Chaos and Order

Full Title.or Meme

The Universe is a constant struggle of Order against Chaos.

Chaos was the law of nature, order was the dream of man. - Henry Adams

Context

In The Function of Reason A.N.Whitehead claims that “History discloses two main tendencies in the course of events. One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature…The other tendency is exemplified by the yearly renewal of nature in the spring, and by the upward course of biological Evolution.” The ‘downward’ tendency is towards increasingly stable states of Equilibrium (as exemplified in the Second Law of Thermodynamics), while the ‘upward’ tendency is towards increasing orders of Complexity (as exemplified in biological forms of life). These tendencies can be found at all levels of being, from the day-to-day cycles of an individual organism to the Evolution of the cosmos. Viewed cosmologically, for example, the current cycle or phase of the universe suggests that the ‘downward’ tendency is most prominent, but we can expect the upward tendency to have been more prominent in the distant past and to become more prominent again in the future. The upward tendency is manifest in the active manner in which living things relate to their environments; organisms not only adapt to their environments, they also “have progressively undertaken the task of adapting the environment to themselves.” This active transformative aspect of things is the expression of a “three-fold urge: (i) to live, (ii) to live well, (iii) to live better.” This three-fold urge is a central feature of the art of life First to be alive, secondly to be alive in a satisfactory way, and thirdly to acquire an increase in satisfaction.” It is here that Reason enters the picture, for the principal “ The function of Reason is to promote the Art of Life. Reason accomplishes this by serving as “the self-discipline of the origin active element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic.”

But even before life had started its struggle against Chaos, the earth itself had been subject to great upheavals as continents slide around, mountain rose, only to be ground down into sand. Only the Earth, among the solar planets, has such continental activity which gave rise to a surprising amount of order in the minerals that we mine today for our technological wonders. Also we know know that nearly half of all minerals are biogenic - that is, their formation depends in one way of another on some living species. The really astonishing thing about the relationship between us and out planet is not the mismatch, but the match. The Earth is already fifty million times older than you or I - and yet, given some sandstone and granite, some tektites and tuff, some fragments of flint and crystals of zircon, we can infer its entire 4.5 billion-year history. Just the inventive human find can represent scales of existence wildly different from our own. Our brain acts like a time machine allowing us to see so far into the past and into the future, at least for those things that move slowly, like tectonic plates.

A fully functional human body operates at the highest level of order that we have experience so far. In medicine there are to disruptions to this order, disease which is a problem with a known cause and disorder which has, as yet, no known cause.

Problems

• The Second Law of Thermodynamics appears to be quite pessimistic about the future of any closed system, like the universe. Every such system is in a constant state of running down, headed to complete disorder.
• Humans generally fare poorly in chaotic environment, even though it seems that we owe our very existence to environmental changes that gave a distinct evolutionary advantage to those with big brains that were capable of reasoning and abstract thought.
• When rapid changes occurs in a social structure, those that are comfortable in the old order resist the change and use chaos as something to be avoided at all costs. For example after the first world war in the US laws against Evolution, against change, brouhgt about one of the great conflicts into the courtroom as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The result in that trial was a vote for order versus change with Evolution as the proponent of change. Campaigning for the US presidency in 1920 Warren G Harding had promised "a return to normalcy", to the better times of the past.

Solutions

At a conference of physicists and philosopher John Wheeler gave one of his excellent descriptions of the current model of Quantum Mechanics. Karl Popper turned to Wheeler and quietly said: "What you say is contradicted by biology." What he could have equally said is that reality is always contradicting the models that humans make of nature. We need to be able to remember humbly the words of the statistician George Box, "all models are wrong, but some are useful."

More Material

• See more detail in the page on Complexity