Hi, I'm just learning how to blog ...

[Ulrike Reinhard]

... so this is my first effort. (me is Stuart Kauffman; I, Ulrike just copied the post in the right field:-)))) I thought I might talk briefly about what using the word "God" to mean the creativity in the universe is starting to mean for me. The answer is, to my surprise, a lot. Like most scientists, but not all, I do not and have never believed in a supernatural God. My own earliest steps towards something spiritual were two. First, I had in about 1971, thought about the origin of life and concluded that life must be based on something far deeper than the beautiful template replication offered by double stranded DNA or RNA. It must, I thought, be based on chemistry, catalysis, and displacement from chemical equilibrium. I sketched a theory in which sufficiently complex mixtures of chemicals would be expected to catalyze so many reactions among themselves that "collectively autocatalytic sets" would be expected to arise. Focusing on small proteins, or peptides, as the molecules in question, led to the question of the probability that such peptides could catalyze reactions, and later, could mimic hormones or other biologically important molecules. In turn this was one route to what is now combinatorial chemistry and high throughput screening. In about 1983 I returned to the topic and managed to prove analytically that one would expect such a spontaneous formation of self reproducing molecular systems. I was, of course, deeply moved, for if correct, life may be far more probable than we had thought. I remember climbing up a waterfall route into Desolation Valley in California, home to many young adventures, and sitting quietly on a boulder and thanking God. I don't know what sense of God I was thanking, but I felt profound gratitude that such an idea might be right, so life might be "At home in the universe', which became the title of my second book.
In 1993 I participated in a small conference hosted by the Gihon foundation in Northern New Mexico, with three others. We were supposed to consider the most important issues confronting humanity - as if any four people could be useful. The centerpiece of this meeting was set by a wonderful bear of a man, N. Scott Momaday, Kiowa, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, six foot six inches, perhaps 260 pounds, bass voice. He told us the most important problem confronting humanity was to reinvent the sacred. I was stunned. As a scientist, I had no conception that it was permissible to speak in such language. Scott's phrase changed my life. Our small group considered an emerging global civilization, the cultural tensions it would create, the need to reinvent the sacred, and, Scott's phrase in the report we wrote, "create the transnational mythic structure" to sustain the global civilization that will emerge.

Obviously, I have taken Scott's phrase as the title of my new book, Reinventing the Sacred, with credit in the chapter notes. I thought then and think now, that Scott Momaday was exactly right. We do have to reinvent the sacred - in part for this secular, commitized, age. In part we must consider doing so to span across our civilizations as, under the pressure of globalization that our little group foresaw, is in danger of retreating into fundamentalisms.
So the Gihon Foundation meeting is the initial source of the book and subject we are discussing. The core of this new book is new science strongly suggesting that reductionism is inadequate scientifically, that emergence is real, and most surprisingly, that the evolution of the biosphere, economy, civilization, and perhaps aspects of the abi0tic universe do not seem to be sufficiently describable by natural law. In its place is an unexpected - since Newton - creativity in the unfolding of some aspects of the universe. We ourselves, as humans, are the unexpected fruit of this partially lawless evolution of the biosphere. But then we are members with all of life in this same partially lawless, awesome "becoming" of the universe.

God, I believe, is our own invented symbol, d0wn the ages, across the thousands of gods we have worshiped. It is we who have told our gods what is sacred, then they have revealed to us what we told them to tell us. It has always been us talking to ourselves. But this is no crisis, it is wonderful. It does not mean that what we deem worthy of being held sacred is not sacred, it means that what we will embrace as sacred is our own choice. So the question becomes, following Scott Momaday, whether at this stage in our human evolution we are just beginning to be ready to be responsible for our own choices of what to hold sacred. I think the answer is yes, and that it is we, together, who must reinvent the sacred. Then we must derive from it a renewed spirituality that will lead us towards a global ethic that will become Scott Momaday's "transnational mythic structure" to guide the emerging global civilization.
So we come to whether we should use the "God" word to mean the fully natural creativity in the universe. I am ever more convinced that we should do so. To those of us who are secular humanists, this step is deeply worrisome. We remember Galileo forced to recant by the Inquisition. We want no religion that requires that we forego the truths of the real world. We remember the millions killed in the name of God. We forget the comfort, sense of unity with a transcendental God, and orientation for life that religion also brings. For those who believe in God, even the idea that it could be we, ourselves, who take responsibility for what we will deem sacred is Godless heresy. I understand and emphathize. Yet, we also need to create a common spiritual space across our civilizations as we co-evolve together. Those who believe in a supernatural God can also consider embracing the idea that the creativity in the natural universe that this God created is itself awesome and worthy of reverence, and that it leads us to hold all of life and this planet sacred and view it with a sense of stewardship to the best of our limited knowledge.

Now to myself: I have now lived for two years with the thought that God is the natural creativity in the universe. It is affecting my life in ways I would not have expected. A summer ago, sitting on my porch along side a sweet little river, the Elbow, looking at a hillside covered with spruce, I found myself thinking, "I can cut down those trees if I choose, but I better have a very good reason to do so, this is God's work." I looked at the river and thought, "I could dam this river, but I'd better have a very good reason to do so, this is God's work." In my own life, I am finding that the symbol "God" used to mean the very creativity in the universe, and membership with all of life that we all share, and the planet we share, does in fact, bring a sweet and enlarging sense of joy, responsibility, and humility. How graced we are, not by a Creator Agent God, but by the staggering emergence of the universe, life, and human civilization, so much of it, it begins to appear, partially beyond natural law. So, since we do no t and cannot kinow, we live into Mystery. We need a sense larger of ourselves and too much of our current society where we are consumers, not citizens of the world. We can lift up our eyes to a reality we can revere, share, use wisely, but protect. This God is reality, even as we love to kill one another. Then we are invited to Scott Momaday's proclamation: We must reinvent the sacred.

[Olaf Krassnitzky]

Hi,
If you feel like cutting the tree, you are acting as a small speck of the creating universe (which, with humans and beavers present includes cutting trees as part of the creative process). If you have to think about a good reason to cut the tree, you are really trying to step outside of the process and you are considering whether you should or should not intervene in the creative process. But that is an illusion of course. You cannot step outside of the creative process of the universe, and even if cutting the tree had some disastrous consequences, it is no less part of the creative process than a metorite hitting earth. It is this notion of setting ourselves aside from the universe which leads to the notion of a God creator (who has put us in charge of tree cutting amongst other things). But we are trying to depart from that, are we not? If you adhere to traditional moral thinking, you may find this difficult to swallow.

Olaf.

[Z'ev Rosenberg]

Stuart,
Sorry to bother you again, but I just opened your book to page 268, "The Evolution of Morality". You write "in the early old testament, it was ten eyes for an eye , then an eye for an eye, then, with Jesus, love thy enemy. Our morality evolves. . . "

One must read the Torah with its commentaries for it to make any sense at all. What 'eye for an eye' means, according to Rashi, is that if a person is injured in a dispute, and his eye is damaged or tooth dislodged, he or she must be recompensed financially for the full amount of the damage. There has never been a time in Jewish history when anyone's eye was removed as a form of punishment by any Jewish court or authority. I don't think there is anything primitive here that needs to 'evolve'. And I don't see the connection between 'love thy enemy' with that statement.

Z'ev Rosenberg

[Z'ev Rosenberg]

Stuart,
I've got your book "Reinventing the Sacred" here in my hand, just in via UPS. I look forward to reading it in the coming days. . .
I've taken awhile to respond to your deep ideas, because there is so much to say and little space to say it in. So I've decided to focus on one or two issues for now.

I applaud your finding of new space for sacredness in the universe. In Judaism/Kabbalah, we call this level of divinity "Elokim", the revealed aspect of G-dliness. However, there is also a transcendent aspect that is associated with "YHVH", that can not be defined or limited by the human intellect. This is where I must diverge from you and perhaps several other bloggers on this site. But that is fine, we can agree to disagree on this, I am still fascinated by your discoveries.

One criticism I have of modern scientists in general is that they are too quick to label all spiritual or religious activity as 'fundamentalist", forgetting that many of the greatest eras in science and the arts were encouraged and sponsored by 'religionists', such as the Golden Age of Islam in Spain, where medicine, poetry and the sciences flourished, the Renaissance in Italy, and the 'renaissance' in Morocco among the Jewish communities there that lasted several centuries. Present day fundamentalisms in my mind reveal a dualistic split that in Europe were a reaction to Spinoza and the "Enlightenment", leading to a huge divide between matter and spirit. In traditional Jewish thought, there is no conflict. I would love to see scientists such as yourself take the time to study such works as the Talmud and apply your scientific insight to a text that contains such depths of wisdom. How can one criticize religion without deep study of the vast stores of knowledge stored there?

More later,

Z'ev Rosenberg

[Stuart Kauffman]

I'm copying a long email to mathematician Greg Chaitin at IBM about the status of the creativity about which we speak. Chatin discusses this from a different perspective. If a natural law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, some processes have descrpitions as complex as themselves, hence are not "lawful" in the above sense. In addition, Chatin discusses numbers that he calles mathematically irreducible. An example comes from the famous computer halting problem. Will a computer halt with the answer in finite time? Alan Turing showed that this question is formally undecidable. Chaitin discusses the "dangerous" number "omega", the halting probability. It seems there is no way to prove anything about omega. In the email below I ask Greg if there is a relation or not between this mathematical irreducibility, and the apparent difficulty prestating the adjacnet possible of the biosphere evolving by Darwinian preadaptations, which may not be mathematizable at all - and if not it is deeply important. This too may be, like "omega", mathematically irreducible. Stu


Hi Greg, its been a long time - since lunch at John Casti's several years ago. I hope you are well. I'm in Canada as iCORE Chair building an Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics. Greg, I've just read your fine paper, "On the intelligibility of the universe and the notions of simplicity, complexity and irreducibility". I believe I understand what you are saying and understand the wonderful Omega problem of the probability that an arbitrary computer program will halt in finite time.

We may, or may not, be treading similar ground, but in very different ways. I've taken the liberty of attaching an uncorrected galley of my new book, Reinventing the Sacred, out, Basic Books NY in May. You are probably the best person in the world with whom to raise these issues. I think I'm finding something radical that I first talked about in my book, Investigations, and return to here. I do not think we can finitely prestate the evolution of the biosphere by what are called Darwinian preadaptations, or their analogues in the economy and human culture/history. In the book I lay out the idea of a chemical reaction graph, the molecules now on it, and the perfectly describable Adjacent Possible molecules that can arise in a single reaction step from the molecules already present, which I call the Actual. Chemically, the biosphere has been expanding into its adjacent possible for 3.8 billion years, from a few hundred to trillions of organic molecules. In Chapter 10 I make my most radical claim: Breaking the Galilean spell. As you say, we in the West live with the idea, since Descartes, Galileo, and Newton, that, when the science shall have been done, everything that unfolds in the universe will be describable by natural laws. Here a natural law is, as you say, a compact description of the regularities of a process. Now you take one tack on this issue: Omega is irreducible (I'm going to ask you if the value of omega is "mathematizable" in a moment, whatever that might mean.) And you argue persuasively that the description of some phenomena are incompressible so no "natural law" in the above sense applies to them.

I am taking an apparently different tack in Chapters 10-12. The heart pumps blood, which is its selected biological function, requiring since Darwin, a selective account. But it also makes heart sounds, and these are not its biological functions, for the heart was not selected to make heart sounds. All this has to do with whether a physicist can "say" what a biological function is, and why hearts exist in the universe, which I think the physicist cannot do - chapter 4. Now Darwin's neat next idea is that a causal property of part of an organism might be of NO use in the current selective environment, but become of use in a different environment, so come to be selected, typically for a new use, or function. These are now called Darwinian preadaptations, without implying any kind of design. Steve Gould called them exaptations. Two examples are the evolution of your middle ear bones from three adjacent jaw bones of an early fish, and the evolution of swim bladders that adjust neutral bouyancy in a water column by adjusting the levels of water and air in the bladder, from lungs of lung fish. In both cases, a new function has arisen in the biosphere. In both cases, these new functions have causal consequences for the further evolution of the biosphere, ie new species, proteins etc. Now the critical question is this: Can we finitely prestate all possible Darwinian preadaptations for all organisms alive now, or even for humans? Noone thinks the answer is "Yes", Greg. Parts of the problem are that we seem to have no way at all of prespecifying what the set of possible selective environments might be, and that RELATIONAL properties among "degrees of freedom" matter - eg the ADJACENCY of the three jaw bones in the fish. Were the 3 bones in the skull, jaw and spine, presumably our middle ear bones would not have evolved by preadaptations. So it seems we cannot prestate the selective conditions for which, among other things, all possible relations among parts of an organism and parts of its environment might be useful for some unspecifiable function.

If this is right, then we cannot do as Newton said, prestate the variables, laws among them, initial and boundary conditions and calculate forward. We do not know the variables, middle ear bones and swim bladders, that will emerge in evolution, and we do not know the boundary conditions, or the "sample space" of the evolutionary process. Thus, I believe that the emergence of preadaptations in biology, economy etc. are partially beyond natural law. More, we cannot make probability statements about them rather like omega, because we do not know the sample space in this case, and because Turing showed the halting problem was undecidable.

I suspect we are both right. Perhaps the two "intelligibilities" of the universe, yours and mine, are connected. Perhaps not. It is not clear to me how to "prove" that Darwinian preadaptations cannot be finitely prestated. I may be wrong, hence in part, this email. Would it be a mathematical proof about what seems to be the real world? An experiment? Then comes my next question: Can one create a mathematical "structure" of some kind for the Adjacent Possible of the biosphere? I just don't see how to do so at all. If not, then, somewhat as you hint, the intelligibility of the universe a la Pythagoras and Galileo, is limited. And then, are my issue of preadaptations and your omega really the same problem? I doubt it because omega has a mathematical structure in the first place, while it is not clear that the adjacent possible of the biosphere has any mathematical structure. And by the way, also the economy, see chapter 11.

I'd love to have your thoughts, Greg. If I am right about no prestatement of the adjacent possible, there may be very novel mathematics hiding in it, for the real universe, at least biosphere and up, unfold in part via such preadaptations - as in the fact that most inventions are used for different purposes than the initial intent - computers for EBay via the web.

Kind regards and hope you have time to think about this. Stu

[Jeff Wild]

Dear Stuart,

Since I am no scientist, I have always read your works from a spiritual perspective. It seems to me you have been writing about God from the beginning. At least you help me think about God more effectively with such wonderful lines as these from Investigations:

“Life is doing something far richer than we may have dreamed, literally something incalculable.” 7

"Blessed proliferating profusion of ways of being." 120

"The universe in its persistent becoming is richer than all our dreams." 139

In your blog posts you have mentioned Spinoza, but I would think that Henri Bergson or Alfred Whitehead are closer to your approach. Are you familar with Bergson's Creative Evolution or any of Whitehead's work that led to process theology?

I look forward to your latest work.

Jeff

[Stuart Kauffman]

Hi Zev, I remember meeting. Thanks for the blog. I am firmly committed in Reinventing the Sacred to a fully natural sense of God. This sense derives from the fact that it appears we cannot prestate Darwinian preadaptations, such as the emergence of swim bladders from lung fish, or the middle ear bones from three adjacent bones in the jaws of an early fish. If we cannot prestate such preadaptations in the biosphere, economy or cultural evolution, then, following Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann where a natural law is a compact description of the regularities of a process, there appears to be no sufficient natural law to describe the emergence of swim bladders in evolution. So the biosphere keeps "popping up" new "variables, like swim bladders, thus we cannot follow Newton and write down the variables, laws among the variables, initial and boundary conditions and solve for the future evolution of the biosphere. We just don't know the variables, eg middle ear bones for hearing, or swim bladders, that will emerge. Now Spinoza held that God was identical to nature. I believe he held a completely deterministic view of the one substance that was nature, hence his God, the God of Einstein, also a determinist, led to reverence for ALL of nature. I am fully happy with reverence for all of nature, but feel, from the above, that at least some "bec0mings" of the universe are partially beyond natural law, so in particular want to associate God with the creativity in nature. For me, Mystery is that unknown which will become actual in the unfolding of the universe. It seems there is a "possible" out in front of us, sometimes we can fully prestate it, sometimes, as in the evolution of the biosphere and economy, it seems we cannot. So Mystery is this unstatable possible. That does not in any way make it supernatural however. That we do n0t know does not imply that what we do not know is supernatural. There are hints in Reinventing the Sacred, chapter 13, where I struggle about responsible free will on the improbable hypothesis that consciousness is a quantum coherent state. The way the "classical world" is now held to emerge is via decoherence, a loss of quantum phase information of a system into the universe. As far as I can tell, for diverse and dense quantum processes, the way the process of decoherence happens is, like Darwinian preadaptations, not open to detailed description of the regularities of the details of the decoherence process. If that could be proven true, then many or most cases of the coming into existence of classical matter from quantum possibilities might also be partially beyond natural law. This is probably - possibly provable, but I am not sure. If true, then even the "becoming of classical matter" from the quantum world is partially beyond natural law. It too becomes mystery, but fully natural none the less. All told, I want to avoid a supernatural God, reality and its becoming are so awesome that they deserve reverence and awe. One can love this God, but this God is not a creator agent and cannot love back. But giving love invites membership in all that is, care, and stewardship to the best of our lijmited knowledge in the face of the mystery of what will become.

[Z'ev Rosenberg]

Stuart,
I've been a fan of your work since "At Home in the Universe". I met you while you were in Santa Fe over the Bios offices at Old Taos Highway a few summers back. We discussed Chinese medicine and chaos theory at the time.

I am excited with this new topic, book and blog. It is very profound material, and a very difficult position for you to take. It is brave for a scientist to tackle G-d in the era of Dawkins and Bennett.

A few thoughts I have while listening to African harp music:

I don't understand why you need to limit G-d to the realm of a one-way personal relationship. Why is it difficult to conceive of a G-d who can relate to us, if you feel that we can relate to Him? You also speak of the realm of Mystery, which means to me that you accept that there are aspects of Godliness that are perhaps beyond our comprehension? Personally, I am comfortable with the paradox of an infinite G-d who is beyond the complete grasp of the human intellect and emotion, but whom we can relate to in our small ways, and a G-d who is both embodied in the universe and transcendent of it.

The inner teachings of the Torah are called 'sod', which Rabbi Chaim Zimmerman translates as 'code'. The inner teachings are called Kabbalah, which means to receive, and are the heart of Jewish teachings about spirituality and the universe. Within these teachings, such as those in the Aryeh Kaplan translation of "Sefer Yetzirah", are concepts that any physicist could relate to, such as the relationship of language to the human mind and how we perceive the universe, cycles of time, creation, and even evolutionary ideas. Unfortunately, I am unable to do justice to these teachings in the company of such intellectual giants as seem to populate the Santa Fe Institute and other such institutions. Nonetheless, in my humble opinion, one cannot understand the Torah or the Bible in its full depth without access to these teachings.

Z'ev Rosenberg

[Stuart Kauffman]

Hi All, I want to closely associate myself with Gordon Kaufman's lyrical and deeply honest statement. There is a sense in which Gordon and I are rather like Spinoza in our views. But Spinoza, like Descartes, saw the universe as determinist, was a "monist", not a dualist, and reasoned that God was identical to natural nature. Einstein, as we know, believed in Spinoza's God. This is not astonishihng as Einstein was the greatest voice for beauty and determinism in his General Relativity where there IS no creativity in the universe. Rather, in his spacetime, all there is are one or more "world lines", geometrical objects with no time in them, no becoming in them, for time has disappeared in GR. This is a well recognized problem. Gordon and I want creativity in the universe. In Reinventing the Sacred, I partially find it in the evolution of the biosphere into its unstatable adajacent possible; so too for the economy and human culture. I then argue that these are partially beyond natual law, and hence creative. However, we face here a deep scientfic issue: whence the creativity? If the universe were deterministic, there seems to be little or none. A way of seeing this is that deterministic systems of differential equations have trajectories in their state spaces that never cross. Each is a unique pathway in state space as time elapses. The only creativity is the future of the deterministic trajectory. ( I overstate, for the future trajectory could correspond to very complex events.) But another option is a failure of determinism, already at the center of quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen interpretation and Born rule, in which the Schrodinger equation propagates waves of mere "possibilities", whose amplitudes squared become the probabilities that specific quantum events are measured by classical appratuses. The puzzle here is how the classical world emerges out of mere possibilities. The old Copenhagen interpretation was the "collapse of the wave function". The newer argument is "decoherence" in which phase information is lost from the quantum system and quantum interference can no longer occur, so the system approaches classicity "for all practical purposes".
Quantum mechanics, with its lack of determinism, may be an important ingredient in the creativity Gordon and I seek. Another which I am currently exploring is the role of what I am calling the "Adjacent Possible", eg of the biosphere and economy, or even complex chemical reaction networks on what I call "vast reaction graphs" with little or no matter on them. In the chemistry case one can cleanly define and describe the "adjacent possible, but, due to quantum effects, may not be able to say how the system behaves, and fluctuations may not damp out. In that case, the detailed behavior of the system may be entirely unpredictable, while larger scale features may be describable by emergent laws. For the biosphere and economy, it appears we cannot even prestate the Adjacent Possible, yet it seems to be shaped by what is currently actually present. In turn, and rather mysteriously, the Adjacent Possible appears to support two "modal" logic statements: If X is NOT in the adjacent possible, it cannot "happen" next, or soon, in some sense of soon. Second, X being IN the Adjacent Possible is a necessary condition for its happen "next" or soon". There is no modal logic I yet know, probably due to ignorance, that discusses this case. However, here "possibility" seems to enter in a fundamental way if I am right that biological evolution and beyond cannot be reduced to physics.
I suspect there may be important issues here. If reductionism and determinism worked, we would know the framework of explanation of all in the universe, no mystery, no creativity, and Stephen Weinberg's explanatory arrows all point downward from societies to people, to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics to the Standard Model and General Relativity. With quantum field theory etc. Weinberg holds to the same claim. I think he is wrong and that reductionism alone is not enough. There appears to be true emergence, and partial "lawlessness". But then, it seems we may have to rethink what science now becomes, let alone how to reunite our entire humanity.

So Gordon, we need to understand this creativity. Stu

[Stuart Kauffman]

Hi All, I want to closely associate myself with Gordon Kaufman's lyrical and deeply honest statement. There is a sense in which Gordon and I are rather like Spinoza in our views. But Spinoza, like Descartes, saw the universe as determinist, was a "monist", not a dualist, and reasoned that God was identical to natural nature. Einstein, as we know, believed in Spinoza's God. This is not astonishihng as Einstein was the greatest voice for beauty and determinism in his General Relativity where there IS no creativity in the universe. Rather, in his spacetime, all there is are one or more "world lines", geometrical objects with no time in them, no becoming in them, for time has disappeared in GR. This is a well recognized problem. Gordon and I want creativity in the universe. In Reinventing the Sacred, I partially find it in the evolution of the biosphere into its unstatable adajacent possible; so too for the economy and human culture. I then argue that these are partially beyond natual law, and hence creative. However, we face here a deep scientfic issue: whence the creativity? If the universe were deterministic, there seems to be little or none. A way of seeing this is that deterministic systems of differential equations have trajectories in their state spaces that never cross. Each is a unique pathway in state space as time elapses. The only creativity is the future of the deterministic trajectory. ( I overstate, for the future trajectory could correspond to very complex events.) But another option is a failure of determinism, already at the center of quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen interpretation and Born rule, in which the Schrodinger equation propagates waves of mere "possibilities", whose amplitudes squared become the probabilities that specific quantum events are measured by classical appratuses. The puzzle here is how the classical world emerges out of mere possibilities. The old Copenhagen interpretation was the "collapse of the wave function". The newer argument is "decoherence" in which phase information is lost from the quantum system and quantum interference can no longer occur, so the system approaches classicity "for all practical purposes".
Quantum mechanics, with its lack of determinism, may be an important ingredient in the creativity Gordon and I seek. Another which I am currently exploring is the role of what I am calling the "Adjacent Possible", eg of the biosphere and economy, or even complex chemical reaction networks on what I call "vast reaction graphs" with little or no matter on them. In the chemistry case one can cleanly define and describe the "adjacent possible, but, due to quantum effects, may not be able to say how the system behaves, and fluctuations may not damp out. In that case, the detailed behavior of the system may be entirely unpredictable, while larger scale features may be describable by emergent laws. For the biosphere and economy, it appears we cannot even prestate the Adjacent Possible, yet it seems to be shaped by what is currently actually present. In turn, and rather mysteriously, the Adjacent Possible appears to support two "modal" logic statements: If X is NOT in the adjacent possible, it cannot "happen" next, or soon, in some sense of soon. Second, X being IN the Adjacent Possible is a necessary condition for its happen "next" or soon". There is no modal logic I yet know, probably due to ignorance, that discusses this case. However, here "possibility" seems to enter in a fundamental way if I am right that biological evolution and beyond cannot be reduced to physics.
I suspect there may be important issues here. If reductionism and determinism worked, we would know the framework of explanation of all in the universe, no mystery, no creativity, and Stephen Weinberg's explanatory arrows all point downward from societies to people, to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics to the Standard Model and General Relativity. With quantum field theory etc. Weinberg holds to the same claim. I think he is wrong and that reductionism alone is not enough. There appears to be true emergence, and partial "lawlessness". But then, it seems we may have to rethink what science now becomes, let alone how to reunite our entire humanity.

So Gordon, we need to understand this creativity. Stu

[Stuart Kauffman]

Hi All, I want to closely associate myself with Gordon Kaufman's lyrical and deeply honest statement. There is a sense in which Gordon and I are rather like Spinoza in our views. But Spinoza, like Descartes, saw the universe as determinist, was a "monist", not a dualist, and reasoned that God was identical to natural nature. Einstein, as we know, believed in Spinoza's God. This is not astonishihng as Einstein was the greatest voice for beauty and determinism in his General Relativity where there IS no creativity in the universe. Rather, in his spacetime, all there is are one or more "world lines", geometrical objects with no time in them, no becoming in them, for time has disappeared in GR. This is a well recognized problem. Gordon and I want creativity in the universe. In Reinventing the Sacred, I partially find it in the evolution of the biosphere into its unstatable adajacent possible; so too for the economy and human culture. I then argue that these are partially beyond natual law, and hence creative. However, we face here a deep scientfic issue: whence the creativity? If the universe were deterministic, there seems to be little or none. A way of seeing this is that deterministic systems of differential equations have trajectories in their state spaces that never cross. Each is a unique pathway in state space as time elapses. The only creativity is the future of the deterministic trajectory. ( I overstate, for the future trajectory could correspond to very complex events.) But another option is a failure of determinism, already at the center of quantum mechanics on the Copenhagen interpretation and Born rule, in which the Schrodinger equation propagates waves of mere "possibilities", whose amplitudes squared become the probabilities that specific quantum events are measured by classical appratuses. The puzzle here is how the classical world emerges out of mere possibilities. The old Copenhagen interpretation was the "collapse of the wave function". The newer argument is "decoherence" in which phase information is lost from the quantum system and quantum interference can no longer occur, so the system approaches classicity "for all practical purposes".
Quantum mechanics, with its lack of determinism, may be an important ingredient in the creativity Gordon and I seek. Another which I am currently exploring is the role of what I am calling the "Adjacent Possible", eg of the biosphere and economy, or even complex chemical reaction networks on what I call "vast reaction graphs" with little or no matter on them. In the chemistry case one can cleanly define and describe the "adjacent possible, but, due to quantum effects, may not be able to say how the system behaves, and fluctuations may not damp out. In that case, the detailed behavior of the system may be entirely unpredictable, while larger scale features may be describable by emergent laws. For the biosphere and economy, it appears we cannot even prestate the Adjacent Possible, yet it seems to be shaped by what is currently actually present. In turn, and rather mysteriously, the Adjacent Possible appears to support two "modal" logic statements: If X is NOT in the adjacent possible, it cannot "happen" next, or soon, in some sense of soon. Second, X being IN the Adjacent Possible is a necessary condition for its happen "next" or soon". There is no modal logic I yet know, probably due to ignorance, that discusses this case. However, here "possibility" seems to enter in a fundamental way if I am right that biological evolution and beyond cannot be reduced to physics.
I suspect there may be important issues here. If reductionism and determinism worked, we would know the framework of explanation of all in the universe, no mystery, no creativity, and Stephen Weinberg's explanatory arrows all point downward from societies to people, to organs to cells to biochemistry to chemistry to physics to the Standard Model and General Relativity. With quantum field theory etc. Weinberg holds to the same claim. I think he is wrong and that reductionism alone is not enough. There appears to be true emergence, and partial "lawlessness". But then, it seems we may have to rethink what science now becomes, let alone how to reunite our entire humanity.

So Gordon, we need to understand this creativity. Stu