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Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.
Some frontier science with a goodwill message
| Customer Rating:   | "Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental changeFITNESS-- in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance." George Wald, Nobel Prize winner.
This book has two main general ideas: One is that reductionism, although an extremely successful philosophy of science, does not suffice to explain reality. The other is that the ceaseless creativity of the universe, that part that escapes reductionism, should be revered as "the sacred". Kauffman calls this "God" in an effort of "rapprochement" between agnostics and religious people, since he envisages a future global civilization.
The first idea is developed mainly in the context of evolution in the chapter titled "The Nonreducibility of Biology to Physics", although some physicists, such as Laughlin, are also mentioned, temperature being a classical example of emergent physical phenomena. Kauffman claims that evolution cannot be predicted and, as we see in the citation above, he is not alone. He makes similar claims for the economy, human mind, human history, our legal system, etc.
The second idea is not that new either and Kauffman himself admits that his idea of God is similar to Spinoza's.
Kauffman tries to search for some general laws for emergent phenomena and he hints some of them, including some mathematics of graph theory and random Boolean networks and the use of some concepts such as "minimal molecular autonomous agent". He says, for example: "This raises the fascinating but unproven possibility that , due to natural selection, life achieves a maximization of the product of total work done multiplied by the diversity of work done by being dynamically critical. Then cells would be maximally efficient in carrying out the widest variety of tasks with the maximum total work accomplished, given energy resources available".
The author also suggests that the origin of life might have been systems of autocatalytic molecules and thinks that "self-organization, order for free, is as much a part of evolution and natural selection as historically frozen accidents".
The most controversial chapter, as Kauffman readily admits, is the one about the quantum brain in which he takes the idea of Penrose, which has not had many followers so far. Kauffman believes that the human mind is not algorithmic. Euler's creation of topology by solving the Könisberg's bridges problem is an example, according to Kauffman, of the non algorithmic operation of the human brain. He ads that computations are devoid of meaning, they are purely syntactic. This flies in the face of the strong artificial intelligence theory of consciousness. Kauffman says that meaning derives from agency. Although a controversial idea, a quantum brain, however, would help to solve such hard problems as free will since quantum mechanics is an acausal theory.
The author believes that the conscious mind is a persistently poised quantum coherent-decoherent system, forever propagating quantum coherent behavior, yet forever also decohering to classical behavior. Recent studies seem to prove that chlorophyll maintains a quantum coherent state for a very long time compared to chemical-bond-vibration frequencies. So may be this hypothesis of the quantum brain is not so far fetched.
The last chapters are dedicated to ethics and to an effort to reach out to religious people and Kauffman is aware that convergence of agnostics and religious people can take generations and that we may never fully agree.
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Brilliant and flawed
| Customer Rating: | Like my fellow neurologist Dr. Lasker (whom I remember from days of yore when I was a resident at UCSD--hi Bruce!) I find much to admire but some things to criticize in this book. Some of Kauffman's main ideas are as follows:
1) At each level of organization (physical/chemical/biological), new laws emerge which are inherently unpredictable from first principles of physics. The analogy here is from Godel's famous theorem that in any system of mathematics there are true statements that can not be derived from the initial axioms. If such a statement is taken as a new axiom, more true but unprovable statements result. The new emergent laws are like such true mathematical statements. Thus reductionism is doomed to failure.
2)One of these emergent laws is that complex systems tend to self-organize, and that in particular living systems organize themselves such that they reside on the boundary between order and chaos. Kaufmann extends this analysis from an individual cell to other complex areas including economics and even legal and ethical systems.
3) There is no "Creator God" but only the endless creativity embodied in the universe where complex systems emerge spontaneously along with their new principles of organization. The laws of physics are never contravened; there are no miracles--yet the systems are not predictable from first principles.
4) This natural endless creativity itself can be called "God" and can be the basis for a new global system of ethics and religion.
I like these ideas, and along the way Kauffman provides some really interesting examples, like his speculations on how life may have first evolved from systems of catalytic peptides and RNA oligomers, and how the subsequent use by organisms of "preadaptations" in evolution are inherently unpredictable from physics.
What I didn't like were his speculations on the quantum nature of consciousness (which he admits are scientifically the weakest point of his book, though it is the longest chapter). The whole argument--that consciousness depends on decoherence of a poised, enormously complex quantum wave generated essentially by the entire brain--falls down from the simple observation that small, very specific brain lesions (in the brainstem reticular activating system)abolish consciousness. It seems to me that attempts to explain this clinical fact would result in absurd Ptolemic-like epicycles. I agree with his footnote that this chapter could be skipped by the reader with no harm done to his basic ideas.
I also agree that the book could use a heavier editing hand--Kauffman tends to repeat himself often, for example with how all the unpredictable ways a screwdriver could be used (to pry open a lid, jam a door etc.) could not possibly be predicted by first principles of physics, which he employs in detail several times.
But overall I think it's a great and important book that everybody should read and ponder.
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A Fourth Law of Thermodynamics?
| Customer Rating: | Stuart Kauffman gave two lectures to our medical school class (U. of Pennsylvania) twenty or so years ago and I have been following his journey every since. I was struck, at the time, at his willingness to wonder at the complexity of ontogeny and admit how much was not understood. An excellent book by all standards, but as one reviewer said, to be fully critical one would need to be an expert in physics, biology, computers and philosophy.
One question, however. Practicing medicine, it seems that hypotheses must be falsifiable. On page 147, chapter Breaking the Galilean Spell, Kauffman says, "It is an amusing fact that scientists who eschew philosophy invariably espouse a philosophy of science that is long outdated. Most scientists today will somberly argue that hypotheses must be falsifiable. But science and real life are more complex." He goes on to describe the philosophy of W. V. O. Quine "the holism in science thesis." "I am not a Popperian," says Kauffman. OK, but didn't Popper support coming up with a hypothesis, and then trying to prove it wrong?(the scientific method?) Any clarification on this point would be helpful.
Also, this would be a great book for a science book club. Not only do we confront how much we don't know, as in the medical school lectures, but how much we ultimately can we know. "We must live our lives forward, into that which is only partially knowable." (P. 282) |
Living Life Forward, With Courage and Faith.
| Customer Rating: | In a conversation I had with Stuart Kauffman on Star Island, NH in 2006 I told him that I had found his latest book--At Home in the Universe at that time--a difficult read. He responded that that made him sad because he had tried his best to keep it simple. I assured him that that was my problem and not his.
He obviously has done a better job in his latest book, Reinventing the Sacred, in writing for the non-expert audience. While portions of the book were difficult for me, eg, the chapter on the "Quantum Brain", the book overall is much more comprehensible to me personally. I'm sure that others with a deeper background in complexity theory and science will find the book very understandable.
The author shows courage in presenting a new (to me) scientific paradigm--emergence--and in offering what are, in his own words, highly controversial suggestions and potential methods of investigating these suggestions. Graduate students and post-docs should find a wealth of ideas for future research in this book.
As a religious naturalist I appreciate the author's writing of "naturalizing the sacred" and suggesting that he is only the latest of many thinkers who would like to hold on to the god symbol because of its power accumulated over the centuries and across cultures. Kauffman's erudition and graciousness come through in his writing, especially in the latter parts of the book as he pleads for a better understanding of our "evolving ethics" that hopefully will lead to a desperately needed "global ethic". Because we cannot foresee the future--a key feature of emergence--we must nevertheless "live our lives forward, with courage and faith." I think I will.
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Got to have this book
| Customer Rating: | | I heard this author interviewed on the radio and ordered the book from the library. Three pages in I knew I had to own the book so I could underline and write in the margins. It's a book to dialog with. |
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