Bantam
Books, 1984
Finally, yet another profound synthesis is implied—a new relationship
between chance and necessity. The role of happenstance in the affairs of the
universe has been debated, no doubt, since the first
Paleolithic warrior accidentally tripped over a rock. In the Old Testament,
God’s will is sovereign, and He not only controls the orbiting planets but manipulates the will of each and every individual as He
sees fit. As Prime Mover, all causality flows from Him, and all events in the
universe are foreordained. Sanguinary conflicts raged over the precise meaning
of predestination or free will, from the time of Augustine through the
Carolingian quarrels. Wycliffe, Huss, Luther, Calvin—all contributed to the
debate.
No end of interpreters attempted to reconcile determinism with freedom of
will. One ingenious view held that God did indeed determine the affairs of the
universe, but that with respect to the free will of the individual, He never
demanded a specific action. He merely preset the range of options available to
the human decision-maker. Free will downstairs operated only within the limits
of a menu determined upstairs.
In the secular culture of the Machine Age, hard-line determinism has
more or less held sway even after the challenges of Heisenberg and the “uncertaintists.” Even today, thinkers such as René Thom
reject the idea of chance as illusory and inherently unscientific.
Faced with such philosophical stonewalling, some defenders of free will,
spontaneity, and ultimate uncertainty, especially the existentialists, have
taken equally uncompromising stands. (For Sartre, the human being was
“completely and always free,” though even Sartre, in certain writings,
recognized practical limitations on this freedom.)
Two things seem to be happening to contemporary concepts of chance and
determinism. To begin with, they are becoming more complex. As Edgar Morin, a
leading French sociologist-turned-epistemologist, has written:
Let us not forget that the problem of determinism has changed over the course of a century. . . . In place of the idea of sovereign, anonymous, permanent laws directing all things in nature there has been substituted the idea of laws of interaction. . . . There is more: the problem of determinism has become that of the order of the universe. Order means that there are other things besides ‘laws’: that there are constraints, invariances, constancies, regularities in our universe. . . . In place of the homogenizing and anonymous view of the old determinism, there has been substituted a diversifying and evolutive view of determinations.
And as the concept of determinism has grown richer, new efforts
have been made to recognize the co-presence of both chance and necessity, not
with one subordinate to the other, but as full partners in a universe that is
simultaneously organizing and de-organizing itself.
It is here that Prigogine and Stengers enter
the arena. For they have taken the argument a step farther. They not only
demonstrate (persuasively to me, though not to critics like the mathematician,
René Thom) that both determinism and chance operate, they also attempt to show
how the two fit together.
Thus, according to the theory of change implied in the idea of
dissipative structures, when fluctuations force an existing system into a
far-from-equilibrium condition and threaten its structure, it approaches a
critical moment or bifurcation point. At this point, according to the authors,
it is inherently impossible to determine in advance the next state of the
system. Chance nudges what remains of the system down a new path of
development. And once that path is chosen (from among
many), determinism takes over again until the next bifurcation point is
reached.
Here, in short, we see chance and necessity not as irreconcilable opposites,
but each playing its role as a partner in destiny.
- Forward by Alvin Toffler
We begin to see how, starting from chemistry, we may build complex
structures, complex forms, some of which may have been the precursors of life.
What seems certain is that these far-from-equilibrium phenomena illustrate an
essential and unexpected property of matter: physics may henceforth describe
structures as adapted to outside conditions. We meet in rather simple chemical
systems a kind of pre-biological adaptation mechanism. To use somewhat
anthropomorphic language: in equilibrium, matter is “blind,” but in
far-from-equilibrium conditions, it begins to be able to perceive, to “take
into account,” in its way of functioning, differences in the external world
(such as weak gravitational or electrical fields).
Of course, the problem of the origin of life remains a difficult one,
and we do not think a simple solution is imminent. Still, from this perspective
life no longer appears to oppose the “normal” laws of physics, struggling
against them to avoid its normal fate—its destruction. On the contrary, life
seems to express in a specific way the very conditions in which our biosphere is embedded, incorporating the nonlinearities of chemical
reactions and the far-from-equilibrium conditions imposed on the biosphere by
solar radiation.
- p. 14