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A Review of Stuart Kauffman's a World Beyond Physics and Its Parallel

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A Review of Stuart Kauffman's a World Beyond Physics and Its Parallel Available online at https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/nexj Visit our blog at newexplorations.net Vol 1 № 1 (Spring 2020) A Review of Stuart Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics and Its Parallel with McLuhan’s Reversal of Cause and Effect. Robert K. Logan University of Toronto ABSTRACT A review of Stuart Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics is made and its parallels with McLuhan’s reversal of cause and effect is made. KEYWORDS: McLuhan; physics; enablement; general systems; extensions of man; media; technology; tool Robert K. Logan [email protected] 2 New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication In A World Beyond Physics, Stuart Kauffman (2019, 10) critiques the “physics-based view of the world” and the notion that physics can ultimately explain all phenomena of the universe including biology and cognition. He wrote, Brilliant physicist Steven Weinberg voiced the physicist thoughts: (1) the explanatory arrow always points downwards from social systems to people to organs to cells, to biochemistry to chemistry and finally physics; (2) the more we know of the universe, he wrote, the more meaningless it appears (ibid.). Kauffman (2019, 12-13) states that Weinberg is categorically wrong and points out, “One thing missing in the world according to physics is the crucial idea of agency… Given agency, meaning exists in the universe.” He then asks "How did the universe get from matter to mattering? In the meaningless, numb universe of Weinberg, where does mattering come from?” Mattering, in Kauffman’s play on words, is simply meaning or information and information is about the informing of a living agent that is able to propagate its organization. Physics has no explanation of agency or an agent capable of propagating its organization. A living agent to create and propagate its organization must be able to take energy from its environment and convert it into work which requires constraints. The constraint of the cylinder in an automobile engine that directs the energy of the gasoline air mixture explosion to push against the piston and hence do work is an example of the necessity of constraints to do work. In a paper entitled Propagating Organization: An Enquiry (Kauffman, Logan, et al. 2007) we argued that the constraints are information and hence possess meaning or meaningfulness. According to Kauffman, this ability for a system to self-organize in such a way as to propagate its organization is the extra ingredient that cannot be explained by physics. Kauffman (2019, 5) invokes the notion of the propagation of organization to explain how “the biosphere has become complex with teeming diversity since its origin on the earth 3.7 billion years ago.” He points out that each living self-propagating system or Review of Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics3 organism enables other living self-propagating systems or organisms to come into being. Kauffman (2019, 107) suggests that, Each species affords one or more adjacent possible new niches for yet new species, which so expands what now becomes possible… each species also affords adjacent possible… new niches that invite the next new species… new niches expand faster than the species that create them. Thus, each new species that emerges enables still other new species to emerge, a process which Kauffman (2019, 117) describes as ‘enablement’ rather than ‘cause.’ “All of the niche creation of which we speak in this open-ended evolution is enablement not cause.” As a media ecologist I particularly enjoyed the way in which Kauffman expanded the notion of enablement, niche creation and teeming diversity in his treatment of the evolution of biological species and then applied it to the evolution of technology in the epilogue to his book entitled The Evolution of the Economy. He suggested that once again as was the case with living species that each technology creates a new niche that enables the emergence of still newer technologies. He applies this idea to the way in which mainframe computers enabled personal computers, and in turn enabled word processing, the modem, the Internet, the Web, and Amazon. There are many other examples of the existence of one technology enabling others. The Newcomen steam engine enabled the Watt steam engine which in turn enabled the steam boat and the steam locomotive. The Watt steam engine enabled the internal combustion engine. The internal combustion engine plus the carriage originally powered by the horse enabled the automobile, which explains why the very first automobiles came equipped with a buggy whip holder. 4 New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication While not suggesting a causal connection, I see a parallel between Kauffman’s notion of enablement and McLuhan’s notion of the reversal of cause and effect and the evolution of technology. For example, McLuhan evokes the reversal of cause and effect when he suggested that the effect of the telegraph was the cause of the telephone. I believe that McLuhan’s observation would be better formulated using Kauffman’s notion of enablement to say that the invention of the telegraph enabled the emergence of the telephone rather than caused the telephone. By the way, McLuhan first developed the notion of the reversal of cause and effect when explaining that the artist always starts with an effect he or she wants to create and then looks for the causes that will create that effect. He therefore concluded that effects precede causes and then applied this notion to the evolution of technology. Kauffman’s notion of enablement is closely related to his notion of niche construction. The way in which a species enables another species to come into existence is by creating a niche in which the new species comes into existence. The examples of the above two paragraphs can be reformulated in terms of niche construction rather than enablement. Mainframe computers created the niche in which personal computers emerged, which in turn created the niche in which word processing, the modem, the Internet, the Web, and Amazon, one by one emerged. Expanding on Kauffman’s suggestion of biological species, technologies and economies enabling a teeming diversity in their respective domains, let me suggest that perhaps the same dynamics applies to the evolution of ideas. Is it possible that McLuhan’s idea of the reversal of cause and effect created a niche for or enabled Kauffman’s notion of niche creation and enablement? Both Kauffman and McLuhan were influenced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy the founder and originator of general systems theory who describes his general systems theory as follows: Review of Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics5 General system theory… is a general science of wholeness... The meaning of the somewhat mystical expression, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts” is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explainable from the characteristics of the isolated parts. The characteristics of the complex, therefore, appear as new or emergent (http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/history_isd/bertalanffy.html, accessed Dec. 26, 2019). Both Kauffman and McLuhan incorporated general systems thinking in their work. Kauffman’s notion of autocatalysis as the origin of life explicitly incorporates Bertalanffy’s general systems approach. McLuhan who developed an ecological approach to the interaction of media and their users was an avid reader of Bertalanffy’s books and corresponded with him. Bertalanffy in turn was a fan of McLuhan. Bertalanffy was the link between Kauffman and McLuhan and perhaps explains the connection between Kauffman’s enablement and McLuhan’s reversal of cause and effect. I had the good fortune to work with both of these intellectual giants. In the article “Propagating Organization: An Enquiry (Kauffman, Logan, Este, Goebel, Hobill & Shmulevich 2008)” we claimed that Constraints are information and information is constraints. The first part of this twosome, constraints are information is, we believe, secure. The second part, information is constraints, may be more problematic (ibid.). 6 New Explorations: Studies in Culture & Communication The idea that constraints are the information, instructional or biotic information, was first formulated in a conversation I had Kauffman when he asked me how cells were able to do the work to build constraints that allowed them to convert external energy from their environment into work if the constraints that are required to turn energy into work did not exist at first. I told Stuart that it was a chicken and egg problem and that I could not answer his question but that I believed that the constraints are the information, which I came up with by channeling Marshall McLuhan and his notion that ‘the medium is the message’. I saw the constraints that allowed energy to become work as a medium and the information that are the constraints became the message and therefore the medium (i.e. the constraint) is the message (i.e. the information) became the constraint is the information. Here is an example of what Kauffman called enablement. McLuhan’s notion of “the medium is the message” enabled us to formulated the notion that the constraints are the information. The lesson from this little episode is that Kauffman’s notion that biological species enable new living organisms to come into existence and McLuhan’s notion that technologies enable new technologies to come into existence can be generalized to obtain the notion that ideas enable new ideas to come into existence. Stuart Kauffman’s A World Beyond Physics is a book full of ideas that stimulates and enhances new ideas. I therefore can highly recommend that you read Stuart Kauffman’s new book as it will enable all kinds of new ideas for you as it did for me. It will also make you want to read some of Kauffman’s other books if you have not already done so.
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