Myth, Chaos, and Certainty

Notes on Cosmos, Life, and Knowledge

Rosolino Buccheri

• Publisher: Jenny Stanford Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000172973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Cosmologia

This book offers a study of the three evolutions in a circle (cosmos, life, and knowledge) with the aim of discussing human social behavior, a metaphor of the general behavior of nature (from which man derives) within the fluctuating equilibrium between the opposite tendencies to cohesion and shredding; a circularity revealing an indefinite and probably never conclusive run-up of human beings to the knowledge of nature; an analysis that demonstrates any theoretical/practical impossibility to formulate absolute certainties, since it depicts a situation in which man finds himself hovering between a rational way of living and the contradictory modus operandi of mythos. All that, within a society where the powerful communication and transportation technologies give rise to conflicts and fragmentations, where anyone's will to self-distinguishing is enhanced by highlighting any small difference and obscuring any large similarity. The main difference between this book and existing ones stems from its interdisciplinary nature, particularly because it establishes a close connection between three, apparently so different disciplines—cosmology, life sciences, and sociology—compared with respect to their increasing complexity laws, giving rise to always more chaotic configurations.

PART I
LAW, CHANCE, AND EVOLUTION

Enigma

From Nowhere’s enigma, Universe springs;

From the night’s black, Sun appears;

From non-existence darkness, Man arises,

In death’s mystery later broken up.

In the night gloom, Sun vanishes;

Universe future in the arcane’s hidden.

Amid start and closure, a lot we know;

To before and after we’re not allowed.

Ever at present our conscience will halt?

—Rosolino Buccheri, 2014

Premise: Dissipative systems and self-organization processes

Before starting our discussion, I find it better to open an informative parenthesis, concise as it can be, on matter’s self-organization processes in complex physical systems open to interaction with their environment.¹ In these systems, new structures may spontaneously emerge along their evolution path, with always more complex and unattended shapes with respect to the underlying fundamental physics, but anyway equipped with causal effectiveness in their following road.

¹ I refer to systems far from thermal equilibrium, those that Ilya Prigogine defined as “dissipative systems,” among which we may include living systems, of particular interest for our discussion (Prigogine and Stengers, 1999).

Such a situation is basically due to the fact that in a complex system, the myriads of elementary particles of which it is made interact in a nonlinear way, reciprocally and with the environment, thus confusing any cause-effect relationship that is, instead, clearly visible in all linear processes. It follows that however precise the knowledge of the properties of single constituents and of their reciprocal interactive connections could be, any analysis of a reductionist type is usually ineffective, preventing us to foresee the role that every element will play in the future organization process of the system, therefore making us unable to explain any new emerging behavior.

Obviously, the difficulties in describing the evolution of any systems grow together with their level of complexity: from the simpler one, the universe evolution—mostly comprehensible by using physics and mathematics techniques—to the more complex one on living systems studied by biology, until the enormously more difficult study of the evolution of social systems, where only statistical simulation techniques may help. A hierarchy of complexity that, from the interaction of the elementary components of matter, leads to the evolution of the universe, then to life by means of the mutual interaction of complex molecules, and finally to man’s knowledge with the emersion of the mind.²

² The first step toward living matter—the “informative property” and the forming of DNA—is seen in molecules with a very high level of complexity. The importance of this property, emerged along the evolution of matter toward life, will be discussed later.

Just following the opening by Ilya Prigogine of a new research stream on the non-equilibrium thermodynamics,³ a deep investigation was undertaken about the above-discussed phenomena, where, countertrending with respect to the predictions of the second principle of thermodynamics, conditions may emerge for which their order may increase with time instead of decreasing.

³ The non-equilibrium thermodynamics refers to non-isolated systems, open to interaction with outside. For such studies, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was awarded to Prigogine in 1977.

By studying physical systems with a multitude of interacting elements in a state of thermodynamic disequilibrium, Prigogine realized that such systems gradually increase their complexity by means of nonlinear processes of self-organization, for which they acquire, almost temporarily, “ordered” energy and entropy, which is successively dissipated gradually into “degraded” energy and entropy. Prigogine discovered, in particular, that while in all complex physical systems in equilibrium, nature’s laws are universal and predictable, when a system is far from equilibrium, it is submitted to changes due to the forces acting to it from the outside, and the laws describing it are not anymore universal and predictable but become specific of its present condition.⁴ In such cases, any single physical system organizes itself through an effective and continuous exchange of energy and information with its environment, thus producing an order that is functional to its composition and to the features of the environment where it is merged so as to build and maintain stable for some time a well-defined internal structure. Along this process, we observe an evolution characterized by the continuous “emergence” of always new and unpredictable properties for which the quantum physicist Josef Maria Jauch wrote:

“… the whole is more than the sum of its parts and […] the constructive integration of complementary processes is the secret of any activity in life.”⁵

⁴ As Prigogine himself said, “Matter is blind when approaching equilibrium, when there is no more arrow of time; but when the arrow of time presents itself, matter starts to see!” (Prigogine, 1996).

⁵ Jauch (2001).

Here the term “more” refers to the new properties spontaneously and unpredictably emerged in the whole evolving system. A circumstance, this, where we see the failure of the classical reductionism, for which the whole arrangement should be directly deductible from the properties of its single components.

The studies quoted before made Prigogine introduce in 1981 the notion of “dissipative structures” for this kind of systems and to think that their formation and their subsequent “chaotic” evolution by means of self-organization processes could be a general principle that all matter always obeys, in competition with the second principle of thermodynamics. A process in which the time evolution of every complex physical system develops through the formation of “chaotic” order, that is, through the tendency of inert matter to autonomously organize itself toward always more complex, temporary stable, structures. A trend that Prigogine assigned to the “creativity” of dissipation processes, able to effectively use the available energy.

Obviously, the debate on the “emergency” of new unpredictable phenomena in a physical system, starting from its elementary constituents, is far from being definitely closed. If from one side it seems already clear that any nontrivial emerging processes are bound to the specific nonlinearity characterizing the system itself, we may still ask whether it is possible to state a general theory of complex systems, able to indicate the necessary and sufficient conditions for the appearance of processes, irreducible to the laws that rule their elementary constituents.

Some elementary self-organization processes of matter in which spontaneous formation of order follows are known for a long time. One of the simplest, easily observable by everybody, is that of Bénard cells⁶—ordered configurations connected with the convective motion generated in a thin layer of liquid warmed from low.

⁶ Bènard (1901, pp. 62–144).

A slightly more complex example, easily reproducible, is given by swinging chemical reactions, scientifically denominated “chemical clocks.” The first of these changing structures, discovered by the soviet physicist Boris Belusov around 1950, was harshly challenged by the scientific community of tha...