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Conditions
of Creation
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The
Invisible Hand and the Global Acceleration Crisis
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The following text
appeared in: Entropy and Bioeconomics, Proceedings of the
First International Conference of the European Association for
Bioeconomic Studies (E.A.B.S.), J. C. Dragàn, E. K.
Seifert, M. C. Demetrescu eds., published by NAGARD, Rome 1993.
ISBN 88-85010-11-3. It was written a few months after a free
presentation at that conference (Rome, 28-30 November 1991),
which took place in honour of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s
85th birthday. I had been asked to talk about entropy, but I
wanted to go a bit beyond and not only touch on the question of
“how to organize limits to growth” but also mention
an essential point of the answer – the necessary
“de-subsidization of capital” and the introduction of
a TAT instead of VAT – i.e. the replacement of “value-added
tax” by “trashiness-added tax” …
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Theories
in economics remind an astrophysicist of simple games, like
“monopoly”. Of course, there is more progress here.
No longer do most economists believe in the possibility of a
perpetuum mobile, and with improvements in general scientific
education of the public, and particularly with the appearance of
computers, the rules have become a bit more sophisticated. Even
some non-linear terms may now be added in the formulation of the
rules which allow for the development of “deterministic
chaos” if parameters are appropriately chosen. Still, it
remains a stunning observation, even in this meeting of
“unconventional” economists, how few relevant facts
of the real world are usually included in the theoretical
thinking. If an astrophysicist would dare to produce a
quasar-model containing so little reality, he would be ridiculed
in his scientific community. Obviously, we have different
criteria of falsification, and even different concepts of
reality. A decisive difference is the strong back-action which
economic theory has on its subject. In astrophysics, we cannot
push galaxies or stars to behave in a theoretically preferred
way. On the other hand, in economics, one cannot even demand that
a theoretical model should represent essential features of a
pre-theoretical world. Economics is the science of economy, where
economy may be defined as a process of simplifying not only the
models but the world itself until – in a climax of
reductionism – it can be modeled by economists. There may
be few formal errors in the theory, but even some of its
“bioeconomical” versions tend to help reducing
reality to money and its by-products. Since the idea that “hard
science” forbids value-judgments is still in highest
esteem, a realistic theory of value – which one would
expect to be a basic part of economic theory – is scarcely
looked for. (Still, economists find it compatible with science to
believe in the value of money … )
Embarrassingly
indecent as it may seem, I shall use this opportunity to sketch a
theory of value on scientific grounds which does have
implications for economists, too. Since the world appears so
immensely valuable to every healthy mind and heart, theory must
deal with the question how all this value could originate. We
have to study the creation of the world. Reductionist science has
now reached a level from which it can tell the story of genesis
in terms of laws of nature and laws of logic. It turns out that
even a theoretical “reduction to nothing”, which
advanced theoretical physicists are striving for, will not reduce
the value of our world but rather let it become more evident: The
value of everything, including life, man and society, is not in
the starting point or in the fundamental laws, and certainly not
in the “use-value” for some sub-structure, but in the
immense complexity which has evolved during those “six
days”.
We must understand the principles of this
creation process (now called self-organization) if we want to
answer the question why all those structures – from
elementary particles to healthy bodies and minds – could
come into existence and fit together in such an intricate way. I
shall try and strengthen the intuitive insight that a reasonable
assignment of “value” is nothing but the perception
of viable complexity. Only when we know under which conditions
such complexity can or must arise, will we perhaps learn to
understand where the cloven hoof comes in, why the “invisible
hand” can also throw things in disorder, why the principle
of creation doesn’t work successfully now – and why
there is still hope.
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1.
Sources and sinks
Nearly everybody here
seems to agree that present human activities endanger the
survival of man and other higher life-forms on earth. The
extinction of species (about one every hour!); the spread of
chemical compounds which never before existed on earth or in the
universe (perhaps a new one every hour?); the population growth
(by more than 10 people while I count to 10 as fast as I can!)
and the number of people dying from starvation (now one child
every two seconds!); the steadily rising carbondioxide content of
the earth’s atmosphere (predominantly from the socalled
developed countries, where the average citizen contributes every
day an amount of CO2 equaling nearly his own body-weight!); the
thinning of the stratospheric ozone-layer (which has been
developed by life and allowed the evolution of higher life-forms
for a billion years); the perishing of forests, coral-reefs and
more and more other ecosystems … Most of us feel that
these are symptoms of decline or even fall.
The recent
experience – that within a human life-time the terrestrial
biosphere as a whole, including man, might be seriously
threatened – seems to present a sharp contradiction to the
previous ascent of life, mind and culture. Since this symposium
is in honour of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, many of you may think
this all has to do with the second law of thermodynamics which
states the inevitable growth of entropy in a closed system. On
the other hand, this law has always been valid, and obviously up
to quite recently not only did not prevent, but even entailed the
evolution of ever more complex, more beautiful, more valuable
structures in the world. In fact, those are all “dissipative”
structures which, in a sense, form and function by means of and
because of their entropy production: As “free energy”
or “exergy” flows through them and is degraded to
“lower value”, there is a tendency to establish even
more refined structures. Thermodynamically, a kind of “use-value”
can be attributed to any deviation from equilibrium. Energy flow
from higher to lower temperature or other equilibration processes
tend to be organized in such a way that more complex structures
evolve which make still better use of these flows.
Therefore,
one of you said: The problem is not the increase of entropy
but the access to free energy … All problems can be solved
with better technology and recycling. One of
Georgescu-Roegen’s main concerns – the fact that the
disequilibrium of “raw materials” in the earth’s
crust is being exploited to its exhaustion and complete
dissipation – is then answered with the remark that “the
growth of matter entropy can in principle be reversed with
energetic negentropy” and that we, therefore, only need
enough free energy to regain any material from sea water or waste
or even from polluted soil. What, however, if the problem lies in
the fact that each problem-solution creates several new problems
which cry for even faster and more global solutions and for the
help of still more free energy? Then, what always had been called
progress should suddenly rather be called an instability.
Instabilities do not go on and on. They find an end. But how
likely is the end to be found in a state of more viable
complexity? Can our “technological optimist” convince
us that the access to ever more free energy makes this kind of
lucky outcome more likely?
You will certainly tell him,
that it isn’t enough to consider the sources, but that the
sinks are equally important. We must get rid of the entropy which
is the unavoidable waste of all that free energy. In fact, two of
the most urgent global problems discussed these days, the
greenhouse effect and the ozone depletion, are directly due to
disturbances in the old flow equilibria of exergy and entropy
from the sun over the earth into deep space. Too much free energy
has been used too quickly for the production of goods and bads
which now choke the entropy-sink. The earth’s temperature
will have to rise in the search for a new flow equilibrium, and
this is now happening on the time-scale of a few decades. At the
same time, and even faster, the ozone depletion raises the flow
of a particularly valuable kind of free energy: More and more of
the hard ultraviolet radiation can reach the earth’s
surface.
Well, our optimist might throw in, if terrestrial
life is so stupid that it cannot make sophisticated use of such
innovations, can’t human intelligence help with a little
more spirit of enterprise? Of course, he will say, he did not
forget the “other end” of the problem. He clearly
meant to include it in the concept of better technology and
recycling. We just have to endeavour global environmental
engineering, “geo-engineering” as it has already been
called! For instance, among the infinitely many possible
combinations of old genes (and new home-made ones) we must find
some which let amoebae or plants remove CO2 from air, or bring
ozone into the stratosphere, or use hard UV to produce food for
more people. True – more free energy may not suffice. But
isn’t everything else just a problem of good will and more
money for science and technology? With better education, nicer
laboratories, larger computers and higher salaries for scientists
the experts will be stimulated to create even more fabulous
gadgets and drugs, and weigh their risks and benefits even more
responsibly before they may be sold and spread and start
saturating air and water and soil, and souls.
Of course,
mistakes will be unavoidable. Much and perhaps most of the old
world will disappear. But this has always been so. Nearly all
species which ever existed on earth have died out and have been
replaced by superior ones. This process will always go on, only
faster – because now the source of innovation is no longer
the accidental mutation of nucleic acids but fluctuations in the
firing pattern of billions of neurons in billions of human
brains. Compared to that tiresome reproductive diffusion of new
genes within a species (with that unbearable limitation through
boundaries between species!) this new principle of evolutionary
progress is immensely more effective. If the old-fashioned kind
of life has been able to find not only sources of free energy but
also proper entropy sinks, mind will certainly succeed, too, and
much more quickly!
A year ago I asked a scientist, in fact
a social scientist: “How many new options do you want every
year?”. “Stupid question!”, he answered, “of
course, as many as possible!”. “And every day?”,
I went on, “and every hour? and every second?” –
Can you imagine the answer? No, there is no answer; just
frustration; likely to turn into hate if I don’t smile and
go away.
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2.
Probably, something likely is going to happen
Do
you find the value-judgment which shines through my skepticism
disgustingly unscientific? Let me put it on firmer ground! Access
to free energy and sinks for the entropy are clearly essential
prerequisites for any creation of values. But there are more
necessary conditions. The timescales and the degree of
diversity in the process of trial and error are decisive
for the probability of “success”. We shall see that
there are limits to speed and globality of evolutionary
processes. If they are surpassed, progress degenerates into that
instability in which people try ever faster to escape from their
mistakes and make ever more new ones, and more and more quickly.
Of course, they ask so-called specialists to take care of the
prevention of mistakes. But how many possible “side-effects”
of innovations do the experts have to consider in order to
exclude later severe damages to human society or ecosystems, or
to the whole biosphere? When can the process of “weighing
the risks and benefits” be declared finished? As an
example, think of a few trace-gases in the atmosphere which are
involved in a few geological and biological loops. Let us assume
we know the reaction rates between these gases under various
conditions of density and temperature, in the presence of various
kinds of radiation and with all possible combinations of the
geological and biospherical partners. rather complex network of
interactions will appear – but does this offer a real
problem to modern computers?
In order to answer this, let
us simplify the picture and represent each partner in this net by
a point and each possible interaction between two of them by a
single straight line, neglecting all details of kind or strength
and “catalysis” or other synergisms of the
interactions. You are all mathematically educated. You see the
disaster coming. But for other readers let me add: With two
points there are two possibilities (you can draw one line or
none), with three points there are eight (three pictures with one
line, three with two, one with three, and one with none), with
four points you find sixty-four … Clearly, the number of
different possible relation-structures of this simple kind is
rising rather steeply with the number of points. Now the
question: How many points do we need in order to let this number
surpass the number of atoms in the observable universe? –
Mind your breath! The answer is: Twenty-four!
You see,
there is a problem with the “weighing of risks and
benefits”. Benefits are usually obvious – but how
does one weigh risks if there are so incredibly many
possibilities? The risk is scarcely ever what comes to your mind
via calculations. It comes as the experience of something
unexpected but very real. And this must necessarily be so in all
complex situations. The unknown is simply too much. If the whole
matter of our universe were organized as a single big computer,
and this would run for many ages of our universe, it would not
even be able to just count the number of possible
different interaction patterns between a quite moderate number of
partners – not to talk about a calculation of probabilities
for their realization in a “chain of unfortunate
accidents”. Thus, reliable risk-assessment is impossible in
complex systems. Planning and risk-assessment cannot have been
parts of the process of creation of our world. Planning of
creation is out, like planned economy.
You know that the
alternative is not miracles but the “free market” of
evolutionary self-organization. This paper shall summarize its
logical structure which many scientists and economists have
difficulties to accept because, at least subconsciously, they
still stick to the belief that mind is not subject to the laws of
nature. However, if a scientist looks at the world as material
structures in space and time he finds only one kind of world.
Even ideas influence the world only through some materialization.
The introduction of a “metaphysical” difference
between matter and mind doesn't seem to make much sense.
Therefore, the scientific working-hypothesis is: All laws which
govern processes in the world – like the formation and
functioning of elementary particles, atoms, galaxies, stars,
life, mind and societies – have evolved via
“self-organization” from a single germ which we call
big bang and which includes the fundamental laws of
physics. Whether these laws are themselves the result of
evolutionary processes in the earliest stages of our universe,
and how “simple” the world really can or must have
been when it all started – such questions remain open.
However, for a sketch of the logic of all subsequent evolution
this does not seem to be very important. For the purpose of this
paper, we may start the story when the fundamental laws have been
fixed for what we call our universe.
A basic insight of
our century is: Besides logic, chance is the only necessity.
Chance is enough to make the evolution of complexity likely for a
wide range of initial conditions. The essential reasons are the
vast number of possibilities and the fact that the laws of
quantum-mechanics make everything in the world fluctuate. One can
say this although the fundamental laws are not yet known, and not
even known to exist in a conventional sense. The observational
facts which led to the theory of quantummechanics will never
allow a step back to classical concepts of reality. Any
“phenomenon” or “event” or “realization
of eventualities” contains stochastic elements. I put all
these words in quotation marks because their meaning becomes
blurred at the horizon of present physical theory. But, believe
me, the cognition of the decisive role of “accidents”
in the history of creation will not become obsolete with further
progress in fundamental theory.
If any realized structure
fluctuates, this means that a large number of its “neighbouring
possibilities” are realized for some time. If among them
there are “more viable” possibilities, that is if
they are likely to survive longer, they will probably survive.
This Darwinian tautology is the principle of selforganization, as
creation is called nowadays. “Probably, something likely
is going to happen”, or: “Something more
viable is likely to survive longer”. As far as the
principles are concerned, nothing but these tautologies is needed
in the free market of evolution from the birth of matter to our
own innovative thinking and acting.
How does it all start?
What kind of “everything” or “something”
has to “be there” initially in order to go through
our “six days of creation”? Obviously, we cannot
start in thermodynamic equilibrium – where it is most
unlikely that microscopic fluctuations ever reach something more
interesting. Indeed, we do quite convincingly see that it all
started in extreme disequilibrium! Everything which we call our
universe was once very closely packed together, flying apart in
an extremely well ordered way. All those galaxies and their
precursors which now fill the space within our horizon have been
created out of this simple initial state near the “big
bang”. Our horizon is at the distance which light could
travel during the about 15 billion years since this beginning.
That means, we nearly see the beginning! “Nearly” we
must say because the red-shift approaches infinity as we try to
look nearer the beginning. Thus, in a sense, red-shift manages to
make the finite distance to the present horizon infinite. But
this also has the consequence that the (still unknown)
fundamental physics of the big bang is not very important for the
present discussion. It is enough to say that we came from
“something with practically no detailed structure except
the unavoidable fluctuations”. Let me leave this blurred
here.
Some scientists have been puzzled by the fact that
matter and radiation were close to thermodynamic equilibrium when
they were born from the “original substance”. This
seems to mean high entropy, and all the subsequent formation of
structure might then appear as a miracle. But this is only so, if
we forget gravitation – which plays the dominant role in
the beginning, and even today. With respect to gravity, the world
is in extreme disequilibrium, near the minimum of entropy. The
presently observed entropy of roughly 109 natural units per
baryon has obviously arisen in the first fraction of a second in
the formation of matter (perhaps in a so-called inflationary
period), but this seemingly large number is totally negligible if
we compare it with the entropy which would be gained by
gravitational recollapse. This point has been made particularly
clear by Roger Penrose in his book “The Emperor’s New
Mind”. (For physicists: In order to calculate the entropy
of a black hole – in units of Boltzmann's constant –,
measure its radius in units of the “Planck-length”
and take the square of the result. The radius of a black hole is
proportional to its mass, and is 3 kilometers for the mass of our
sun. The Planck-length is about 10-35 meters …) All this
talking about the low-entropy start of the universe may to some
of you appear as theoretical fantasy. But let me remind you of
the surprising experience that even without knowledge of the laws
which govern the very beginning, present physics can successfully
extrapolate back to the first minute and e.g. “predict”
the abundances of Hydrogen, Helium and other light nuclei which
have actually been observed in the oldest stars. And we have good
reasons to say that before the first millisecond there were none
of the present types of elementary particles “in
existence”. Thus, it may turn out that physicists come to a
conclusion which theologians have always known: As a creator,
God did not have any realized properties. What, however, were
his possibilities? And how was a selection among them made
and realized ?
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3.
The Space of Possibilities
The beginning of
the universe offers an immense store of free energy for the
subsequent formation of dissipative structures and an ideal sink
for the entropy they produce. The energy source consists
basically of two types of “fossil energy from the big
bang”. First, the regular expansion created (and still is
creating) gravitational potential energy of matter which is
eager to form lumps under its own gravity when irregularities
develop; second, the fast expansion in the first few minutes
prevented matter from trying out more than a few initial steps
into the periodic table of elements. Matter could not reach full
nuclear equilibrium in such a hurry. It was, therefore, likely to
attempt this again later in stars, i.e. after the formation of
lumps which stabilize themselves against further collapse for a
long time while they slowly burn this kind of “fossil
nuclear energy” in self-regulating processes. On the other
hand, the sink for all the entropy from collapsing lumps and from
“friction” (in the ensuing long-lived dissipative
structures like galaxies, stars and planetary biospheres) is the
dark sky. This nearly bottomless sink is due to the cold horizon
– i.e. the low temperature of the background radiation
(only 2.7 degrees above absolute zero) – which is itself a
consequence of the universal expansion, i.e. again a consequence
of the big bang. (If our universe has enough swing to expand
forever, this “bottom” will sink deeper and deeper.
If the world should fall back into a “big crunch”,
the story will be diffe–rent, but this must not bother us
for many billion years – and, for the moment, allow me to
leave this topic to John Barrow, Frank Tipler and other disciples
of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ... )
This simple beginning
of the history of creation has laid the foundation for everything
to come: The sources of free energy, the sink for entropy, a huge
number of nearly independent places for further trial and error –
and a lot of time. The nature of time, and especially its
“arrow”, has puzzled many physicists and
philosophers. I like to speculate (like others) that time does
not have “a direction in itself”. I hope that in a
more fundamental theory the acts of realization may turn
out to be a proper basic concept, and that they create more space
and time and space of possibilities as they “happen”.
But I think that even in the incomplete theories of today the
direction of time is by definition that of the growth of entropy.
The second law of thermodynamics is just a special case (for an
isolated system) of the tautological statement that “probably
something likely is going to happen”.
If there is a
stochastic element in the realization of possibilities, any
process becomes practically “irreversible” after very
few steps. It is infinitely unlikely to find the way back by
chance, but there is always a new way opening into the immense
realm of possibilities. The “difference between past and
future” is a consequence of the large number of
possibilities which the world has, and of the fact that it
started with a most special one, near zero entropy, which could
not but become more complex. “Being” doesn’t
define a direction of time. “Becoming”, however,
does.
All this modern poetry about the idea of time is
variations on one and the same theme: Start from a uniquely
simple beginning, with immense swing, into a realm of
inexhaustible possibilities. On the other hand, it is also this
character of the common beginning which via the high global
symmetry of our universe allows the choice of a universal time
coordinate. (This would not be guaranteed by theory alone.
Remember the theory of relativity and its consequence that the
time-interval between one and the same pair of events may not
only be judged as long or short by two different observers, but
that in special situations involving black holes even the
difference between finite and infinite duration
disappears! The concept of eternal existence becomes
relative. …)
Now, what could possibly happen
in our universe once it had taken off and started wriggling? The
longevity of matter and astrophysical structures (in their
“proper time” or in universal time) can be understood
from the laws of physics. To some degree, we are able to
calculate probabilities for their formation and survival under
the typical fluctuations during early epochs of universal
expansion. We can not yet do this for the very early
period, because fundamental theory is still incomplete. And
certainly, for the much later stages, e.g. when life and mind
have been reached, a mathematical treatment will forever be
impossible because there are too many possibilities of
configurations and interactions. But there is no good reason to
doubt that the principle of innovation remains the same:
Random fluctuations, as organized by already existing
structures, try neighbouring possibilities, and more viable ones
are more likely to survive.
Talking about
“neighbourhoods” implies some concept of space. One
might think of the “phase-space” of all states of
position and velocity of particles in a “classical”
physical system, or of a more modern idea like “the
wave-function of the universe”. However, with present
physical theories such concepts cannot yet be clearly defined.
Therefore, I prefer to speak rather vaguely of a “space of
possibilities”. Clearly, such a space has practically
infinitely many dimensions. Remember the example with the number
of different relation-structures of only 24 things, or the fact
that there are probably no two identical molecules of the same
type of protein in one of our bodies, or even in all living
beings on earth! (Considering the number of possibilities, small
variations which do not influence the “functions”
seem extremely likely in the formation of any enzyme …) It
is also clear that nearly all possibilities never have been
and never will be realized in the history of our universe.
Every moment in history is just a point in this space, and the
whole history is a single path. It springs from a region (or
point?) corresponding to the “simple” big bang and
runs “upwards” to ever higher complexity, realized by
more and more refined dissipative structures which feed on the
flow of “fossil energy from the big bang” and dump
the entropy in the sink of the horizon (and, partially, in
collapsing black holes).
At any moment in the history of
creation, the “upper” end of this path, the
“presence” at that time, is groping its way further
into the space of possibilities via the fluctuations. Near the
beginning the more likely choices were simple enough to allow us
to “understand” them or simulate them on computers.
But as more and more dimensions of the space of possibilities
become realized, diversity is growing so much that this is
impossible. The tiniest fluctuations, very small “accidents”,
can influence the path decisively. (Just think of the story of
your own life!) Further up the path of worldhistory, when many
complex sub-systems have evolved, we may for some of them and for
some time neglect most of their “outside”
interactions (except some feeding and relieving flows of energy
and matter) and look at them as “isolated systems”.
“Subspaces” corresponding to relatively isolated
parts of the world – like a galaxy, a planetary system, a
biosphere, a species, a living individual, a human brain, a
society – are themselves practically still as “infinite”
as the whole space of possibilities. (“Even a tiny fraction
of this kind of infinity is nearly as infinite as the
whole”.)
Is there any general principle which
governs the choice of the realized future among the immensely
many different neighbouring possibilities? Does perhaps the
concept of entropy offer a guide?
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4.
The uselessness of the Second Law
Some of
you may ask for “selection rules” which might tell us
why the increase of complexity is so obviously more likely than a
direct evolution towards configurations with the highest entropy.
For the whole world, in case of a closed universe, the answer is
simple: Its final configuration, with maximum entropy, would be
the “big crunch” ( – mind the essential
difference between the initial and final “singular”
states which have minimum and maximum entropy respectively!), but
this would only be reached after gravitational attraction has
stopped and reversed the universal expansion. This would take
about fifty billion years. Obviously, comparing entropies is not
sufficient for judging the likelihood of somewhat nearer possible
futures of the whole world. And the situation is not much
different when we ask for the future development of sub-systems!
Why do galaxies or stars not straight away collapse into black
holes although those have an entropy many orders of magnitude
larger?
Just look at such dissipative structures, and you
see that their rate of entropy production is not determined by
the “distance” from ultimate thermodynamical
equilibrium (including gravity!), but by much more intricate
features. In astrophysical structures those are e.g. the
transport processes for angular momentum and various kinds of
radiation. Entropy production in a confined region creates a flow
of “waste” energy, directed away from its source,
eventually towards the horizon. In the surrounding, this
represents a flow of free energy which will help the fluctuations
to reach and try out more complex possibilities. In a star, e.g.,
the flow from its centre excites the surrounding material into a
state in which the central entropy-production itself is regulated
and (for light stars) extended over billions of years. Relatively
weak interactions in the outer layers manage to control the
strong interactions in the centre. Further outside the flow is
used again, and this is, e.g., why astronomers find clouds of
quite complex organic molecules around young stars. On planets,
as we know, more and more sophisticated details can come into
play. The flow of energy (which appears as free energy from one
side and as entropy from the other, and which comes ultimately
from the big bang) finds more and more twigs and twiglets in ever
new dimensions of the space of possibilities. The “decisions”
in all the bifurcations are made by fluctuations, but the
“transition-probabilities” depend on many properties
of the realized structures and their reachable
neighbourhood.
Clearly, the non-viability of our present
economy has to do with the entropy production in the wasting of
energy, the squandering of resources and the choking of sinks. On
the other hand, dissipative structures live on entropy
production. Whether a given production rate is viable or not,
cannot be concluded from the second law of thermodynamics. This
does not even offer help in understanding the drive towards
higher complexity and its successes and malfunctions. Neither
does the formulation of a “fourth law”, tailored for
judging the chances of mixing and unmixing matter.
Georgescu-Roegen’s motives in proposing this, and his
understanding of the destructive consequences of our present
dealings with resources and sinks of raw-materials are certainly
to be welcomed, but it does not make sense to introduce several
kinds of entropy and formulate separate laws for them. In
principle, there is only one kind of entropy but in the realm of
real complexity this concept is anyway quite impracticable
because one does not know which degrees of freedom have to be
taken into account and which “coarse-graining” must
be chosen in the definition of the system and its “macroscopic
states”. The situation is particularly unsatisfying in
economics, where one uses the word “system” even
though one knows that the most important degrees of freedom have
been neglected in the theoretical modeling.
One may be
tempted to think of some extremal principle. Doesn’t better
viability mean longer life through more economic use of the
resources? So, shouldn’t the use – and, thus, the
rate of entropy production – be minimized? Obviously, this
is not true. Even black holes do occasionally form. But neither
is the contrary true. Because of the immense number of possible
dissipative structures it has been likely in history to find some
with relatively long internal time-scales, i.e. long-lived ones.
(In this context, life-time does usually not mean that of an
individual material structure. The concept of individuality,
which is lost at the level of particles, has its difficulties at
the more complex levels, too. In more general kinds of metabolism
not only matter and energy are exchanged and “consumed”
but all sorts of “individual” structures. We may e.g.
also speak of the life-time of species or even of a planetary
biosphere.)
Of course, if we think of all possible paths
in the space of possibilities, there are certainly always quicker
roads to ultimate equilibrium. But in the labyrinth of so many
other paths with long delays in “stations”, such
direct roads are unlikely to be found via accidental
fluctuations. Therefore, the speed of approach towards
equilibrium does not necessarily have a positive selection value.
On the contrary: If possibilities with slower internal
dissipation can be realized (and protected from external
disturbances) they are likely to survive. On the other hand, such
structures are so stable because they have less internal
fluctuations. (An extreme example is the proton, which is perhaps
also a dissipative structure, but with a practically “eternal”
life-time of more than 1030 years …) The long-lived
structures cannot play a “creative” role in the
“invention” of a more complex future. They will
rather be used as building-blocks by “higher”
structures, which organize weaker interactions between them.
Viability has a wide spectrum from maximum stability to maximum
evolvability. (Please, be startled by that word, which suggests
limits to growth! Are we, at last, making headway towards
economics?)
I am afraid we must accept that there is no
reason to expect any general “selection rules” in the
evolutionary process, except those of logic. Logic implies, of
course, the generalized entropy law, i.e. the tautology that
“probably something likely is going to happen” and
that this will be the self-organization of something viable which
can be found by fluctuations among the neighbouring
possibilities. But how should such trivialities teach us how to
judge values? Is the new more valuable, or the old ?
Stability or speed of change? You may have become aware that the
time-scales are important in some way. But wasn’t it
pretentious to promise you a better understanding of the concept
of value – just from logic? It’s true that from a
tautology there follows everything, or rather everything
possible. But isn’t it cheeky to claim to have
understood something? Allow me a few more fluctuations between
views of the space of possibilities. Perhaps we find the
invisible hand … ?
At many moments a huge number of
neighbouring possibilities may be nearly equally likely to be
reached – and, therefore, in fact each extremely unlikely.
But one of them must be realized. Something must happen
– which is just another way of saying that time does not
stop. If there are many possibilities which can be reached with
similar but very small likelihood, the result will be very
sensitive to small fluctuations. Then, in spite of the weakness
of a system's external interactions, it may be a poor
approximation to consider it as “isolated”. The
viability of its complexity might be founded in relatively weak
interactions with many different parts of the whole. If
complexity evolves very far in this direction, its viability is
threatened by chaos and collapse. As we saw, viability and
evolvability are intimately connected on more complex levels. A
higher organization of trial and error increases not only the
chance of success but also that of failure. Still, this kind of
failure isn’t likely to lead to deep fall if there are
sufficiently many independent trials. (Nietzsche’s collapse
did not yet mean the end of mind … )
If we try to
visualize the history of the world in the space of possibilities
as a single line, we loose practically all intuition. We cannot
think of all dimensions at the same time. We rather imagine
infinitely many sub-spaces attached to the line in each moment,
and view the complex dissipative structures as bundles of nearly
closed loops in such sub-spaces. Then our “world-line”
consists of hierarchies of intricately interwoven narrow spirals.
Nearly everything repeats itself again and again in nearly closed
“orbits”, i.e. loops which have been established as
viable in the long process of trial and error. But there are
“accidental encounters” which occasionally cause
radical changes, and with extreme resolution we should be able to
follow the history of such accidents back to tiny wriggling
motions which represent spontaneous fluctuations. At the
“present” momentary end of all those spirals, the
random events give the whole bundle a chance to gain essentially
new structural features, but this evolutionary progress through
smaller and larger revolutions, the “Darwinian
upward-drift”, is very slow compared to the essential
internal time-scales of the spiral loops. Isn’t it? (It is
no longer – and this is why I am talking here!)
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5.
The Invisible Hand: Self-Organized Chance on Complex
Attractors
I have insinuated that complexity
and value are practically synonymous. But does this help us to
understand what value is? Even the concept of complexity is
difficult to grasp mathematically. The essentials of a complex
system cannot be analyzed or synthesized in a reasonable time –
not even by the largest computers which might ever be realized.
Of course, mathematicians have been able to invent abstract
measures of complexity – which may e.g. in principle assign
a single number, some “degree of complexity”, to a
given message or system – but for real systems the
calculation of such numbers would either take practically
infinite time or miss all the essentials, i.e. the true value. In
fact, the practical determination of a degree of complexity of a
real system would have to follow the immensely many accidental
bifurcations along the path of its origin, i.e. the whole
“wrigglingprocess” of trial and error in co-evolution
with nearly everything else in the world which influenced the
probabilities of choices.
The complex value of a genome or
a poem does certainly not lie in the correlation structures of
its letters but in their “context” within the whole
world of life and culture. If we look at some “strange
attractors” in the phase space of a simple dynamical system
or if we let a computer “zoom in” at some
micro-region of the fractal edge of the Mandelbrot set, or let it
draw contours of the Lyapunov number of the simplest non-linear
systems of difference equations with two parameters – we
are overwhelmed by a feeling of immense complexity which we sense
as beauty. But in a way, these are all still extremely simple
structures, because they arise from trivial iteration processes,
the rules of which can be written down with a few symbols, and
because in their construction there enter no external
interactions (except the random motion of the eye or the thought
which decided where to look). What we call the functioning of
a cell or the health of an organism or the
viability of the biosphere or the value system of a
society – all these attractors in the space of
possibilities are infinitely more complex than such
visualizable patterns.
Do scientists really claim that the
whole beautiful complexity of our world evolved from the utmost
simplicity of the big bang via random fluctuations, i.e. “pure
chance”? Yes, this is the working hypothesis! But we must
understand that the evolution of viable structures implies an
increasing organization of random fluctuations ! Any
viable “gestalt”, a type of dissipative structure of
matter and energy in space and time, can be looked at as an
“attractor” in the space of possibilities.
Considering the number of possible relation patterns in the
world, this space must be full of infinitely many more or less
attractive ideas of structures which are consistent with the
fundamental laws. The question is, whether and how a specific
attractor can be reached, how it reaches out for others, and
how in an immense number of such steps the “Great Chain of
Becoming” is realized – this one and only real
history of our universe among infinitely many possible others
which did not happen, and never will. (Of course, the
concept of a universe becomes itself doubtful at this stage, and
one must start speculating about a “multiverse” of
infinitely many universes. Their conceptual position in the space
of possibilities is not very different from that of the
unrealized histories of “our” universe …)
You
often hear, the real world could not arise through chance because
the probability of “success” would be negligibly
small: “If an ape played with a type-writer, many ages of
our universe would not suffice to let one of Shakespeare’s
sonnets arise by chance”. But there is a fundamental
misunderstanding in this argument. Chance is organized on a very
much higher level in human mind. Some complex features of this
organization we name by the words “consciousness”,
“intuition”, “wisdom”, “free will”,
“responsibility”. But chance is still at the root of
all this. An identical twin of Shakespeare would have written
quite different poetry – if any at all. And if you would
have “clones” of Shakespeare, born and brought up
elsewhere and in other epochs, the probability for the appearance
of one of his sonnets would be infinitesimally small –
similarly small as with that ape and type-writer. And even with
the real Shakespeare there is the same problem: Infinitely many
random events have gone into each line of his poetry –
every single line is, therefore, infinitesimally likely, i.e.
extremely unlikely, namely one possibility out of practically
infinitely many. However, once this level of complexity had been
reached in his mind, something had to happen at this new
front of creativity. And, no surprise, it turns out to be
something very attractive for other highly organized minds –
which does not mean that from now on all minds move exclusively
along the sonnet-attractor.
An attractor is a pattern in
some sub-space of possibilities which attracts the path of a
subsystem when it happens to come near. With a less fashionable
word we might call it the “idea” of this pattern. Any
realization is only an approximation. It is fluctuating in its
basin of attraction due to internal and external random events –
which may be spontaneous quantum fluctuations on a microscopic
scale or accidental encounters on larger scales. The latter have
a history, but if one could analyze this history, all accidents
could in principle be traced back to microscopic fluctuations –
at least in the big bang, but usually in the much nearer past.
(Remember the “butterfly-effect” in meteorology!) As
random fluctuations let the path of a system cross the border
between the basins of neighbouring attractors, the tautological
principle of creation (“survival of the more viable”)
takes care of a statistical tendency to evolve in the direction
of higher viability, which is the “better idea”. This
quality must be ascribed to the attractor – not to the
realized path. It is, therefore, again a tautology if we say that
more viable attractors organize the statistical patterns of their
internal and external fluctuations in such a way that typical
fluctuations and accidents are less likely to lead outside
the basin of attraction.
All possible ideas, i.e.
attractors in the space of possibilities, may be thought of as
fixed and timeless. Time is, so to say, the counting of steps in
the process of realization which draws a path into the space of
possibilities and tries and proves the viability of more and more
attractors. An attractor which has proven its viability is
likely to be used as a building-block in the evolution of still
higher structures which derive their own viability from the fact
that they organize the fluctuations of their constituents even
better, protecting them from all stronger interactions, and thus
stabilizing their “attractivity”. Higher attractors
organize relatively weak interactions of their constituents.
Successful “enslavement” of sub-ordinate structures
in more complex higher ones does, therefore, usually not mean a
loss of all their individuality, i.e. their proven viability.
Molecules don’t try to change atomic nuclei, life doesn’t
try to change the genetic code, mind didn’t – until
recently – try and change the biology of the immune system
or the climate of the earth. The obvious hierarchy of attractors
is not a hierarchy of “power”. Evolution is
co-evolution. “Fitness” of a part is a property of
the whole. The Darwinian drift towards “higher”
attractors is not at all based on some mysterious “drive”
of the attractors to “push aside” and replace others.
It is a logical consequence of a large number of independent
trials of possible attractors, with slightly different
realizations at many places and times.
In summary, we may
say: Self-organization of complex systems is the necessarily
accidental organization of accidents, the organization of chance
by chance – in which more viable systems must arise if they
are possible in the accessible neighbourhood in the space of
possibilities. We saw that in our universe the inexhaustible
offer of “fossil” free energy from the big bang makes
it likely to reach higher states, i.e. a higher organization of
the fluctuations, via random fluctuations. Therefore, “it
is likely that extremely unlikely possibilities are realized”.
This entailed the co-evolution of ever higher complexity, from
big bang to consciousness. Of course, in this general sense,
minimized interaction, i.e. better isolation, of certain parts is
included in the concept of complexity as well as intricately
organized cooperation of others.
At this point you may
have started thinking of your own brain, well kept in your skull
– and of the realm of ideas which are approached in very
weak interactions in and between our brains. Attractors of the
mind become physically realized in the self-organized growth of
connections between neurons (Gerald Edelman’s “Neural
Darwinism”), in the firing-patterns of those neural
networks, in language, gestures, music and all other sorts of
communication between people, in libraries, in houses and all
other works of art and technology. Due to internal fluctuations
and accidental encounters in souls and minds and cultures the
path wriggles upwards through attractive ideas. There is no
difference in principle to the “premental” earlier
stages of evolution. However, on the new level of complexity it
becomes even more evident that attractors in the space of
possibilities can be “realized” only approximately by
matter in space and time. Think of mathematical ideas –
like the set of natural numbers, or categories of infinity, or
the Mandelbrot set. What is their place in the space of
possibilities, and their relation to the line of reality which
time draws through it? And where are the Brothers Karamasov, or
The Art of the Fugue, or England, or I myself, or my dead mother,
or God?
Where do we place all our customary fancies about
differences between “physical” and “metaphysical”
realities and possibilities? If you are philosophically minded
you may resume the quarrel whether “universalia sunt
realia”, which occupied outstanding European minds for
centuries. But more urgent questions have developed since. Though
the overwhelming majority of possibilities in our neighbourhood
is of this “ideal” kind, more and more very material
“hard-ware” is being selected for realization. The
probabilities in the decisions at impending bifurcations seem to
be determined by rather compulsory motives and motions. More
simplistic ideas seem more likely to win. Let us try and reveal
the nature of this invisible handicap!
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6.
The Visible Foot
Can you see why all this
worked beautifully as long as mind had many independent areas for
trial and error which were sufficiently weakly connected with the
rest of the world? And can you see why there arises a problem
when quick brains start effecting decisively their own roots,
down to the nuclei of atoms and cells, and up to the global
cycles of climate? What about the viability and evolvability of
systems which try and plan improvements of their environment and
their own “building-blocks” in a hurry, and globally?
Why in a hurry? And why globally?
I think I
don’t have to explain to economists why speed and global
unification have a selective advantage. This is a logically
unavoidable trend in the evolution of evolvability in a spatially
finite system. Attractors on which the wriggling is organized at
higher speed, are likely to conquer new frontiers in the space of
possibilities more quickly than others. At any epoch in history,
and in any region in physical space, some types of attractors are
the most successful in this sense. We may say that such
structures are locally “at the front of evolution”.
However, the definition of this front of most successful
innovation may depend decisively on the timescale on which the
success is judged. In all that trial and error it must often be
likely that some attractor is very successful on a short term but
destructive in the longer run. Clearly, this will be more likely
to happen if there is a higher speed of innovation at the
“front”. Important interactions with underlying
“sub-attractors” (which may be internal or external)
or with more encompassing, larger attractors will later turn out
to have been neglected. The trial may then turn out to have been
an error which can no longer be mended by more trials in the
neighbourhood, and this front collapses.
This kind of
mistake is a normal constituent of the evolutionary process.
Think of a cell of your body which undergoes a small genetic
fluctuation – e.g. from some radiation or unfamiliar
chemical agent. Perhaps it is successful, and the cell discovers
that it can multiply much faster than in its old organization. It
wins the competition with your immune system, attracts more and
more of the free energy available from your metabolism, grows
into a tumor, conquers new frontiers in other organs, and swamps
you with its waste – which is deadly poison for you. So
what? This is probably a negligible event in world-history. You
must die anyway, and there are many others to continue with trial
and error. – We can see the same type of phenomenon at an
even lower level of organization: Think of the water-lily on an
pond which has become over-fertilized in some chain of fortunate
accidents. What a fantastic offer of free energy! The lily grows
and grows, covers the whole surface, blocks the sun for the
biosphere underneath – and lets it die. Of course, now the
lily dies too – and again it isn’t a lack of free
energy which causes its death, but the poisoning of the whole
system by the waste, that is by entropy production. But again,
this isn’t a catastrophe in world-history. There are other
ponds from which life will trickle back. And, in fact, much of
the deadly entropy produced in this instability will be used as
free energy by many micro-organisms. So what?
Are there
other planets in our neighbourhood from which intelligent life
could come back to the earth if we let it collapse into a state
similar to the Jurassic or the Precambrian? Probably not. Or
would there be a chance to try again with more success? Well, the
sun will offer its flow of entropy, i.e. the earth’s free
energy, for approximately another 5 billion years. Creation would
go on. But we have understood by now, that it would have to find
a totally different path in the space of possibilities. Only the
features which are inevitable or very likely for purely logical
reasons would have to become realized again. I claim that the
present global acceleration crisis belongs into this category. It
is not due to a chain of unfortunate accidents, but intimately
connected with the level of complex organization reached in us –
and with the fact that planets, the sites for long-lasting trial
and error under relatively stable environmental conditions, are
round and isolated. The selective advantage of a higher speed of
innovation is very unlikely to be constrained via
self-organization before trial and error approach the global
scale. The reason is, in short, the success of what we call
power.
We saw: Faster “wriggling” in the space
of possibilities means faster progress. So, the speed of
wriggling will increase and so will, correspondingly, the speed
of innovation at the front. As an example for the organization of
higher speed in our history, think of the “invention”
of sexual reproduction. The old-fashioned simple splitting –
i.e. copying with a few mistakes – was replaced by
combination. This inflated the rate of “accidents” –
i.e. the speed of wriggling in the space of possible genetic
structures. Without this acceleration it would have been too
unlikely to evolve the richness of our biosphere, especially the
animals with their brains and nervous systems. Still more
revolutionary, of course, was the evolution of the cerebrum. This
shifted the front of trial and error from the molecular structure
of DNS and proteins to the patterns of “firing activity”
in huge neural networks. Remember the number of different
possible relation-structures of twenty-four points – larger
than the number of atoms in the universe! Our brain contains tens
of billions of neurons, and each of them is connected to tens of
thousands of others …
Among the possibilities of
this system there is what we call soul and mind –
attractors of very much higher complexity in newly opened
dimensions of the space of possibilities. The exploration process
does no longer have to wait for a quantum of cosmic radiation or
some poisonous molecule to change a gene in an egg or sperm-cell.
There are immensely more fluctuations in the firing pattern of
brains. Even the thermal fluctuations may come into play (–
think of fever-fantasies!). And more than that: The principle of
combination gains far more influence now. Via language, a sort of
hypersexual exchange, more and more individuals share their
experience while they develop. The time-scales of loops in the
leading attractors and of their innovation become comparable.
Soon, 10 billion brains will be connected by a few TV-satellites
and evolve as one. What a step forward in the organization of the
tools of exploration! What acceleration! Now, how many new
options do you want to be offered every day? There doesn’t
seem to be a limit! Isn’t the globe being conquered by
better and better ideas, ever more quickly?
We have
reached the seventh day of creation. Remember, how God looked
back every evening and saw “that it was very good”.
Very natural, we may think, when we imagine how much time his
wriggling fingers had in order to try and find more attractive
shapes. The six days in the old myth of creation are about
fifteen billion years in the new. The old myth didn’t take
numbers so seriously. In fact, the shaping of man took only the
last minute of that whole week, and written history is a blinking
of the eyes. But I am puzzled now. It doesn’t seem to be
clear which day it is today. Didn’t a leading German
specialist of genetic engineering recently announce the dawn of
the eighth day of creation? Can someone tell me what
happened on the seventh? Wasn’t the Sabbath meant to be a
day of rest? A day for contemplation, i.e. for the unfolding of
possibilities of soul and mind, for the evolution of arts, of
ideas, of happiness, of love? How do the more and more
accelerating restlessness and the demolishing of past works of
creation fit into this picture? What has happened?
Excuse
me for reminding you of old stories. There was that angel who had
watched it all. He understood the laws of nature: How elementary
particles function, and atoms, molecules, solid bodies and the
genetic code, and neural networks, and societies with
well-organized advertising. He even attempted to understand
markets … When we became curious, like any intelligent
child, he enlightened us. Therefore, he was called “the
bringer of light”, that is Lucifer. (In the Greek
myth, he was called Prometheus, i.e. the “fore-thinker”.)
He isn’t at all malicious or evil. He just wants to improve
the world – do exactly what God had done, and with the same
means. However, he wants to do it in a hurry.
He has not
realized that the laws of logic come before the laws of nature,
and that the logic of creation, i.e. of self-organization,
implies some simple conditions of success: There must be
sufficient diversity in trial and sufficient time to eliminate
errors before they have destroyed the viability of the basis.
Otherwise, it is not likely to find more complex
attractors in the space of possibilities, and the wriggling at
the front of evolution becomes unstable. More and more free
energy is turned into entropy via quite complicated dissipative
structures. Locally, and for a moment, they may still seem very
attractive, but they wriggle so quickly and extensively that the
coherence of that bundle of spirals gets lost. Complexity falls
apart, turns into complicatedness. Problems are being felt. You
know the answer: No problem! With faster wriggling they can be
solved! You know the result: Several new problems have
been created, which are being felt on a larger scale, and which
have to be solved still a bit more urgently. The answer: No
problem …
You see why that race between
problem-solution and problem-creation had to set in, down the
road to hell, which has been paved with so many good intentions.
Now, after his fall, the enlightening Lucifer has a new name: The
Devil, i.e. dia-bolos, i.e. “he who throws things
into disorder”. Why? Because he wants to improve the world
faster than it is logically possible. You see: The theory of
value which I promised is nothing but the well-known system
theory of God and Devil. Can we seriously apply it to
economics?
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7.
Are We Free to Constrain the Devil?
Since
the global acceleration crisis is implicit in the principle of
creation, we cannot say that it started at any well-defined
moment with one specific error. We may, however, say that the
global aspect became manifest with the conquest of the globe by
our own powerful system of attractive ideas. We are just
celebrating the fifth centenary. What we call modern times, is
the 500 years of self-organization of this enlightened power.
Modern economy has a dominant part in this process. In short, it
is the incessant discovery of more deviations from equilibrium
which can serve as cheap sources of free energy to be used for
the detection of new attractive possibilities. Exploitable
sources of this kind have been serfs, slaves and whole subjugated
people, as well as the energy sources proper and all the other
resources – ultimately the whole realized creation. They
allow “problem-solutions” which let more people of
each generation live like kings of the preceding one –
until the globe drowns in the entropy production of so many
kings. (Remember that dis-covery and de-tection mean
the same as apo-kalypse – namely “taking a lid
off”. And Pan-dora means “the all-giving
one”!)
The majority of economists either ignore the
threatening collapse-singularity, or pin their hope on faster and
more unified efforts of the same kind – i.e. faster
innovation and global unification. However, those are symptoms
of the devilish disease, and cannot be its cure. Some
have understood that the world has been seized by an instability,
but they tend to consider this as an unstoppable consequence of
the laws of nature. If this were so, it ouldn’t make sense
to call it a “crisis”. The proper words would then be
“decline, doomed to collapse”. In fact, the
cancer-cell and the water-lily are certainly not able to stop
their progress with their own means. In their case, the
fluctuations are organized in such a way that they scarcely have
a chance to escape from the unstable attractor once they happened
to stagger into its basin of attraction. But such accidents don’t
make the whole principle of cells or water-lilies unviable –
because there are so many organisms that immune-systems could
evolve, and because there are so any ponds. These are qualities
of the biosphere which don’t have to be, and cannot be,
organized by cells or lilies. Will the biosphere take care of our
problems, too?
Scientists are easily taken in by the
“biologistic” view in which “man is a species
like others”. Since biochemists, biologists and ethologists
have found out so much about the principles of life and even the
behaviour and “psychology” of higher species –
and because scientists have been taught to talk and think only
about subjects simple enough to be studied scientifically –
they tend to push aside the fundamental difference: The essential
level of man is his mind, and mind is realized on a very much
higher organizational level than life! The essentials of human
life happen in very different dimensions of the space of
possibilities. We must not confuse the human species and mind.
Their relation rather resembles that between life and matter, or
between matter and the big bang. Mind is not a “property”
of the human species. It has been growing on it, like life grew
on matter, and matter grew on the “original substance”
(which physicists may one day even describe as nothing). The
threatening collapse of the biosphere must not be thought of as a
“biological event”. It is not due to a chain of
unfortunate accidents of mutation and selection. It is, so to
say, a spiritual event, namely an expression of that mental
disturbance which the ancients called the Devil. Inescapable, but
superable.
There must be many recent approaches to
theoretical studies of processes in what I call the space of
possibilities. (I don’t know them because I don’t
read much.) One of you quoted Richard Dawkins’ concept of
general structural ideas called “memes”. Those are
considered as analogs of the genes in biological structures. To
the biological phenotypes, which continuously replicate the genes
and try out their mutations, there will then correspond analogous
“interactors” for the memes on the structural level
of mind and its cultural and economical stage. One may then talk
about mental, cultural, technological and economical evolution in
a quasi-biological terminology. Progress – the generalized
Darwinian upward-drift – is then due to the selection of
more successful memes in the “meme-pool”. Of course,
this scenario is similar to what I have described with the
visualization of “attractors in the space of
possibilities”. This similarity will not surprise you once
you have understood the tautological character of the Darwinian
insight. However, no matter which words and images we choose, we
won’t find help in judging values and choosing reliable
paths from such pictures, unless we consider the question of
time-scales and discover the logical inevitability of the global
acceleration crisis and the logical conditions for overcoming it.
Otherwise, any generalized evolutionary theory will remain an
empty frame, or it will – more likely – be misused
for a still more effective self-organization of the forces
leading into this crisis. Like all science, it will serve
very well as “opium for the people”. Just imagine how
much more effective advertising might become under the more
promising and distinguished scientific name memetic
engineering!
I have the impression that all
evolutionary theorists shy away from one simple thought which
leads immediately to what I called the “deviltheorem”,
i.e. the basic insight into the character of the acceleration
crisis. When somebody claims that something is going too fast,
the reaction of a scientist must be: Too fast in comparison
with what? The answer seems to lie far outside the reach of
scientific knowledge about the time-scales in the processes
involved. Indeed, the answer is “pre-scientific” and
comes from logic. Among the many evolutionary processes in a
spatially finite system like our biosphere there is that fastest
one, at “the front of evolution”, defining the
time-scale of innovation. But there is another time-scale
involved at that front, namely the life-time or reproduction-time
of those “leading structures”. This will not become
shorter in the course of evolution, because the internal
complexity of the most highly evolved structures requires that
minimum of time for maturation after reproduction. Therefore, due
to the selective advantage of speed of innovation at the front,
the two time-scales will approach each other until they coincide.
This is the systemtheoretical, “purely logical”,
origin of the acceleration-aspect of the crisis. It is obvious
that it must become global, and that rush and global unification
amplify each other.
It is very unlikely that this devilish
attractor can be overcome by selforganization before the crisis
has become manifest in both its aspects. Its prophets will be
ridiculed or smashed by the successes of power. However, when the
symptoms indicate the approach of catastrophe, there is still a
chance to realize the idea of the “seventh day”. The
selective advantage of speed and globality may be constrained by
conscious organization of mind and society. The idea may be
overcome, that the “good” is something “better”
which can easily, quickly and globally be found with the good
will of a majority or the expertise of some elite. It sounds like
an internal contradiction, that the same idea should then help us
to overcome the crisis. It is again a tautology that a rapid
global instability can only be overcome by quick and world-wide
action – if at all. However, constraints may be more easily
developed than all the details of a complex system. We don’t
have to and we must not design society, but only better
boundaryconditions for its development.
The devil is a
highly organized attractor. It interweaves practically all other
realized attractors of the mind, because mind fluctuates so fast.
But if you are old enough to have a little experience with your
own mind, you may have realized that the same can be said about
God. The fact that the road to hell is so well paved does not
necessarily mean that it has to be followed to the end. All
along, beautiful paths can be found away from it. We have a word
to describe those manifold possibilities of bifurcations: We
speak of our freedom. But this does not mean chaotic fluctuation.
As we saw, the ascent to viable complexity is due to the more
refined organization of chance on ever higher levels. The history
of human mind is the selforganization of freedom.
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8.
The Cloven Hoof in the Market
Liberalism is
at the intellectual foundations of modern economy, but the idea
that freedom has to be organized smells of dirigisme.
Constraining the Devil is by many considered as a fiendish act of
enslavement. To be sure, the ideological war of words is not very
helpful if we want to approach the questions of economy from the
point of view of logic and general system theory. On the other
hand, ideology is an unavoidable guide in the world of ideas. We
can never discuss decisions in all details, because those are not
known, and not knowable. So, self-organization of freedom will
always mean trial and error with a very blurred vision.
The
usual scientific type of mathematical formulation and computation
doesn’t help here. It is mainly intuition what we need, and
this does imply ideology, in a modified sense. Our various
ideological principles have to be checked in the light of basic
insights about self-organization, which I have tried to sketch
here. Although the working hypothesis behind this picture
introduces no other kind of realized mental phenomena beyond our
own mind, it keeps a little bit of the traditional “dualism”
in the discrimination of reality and possibility. In a way, the
whole spiritual world lives in the space of possibilities.
Doesn’t this offer the chance for a re-unification of
materialism and spiritualism?
Because of its
irrefutable logic the evolutionary theory of the invisible hand
and the visible foot may be acceptable for ideologists of many
schools in science, philosophy, religion and even economy –
possibly with the exception of some fundamentalists who claim
that God or the rules of the stock exchange tell them directly
which way to take at each bifurcation. All others might perhaps
agree that God is the attractor which leads “higher”
in the space of possibilities, but that he is found in the course
of physical time via the worldly interactions – beginning
with “quantumfluctuations of geometry”, through
elementary particles, molecules, lifeforms and, for the present,
the abilities of our minds, which are wriggling in that basin of
attraction. Praying is then a good word for our attempts
to allow the self-organization of better sub-attractors.
Successes are stored in cultural loops, and even in stone. If you
worry about uniqueness, you must remember our first visualization
of the space of possibilities, in which reality is a
single line. If you are intimidated by too many dimensions, stay
in your homely subspace. In fact, I am doing this here right now.
This doesn’t mean that I deny the possibility that I know
and use only a small selection of human mental abilities –
but I am glad to say that even the known ones leave us a lot of
hope.
We have the freedom to choose – not only as
individuals but also as democratic societies. E.g., we must
choose which dealers should be admitted to the market. Who should
be responsible for this? Adam Smith already told you that the
invisible hand cannot even build the light-houses, needed to show
safe waters. Nobody but informed and conscientious people can
take care of this. They must struggle to convince everybody. It
is a misunderstanding of the idea of equal political rights, when
such people leave the responsibility with the less informed
majority. If you see rubbish and poison and weapons being sold
and bought in the market, you must shout and act and try
and stop this. The most important section of the market must be
the free exchange of ideas, and exactly this cannot be regulated
by money. If the view of the masses makes you wash your hands of
it, your cowardice may cripple or paralyze the invisible hand.
The front of evolution is in the individual minds. The ideas of a
personal soul and of equal human rights have their roots in this
insight. God can defeat the Devil and realize higher parts of
himself only through our wriggling. Now we understand the
peculiar notion, that God has to be served. Just one tiny
complication arises. Someone said it: Ye cannot serve God and
mammon.
Once a global instability has set in, you
will find its organizational principle acting everywhere. Nearly
everything which happens on earth today, is organized in a wrong
way! This sounds ominous. However, since nearly everything
develops from good will – and not from malice, as we saw –
it will be possible to find a few “leverage-points”
in the organization of society, from which changes will spread
easily to many other points of that complex network. I think the
monetary system, land-law and other so-called property-rights are
such leverage-points from which the self-organization of freedom,
i.e. the organization of the necessary impediments to “size
and speed”, might start. Of course, this can and will not
happen in one mind. I shall only give a few hints and leave the
necessary research to you, the experts. (I have said a little
more elsewhere, also in my last book: “Das Grundgesetz vom
Aufstieg”, Carl-Hanser-Verlag, München 1989.)
The
basic ideological principles of the present organization of
society are called democracy, free market, and capitalism. People
have needs, demands, wishes – often very “selfish”
ones – but all this is supposed to come into a viable
quasi-equilibrium with a Darwinian upward-drift if (1) everybody
has the right of vote and thus can every few years influence the
choice of the main figures in the administration, and if (2)
everybody has access to the free market of ideas and goods which
organizes itself via supply and demand. These ideas are
summarized in Adam Smith’s image of the invisible hand. The
idea of democracy sprang from an intuitive insight into the
evolutionary principle of self-organization, supported by the
experience that we don’t have reliable means of classifying
people according to the quality of their aspirations. So, in its
root, it is a good idea. However, future thinking must turn to
the long-neglected question which scales are optimal at various
levels of democratic organization, and how the relations between
these levels should be organized. Much of the present
“constitutional” state of our planet and its regions,
and much of the recent developments in the political organization
is clearly “wrong” from the point of view of
viability and evolvability, which would require more diversity.
Size and speed will have to be constrained in the world’s
political organization, too.
The idea of a free
market is, at first sight, exactly what evolution needs.
Everybody participates in the political and economic trial and
error, and if improvements are possible and can be reached by
present activities, they are likely to be realized. The main
defect of the so-called socialist system – which just
collapsed at last – was the attempt to replace the free
markets of opinions and goods by planning in small groups of
“those responsible”. Now, everybody admits that
“planning replaces chance by error”. Originally those
systems were “devilish” not because of bad intentions
but because of good will – like with Lucifer. We must not
forget that socialist ideas formed at a time when children were
forced to creep through mines and chimneys in order to survive.
But degeneration of good will is inevitable if principle flaws
block the chances to reach improvements. Then, the “evil”
side of the Devil tends to show up – which is a very subtle
feature of that attractor. Atrocities certainly accelerate the
recognition of the non-viability of a system. Unfortunately, the
fact that the other system collapsed does in no way prove a much
longer viability of ours. In fact, the largest contributions to
the ongoing destruction of atmosphere, soils, water, species etc.
– as well as the weapons for most of the brutal violence in
the world – come from the richest western democratic
societies. The ideology of the free market does not guarantee
viability. The spread of cancer-cells is a freemarket phenomenon,
too. When the immune system of the organism has been overcome,
freedom becomes unlimited – for some participants at the
cost of others. So, which constraints should be taken into
consideration as an immune system for the free market?
A
critical shortcoming of present realizations of democracy and
markets is the extreme economical inequality. If people cannot
even satisfy their fundamental human needs through relatively
simple own efforts, they can be easily exploited. In order to
properly feed and house your family and bring up your children,
you need a “job”, and you only get the job if you do
what the “employer” wants. As a result many people
are working hard to help producing goods which they have long
recognized as rubbish or poison. But they must help producing and
selling something – with the means of production
owned by others. So, a majority depends on producing and
selling rubbish and poison. And on advertising it! Demand is
often created by supply – like in the drug-scene. Science
and technology do their best to supply more “opium for the
people” and let themselves be paid by the producers of
poison to supply the wanted “risk-assessment”. It is
cynical to talk of a free market when people are not free to do
something less destructive, and can satisfy their basic demands
only with so many “sideeffects”. The democratic idea
– to define value via demand – must then lead to
break-down.
Economic inequality is still increasing –
in practically all nations as well as world-wide. With small
variations the present distribution is like this: The first tenth
of the people owns half of all property, the second tenth owns
one quarter, the third tenth one eighth … and so on in the
geometric progression. This means that the vast majority of
people own scarcely anything. One might think that this
“injustice” is at least steadily being corrected when
there is so much good will everywhere. It isn’t. The
distribution is changing, but still further in the wrong
direction! This means that the majority of people work for their
bare life or even starve in order to make a minority
richer.
Increasing inequality is organized via the idea of
capitalism. Capitalists tend to confuse this concept with that of
the free market, but it is something quite different. The basic
idea of capitalism is income from property. A very attractive
idea, admittedly, if you own something! But in fact it is the
most effective suppressor of the individual and collective
components of the mental immune system, the main organizational
principle of the global acceleration crisis. Why that? As an
economist, one must not talk about the problem, you know, because
Karl Marx wrote so much about it and is still being blamed for
the consequences. As a physicist, I may be forgiven a few
remarks: If some people are allowed to appropriate the
foundations of living of others, the vicious circle of growing
inequality sets in. The owners let the non-owners pay for the
unavoidable use of their property. So, the property grows, which
means that the owners become richer and can appropriate more of
the foundations of living of others, even further away.
Since
people are no longer the main means of production, it is useless
to own them directly. It is much more rational to own just the
foundations of their life. The old-fashioned kind of slavery
could be abolished. But most people in the world are still forced
to misuse their mental abilities for bare survival. This is not
what those were “meant for” in their evolution.
(Remember: Like life is not there for the functioning of
molecules, mind is not there for the functioning of life.) The
degeneration is not always a consequence of brute force.
Unobtrusive gifts can lure you into deadly addiction. A
particularly vicious feature of this attractor loop of
appropriation and expropriation is the fact that capital
ultimately also controls the foundations of living of university
professors, including economists and even moral philosophers.
This is why there is so little scientific and ethical discussion
of this obvious and very effectual phenomenon. It is considered
as a law of nature. Perhaps you are right, then, to leave its
exploration to physicists?
Modern history is dominated by
consequences of this fault in the selforganization of society. It
is tempting to write volumes like Marx, but I cannot go into
details here. I must, however, at least mention the obsession
with the growth of gross national product. It has been clear for
decades that the contributions in the GNP which are related to
damaging activities are growing fastest. But whatever has been
paid for with money, is still simply added up in the GNP, as
though economists had never heard about negative numbers. So
strong is the general feeling that money is something positive!
Something which has not been bought or sold is worthless. People
with zero per capita income are, in a way, considered as
nonexistent – although the majority of all ancestors of
economists were among those, too. Recently, many of you may feel
a bit ashamed about the misuse of the GNP, and rather keep silent
about it. But it isn't enough to be ashamed of dangerous
stupidity. You must name it and attack politicians and media
whenever they talk about growth without mentioning entropy or
cancer. Economic progress has become a cancer of the mind, and it
metastasizes throughout the biosphere. When it has become so
overwhelmingly clear that most economic activities are damaging
our roots, why don’t you admit and loudly demand that the
GNP must shrink ? We know the answer: Because the whole
political and economic system would break down! And that seems
unacceptable – until one has understood that this system
organizes a far more encompassing collapse, along that unstable
attractor which I called the global acceleration crisis. Once you
have realized this, you will of course try and help break down
this system to let a more viable one grow.
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9.
Reduction Strategies
First, forget about GNP
and its “sustainable growth”. Second, forget the idea
that you have to replace GNP by some other “welfare-indicator”
which should grow. The devil can only be defeated if we stop
doing things which we have recognized as wrong. The concept of
“qualitative growth” must be taken seriously! The
first steps towards qualitative growth mean quantitative
shrinking in the areas which we have recognized as most damaging.
E.g. the production of such chemical compounds and materials must
be reduced, which are probably incompatible with the viability of
our biosphere (because they didn’t co-evolve with it) –
no matter how many people profit from the investions, the jobs,
the trade, the application and consumption, or the attempts to
heal the damages. Most of such wrong activities cannot be stopped
over night. Reduction strategies have to be developed, where the
time-scales will depend on the present speed of destruction due
to each activity.
Sorry, there will be planning
involved. Not for the design of some saleable good, but for
the reduction of sales, especially for the greatest
runners. So, the kind of thinking necessary will appear as
“countereconomical”. But economy has to be
countered when it organizes collapse. Let me illustrate this with
only one example – the energy problem: Practically all
climatologists agree by now that the continuation of the present
world-wide energy consumption would overthrow the earth’s
climate in about 5o years. Due to many unknown or ill-understood
positive and negative feed-back mechanisms the time might be
longer or shorter, but most experts agree that it would be very
foolish to rely on good luck in this case. So, a reasonable
energy policy should set the aim of reducing the present
consumption of fossils by about a factor of five within the next
fifty years. Today, four fifth of mankind do practically not
contribute anything to the consumption, and the population is
still rapidly growing in exactly those “under-developed”
countries. Therefore, if we assume that we (the “developed”
countries) manage to reduce our energy consumption to, say, 20%
of the present German one, and if you give justice a chance in 50
years and allow the rest of the world to approach the same level
from below, world energy consumption will roughly remain the same
as today – namely about 10 Terawatts. With the about 10
billion people living 50 years from now, this would mean about 1
kilowatt per capita – as compared to more than 5 kW in
Germany and more than 10 kW in the US today. (This means the
daily production of your own body-weight in carbon dioxide!
One human generation scatters to the winds what the biosphere
stored from solar energy on a millionfold longer time-scale!)
1
kilowatt may sound like utmost poverty to some of you. But,
believe me, nearly all our present energy consumption goes
straight into entropy. With more intelligent use, to be developed
by the next two generations, 1 kW will be comfortably enough.
However, even this radical reduction of the worst sins would not
bring the earth one step nearer to viability! The same two
generations which must achieve this tremendous task of saving
energy, will at the same time have to develop alternatives to
fossil energy at the scale of the global consumption, i.e. 10 TW.
Huge advertisements in all newspapers tell you that there is
one good plant in the greenhouse, namely the nuclear one
which produces no direct CO2-emissions. Some of its proponents
still rant about a nuclear future, in which they will supply even
all the fuel. But you need little more than counting, to
recognize the nature of such dreams. To supply 10 TW within 5o
years, with plants of about 1 GW each, which live for about 30
years, you must set in operation one big plant every day,
for 50 years, from now on. This shows the size of
the so-called energy-problem. But nuclear energy is not only out
because of this order of magnitude, but because the radioactive
inventory of even the safest reactor makes you play a sort of
“Russian roulette” with cities and whole regions.
Those infamous “chains of unfortunate events” can
never be excluded in a world with so much good-willed megalomania
and so much stupidity, not to talk about wars and terrorists.
Therefore, in a viable society, any large-scale technical use of
radio-active nuclides will become for ever taboo.
The only
remaining alternative is solar energy in the widest sense (which
also includes wind and water), used in manifold ways. Many of
them can already be seen, many new ones will be found and
developed by our children and grandchildren. In Munich, where I
live, the sun delivers on each square meter annually the energy
content of 100 liters of oil. With realistic efficiencies an
average area of about 100 square meters will be needed for each
inhabitant of the earth to “harvest” his share of
energy – a fraction of what is needed for his food.
(Perhaps it is helpful to think of an example of a particular
piece of land of 100 square meters, say in Kenya. The former
owner has sold it to a land-lord who produces cash-crops.
He could buy a used TV for his family, and he is now working for
the new owner. The harvest is a box of beans which can be sold
for about 1 British Pound to an export firm. On the next day it
is on the European market, where the consumer pays about 13
Pounds. Exercise: What is the growth of GNP in Kenya and in
Europe, respectively? How much energy has been spent? How many
people have been fed, and what is their body-weight? …)
From
what I have said about energy, it is clear how the reduction
strategy has to begin in Europe: In order to reach 20% of today’s
consumption within the next 50 years, we should reduce it by 3%
every year. It is worth thinking about your own possibilities of
reduction – when you buy a car, when you choose the type of
vehicle for your way to work or for a voyage, when you buy
electric household equipment or energy-intensive food or consumer
goods, when you build or renovate a house. You will see that for
the first few years you and everybody can easily save 3%, and it
will turn out that this doesn't even have to cost you money. On
the contrary: Even money will be saved, and we just have to take
care that everybody gets a fair share of these savings. In later
years this will, of course, change. It will cost a good part of
the efforts of two generations to “solve the energy
problem”. But what does this mean for economy? It means
that people will have something meaningful to do. There
will be plenty of jobs which do not accelerate the destruction of
the biosphere and regional cultures. If we are able to find a
better type of “division of labour”, those jobs will
not be organized for the growth of capital but in order to
achieve a long-term coexistence of mind and biosphere on earth.
It’s worth trying! We are getting a bit nearer to the
concept of real value ...
You may think, society must
first find a better way of organizing the committees which
discuss the probabilities of “risks and benefits” of
technological or economical activities and make recommendations
to politicians. I agree. As the experts for technology assessment
one should no longer call the people who invented a technology
and want to sell it. And as experts for constraints to economy
one must not ask the moneygrowers. I think, however, that even
more barriers must be found against the fast offering of “new
options”. The organization of freedom must lead us in a
direction where it becomes less likely to find buyers and
consumers for more and more fast world-wide innovation. Under
present conditions it appears illusionary to try and stop the
spreading of fashions of ever more sophisticated gadgets. Not
only will soon every child want to carry a “game-boy”
with his “walk-man”, but everybody may wear tiny
computers, perhaps under his skin, which can receive messages of
his own voice via microphones, and via radio from other people or
from libraries and big computers anywhere in the world –
and probably from the “administration”. Your
“personal computers” will then really be part of your
person and assist your little brain by processing all incoming
information in microseconds and supplying the output as words in
your ear-phone, or showing it on screens which cover the back of
your hands or the inside of your glasses. Who is laughing?
Thousands of the brightest young men in well-equipped
laboratories are working hard to let even you, but certainly your
children, participate in such blessings of “AI” –
which stands for artificial imbecility.
Wouldn’t
a high-tech development of this kind be one of the most
instructive examples of “qualitative growth”? Yes,
indeed – if it happened in some Silicon-Valley, and we
wouldn’t mind. But obviously, such innovations would
conquer the globe within a few years and would change everybody’s
way of life and thinking immediately. And a good part of the
people would only find a job in this branch of industry –
if at all. This is the characteristic of the global acceleration
crisis. Am I telling you, we must try and constrain such
developments, which are as democratically legitimated as
anything? Who is “we”? Who am I, that I dare
challenge the free market of evolution?
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10.
Optimal Scales of Property?
You may think,
with me, that human mind and soul are the highest structures
realized in the space of possibilities – the “crown
of creation”. But it takes our generation-time or our
life-time to experience this complex value and let it blossom and
bear fruit. The attempt to improve basic features of an attractor
before it has run through just one cycle, is doomed to failure.
This is a logical, not an ideological statement which summarizes
once more the essence of the crisis. In fact, we are changing
essential features not only of society, but even of climate and
the whole biosphere within our own life-time. This is the
system-theoretical climax of the crisis, in which everybody at
the front will feel it, because he doesn’t recognize the
world of his youth any more when he has grown up. Life-long
experience has become worthless. This hurts, but old people’s
pain does not count. They can’t move much. Midlife-pain,
however, and the pain of the youth, will cause wriggling. At this
point, that is in our children’s generation, today and
tomorrow, it will be decided whether it was a crisis, or whether
we go to hell.
One of you asked “whether the shift
to qualitative growth should be left to market forces or to
rational, conscious, democratic decision”. Isn’t it a
fascinating psychological phenomenon, that an economist can ask
such a question, when it is so obvious that both the
market forces and the democratic process are organized
predominantly by that “invisible foot with a cloven hoof”?
Market forces are the collective result of processes in many
human minds under environmental and psychological constraints, as
well as political and economical constraints which are of chiefly
ideological nature. The imminent task is a more rational shaping
of those ideological constraints via democratic decisions, with
the aim of increasing the likelihood of evolving viable societies
of free citizens in a viable biosphere. This is certainly not an
impossible task. (Remember the number of possibilities!) So, let
us ask many rational, conscious, democratic citizens: Which
constraints does the so-called free market need most urgently,
and which have to be taken away from it, in order to foster
relatively slow qualitative growth with a lot of
diversity?
Probably, the first thing which comes to
everybody’s mind is the monetary system. In its present
organization it takes care that the value of anything is defined
by the amount of money which somebody will pay for it. On the
other hand, the system takes care that money grows by about a
factor of twenty per generation. (Let me neglect inflation here.
Taking it into account would only strengthen my argument.) What
can all that money buy and turn into more property? After the
abolition of slavery there aren’t many really valuable
things for sale, are they? We have already seen what the
secondbest is: Appropriation of the foundations of living of many
others! Or should we rather call this “misappropriation”
or “usurpation”? Who can explain why such property
rights are right? If you don’t own much more than you need,
however, don’t be frightened to hear the war-cry “property
is theft”. The self-organization of freedom will certainly
include the concept of property, perhaps even innate and
inalienable property, for everybody on earth. But there must be
limits to the size of property.
Legal limitations
to the size of property will probably suffice to change the world
in the right direction, and awaken the kind of market-forces
which deserve that name. The continuation of slavery by
appropriation of the essentials of other people's lives will
simply become impossible. The discussion about the idea of
interest and capital gain can be followed from Moses through
antiquity and the middle ages to Karl Marx, Joseph Proudhon,
Silvio Gesell, John Maynard Keynes, down to our time. The
mainstream of economics has, of course, always shown little
interest in such unscientific topics. Nowadays, only a few
outsiders have tried to keep the discussion alive. I should like
to mention the German constitutionalist Dieter Suhr, who recently
died in an unfortunate accident. His thoughts about neutral
money are certainly worth further consideration. (His last
book was The Capitalistic Cost-Benefit-Structure of Money,
Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg, 1988.) The “wrong”
ideas about the creation of values are focused in the
institutions of interest and capital yield. Real progress in the
space of possibilities cannot run at a speed corresponding to
that factor of 20 per generation. This kind of growth rate
enforces exploitation. Actually, the pauperization of the third
world was not sufficient to render all our development
possible. Through exploitation of all resources and sinks, nature
had to be reduced to misery, too.
For those of you
who still believe in the money system, let me add a remark on the
discount rate. This is a perfect symbol for the “exploitation
of the future”, typical for an instability. One of you
showed a table here, in which a discount rate of 12% had been
assumed! At that rate, one dollar which has to be paid in 10
years is valued today as 28 cents, a dollar in 30 years as 2
cents. You see why it doesn’t itch us today if we prepare
the annihilation of the GNP of all times and nations just a few
generations from now. Shouldn’t the discount rate rather be
negative? (Again, inflation doesn’t mend this flaw. Its
expropriative effect hits only the small owners. The big ones own
the “foundations of living” which don’t lose
value.)
A reformation of the money system and of property
rights will have to run parallel to more general constraints
which must prevent “everything big and fast” –
like the size of companies, organizations, nations and what else
you may think of on earth. The earth is round, and since the
creation of values needs many independent trials and errors, most
structures which tend to grow must probably be limited by laws
and taxation long before they approach the global scale. Optimal
scales between the individual and the globe will have to be found
in the imminent process of organization. The only global
structures which mankind must soon establish will be a
world-constitution which must guarantee those constraints and
regulate the co-operation of political sub-units in finding,
implementing and defending this constitution. A “world
market” will scarcely play a role in the longer run, and
the idea of international competition will be ridiculed as one of
the most absurd manifestations of the global acceleration crisis:
“Who is first in the collapse-instability?”
The
other day I had a dream: Our parliament found leverage points for
some of our seemingly insurmountable problems. The usual taxes
were abolished and replaced by a tax on money and taxes on goods
or activities which are known or suspected to be damaging.
Imagine: This included a tax on size and speed in many
areas! And an old idea (of Silvio Gesell’s, I think) was
realized: All rent from land would regularly be distributed
among all children! Billions of pages of coded results of
bureaucracy were pulped. The hopelessly complicated legal system
was suddenly not needed any longer. Its radical simplification,
relying more on boundary conditions than on detailed regulations,
opened paths for the self-organization of highly complex
societies of free citizens. More and more countries followed as
the viability of the new values became obvious. In a loose
world-wide cooperation of such societies, our planet started
blossoming again in many different colours and patterns.
You
may smile about this unrealistic sermon of an itinerant preacher.
I find it quite ridiculous, too, that a physicist must try and
teach economists how to judge values, and tell them why the
liberation of the free market from capitalism is a basic
condition of further ascent to viable attractors. Fortunately,
mind is still alive, and creation can go on and realize unreal
possibilities. Many economists, who are still theoretical
assistants in the organization of the crisis, will have
difficulties to imagine that the necessary is possible. But this
lack of imagination is quite normal before revolutions. The
climax of the crisis is quickly bringing forth a revolutionary
situation. Managers in industry and finance, and even professors
have begun to realize that our economic system is not viable
without some basic changes.
We have seen: Entropy and
Free Energy are certainly not sufficient concepts for a
discussion of why economy ruins the earth. The question of the
scales is the decisive one. But you may still be waiting
for the announced “theory of value” – or be
angry that I dared to use this word at all. Have I been able to
offer a better understanding of the invisible hand? Maybe you
have a wrong idea of understanding! I have tried to make clear:
Viable complexity is valuable because it cannot be
understood or planned. At the present front of evolution, new
value is something that may grow in and through ourselves under
proper boundary conditions. Those conditions, however, can be
easily understood. They must guarantee diversity and a
leisurely pace. This will mean the end of history for all
sorts of power which organize the global acceleration, and for
many activities which are called economic but are, in fact,
destructively wasteful. In the new realm of possibility, where we
must succeed in the self-organization of our freedom, history may
just be beginning.
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