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I
shall use this “after-dinner-talk” (presented before
supper) to smuggle some “soft” considerations about
science and scientists into the “hard” scientific
program of this birthday celebration. It seems worth while
reflecting on our own position as producers or even dealers in
science, since this stuff has taken over the role of “opium
for the people” and as mankind’s addiction may be
reaching a final state of destruction.
Of course, neither
of our two “celebrants”, and none of the contributors
to this celebration should be blamed. Everyone in this room deals
with things untouchable, though we are still of basically two
different types. Let me classify them as types I and II. (I am
really aiming at type III, but this will appear later.)
A
type-I astrophysicist is mainly interested in the patterns of
selforganization observed anywhere between the sun and our
cosmological horizon. He finds it quite natural that underlying
fundamental laws exist, but he is much more fascinated by the
complex structures built on them, and he wants to model them,
indulging in re-creation. The type-II scientist, on the other
hand, is not at all surprised that the real world has grown
complexity if the fundamental laws allow for it. Rather, he is
fascinated by those laws themselves, especially by the question
of how far they are arbitrary or necessary.
As usual,
extreme representatives of the types can be expected to tend
towards degeneracy: The one may become a collector of
eye-catching real phenomena, or even just of data – the
other may, in an attempt to create concepts about the real world,
lose all contact with it and get lost in homemade artistic worlds
of rigorous mathematical beauty. In a way, the extremes touch
each other again: Unrealistic art finds its collectors, too –
especially since computers provide a wealth of unpredictable
artistic prodigy.
Anyway – what is reality? To quote
from Helmut Friedrich’s talk: “Now we have got rid of
all the physics, but all the difficulties are still there”.
You see: Science may emancipate itself from so-called nature, but
not from complexity. It has still not reached its great aim,
simplification of the world, reduction of everything to graphs in
a plane, i.e. what we call explanation. In fact, this aim
may turn out to be a strange attractor: The sequence of questions
and answers which generate each other may form a kind of infinite
Mandelbrot set – not in spatial but in logical structure,
and perhaps with dwindling self-similarity of the concepts as
magnification runs on. So, the attempts to unify amd simplify the
understanding of the world may in fact contribute to the growth
of its complexity.
This reminds us that we don’t
have proper measures of complexity. There is even a sort of
relativity involved in its judgement. The point of view of
an observer will influence the measure. An old dispute with Bernd
Schmidt comes to my mind: A non-rotating lump of viscous fluid,
alone in an otherwise empty world, will take the shape of a ball,
won’t it? Is this a trivial or a deep theorem? A simple or
a complex statement? Well, Bernd told me, there is still no
rigorous proof for it in General Relativity. So, why not make it
an axiom? But, of course, other simple things would then appear
as highly complex. Remember: One must not apply the term
“complex” to parts of a system. The complexity
is in the whole. Even complexity-theorists have now
started to realize that a “measure of complexity”
cannot be based merely on internal relations within a subsystem
but must somehow include the whole process of its creation. (Cf.
Rolf Landauer’s recent commentary in Nature 336, 306 on the
proposals by Bennett and by Lloyd and Pagels, and the literature
quoted there.)
“Relativity of complexity” also
shows up in physical cosmology. We may now observe or conceive
extreme simplicity for the origin of what we call our universe:
Just the laws of physics, and no detailed ordered structure
except the extremely well-ordered primeval expansion, i.e. some
initial condition of “low entropy”. But in order to
discover its own basic simplicity, this universe had to evolve
complexity up to our level, including mathematical geniuses and
giant accelerators and telescopes. And why has all that happened?
Because it was more likely than other possibilities? Obviously,
the meaning of time is to let more likely things happen –
the becoming of complexity, the realization of possibilities, the
selection of things realized, among the things possible.
You know it: The evolution of elementary particles, of galaxies,
stars, living planets, neural networks, cultural networks –
it all follows the same principle: The state of the world
explores its neighbourhood in the “space of possibilities”
by accidental fluctuations, discovers more long-lived structures,
which are therefore more likely to survive longer. (The
“accidents” involved are either quantum fluctuations
or accidental encounters with a long history – back to the
beginning, with many other accidents along the way.)
The
concept of a “space of possibilities” which I often
use in the formulation of this Darwinian tautology may remain
vague. Only one line in this space is definitely known to have
been possible: The realized past. The possible is only found by
trial and error. Whether something compatible with the laws of
nature “could have been realized” is usually an
undecidable question, and whether something will be
realized has to be waited for. On the other hand, thinking and
even dreaming are certainly real processes connected with matter
in space and time – e.g. in neuronal networks and
libraries. In this sense, our ideas belong to that one line,
are realized, even materialized possibilities. Who
says, what we see is more real than what we think? Thinking is a
very real phenomenon of self-organization, still more highly
developed than seeing! The idea of reality becomes quite fuzzy
when you realize that. We don’t even have to discuss the
EPR-paradox to shatter our confidence in concepts of “objective
existence here and now” …
However, I don’t
want to get lost in extreme type-II reflections. If you know me,
you know that I only speak here in order to excite thinking and
action against a third type of scientists: Those do-gooders who
not only dream of effecting all things possible, but who
have really started doing it – with fatal consequences.
These type-III scientists outnumber by far the ones of types I
and II, and their Baconian megalomania is sweeping aside
Darwinian modesty. They claim that they can improve the
world because they have understood the laws of nature.
What’s
wrong with this idea? Aren’t we scientists clearly the
tools by which the world here and now gropes its way further into
the space of possibilities? Why should more scientific knowledge
be harmful in this latest version of the evolutionary process?
Why do I call it “opium for the people”? Well, of
course, you know: The harm is not in the “opium” as
such but in its misuse. And the parallel goes quite far: The drug
is applied to solve a problem, but it creates a new and bigger
problem. More of the drug has to be used, and more quickly. The
new problems thus created are even bigger, need still higher
dose, stronger drugs, faster application. . . Sounds like an
instability, doesn’t it? How can the evolutionary path of
the world (or of its subsystem Gaia) into the space of
possibilities become unstable? Isn’t this just a matter of
value-judgement?
Exactly! “How to judge values?”
is the fundamental question. Evolutionary selection in
dissipative open systems has answered it: If more and “better”
relations between all subsystems can be found by fluctuations
(where better relative isolation of some parts may often also be
a better relation), they will probably be realized. And what is
“better”? The more likely under the circumstances! As
we saw: “Very likely, the more probable is going to happen”
– and in a complex dissipative system this is the growth of
complexity as far as possible. So, the better, the more valuable,
arises without any value-judgement! Or, rather, the selection
process is the valuejudgement! No God seems to be
necessary to discriminate between good and evil. More valuable
possibilities, i.e. more complex ones, where things fit together
in a more viable way, are just more likely to be realized. All is
well, isn’t it?
Just one little dark spot in all
this enlightenment remains to be cleared up, the role of time in
the growth of complexity. And here, I must shock you, we meet the
Devil. A theorem may be proved in system theory: In a spatially
finite system with unbounded evolution, the devil (“dia-bolos”,
i.e. he who “throws things into disorder”) must at
some stage appear at the front of evolution and cause a singular
crisis. The mechanism is easily understood – you find hints
at it already in the myths of Lucifer/Prometheus or of the Tower
of Babel – but a constructive proof of the theorem lies at
hand only now: One of the successes of evolution must be an
increasing speed of the evolutionary process itself, because more
and more efficient “languages” are found and realized
in the space of possibilities. The beings at the front of
evolution will, due to their own complexity, need some time to
develop individually. This is their own life-time or
generation-time. If they try to judge values (i.e. select new
possibilities for realization) on a shorter time-scale than this,
adaptation of the new and the old cannot work by definition.
Hence, most likely, complexity will not grow but decrease. Under
these circumstances, the worse is the more likely! Complex
diversity will be quickly and globally replaced by universal
simplicity. Reduction of diversity, however, allows for still
faster global decisions, and the next decisions will be even more
likely wrong in the same sense.
You see, evolution itself
defines and creates a critical time-scale, which it then tries to
surpass. But thereby it must destroy its own logical
pre-condition. The leading figures at the front of evolution
don’t give themselves enough time to judge values in the
process of exploring the neighbourhood in the space of
possibilities. Of course, the tautology remains valid that “more
likely things will probably be realized” via the accidental
fluctuations (including their more recent form of appearance,
called planning) – but with a lack of time for selective
adaptation, i.e. adaptive selection, the more likely is no longer
a growth of complexity but rather its decomposition. In a very
sophisticated way the entropy-law seems to have conquered the
Earth, an open dissipative system in which we thought it wouldn’t
be valid. While everybody was still worrying and quarreling about
the resources, we have been filling up and blocking the sinks
…
Now, the news and the science-journals are full
of the symptoms of this crisis. But the understanding of its
origins remains poor. Most doctors recommend faster innovation
and unification as the proper drug. This means that the ailment
itself is offered as its only promising remedy. We cannot expect
the dealers of the drug to promote much insight. Those type-III
scientists, the do-gooders who promise to improve the world by
ever more contraptions conjured up ever more quickly from ever
more matter and energy, have to be discredited. Perhaps the
scientists assembled here are sufficiently remote from the
complications of reality to be able to reflect on the role of
time in the growth of complexity. Thinking about general
principles of evolutionary creation of values you will discover
that “deviltheorem”, and you will immediately
recognize that evolution toward higher complexity can only go on
if we guarantee its pre-conditions at the front: Conservation of
old complexity must become a kind of holy rule, and the speed of
change must be bounded by the “human measure” (and,
of course, still more tightly where our biological or even
climatological roots are threatened).
I cannot discuss
here the role of occasional revolutions which arise from hot
spots in the system, where dissipation is not organized in a
sufficiently complex way. But it is obvious that we are
approaching one. Our mental capabilities which inevitably had to
lead into this crisis also have to evolve the insight that
further evolution will need self-restriction. The “preconditions
of evolution” which had been automatically fulfilled in the
past, will have to be fulfilled by social “constitutions”.
Those conditions, which we will have to try and re-establish, I
have often characterized by the slogans “Vielfalt und
Gemächlichkeit”, which is roughly (and clumsily)
“manifoldness and leisureliness”. It means that the
selection procedure, trial and error at the front in the space of
possibilities, has to be left to many individuals and groups
(implying very de-centralized structures) – and it means a
deliberate, institutionalized suppression of the speed of
innovation ( – except in purely mental fields like music,
poetry or mathematics). Consequences for a new organization of
politics, economy, science and technology are indeed manifold. In
a book which I have just written, I could only rather
accidentally touch on a few of them (Das
Grundgesetz vom Aufstieg, Carl-Hanser-Verlag, München
1989).
Perhaps some of you will spare a little time from
research about the last billions of years and help think about
how the laws of logic and probability will influence your own
remaining life-time, and all of the future. We must not leave
this to the “experts” who want to sell their
products. Too long, scientists have misunderstood the last
sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Whereof
one cannot speak thereof one must be silent”. We are still
misusing it in pleading for irresponsibility. But surely,
Wittgenstein didn’t learn speaking by being silent. The
word should be changed: “Whereof we cannot speak thereof we
must stammer”.
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