Towards a new enlightenment: Kauffman

[Pure]

http://www.stuartkauffman.com/2008/...htenment-and-the-tasks-of-a-natural-religion/


SK is a pioneer in complexity theory, scientist and philosopher on the scope of natural law.

creativity in the biosphere as not reduceable to natural law.

possible re invention of the sense of 'sacred' without religion per se.

ADDED: the whole article is at http://www.we-magazine.net/volume-0...ment-and-the-tasks-of-a-natural-religion_neu/

 

[rgraham666]

What was wrong with the old enlightenment?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I wasn't up to listening to the whole thing but it appears that he is trying, in a very pedantic, boring way, to make a case for mysticism. Hello? It's been around for millenia and is very respectable among Believers.

Admittedly, hierarchies have a hard time of it.

 

[Pure]

rob,

i think the issue from 'old enlightment' [to the new] is the scope of the Newtonian/laplacian program of scientific laws. e.g. around 'emergent properties' and 'pre adaptation.'

what is not at issue, and common to the two enlightments is an absence of supernaturalism, rejection of the 'outside agent' (God of Jewish and Xian traditions).

you might listen to the clip!
===

here are a couple text links and the last to SK's homepage:

http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/zd-Ch.20.html
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html

http://www.icore.ca/research_biocomplex.htm

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I don't know. Mutations are explainable by Newtonian science. Their functional use isn't, but that's just a matter of human perspective, isn't it? That's not really a question for physical science.

He's not going to get anywhere with a god people can't interact with though. I think the sense of the sacredness of nature is already pretty ingrained in the people who care about it.

What he's really talking about with his sense of the sacred is the sense of awe when confronted with the unknown. That's the same whether you believe in God or believe in Nature.

 

[Pure]

a few paras from one of the links

If no natural law suffices to describe the evolution of the biosphere, of technological evolution, of human history, what replaces it? In its place is a wondrous radical creativity without a supernatural Creator. Look out your window at the life teeming about you. All that has been going on is that the sun has been shining on the earth for some 5 billion years. Life is about 3.8 billion years old. The vast tangled bank of life, as Darwin phrased it, arose all on its own. This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. So, too, are human history and human lives. This creativity is stunning, awesome, and worthy of reverence. One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.

Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know. The Enlightenment’s reliance on reason is too narrow a view of how we flourish or flounder. It is important to the Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition that the ancient Greeks relied preeminently on reason to seek, with Plato, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. The ancient Jews, living with their God, relied more broadly on their full humanity.

The ancient Jews and Greeks split the ancient Western world. The Jews, as Paul Johnson wrote in his History of the Jews, were the best historians of the ancient world, stubbornly commemorating the situated history of a people and their universal, single God, our Abrahamic God. With this part of our Western Hebraic-Hellenic tradition comes our Western sense of history and progress, alive in the creativity of human history. In contrast, Greek thought was universalist and sought natural laws. The Greeks were the first scientists in the West.

If both natural law and ceaseless creativity partially beyond natural law are necessary for understanding our world, and if we as whole human beings live in this real world of law and unknowable creativity, these two ancient strands of Western civilization can reunite in ways we cannot foresee. Out of this union can arise a healing of the long split between science and the humanities, and the schism between pure reason and practical life, both subjects of interest to Immanuel Kant. Science is not, as Galileo claimed, the only pathway to truth. History, the situated richness of the humanities, and the law are true as well. This potential union invites a fuller understanding of ourselves creating our histories and our sacred, as we create our lives.

Across our globe, about half of us believe in a Creator God. Some billions of us believe in an Abrahamic supernatural God, and some in the ancient Hindu gods. Wisdom traditions such as Buddhism often have no gods. About a billion of us are secular but bereft of our spirituality and reduced to being materialist consumers in a secular society. If we the secular hold to anything it is to “humanism.” But humanism, in a narrow sense, is too thin to nourish us as human agents in the vast universe we partially cocreate. I believe we need a domain for our lives as wide as reality. If half of us believe in a supernatural God, science will not disprove that belief.

We need a place for our spirituality, and a Creator God is one such place. I hold that it is we who have invented God, to serve as our most powerful symbol. It is our choice how wisely to use our own symbol to orient our lives and our civilizations. I believe we can reinvent the sacred. We can invent a global ethic, in a shared space, safe to all of us, with one view of God as the natural creativity in the universe.

~~~




[Copyright © 2008 by Stuart Kauffman. Excerpted from the Preface and First Chapter of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.]

 

[Stella_Omega]

He sounds like... me! Or, I sound like him, or we seem to share the same sense of the failure of culture in regards to human needs as they really are.

Interesting, thanks, Pure

My quibbles; what Kauffman is calling "beyond natural law" is a misstatement, IMO; what he means is "Which hasn't been found yet, and might not be in our lifetimes." And what, exactly, he means by "natural creativity" is undefined-- but that might be because you didn't quote that particular passage?

He's right; the cultural failure of the Age Of Reason is that many of us cannot be comfortable with the unknowable. Conventional religion is a pat on the hand, a way of reassuring ourselves that someone knows, even if we don't, and therefore it's okay.

The big problem will be, as it is right now, that this new god will have to be ever-redefined. Will humans be able to cope with that, given the survivalist nature of belief?

 

[Liar]

He's right; the cultural failure of the Age Of Reason is that many of us cannot be comfortable with the unknowable.

The problem with the unknowable is that it's often confused with the unknown. And history has shown us, over and over again, that what we thought was unknowable was merely unknown, stuff we hadn't figured out yet.

What people need to realize, is that as long as they define anything beyond their horizon as "mystic" or "divine", they are going to have their notion of said divinty shattered, as the human race figure out more and more stuff.

In order to accept a mystic aspect to this world, it therefore has to lie beyond anything that we can possibly fathom science making us know in the future. And then some.

I can, philosophically speaking, fathom the possibility of calculating God. Where do I turn for unknowables?

 

[cantdog]

He sounds like... me! Or, I sound like him, or we seem to share the same sense of the failure of culture in regards to human needs as they really are.

Interesting, thanks, Pure

My quibbles; what Kauffman is calling "beyond natural law" is a misstatement, IMO; what he means is "Which hasn't been found yet, and might not be in our lifetimes." And what, exactly, he means by "natural creativity" is undefined-- but that might be because you didn't quote that particular passage?

He's right; the cultural failure of the Age Of Reason is that many of us cannot be comfortable with the unknowable. Conventional religion is a pat on the hand, a way of reassuring ourselves that someone knows, even if we don't, and therefore it's okay.

The big problem will be, as it is right now, that this new god will have to be ever-redefined. Will humans be able to cope with that, given the survivalist nature of belief?

He already said reason wasn't ever going to be sufficient. Yet here you go, insisting on a better definition. You talk a good game about the limits of the Enlightenment, but you want to reduce to reason all the same, else why insist on a stark definition?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

The problem with the unknowable is that it's often confused with the unknown. And history has shown us, over and over again, that what we thought was unknowable was merely unknown, stuff we hadn't figured out yet.

What people need to realize, is that as long as they define anything beyond their horizon as "mystic" or "divine", they are going to have their notion of said divinty shattered, as the human race figure out more and more stuff.

In order to accept a mystic aspect to this world, it therefore has to lie beyond anything that we can possibly fathom science making us know in the future. And then some.

I can, philosophically speaking, fathom the possibility of calculating God. Where do I turn for unknowables?

Hence the correct definition of God being The Great Mystery. It was a severe theological error on Thomas Aquinas part to attempt to logically establish the existance of God. Thomas Bradwardine had a more tenable approach, stating that the nature of God is not only unknown but unknowable and therefore speculation in that vein was a waste of time. What people should do instead is admit that they will never understand God and simply work as hard a possible to understand His creation. Our minds are not great enough to conceive of what created us.

 

[Liar]

Hence the correct definition of God being The Great Mystery. It was a severe theological error on Thomas Aquinas part to attempt to logically establish the existance of God. Thomas Bradwardine had a more tenable approach, stating that the nature of God is not only unknown but unknowable and therefore speculation in that vein was a waste of time. What people should do instead is admit that they will never understand God and simply work as hard a possible to understand His creation. Our minds are not great enough to conceive of what created us.

Once upon a time, it was common consensus that our minds were not great enough to understand weather. It was not seen as a creation of the gods, but as a divinity in itself. And to try and figure it out logically, was seen as futile, or even worse, heresy.

What's the difference now?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Once upon a time, it was common consensus that our minds were not great enough to understand weather. It was not seen as a creation of the gods, but as a divinity in itself. And to try and figure it out logically, was seen as futile, or even worse, heresy.

What's the difference now?

The difference is that by parsing creation into knowable bits we have developed a reasonable (and only reasonable) understanding of that part of it called 'weather'. But to attempt to use the same 'bit-piecing' to the entire Cosmos is hubris. The Whole is greater than any of its parts.

 

[Liar]

The difference is that by parsing creation into knowable bits we have developed a reasonable (and only reasonable) understanding of that part of it called 'weather'. But to attempt to use the same 'bit-piecing' to the entire Cosmos is hubris. The Whole is greater than any of its parts.

I'd hafta disagree. It's by aiming for knowing everything that we end up knowing something along the way. Saying "we shouldn't try figuring out X, because it's beyond out limits", amounts to nothing but building a dogmatic wall.

If there is a god, he made us relentlessly curious for a reason. And if it's impossible to understand the Cosmos, then so be it. But if you can'yt know the Cosmos, you can't really know that you can't know it either. I'd say that that limit itself, and where that limit is, is the only unknowable that is really in play. At least it's damn good excersize to try.

 

[Pure]

i don't think that SK is suggesting worship of the Great Mystery.

he sees the universe as *self organizing.* there is nothing external or supernatural. (or if so, there's nothing that can be said about it.)

i think the point is to have a *neutral* terminology, that may not suit the fundamentalists or 'neo atheists'. there being proposed a kind of indwelling (immanent) creative principle.

the case of the weather is actually a prime one for complexity and chaos theory. because of 'sensitivity initial conditions', longer term predictions are very risky.

in fact the stronger cases may be with biology, since there is development of complexity in 'far from equilibrium' situations (prigogine). there is no reason to question the overall increase of entropy, but living creatures, for a time, and in a local situation, go against the gradient, so to say.

he is, of course, suggesting a reverence for life. 'believers' killing each other is not the way to keep the planet going.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I'd hafta disagree. It's by aiming for knowing everything that we end up knowing something along the way. Saying "we shouldn't try figuring out X, because it's beyond out limits", amounts to nothing but building a dogmatic wall.

If there is a god, he made us relentlessly curious for a reason. And if it's impossible to understand the Cosmos, then so be it. But if you can'yt know the Cosmos, you can't really know that you can't know it either. I'd say that that limit itself, and where that limit is, is the only unknowable that is really in play. At least it's damn good excersize to try.

Which is exactly the point. Understand the creation. Beyond the creation is the Creator who is beyond understanding. However, we are, as you pointed out, made relentlessly curious. Thus we can possibly believe that understanding the creation may well be our purpose from the Beginning.

 

[Stella_Omega]

He already said reason wasn't ever going to be sufficient. Yet here you go, insisting on a better definition. You talk a good game about the limits of the Enlightenment, but you want to reduce to reason all the same, else why insist on a stark definition?

Insufficient for what? I agree that Reason, with a capital R, isn't sufficient for human happiness. But it's an imperative when we are quantifying things-- like the amount of knowledge we do or don't have.

I hardly think "not yet" is in any way stark, to me it's the most optimistic two words in my vocabulary! And, as Liar points out;

The problem with the unknowable is that it's often confused with the unknown. And history has shown us, over and over again, that what we thought was unknowable was merely unknown, stuff we hadn't figured out yet.

Bear, by being so certain that there is a creator-- you've defined "him." Made him sentient, and male, and declared him unknowable.

I say-- just until we catch up. Like thunder.

 

[Pure]

the second url is particularly good

sk interview on complexity.

http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2001/05/complexity/


summary review and critique of sk
http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho32.htm


--
self organization theory is quite diffferent from so called 'intelligent design' theory which postuluates "Intelligence" outside of nature (aka God) as the source of 'design' in nature.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Insufficient for what? I agree that Reason, with a capital R, isn't sufficient for human happiness. But it's an imperative when we are quantifying things-- like the amount of knowledge we do or don't have.

I hardly think "not yet" is in any way stark, to me it's the most optimistic two words in my vocabulary! And, as Liar points out;

Hence my position that human purpose is basically to keep trying to find out. For the last about two hundred years the best way we've had to do that is quantification. In the future that may change but for now, it's still the best.

 

[Liar]

Which is exactly the point. Understand the creation. Beyond the creation is the Creator who is beyond understanding.

And my inquisitive human mind immediately asks. "Says who? And why? And why should I accept that?"

 

[voluptuary_manque]

And my inquisitive human mind immediately asks. "Says who? And why? And why should I accept that?"

At which point you become a theologian. Rather a tough call for a journalist, no?

Actually, the answer is 'by definition'.

 

[Liar]

At which point you become a theologian. Rather a tough call for a journalist, no?

Uh, I don't follow.

What I say is, I do not know, and I do not know if I ever could know. But I can't accept that there's an arbitrary limit to what I can know. That limit, "the Creator is unknowable" is a theologic position, no? All we can know is that the truth about the creator is unknown. Then we can claim that this is because we actually can't know. But that's, to me, an authoritarian religious dogma.

Oh, and you say "by definition". Whose definition? Man's definition. (Whose house? Run's house! Eh, never mind.) Which, by definition, can be wrong.

And finally, if I accepted theat there are questions that are fultile to ask, I shouldn't be a journalist.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

It's kind of silly anyhow. Scientific understanding is understanding of the most basic sort: mechanistic, materialistic, and superficial. It supplies no meaning. Meaning can only come from theology and that's always been true, even before Kauffman.

Science can tell us that all the atoms in our body were made in stars billions of years ago. But what we make of that fact -- what meaning that has for us -- that's a theological question, whether we're religious or atheists, and it's always been that way.

I don't see where there's anything new in his philosophy.

 

[Pure]

?

doc Meaning can only come from theology and that's always been true, even before Kauffman.

you're waxing metaphoric on us, doc, to put it charitably. lots of folks with no God or gods (and hence no theology) find meanings in their lives.

kauffman's enterprise is solidly on a scientific basis. self organization and self ordering phenomena are studied in chemistry and biology, eg. by nobel prize winners (Chemistry) prigogine and eigen. ever read them?

the view of science as opposed to or set apart from theology [your view], or facts as opposed to mystical experiences [as asserted by other posters] is rather counter to what Kauffman is trying to do, which might be described as reaching a rapprochement in *understanding* between science and spiritual (not necessarily God-related) approaches.

but thanks for dropping by!

 

[Pure]

"order for free"; self organization

sk: Think of a wiring diagram that has ten thousand light bulbs, each of which has inputs from two other light bulbs. That's all I'm going to tell you. You pick the inputs to each bulb at random, and put connecting wires between them, and then assign one of the possible switching rules to each of the light bulbs at random. One rule might be that a light bulb turns on at the next moment if both of its inputs are on at the previous moment. Or it might turn on if both of its inputs are off.

[[see links at http://cell-auto.com/
example at
http://texturegarden.com/java/rd/plugin/index.html
fractal drainage patterns:
http://fd.alife.co.uk/model/plugin/index.html
see also cellular automata demonstrations at
http://www.rennard.org/alife/english/entree.html
see 'game of life' [conway] related software
]]

If you go with your intuition, or if you ask outstanding physicists, you'll reach the conclusion that such a system will behave chaotically. You're dealing with a random wiring diagram, with random logic — a massively complex, disordered, parallel- processing network. You'd think that in order to get such a system to do something orderly you'd have to build it in a precise way. That intuition is fundamentally wrong. The fact that it's wrong is what I call "order for free."[...]

By spontaneous order, or order for free, I mean this penchant that complex systems have for exhibiting convergent rather than divergent flow, so that they show an inherent homeostasis, and then, too, the possibility that natural selection can mold the structure of systems so that they're poised between these two flows, poised between order and chaos. It's precisely systems of this kind that will provide us with a macroscopic law that defines ecosystems, and I suspect it may define economic systems as well.

While it may sound as if "order for free" is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it's not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don't think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn't have gotten right.

One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There's no body of theory in science that does this.

 

[Pure]

self organization

benard cells

see wiki article and such images as the following:

http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgu...8&prev=/images?q=benard+cells&um=1&hl=en&sa=N

http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgu...0&prev=/images?q=benard+cells&um=1&hl=en&sa=N