It Seems That We Live in Two Different Worlds the World of Our Mind and the Natural World

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It seems that we live in two different worlds—the world of our mind and the natural world of things. This dualism, a rift in the perceived order of reality, stands as a persistent challenge to Western thought. Can we accommodate it?

Most natural scientists hold a view that maintains that the entire vast universe, from its beginning in time to its ultimate end, from its smallest quantum particles to the largest galaxies, is subject to rules—the natural laws—comprehensible by a human mind. Everything in the universe orders itself in accord with such rules and nothing else. Life on earth is viewed as a complex chemical reaction that promoted evolution, speciation, and the eventual emergence of humanity, replete with our institutions of law, religion, and culture. I believe that this reductionalist-materialist view of nature is basically correct.

Other people, with equal intellectual commitment, maintain the view that the very idea of nature is but an idea held in our minds and that all of our thinking about material reality is necessarily transcendent to that reality. Further, according to this view, the cultural matrix of art, law, religion, philosophy, and science form an invisible universe of meanings, and the true ground of being is to be found in this order of mind. I also believe that this

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transcendental view, which affirms the epistemic priority of mind over nature, is correct.

These two views of reality—the natural and the transcendental —are in evident and deep conflict. The mind, it seems, is transcendent to nature. Yet according to the natural sciences that transcendent realm must be materially supported and as such is subject to natural law. Resolving this conflict is, and will remain, a primary intellectual challenge to our civilization for the next several centuries. The great temptation will be to resolve the conflict by collapsing the differences between these views into one viewpoint or the other and then claiming a solution. The Buddha, it is said, when confronted with a similar temptation, held aloft a flower and smiled, indicating that neither dualism nor nondualism provide a resolution. That insight, however, provides us with the beginning of an inquiry, and not its end.

The emergent new sciences of complexity and the order of being that they study are a first step toward a resolution of this problem. What are the sciences of complexity?

Science has explored the microcosmos and the macrocosmos; we have a good sense of the lay of the land. The great unexplored frontier is complexity. Complex systems include the body and its organs, especially the brain, the economy, population and evolutionary systems, animal behavior, large molecules—all complicated things. Some of these systems are simulatable on computers and can be easily modeled rather precisely; others cannot be simulated by anything simpler than the system itself. Scientists, in a new interdisciplinary effort, have begun to meet the challenge of complex systems and, remarkably, are understanding how complexity can emerge from simplicity. For example, cellular automata, an artificial set of video dots that rearrange themselves according to definite, simple rules on a screen are an example of complex behavior emerging from simplicity. The evolution of life and culture may be another example, in this instance, of a three-dimensional cellular automata made of atoms instead of video dots and which fills the entire universe. All of existence may be viewed as a complex system built out of simple components.

Some of the themes of the new sciences of complexity—the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics and selective

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systems, the new understanding of chaos, experimental mathematics, the connectionist's ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing—are described in the first part of this book. Where these new developments are headed no one can tell. But they portend a new synthesis of science that will overturn our traditional way of organizing reality. Already institutes and centers for the study of complexity are springing up on campuses and within corporations around the world—a sign of what is to come.

In this book I will focus on three main themes: first, the rise of the sciences of complexity that stand at the newest frontier of knowledge; second, the role of the computer as a research instrument and the reordering of knowledge it implies; and finally, the philosophy of science.

The primary research instrument of the sciences of complexity is the computer. It is altering the architectonic of the sciences and the picture we have of material reality. Ever since the rise of modern science three centuries ago, the instruments of investigation such as telescopes and microscopes were analytic and promoted the reductionalist view of science. Physics, because it dealt with the smallest and most reduced entities, was the most fundamental science. From the laws of physics one could deduce the laws of chemistry, then of life, and so on up the ladder. This view of nature is not wrong; but it has been powerfully shaped by available instruments and technology.

The computer, with its ability to manage enormous amounts of data and to simulate reality, provides a new window on that view of nature. We may begin to see reality differently simply because the computer produces knowledge differently from the traditional analytic instruments. It provides a different angle on reality. I will be describing some uses of the computer—simulating intelligence, simulated annealing, modeling molecules, computer modeling of both real and artificial life, the discovery of deterministic chaos, nonlinear dynamics, modeling evolution, neural nets, Boltzmann machines, experimental mathematics, to name a few. The technology that emerges from these applications will have profound implications in the commercial and business world, the financial services industry, the legal profession, and the military. The world will be changed. As a new mode of production, the computer creates not only a new class of people struggling for intellectual and social acceptance, but a new way of thinking about knowl-

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edge. It will transform the scientific enterprise and bring forth a new worldview.

The second part of the book deals with the impact of the sciences of complexity on the philosophy of science. Philosophy of science has fallen on hard times, deserted by even the professional philosophers, some of whom think it has come to an end. Once the handmaiden of theology, in this century philosophy became the whore of science, and finally, today, it is all but abandoned. Practicing scientists like myself tend to be antiphilosophers, often rejecting the efforts of professional philosophers to clarify and interpret our enterprise. This was not always the case. A few decades ago many scientists, especially my tribe—the physicists—were intellectually interested in, debated, and wrote about the philosophy of science. Today the pendulum has swung from thinking to doing. The external activities of scientists are more ethically oriented and less philosophically inclined. They have become involved in issues—the environment, war and peace, and human rights. So writing about the philosophy of science today, especially by an "antiphilosopher," requires an explanation.

Thinking about and doing science have become two very distinct professional activities, one philosophical, the other empirically investigative. This schism between the philosophy of science and science itself was wrought by Kant more than two centuries ago and has persisted until the present day. I believe that these two activities will become less distinct in the future, an influence of the new sciences of complexity. I welcome that. Philosophers and scientists may begin to collaborate more directly, especially in the cognitive sciences. It may turn out that philosophy has not so much come to an end, rather it has reintegrated with the activity of science, to where it was prior to the Kantian schism.

I am not a philosopher, and what I am writing in this book does not qualify as professional philosophy because it is not sufficiently closely argued. But I am trying to expose the new outlook on science that is arising out of the study of complexity, and I am using the themes and problems of traditional philosophy to do this —the nature of physical reality, the problem of cognition, the mind-body problem, the character of scientific research, the nature of mathematics, and the role of instruments in research.

I am profoundly biased in my views by my training as a professional physicist. As a physicist I feel more at home writing about

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the natural sciences. But some of the most exciting new developments in the sciences of complexity deal with social, economic, and psychological behavior. Interestingly, the interdisciplinary nature of these new sciences will in some cases cut across the traditional distinction between the natural and the social sciences. This will be lauded by some people and abhorred by others.

A recurrent theme in my thinking about science is the notion of "a selective system," a generalization of the Darwin-Wallace idea of natural selection to a general pattern-recognizing system. Empirical science itself exemplifies such a selective system. Instead of selecting species, natural science selects the theories of nature, our repertoire of reality. Empirical science may be viewed as a selective system for finding the invariant rules that order the universe. While these ideas are familiar in biology, the impact of the selective systems way of thinking on the social and psychological sciences is just beginning. It has been a long time in coming, and it will change them profoundly, a change that will be resisted by more traditionally oriented scientists.

I believe that the problem of the dualism of mind and nature will not so much be solved as it will disappear. Fundamental problems have disappeared before. Centuries ago natural philosophers debated the distinction between "substance" and "appearance," a distinction that vanished as empirical science matured. Likewise the radical distinction between mind and nature will disappear with the development of the new sciences of complexity and the categories of thought that development entails. As we deepen our understanding of how the mental world of meaning is materially supported and represented, an understanding coming from the neurosciences, the cognitive sciences, computer science, biology, mathematics, and anthropology, to name but a few contributing sciences, there will result a new synthesis of science, and a new cosmopolitan civilization and cultural worldview will arise. I am convinced that the nations and people who master the new sciences of complexity will become the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century. The purpose of this book is to articulate the beginnings of this new synthesis of knowledge and to catch a first glimpse of the civilization that will arise out of it.

______Chapter 1

BigSurand the Apples of Cezanne

When the penis goes up, reason goes out the window.

—ROBERT M. HUTCHINS, from the satiric short film Zuckerkandel

Straddling two of our planet's great tectonic plates, California is a geologically violent place where the land has only temporary stability. Here the Pacific plate, slipping against the continental land mass along the San Andreas Fault, moves ever northward and finally, in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands, subducts deep into the molten bowels of the earth. California's geologic activity produces one of the most dramatic meetings of land and sea that I have ever seen, especially the coast near Big Sur south of the city of Carmel and north of Morro Bay. Here the Santa Lucia Mountains, which long ago moved north with the plate, rise a thousand feet right out of the Pacific, directly confronting the irresistible force of the sea.

Big Sur is an awesome and for the most part still primitive place that owes much of its magic to the quality of its light—diffuse in the winter and in early-morning fogs and lucid and intense during the summer afternoons. The mountains are covered with grasses, dry and golden in the hot summer sun. Cooler forested areas,

______Chapter 1

Big Sur and the Apples of Cezanne

When the penis goes up, reason goes out the window.

—ROBERT M. HUTCHINS, from the satiric short film Zuckerkandel

20 The Dreams of Reason

shaded by cedars, pines, oaks, and redwoods, shelter wildlife. Just off the coast lie the giant feather boa, bull and bladder kelp beds undulating in a complex pattern with the waves. It is a rocky coast punctuated with occasional beaches harboring a rich and varied marine life, including tidepools filled with purple sea urchins, stars, hermit crabs, sea palms, and occasional black abalone. Pelicans, birds that seem to have forgotten evolution, patrol the surf, while cormorants rest on the cliffs, awaiting the fish that are attracted to the upwelling plankton carrying currents out of the depth.

The main evidence of human presence is the coast highway (Route 1), which was built in the 1930s with convict labor as part of the coastal defense system and which is the only rapid access to the region. With the highway came people, mostly artists and Bohemians, to join the ranchers who were already there; a few inns, restaurants, and houses were built, but the lonely damp winters, inaccessibility, and absence of jobs kept the extensive development that California has seen elsewhere, and most people, out.

As an easterner I never heard of Big Sur until 1960, my first year in physics graduate school at Stanford University. I was twenty-one. Grad students like myself used to hang out around the old student union fountain hoping to make friends. There I met Hal, who after serving in an army intelligence unit became a perennial Stanford student. Hal was a second-generation native Californian of Irish extraction, with a deep tan, jet-black hair, and blue eyes and, in the tradition of Irish poets, an adventuresome rebel.

Hal knew the Big Sur area, and one day he invited me to take a long weekend trip down there with him; in effect he was going to play Virgil to my Dante. He owned a number of VWs modified according to his specifications—the tops were cut off to the win-dowsills, for example—and outfitted with powerful Porsche engines. Around the bare edges of the cut-off cars Hal put polished white wood moldings so that the vehicles looked like bathtubs on wheels—very fast bathtubs. One such bathtub was to be our mode of transportation.

On the way to Big Sur from Stanford we took the back roads (Hal seemed to know them all) through the artichoke fields surrounding Monterey Bay. The salt smell of the sea filled the air. In Monterey we spent the better part of the morning exploring the old canneries that once packed the fish that fed England during