Quest For A Unified Theory

Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Wolfgang Hofkirchner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134574865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1999. Volume 13 in the 13-volume set titled World Futures General Evolution Studies with a common focus of the emerging field of general evolutionary theory. This volume will expand across disciplines where scholars from new fields will contribute books that propose general evolution theory in novel contexts. The essays are structured with five topics: Approaches to Unification; Concepts of Information; Self-Organizing Systems; Life and Consciousness; Society and Technology.

1:

A Note on Evolution

ERVIN LASZLO

Everybody knows the meaning of ‘evolution’. Children know it as the theory that man descended from the monkeys and not from Adam and Eve. Adults know it as the theory of Darwin, that all living species had a common origin. Biologists know it as the ‘modern synthesis’, the neo-Darwinian integration of biological theories in which mutation and natural selection account for the variation and emergence of species.

All these conceptions are true, as far as they go. None go as far as the meaning of ‘evolution’ in the sense of the currently emerging paradigm of scientific thought. In this sense the concept of evolution goes beyond the origins of humanity; beyond the origins and development of all living species. It embraces the patterns and dynamics of change in the cosmos as well as in the living world; in the history of human culture and society no less than in the history of life on earth. In its emerging meaning evolution is not only the evolution of living species but the evolution of all things that emerge, persist, and change or decay in the known universe. It is evolution in the generalized sense of the term, and the theory that describes it is GET: general evolution theory.

Now ‘evolution’ is not a newly invented concept—it comes from the Latin evolvere, meaning to unfold. It was first applied, erroneously as it turned out, to the development—or ‘unfolding’—of the full-grown organism from the minute homunculus that was presumed to exist, fully formed, in the male sperm or in the female egg. Later the concept of evolution became identified with the theory of Darwin and the field of macrobiology. Notwithstanding the encompassing evolutionary philosophies of Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead, and Teilhard de Chardin, and the misguided attempts of Social Darwinists to make the struggle for survival in the human sphere into a social and political doctrine of modern society, evolution remained restricted essentially to biological theory—until, that is, a group of new disciplines that came to be collectively known as ‘sciences of complexity’ entered the scene. These disciplines, which include general system theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, dynamics, autopoietical system theory, as well as catastrophe, chaos, and dynamical system theory and, above all, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, began to describe irreversible processes of change and transformation in a rigorous fashion. Their findings proved to have application to a wide range of phenomena, from physics to chemistry, from biology to ecology, and from historiography to psychology, sociology and the allied social sciences such as organization and management theory and the theory of international relations.

The realization that change is irreversible in nature as well as in certain fields of human and social development and, even more, the recognition that such change exhibits analogous dynamic patterns in domains that are seemingly entirely different, led to a systematic search for commonalities that would underlie its various manifestations. Invariances in the dynamic and formal aspects of complex systems were actively researched in general system theory and cybernetics since mid-century but were centered mainly on processes of self-preservation, operating by means of self-correcting negative feedback. Processes of self-transformation, that is, fundamental and irreversible change, came into the focus of investigation in the 1960s as Prigogine, Katchalsky, Curran, de Groot, Nicolis and others began to publish their pathbreaking theories. At about the same time the new cosmology made its appearance in the work of Shapley, Weinberg, Guth, Hawking and others, and proved to be a fertile field for the exploration of continuities between the evolution of physical structures in the universe and the structures of the living world here on earth. The study of irreversible change was reinforced by new developments, such as the topological theories of Thom and Zeeman, and the chaos theory elaborated by Birkhof, Rössler, Abraham, Shaw, and others on the basis of the pioneering work of Edward Lorenz in meteorology and Benoit Mandelbrot in mathematics. As Peter Allen and the Brussels school began to extend the theories of irreversible thermodynamics to the living and to the social spheres, and Maturana and Varela began to investigate cognitive processes in light of autopoietic system theory, the stage was set for a thorough exploration of the phenomenon of evolution in its full breadth, from cosmos to culture. Chaisson in cosmology, Artigiani and Eisler in history, Csanyi, Salthe, and Corliss in the life sciences, Loye and Schull in psychology, Ceruti and Bocchi in philosophy, Banathy in human development and education theory, and Salk in its general human and social implications, are among the pioneers in this field. My own work over the past years has been devoted to the creation of a general theory that goes beyond the exclusively biology-oriented modern synthesis to join the developmental aspects of cosmology with similar aspects of biology, and the human and social sciences.

As a new paradigm, evolution satisfies a basic ideal of science. Science, in turn, responds to an age-old aspiration of the conscious mind: to search for meaning underlying the chaotic welter of everyday experience. The search for meaning is constant and continuous—all of us engage in it during all our waking hours; the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science; in the contemplation of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled with awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence is as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation.

The search for meaning takes many forms; many kinds of meanings can be found. It is up to us which ones to accept. Our choice is determined by the criteria for meaning that we choose to adopt. Science does not differ from art and religion in intrinsic meaningfulness, but it does differ in its criteria of acceptability. These criteria are stated in the method of science; it is by adherence to its method that scientists admit or reject concepts and hypoth-eses. The method of science involves hypotheses that are tested against experience— against direct observation or the reading of instruments—with the proviso that the test be repeatable at all times and by all people in identical circumstances. And if a hypothesis is borne out by experience, it is compared with alternative hypotheses and is accepted only if it explains more with less: only if it applies to a wider range of phenomena with fewer assumptions than any other. Einstein said it clearly: “we are seeking for the simplest possible system of thought which will bind together the observed facts”. [The World As I See It, 1934] Art, religion and non-scientific systems of thought in general, do not have to respond to these particular criteria. They have their own criteria, their own methods of validation. Not everything that people play on an instrument is great music; not every configuration of paint that they dab on a canvas is great art; not every intuition of a higher reality is religion.

The way science derives meaning from experience is not necessarily better than any other; in some respects it is more limited and hence less satisfactory. But science excels in one respect at least: it is the system of thought that is the most consistent, and the most thoroughly tested and hence reliable. If a hypothesis is not public and testable, it is not science; and if it is not the most parsimonious, the most coherent and embracing of all that are advanced it is not valid science.

Given the restrictions on acceptability imposed by the method of science, it is indeed remarkable that it could make enormous progress in constructing the stream of immediate experience into a world that, while often abstract, is nevertheless consistent, minimally burdened with a priori assumptions, and embracing of a growing range of phenomena.

The unity that contemporary science seeks and increasingly finds is not in the form of a fundamental element from which the manifest diversity of the world is built up, and to which it can be reduced. Rather, it is in the form of the fundamental pattern that appears in ever more varied, more diverse transformations. The key concept is not a substance, it is not even the form of a substance. It is not any form or formula of physics or biology, but a pattern that transcends every empirical discipline and embraces them all. To use the classical Greek expressions, the ‘one’ is not the form of Being but the form of Becoming. In modern terms it is not the form of the brick but the form of the building. And in the terminology of science it is not an element, a cell, or some other ‘basic’ unit but the pattern of irreversible change manifest in all systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The key concept is the invariant pattern of evolution.

It is a source of the deepest wonder that this pattern of change, the pattern of evolution, exhibits a basic unity and consistency. After all, this need not have been the case: nature is not constrained to be logical. Yet there is logic in nature, and unity. There is an inherent order that underlies and interrelates all the phenomenal orders that appear in an almost infinite variety. There is, in the pattern traced by nature evolving, an order that repeats, an invariance that is conserved. The ultimate ‘one’ that underlies the experienced ‘many’ is the invariance in the evolution of complexity in physical nature, in the living world, and in the world of humankind.

What, precisely, is the nature of this invariance? It is, I believe, (as does David Bohm) the order of change itself. It is the order of orders; the order that orders exhibit when they emerge in the universe. It is the order of evolution. Evolution is truly an unfolding, but not of things or substances but of orders. The order inherent in the physical universe unfolded first, appearing already at the first 10^–33 second that marked the end of ‘Planck-time’—and the beginning of the cosmic processes that still hold sway in today’s universe. The order that arose some ten or twelve billion years later was the biophysical and biological order exhibited by self-replicating and self-sustaining thermodynamically open systems basking in a rich flow of energy on suitable planetary surfaces. And the order that precipitated from these higher-level orders on our own planet is the order of the human world, the order wrought by thought and feeling and intuition, and expressed in the societies and cultures created by thinking and feeling human beings.

It used to be thought—and it still is thought by ‘pragmatic’ specialists who willingly wear the blindfolds of their specialities— that there is no discernible relation between the manifest orders of the physical, the living, and the human worlds. It is practical and efficient to think so as long as ad hoc assumptions work—and they work as long as one is digging near the surface of phenomena where almost anything that he turns up is new and significant. The economist investigating the effect of a change in the money-supply on external trade has no need to worry about the evolution of galaxies, nor about the way in which human societies have evolved from hominid tribes. The biologist at pains to understand the influence of irradiation on the dynamics of phase change in the genome need not concern himself with nuclear processes in the interior of stars. But the mind that seeks order in experience is not halted at the boundaries of disciplinary specialities. It cannot help asking if there is not some connection between these seemingly diverse processes. Is there not an order that connects the emergence of living systems on the surface of certain planets with the formation of the planets themselves? Is there not an order that relates the emergence of societies populated by interest-conscious economic actors with the mutation of genomes in the phenotype?

These and similar questions seem arcane; any answer we might give to them would appear far-fetched. Yet the remarkable, indeed the momentous, fact in the development of the contemporary sciences is that such questions not only can be answered, but that the answer we can give to them is coherent and unitary. Evolution, we now see, repeats itself. It is not that it is the same in the different domains, but that its basic dynamic and formative features are invariant. The basic descriptions that we can now give of the processes of evolution remain unchanged as we move from the physical to the biological, and from the biological to the socio-cultural realms. There are general laws of evolution, and these general laws refer to invariant patterns appearing in diverse transformations. They are the warp and woof of the general theory of evolution.

The recognition that, underneath the great diversity of empirical phenomena there is a fundamental invariance, an order that governs the unfolding of order in the universe, inspires the same depth of awe and wonder as great art, and great religious or mystical experience and intuition. At long last we may be coming face to face with the reality that the human mind has perennially sought and occasionally glimpsed, but never truly grasped. We may now be realizing the inspiration of the artist and the intuition of the mystic as we realize the ambition of the scientist. We may now come closer than ever before to beholding the ‘sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought’—to quote Albert Einstein again.

The search for this order has motivated the efforts of great minds throughout the history of human consciousness. That it now brings fruit within the rigorous limits of the scientific method should be a cause for joy and encouragement in an age when science is more feared than revered, and more noted for creating technologies that destroy than systems of thought that enlighten.

2:

Is a Unified Theory of Information Feasible? A Trialogue^1

RAFAEL CAPURRO, PETER FLEISSNER, and WOLFGANG HOFKIRCHNER

WH Dear Rafael, in order to start our trialogue, I would appreciate your giving the first contribution by answering the following question: what conclusions do you draw from the logical trilemma in your speech at the conference?

RC Dear Wolfgang, may I first summarize the content of the logical trilemma, or “Capurro’s trilemma” as you called it in your paper “Informado revisited”.² Information may mean the same at all levels (univocity), or something similar (analogy), or something different (equivocity). In the first case we lose all qualitative differences, as for instance when we say that e-mail and cell reproduction are the same kind of information process. Not only the “stuff” and the structure but also the processes in cells and computer devices are rather different from each other. If we say the concept of information is being used analogically, then we have to state what the “original” meaning is. If it is the concept of information at the human level, then we are confronted with anthropomorphisms if we use it at a non-human level. We would say that “in some way” atoms “talk” to each other, etc. Finally there is equivocity, which means that information in physics and information in education are wholly different concepts. In this case, information cannot be a unifying concept any more, i.e. it cannot be the basis for the new paradigm you are looking for.

Your conclusion or “solution” of this trilemma is: we go back to the etymological roots (information as “giving form”) and we take an evolutionary perspective where qualities can emerge. I call this solution “dialectical informatism” (DIAINF), considering it to be a new version of dialectical materialism (DIAMAT).

I think there are several questions to be considered, among them Gregory Bateson’s definition of information as “any difference that makes a difference”, this being different from information in the sense of the mental processes of “finding a difference” (information as meaning).³

But now to your question about my conclusions from the logical trilemma in my speech at the conference. I draw one basic conclusion, namely the task of remembering the trilemma when considering the possibility of a unified theory of information; in other words, the task of remembering the differences between the differenes that make a difference. This was in some way a plea for analogy and even equivocity. I believe that we can take a reductive view of reality under the viewpoint of, for instance, an information-processing concept. We would then say: whatever exists can be digitalized. Being is computation. Such a reductive view is useful in many respects but we have to pay a high price for it, because we have to leave aside other basic phenomena which belong to different levels of reality. This is the problem faced by dialectical informatism, as I call it. Dialectical informatism, I believe, has an over-optimistic view of the capacity of human reasoning. This is why I pointed to Kant in my speech. Is there any possibility of a unified theory of information which includes “Capurro’s trilemma” as a constituent element of it, and not as something to be eliminated or “solved”? Well, this is a difficult question. Maybe we should take a look at the metaphysics of Leibniz. Leibniz considers reality to have two aspects, namely “monads” and matter. There are no monads without matter (except God), and vice-versa. Monads and matter are folded into the different levels of reality in an infinitely complicated way. This means that it is not possible for us to have a “true” view of all the “steps” faced by unfolding (or “evolution”). This means, roughly speaking, that we are faced with infinite concepts of information, something which cannot be overlooked by any kind of theory. But on the other hand, when we are using different concepts of information, we can metaphysically presuppose that they are equivocal, or that our analogies are not completely false, without ever really knowing which is the real or true “primum analogatum”. In other words, from the point of view of our finite reason, a unified theory of information has to learn how to “play” with equivocity, analogy and univocity, thus keeping the trilemma in mind—as a chance!

PF Dear Rafael, in a somewhat pejorative manner you have described the concept of information which Wolfgang and I discussed in “In-formatio Revisited” as “dialectical informatism”. If I understand you correctly, I think by this allusion to dialectical materialism you are saying that we persist in using the structure of DIAMAT, with just one exception, namely that we have replaced its main object, matter, by information; you seem to think that we are leaving everything else unchanged, in particular the dialectical way of thinking. I am not convinced that your argument points correctly to the core of our proposal, i.e. a methodology for perceiving information. Although Wolfgang and I share the method of dialectical thinking, we have different ideas about the possibility of a unified ...