snowflakes are exactly the same, and if everything was strictly ordered in a law-like fashion, the universe would be homogenous, gravity would not be observable, and galaxies could not collide).
Either way, this sort of awe (of either kind) has not much public appeal outside of a philosophical or scientific elite. The sacred provides answers, where answers do not exist or are not comprehended, it provides justice where there is none, it provides purpose, where, as far as we can tell, there is none, plus a bungch of other things such as usefulness for power, for reducing the frear of death etc.)
In other words, what Stuart is trying has been tried before, and it just does not work. Judaism and its derivatives, on the other hand, worked. Now, I do not agree with it just because it worked. But I always ask those who reject religion, what are you going to replace it with, including all of its ramifications?
People do not want the truth, they want meaning! Sofar, including Kaufman's sacred, I have not seen a replacement that can do all that (or even a tiny fraction of it).
On a more theoretical level, any practice or belief that is useful for a wide variety of interests, will not be displaced by a practive or belief that can gather only a few interests. This is why we are still driving cars, why fashion models are thin and why people believe in creationism
Olaf.
The hummingbird/flower example points to a general concept operative in evolution, which has not received much attention from biologists: combination. The big steps in the evolution in life were new combinations, and new levels of combination, not differentiation and natural selection. Combination started right at the supernova explosion with the formation of heavy elements, then the formation of molecular compounds, combining to the big ones of life, DNA, RNA, lipids, sugars and peptides, with lipds providing the inside/outside boundary. All further combination had to happen across that boundary, notably by intrusion (parasitism) or engulfing (predation), two phenomena which almost look the same, except in the outcome (still operative in the fertilization of an egg). Up to that point of proto-cellular life, biologists do not seem to have much trouble with combination, but then it starts. The only combination that found widespread acclaim was endo-symbiosis, propagated by Lynn Margulis and others, as well as a special form of combination, i.e. intra-species combination (as in fungus, or Volvox, but also all known ‘tissues’). A huge explanatory gap exists with respect of the origins of multi cellular organism, with tissues of cells having specialized functions. I looks to me like a pooling and combining of pre-adapted DNA, and differentiation is strictly and embryological phenomenon, not an evolutionary phenomenon. It would explain differences in quantity of DNA in the major classes of life-forms, as well as quantity regulatory and silent DNA. Additional energy sources (sunlight) may have been necessary for that. Ever since the stage of compound formation, the number of possible combinations is mind boggling, and hence perhaps the futility of looking for ‘laws’. Surprisingly few basic designs (phyla and divisions) are left by natural selection from this phase of combination, and it may be safe to assume that all the early surviving phyla were already in some sense pre-adapted for all the species we know today, including some chordate that became us. Thinking that we evolved from a ‘differentiating’ single cell (i.e. by mutation) is plainly ridiculous.
Notably, as we move from low level combinations, to higher level combinations, the links and connections are becoming less and less tight. At the bottom we have tight molecular connections, evolving into the entire receptor biochemistry. But at higher levels of combination, we are finding chemicals moving over short distances, across channels, and sometimes, as in the case of hormones, over considerable distance. With increasing complexity, combinations are becoming more and more communicative. Finally, there are no longer just moving messenger molecules (like in smell), but information travelling by specific energies such as sound or light.
Another special case of combination is the organism/technology combination, in simple forms observable in insects (beehive), beavers (dams), birds (nests), and humans.
Humans are a unique case, in that we find intra-species combinations (societies and cultures), over great distance, as well as technology/biology combination, over great distances (something I have referred to as the ‘global cyborg’). Some of these considerations apply to human technology as well as human organization, perhaps no need here to go into any detail.
I am bringing this up for several reasons:
1) Combination is not a term you can find often in the context of evolution, why not? I think there is just not enough theoretical biology. Empirical thinking opens up new explanatory possibilities, pure empirical thinking, as most of biology, shuts that source of knowledge down.
2) Evolutionary theory, as it stands, is lacking a ‘big picture’, and is vulnerable in its explanatory power. Big picture stories, like religion, have the upper hand here.
3) The issue of partial lawlessness is somehow buried in biological combination. Biological complexity is hierarchically organized, but I am not aware of physical laws that are hierarchically organized! The answer is somehow around here.
4) Thinking combination is absolutely essential to making some predictions as to humanities future on its current path, or alternative paths.
5) I am thinking outside of the academic box, so where else can I take my thoughts.
Olaf Krassnitzky
On hope and games
Why would one draw hope from the ‘prisoner’s dilemma? I remember Axelrod’s best tit-for-tat iteration, I think it went something like this: 1) never defect first, 2) always respond to cooperation with cooperation, 3) always respond to defection with defection, 4) respond immediately and in an obvious way, 5) if the other party does not respond in this fashion, kill the SOB. In fact, US politics have been guided by this, the mafia operates that way, and so do most corporations and other social organizations. It is being used, quite effectively, towards bad ends. So why draw hope from that? There is nothing intrinsic to any of these game strategies that could serve as a source of hope. But there is actually something intrinsic to the structure of these games that is quite troublesome. I always felt that the prisoner’s dilemma is Skinner’s operand conditioning just framed and applied differently, as the responses (cooperation and defection) to the other party’s behaviors can be viewed as reward and punishment, and in that sense it can be linked to neurocognition. As we tend to avoid punishment and seek reward, why wouldn’t most people co-operate eventually? So, back to dopamine, and its potentially destructive power, as it does not just motivate us to meet our needs, it plays big in fulfilling our wants; and norepinephrine on the opposite side of experience……
Another problem is the unequal distribution of power amongst social players, which is always already there for any kind of game, and just to make a point, it is the bigger bully who has a better chance to get the smaller bully to see it his/her way - or kill the smaller bully. (Think again US politics. I think the Chinese paper also saw some merit in punishment - one for the death penalty in the US and China; the Incas used it quite effectively to keep crime down).
The tragedy of the commons is dopamine/norepinephrine driven too, so I do not derive much hope from that either. Do not forget that our entire economic system depends on a pumped up dopamine craving, from SUVs to speed boats, to large houses, and even monkey meat for those who can afford it (‘bush meat’ isn’t just for the workers in the bush). Without enforced constraint resource depletion is pretty much the fate of any commons. In contrast, the insurance industry, healthcare, the religious industry, pump up the norepinephrine (like my life insurance agent said, “chances are you are going to be ded at 70”). And the stock market pumps up both, cyclically.
So, what hope and whose hope? The large bully will always hope to subdue the little bully, and the users of the commons will hope to get theirs before anybody else does. And the subdued and the loosers will hope to reverse those conditions. Nothing intrinsically good or bad in hope. Hope needs to refer to something concrete, something humans need for their lives, something that is available and accessible for all, and this something needs to precede hope. Something we can agree on to be good. And then we can work on the ways of getting there. The hope of getting there needs to be moderated by a hope of not causing new trouble (‘unintended consequences’) along the way. From that, and from that alone, can we arrive at a suitable morality (or ethics if you wish). We cannot derive it from some kind of cosmology, and we cannot derive it from game theory, and we cannot derive it from abstract ideas of variety, mutuality, features, etc. Perhaps a very small group of (privileged, perhaps?) people who dedicate their lives to that sort of thing can derive hope from it.
On preadaptation.
Isn’t every adaptive step in evolution preceded by a preadaptation, or: Isn’t every adaptation potentially the preadaptation for another adaptation? Or: isn’t preadaptation just a rearview mirror look at evolution? Or: how would the notion of preadaptation be better than biological evolution to arrive at notions of hope? I guess diversification and selection have the same standing in both perspectives. I do see a problem though, in a contradiction between the claim of benefits (increased variety and increased mutualism) on one hand, and the call for unification of humankind, inevitably associated with reduction and control, instead of mutualism. Historically, I am not aware of major instances when diversification led to more spontaneous cooperation, and when when unification arose from diversification. Just as an example, heresy, used to be suppressed quite vigorously, and when diversification did take place, hostilities broke out.
I saw a comment somewhere, that said that a highly diversified sacred is preferable to a unified sacred. I think part of this consideration needs to be the environment in which preadaptation, adaptation, diversification and mutualism take place, and secondly, the time it takes for these transformations to play themselves out. Humans have changed the game, they are adapting the environment or creating environments, they now mainly adapt to those created environments, and they do it perhaps hundreds of times faster than any evolutionary process can keep up with. In addition, corporatism is reducing variety, not increasing it, and replacing mutualism with control. I think the hope derived from evolution, which you are referring to is now eclipsed by the dread of global corporatism and its competitive, predatory (not cooperative) systems of communication and control.
Finally, the universe destroys everything it creates, in other words, all creations arise from the debris of the destroyed. I have not seen much of the katabolic side of the creative in your argument. Awsome perhaps, but hope?
Cheers, Olaf
further on the question of hope...
I just read a write-up on Woody Allen, in which he reveals that since a very young age he has been living with the impression that the universe is indifferent. (That makes him an atheist, I guess). But is it really so bad to have no super power breathing down our necks, threatening the children, as R. Dawkins mentions, worst of all, being part of our 'cognized environment' only, not of the 'operational environment', i.e. it is not verifiable independent of individual accounts of witness experiences.
And Woody Allen is wrong, of course, as there is a tiny speck of universe, where parts of the universe (i.e living beings) are not indifferent towards each other and towards their life world. From which I deduce, that if hope is to be found, we need to look for it in our own lifeworld, where things are verifiable beyond individual experiences of witnesses or philosophical abstractions, .... hope is to be found where the operational and the cognized environment overlap and are reasonably isomorphic. This is saying to humanism, we and and our lifeworld are all there is, and life can be a pretty good place to be, so why would we not make the best of it for all of us. Indeed we are continuing to do the opposite, not to a small part because of our beliefs in the sacred, or in utopian philosophies.
Cheers, Olaf.
Spinoza did not succeed in finding wide acceptance of his Nature/God identity, what makes you think that a creative universe (It cannot be 'creativity in the universe')/God identity will fare any better. Why not let nature be nature and universe be universe, which are meaningful terms for most, and elaborate their properties, as others have elaborated the properties of God. We can toss around the meaning of marriage, but the resistance with respect to the meaning of God will be insurmountable.
Focus on 'hope'.
I suspect that most people would have great difficulty finding hope in the complexity jungle. Hope is part of the capacity of humans to imagine future realities, in the case of hope it has to be personally meaningful (I will not die from that illness, I will see my friends in the after life, I will be redeemed in heaven, eternal bliss), a whole bunch of experiences that are by and large experienced as rewarding. (Dopamine carries us right into the afterlife). And this is experienced as rewarding during imagination, and it does not matter whether that particular possible future is rally possible at at all. Can you tell me what people may experience as rewarding in the 'positive sum games' of complexity?
From a sociological perspective, hope has actually a very dark side - what Marx referred to as 'opium', I might settle for a pain killer. In any case, it diminishes the chances that despair turns into revolt, social upheaval and and a change in social conditions. When the Emperor Constantine could not afford the Pax Romana with military might any longer, well, he could see the utility of religion, as it had been used before him, and as it was used after him.
Getting back to complexity. Complexity may drive diversity, to a point, and at some level of complexity, diversity may actually be reduced. And while biological evolution and technology may not be entirely predictable, I would predict that much: that in time, humanity and technology will form one global complex organism, a global cyborg so to speak. And I would suggest that higher levels of complexity do not enhance variety, but there is a need to constrain it. The organism, or 'organization' you may want to look at is the modern corporation. I also would like to mention that at low levels of complexity you have tight chemical bonds or chemical equilibria; at the cellular level you have chemical messengers and communication and electrical impulses (nervous systems). At even higher levels of communication you have sensory analog messages, and today digital messages.
My own impression is that all of our systems of communcation and control, hello N. Wiener) are getting tighter and tighter, not liberating the individual, but constraining it more and more. Just bear in mind that corporations are not dealing with persons any more, but with 'human resources'. You learn about the constraints when you try to write a plan at, say, the branch level of a corporation, in comparison to writing a corporate plan. At the branch level it is pretty much a waste of paper.
We may have already reached a stage the creative uiverse does its thing, but it may not be all that good for the individual.
There goes hope.
Cheers, Olaf
Feels like 'Stuart has left the blog' already.
One could get past the the notion of the universe in awe of itself, after all, we are experiencing awe under many different conditions. The real problem with awe, reverence, etc. is the notion of the sacred. In anthropological as well as public use, the sacred stands in opposition to the profane, and meaning 'inside the temple', and 'outside of the temple', respectively.
The sacred separates us from the universe not just in experience (as with awe), but in actual cultural practice. This stands in contradiction to the notion of a self-organizing, creative universe, and as I have added, reflecting universe: by sanctifying it, one would position it outside itself. Therefore, reinventing the sacred for a self-organizing universe could lead to an impasse (or better, impossibility).
In accepting a self-organizing, getting-to-know-itself universe, a way out of the impasse may be to collapse the dichotomy of sacred and profane, meaning, that everything is profane and sacred at the same time, an approach, I believe, at least some strands of Buddhism have taken. The extreme consequences of hanging on to the dichotomy, for example, have shown up in Islamic attempts to suppress any possible critique of the Islamic faith; the privileged access to the inner sanctum of the Jewish Temple; and the history of heresy in Christianity.
I think there is a middle ground between the sacred and the profane, and it is associated to some extent with our notions of ecology ('science of the household'), and culture (derived from the Latin word colere, 'looking after').
These two concepts, their meanings and associations, have gotten lost in our economic, scientific, ecological, even spiritual endeavours (but I am keeping the issue of spirituality out of this discussion, for now), and I might add, humanism, which often is far too focused on its opposition to the beliefs in the supernatural. Actually, humanism could become transcending, if considered in the context of a self-organizing, creative, and self-reflecting universe.
I would just like to add that the above thoughts have been the consequence of thinking about your propositions. Thanks.
Olaf.
A word of caution: what kind of cosmology?
I would like to draw your attention to John Archibald Wheeler's cosmogram, which consists essentially of a "U", with a human eye on the left end of the U, looking across a the right end of the U, where the beginning of the universe is symbolized. This cosmogram shows the universe as turning on itself in self-awareness.
I took the following from Wikipedia's entry on Wheeler:"From a transcript of a radio interview on the 'Anthropic Universe':
Wheeler: We are participants in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need more?
Martin Redfern: Many don't agree with John Wheeler, but if he's right then we and presumably other conscious observers throughout the universe, are the creators - or at least the minds that make the universe manifest."----------------------------------To fully appreciate the cosmogram, we need to see ourselves not merely as participants, but as products, or perhaps better 'states' of the universe, of a universe that has become conscious of itself. But the universe does not have sudden inights, instead, it is getting to know itself as the result of a rather long and winding process, genetically first, and cognitively later. But we do not know, or better the universe does not know, to what end, and why. And since the universe is learning, how can it know? And does this self-knowledge make any difference at all? I am finding this kind of 'cosmography' impossible to refute, perhaps somebody else can be successfual with that. Assuming that it is an adequate cosmography, then being in awe of the creative universe would mean that the universe is in awe of itself - and I am not sure that this fits with the notion of the sacred.
If we reject this cosmography, and are just in awe of the creative universe as you suggest, then we have put ourselves apart from the universe, and we again are victims of the same illusion that led to creating deities and the notion of humans in charge of the world.
So, which route should we take: the one of a learning, becoming self-concscious universe; or the one of being in awe of a creative universe. I do not believe that you can invent just any cosmology and then hope that a desirable morality will emanate from that. Let us not forget that the universe may be creative, but it is also quite capable of coming up with designs for the trash can.
This is my word of caution here: without consensus on cosmology, no consensus on global morality. (I prefer the term morality over ethics, as it is based on the Latin word 'mos', habit, tradition.)
Olaf
View All Comments