What Should We Be Worried About?

CHILDREN OF NEWTON AND MODERNITY

STUART A. KAUFFMAN

Founding director, Institute for Biocomplexity & Informatics, University of Calgary; author, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion

The great early sociologist Max Weber wrote, “With Newton we became disenchanted and entered Modernity.” I believe that Weber was right: We remain disenchanted and are inarticulately lost in Modernity. Many of us seem to sense the end of something—perhaps a futile meaninglessness in our Modernity.

Was Weber right? And how is it based on science? Yes, Weber was right, and our disenchantment remains because, at least in part, we remain Newton’s children.

Before Newton, in the previous two centuries in Europe, we had the black and white magi. Kepler was the last of the white magi, hoping the Platonic solids would state the orbits of the planets—only to surpass that, and Aristotle’s certainty that orbits were perfect (thus circles), when he discovered that the planetary orbits were ellipses.

But the black magi sought occult knowledge, to stand Nature on her head and wrest their due, a misguided use of God’s promise to Adam in Genesis. In those centuries, we lived with magic and were enchanted.

Newton changed everything with his three laws of motion, universal gravitation, and his invention of differential and integral calculus. Consider seven billiard balls rolling on a billiard table. What will they do? Newton taught us to measure initial conditions of positions and momenta of the balls, the boundary conditions of the table, then write the forces between the balls (and walls) using differential-equation forms of his laws of motion. Then, said Newton, we were to integrate his equations of motion to obtain the forever trajectories of the balls—ignoring friction for the moment. But integration is deduction of the consequences of the differential equations, and deduction is logical entailment. So Newton, in what I’ll call the Newtonian Paradigm, gave us both classical physics and an entirely entailed becoming of physical systems.

With the Marquis de Laplace, a bit more than a century later, we obtain the view that were all the positions and momenta of all the particles in the universe known, a giant computer in the sky, the Laplacian Demon, could, using Newton’s laws, calculate the entire entailed future and past of the universe. This is the birth of modern reductionism in physics, Weinberg’s Dream of a Final Theory that will entail all that becomes in the universe.

Quantum mechanics does not change this fundamental view. In place of deterministic, entailed trajectories, we have, from the Schrödinger equation, the entailed trajectory of a probability distribution, obtained as the squares of the amplitudes of the Schrödinger linear wave equation. In modern physics—general relativity and quantum mechanics—all that becomes in the universe is entailed. Nothing novel can arise. And, profoundly, we remain disenchanted. There can be no natural magic.

From Newton we get the Enlightenment, our Age of Reason, thence the Industrial Revolution, and then the rise of Modernity. We remain disenchanted.

I claim that—at least for the living, evolving world; the evolving biosphere, human economy, legal systems, culture, and history—no laws at all entail the becoming of these worlds into their forever newly emerging but un-pre-statable “adjacent possible opportunities,” which, in evolution, are not achieved by the “action” of natural selection. Nor in human life are these adjacent possible opportunities typically “achieved” by human intent.

Because these evolutionary processes typically cannot be pre-stated, the very phase space of biological, economic, cultural, and legal evolution keeps changing in un-pre-statable ways. In physics, we can always pre-state the phase space, hence can write laws of motion, hence can integrate them to obtain the entailed becoming of the physical system. But because in the evolution of life, and human life, the very phase space changes in un-pre-statable ways, we can write no laws of motion. Nor can we noncircularly pre-state the boundary conditions on this evolution, so we have neither laws of motion nor their boundary conditions and so cannot integrate the entailed trajectories of the laws of motion (which we do not have anyway).

To show why we cannot pre-state the evolution of the biosphere, I start in a strange place: Please list for me all the uses of a screwdriver. Well, to screw in a screw, open a can of paint, wedge a door open (or shut), stab an assailant, tie to a stick to make a fish spear, rent the spear to locals for 5 percent of the catch….

Here seem to be the new and essential issues: (1) The uses of a screw driver are indefinite in number; (2) these uses, unlike the integers, are in no way naturally orderable.

But these two premises imply that no effective procedure, or algorithm, can list all the uses of a screw driver. This is the famous frame problem in algorithmic computer science, unsolved since Turing and his machine.

But all that has to happen in the evolution of a bacterium in, say, some new environment is that a molecular screwdriver “finds a use” that enhances the fitness of the bacterium and that there be heritable variance for that “use.” Then natural selection will “pull out” this new use by selecting at the level of the bacterium, not the molecular screwdriver.

The profound implication of the newly selected bacterium with the molecular screwdriver is that this evolutionary step changes the very phase space of evolution in an un-pre-statable way. Hence we can write no laws of motion for this evolution, nor can we pre-state the niche boundary conditions noncircularly, so we could not even integrate the laws of motion we cannot write in the first place. Since we cannot list all the uses of the molecular screwdriver, we do not know the sample space of evolution.

Evolution of the biosphere and, a fortiori, of the human economy, legal systems, culture, and history, are entailed by no laws at all. True novelty can arise, beyond the Newtonian Paradigm broken beyond the watershed of life.

Re-enchantment, a path beyond Modernity, is open to us.