The Phenomenon of Science a Cybernetic Approach to Human Evolution

The Phenomenon of Science a cybernetic approach to human evolution

Valentin F. Turchin

Translated by Brand Frentz

This electronic edition for the Web was produced by the Principia Cybernetica Project for research purposes (see http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POSBOOK.html). The web edition is also available as separate chapters in HTML. The hard copy book was scanned and converted to HTML by An Vranckx and Francis Heylighen, and from there to PDF by Allison DiazForte. The pagination and layout are not identical to the original. The following information pertains to the original 1977 book edition:

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Turchin, Valentin Fedorovich. The phenomenon of science.

Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Science—Philosophy. 2 Evolution 3. Cosmol- ogy. 4. Cybernetics. I. Title. Q175.T7913 501 77-4330 ISBN 0-231-03983-2

2 Contents

Foreword BY LOREN R. GRAHAM ...... 8 PREFACE ...... 14

CHAPTER 1 The Initial Stages of Evolution ...... 15 n THE BASIC LAW OF EVOLUTION...... 15 n THE CHEMICAL ERA ...... 15 n CYBERNETICS...... 17 n DISCRETE AND CONTINUOUS SYSTEMS ...... 18 n THE RELIABILITY OF DISCRETE SYSTEMS...... 19 n INFORMATION...... 21 n THE NEURON ...... 23 n THE NERVE NET...... 25 n THE SIMPLE REFLEX (IRRITABILITY)...... 26 n THE COMPLEX REFLEX...... 28

CHAPTER 2 Hierarchical Structures ...... 30 n THE CONCEPT OF THE CONCEPT...... 30 n DISCRIMINATORS AND CLASSIFIERS...... 32 n HIERARCHIES OF CONCEPTS...... 33 n HOW THE HIERARCHY EMERGES...... 35 n SOME COMMENTS ON REAL HIERARCHIES ...... 37 n THE WORLD THROUGH THE EYES OF A FROG ...... 38 n FRAGMENTS OF A SYSTEM OF CONCEPTS ...... 40 n THE GOAL AND REGULATION...... 43 n HOW REGULATION EMERGES...... 44 n REPRESENTATIONS...... 47 n MEMORY...... 48 n THE HIERARCHY OF GOALS AND PLANS...... 48 n STRUCTURAL AND FUNCTIONAL DIAGRAMS ...... 50 n THE TRANSITION TO PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTIONS...... 52 n DEFINITION OF THE COMPLEX REFLEX ...... 54

CHAPTER 3 On the Path toward the Human Being...... 55 n THE METASYSTEM TRANSITION...... 55 n CONTROL OF THE REFLEX...... 57 n THE REFLEX AS A FUNCTIONAL CONCEPT ...... 58

3 n WHY ASSOCIATIONS OF REPRESENTATIONS ARE NEEDED ...... 59 n EVOCATION BY COMPLEMENT ...... 60 n SPOTS AND LINES...... 61 n THE CONDITIONED REFLEX AND LEARNING ...... 63 n MODELING...... 65 n COGNITION OF THE WORLD ...... 67

CHAPTER 4 The Human Being...... 68 n CONTROL OF ASSOCIATING ...... 68 n PLAY ...... 69 n MAKING TOOLS...... 70 n IMAGINATION, PLANNING, OVERCOMING INSTINCT...... 71 n THE INTERNAL TEACHER...... 74 n THE FUNNY AND THE BEAUTIFUL...... 76 n LANGUAGE...... 77 n CREATION OF LANGUAGE ...... 79 n LANGUAGE AS A MEANS OF MODELING ...... 79 n SELF-KNOWLEDGE...... 81 n A CONTINUATION OF THE BRAIN ...... 81 n SOCIAL INTEGRATION ...... 82 n THE SUPER-BEING ...... 84

CHAPTER 5 From Step to Step ...... 86 n MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL CULTURE...... 86 n THE STAIRWAY EFFECT...... 86 n THE SCALE OF THE METASYSTEM TRANSITION ...... 87 n TOOLS FOR PRODUCING TOOLS...... 90 n THE LOWER PALEOLITHIC...... 90 n THE UPPER PALEOLITHIC...... 92 n THE NEOLITHIC REVOLUTION...... 93 n THE AGE OF METAL...... 94 n THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS ...... 94 n THE QUANTUM OF DEVELOPMENT...... 95 n THE EVOLUTION OF THOUGHT...... 95

CHAPTER 6 Logical Analysis of Language...... 96 n ABOUT CONCEPTS AGAIN...... 96 n ATTRIBUTES AND RELATIONS...... 97 n ARISTOTELIAN LOGIC...... 98 n HEGEL'S DIALECTIC...... 101 n MATHEMATICAL LOGIC ...... 103 n OBJECTS AND STATEMENTS ...... 103 n LOGICAL CONNECTIVES...... 104 n PREDICATES...... 106

4 n QUANTIFIERS...... 106 n THE CONNECTIVE “SUCH THAT”...... 108 n THE PHYSICAL OBJECT AND THE LOGICAL OBJECT ...... 108 n FUNCTIONS ...... 110 n SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS ...... 112 n LOGICAL ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE ...... 113

CHAPTER 7 Language and Thinking ...... 115 n WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THINKING? ...... 115 n LINGUISTIC ACTIVITY...... 116 n THE BRAIN AS A “BLACK BOX” ...... 118 n AFFIRMATION AND NEGATION ...... 120 n THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL DEFINITION OF SEMANTICS...... 121 n THE LOGICAL CONCEPT ...... 123 n THE STRUCTURAL APPROACH...... 124 n TWO SYSTEMS...... 126 n CONCEPT “PILINGS”...... 128 n THE SAPIR-WHORF CONCEPTION...... 128 n SUBSTANCE...... 130 n THE OBJECTIVIZATION OF TIME ...... 131 n LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY...... 133 n THE METASYSTEM TRANSITION IN LANGUAGE...... 134 n THE CONCEPT-CONSTRUCT...... 135 n THE THINKING OF HUMANS AND ANIMALS ...... 136

CHAPTER 8 Primitive Thinking...... 138 n THE SYSTEM ASPECT OF CULTURE...... 138 n THE SAVAGE STATE AND CIVILIZATION...... 138 n THE METASYSTEM TRANSITION IN LINGUISTIC ACTIVITY ...... 140 n THE MAGIC OF WORDS ...... 141 n SPIRITS AND THE LIKE...... 143 n THE TRASH HEAP OF REPRESENTATIONS ...... 144 n BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE ...... 146 n THE CONSERVATISM OF PRECRITICAL THINKING...... 146 n THE EMERGENCE OF CIVILIZATION...... 147

CHAPTER 9 Mathematics Before the Greeks...... 150 n NATURE'S MISTAKE...... 150 n COUNTING AND MEASUREMENT...... 151 n NUMBER NOTATION ...... 152 n THE PLACE-VALUE SYSTEM...... 155 n APPLIED ARITHMETIC...... 158 n THE ANCIENTS' KNOWLEDGE OF GEOMETRY...... 160 n A BIRD'S EYE VIEW OF ARITHMETIC ...... 161

5 n REVERSE MOVEMENT IN A MODEL...... 163 n SOLVING EQUATIONS ...... 164 n THE FORMULA...... 165

CHAPTER 10 From Thales to Euclid ...... 167 n PROOF...... 167 n THE CLASSICAL PERIOD...... 169 n PLATO'S PHILOSOPHY ...... 171 n WHAT IS MATHEMATICS? ...... 172 n PRECISION IN COMPARING QUANTITIES ...... 173 n THE RELIABILITY OF MATHEMATICAL ASSERTIONS ...... 174 n IN SEARCH OF AXIOMS...... 176 n CONCERNING THE AXIOMS OF ARITHMETIC AND LOGIC ...... 180 n DEEP-SEATED PILINGS...... 182 n PLATONISM IN RETROSPECT...... 183

CHAPTER 11 From Euclid to Descartes ...... 186 n NUMBER AND QUANTITY ...... 186 n GEOMETRIC ALGEBRA...... 187 n ARCHIMEDES AND APOLLONIUS ...... 188 n THE DECLINE OF GREEK MATHEMATICS ...... 190 n ARITHMETIC ALGEBRA ...... 192 n ITALY, SIXTEENTH CENTURY...... 193 n LETTER SYMBOLISM ...... 195 n WHAT DID DESCARTES DO? ...... 196 n THE RELATION AS AN OBJECT...... 197 n DESCARTES AND FERMAT ...... 199 n THE PATH TO DISCOVERY ...... 200

CHAPTER 12 From Descartes to Bourbaki ...... 204 n FORMALIZED LANGUAGE...... 204 n THE LANGUAGE MACHINE ...... 206 n FOUR TYPES OF LINGUISTIC ACTIVITY...... 207 n SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY...... 209 n FORMALIZATION AND THE METASYSTEM TRANSITION ...... 210 n THE LEITMOTIF OF THE NEW MATHEMATICS...... 210 n “NONEXISTENT” OBJECTS...... 212 n THE HIERARCHY OF THEORIES ...... 213 n THE AXIOMATIC METHOD ...... 214 n METAMATHEMATICS ...... 215 n THE FORMALIZATION OF SET THEORY...... 217 n BOURBAKI'S TREATISE ...... 220

6 CHAPTER 13 Science and Metascience ...... 223 n EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS...... 223 n THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD ...... 223 n THE ROLE OF GENERAL PRINCIPLES ...... 225 n CRITERIA FOR THE SELECTION OF THEORIES...... 227 n THE PHYSICS OF THE MICROWORLD...... 228 n THE UNCERTAINTY RELATION...... 229 n GRAPHIC AND SYMBOLIC MODELS...... 231 n THE COLLAPSE OF DETERMINISM...... 233 n “CRAZY” THEORIES AND METASCIENCE[7] ...... 236

CHAPTER 14 The Phenomenon of Science ...... 241 n THE HIGHEST LEVEL OF THE HIERARCHY ...... 241 n SCIENCE AND PRODUCTION...... 241 n THE GROWTH OF SCIENCE...... 242 n THE FORMALIZATION OF SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE ...... 244 n THE HUMAN BEING AND THE MACHINE...... 245 n SCIENTIFIC CONTROL OF SOCIETY ...... 246 n SCIENCE AND MORALITY ...... 247 n THE PROBLEM OF THE SUPREME GOOD ...... 247 n SPIRITUAL VALUES...... 249 n THE HUMAN BEING IN THE UNIVERSE...... 251 n THE DIVERGENCE OF TRAJECTORIES...... 252 n ETHICS AND EVOLUTION ...... 254 n THE WILL TO IMMORTALITY ...... 254 n INTEGRATION AND FREEDOM...... 256 n QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS ...... 259

7 Foreword

VALENTIN TURCHIN presents in The Phenomenon of Science an evolutionary scheme of the universe—one that begins on the level of individual atoms and molecules, continues through the origin of life and the development of plants and animals, reaches the level of man and self-consciousness, and develops further in the intellectual creations of man, particularly in scientific knowledge. He does not see this development as a purposeful or preordained one, since he accepts entirely the Darwinian law of trial and error. Selection occurs within a set of random variations, and survival of forms is a happenstance of the relationship between particular forms and particular environments. Thus, there are no goals in evolution. Nonetheless, there are discernible patterns and, indeed, there is a “law of evolution” by which one can explain the emergence of forms capable of activities which are truly novel. This law is one of the formation of higher and higher levels of cybernetic control. The nodal points of evolution for Turchin are the moments when the most recent and highest controlling subsystem of a large system is integrated into a metasystem and brought under a yet higher form of control. Examples of such transitions are the origin of life, the emergence of individual selfconsciousness, the appearance of language, and the development of the scientific method.

Many authors in the last century have attempted to sketch schemes of cosmic evolution, and Turchin's version will evoke memories in the minds of his readers. The names of Spencer, Haeckel, Huxley, Engels, Morgan, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Vernadsky, Bogdanov, Oparin, Wiener and many others serve as labels for concepts similar to some of those discussed by Turchin. Furthermore, it is clear that Turchin knows many of these authors, borrows from some of them, and cites them for their achievements. It is probably not an accident that the title of Turchin's book, “The Phenomenon of Science,” closely parallels the title of Teilhard's, “The Phenomenon of Man.” Yet it is equally clear that Turchin does not agree entirely with any of these authors, and his debts to them are fragmentary and selective. Many of them assigned a place either to vitalistic or to theological elements in their evolutionary schemes, both of which Turchin rejects. Others relied heavily on mechanistic, reductionist principles which left no room for the qualitatively new levels of biological and social orders that are so important to Turchin. And all of them—with the possible exception of Wiener, who left no comprehensive analysis of evolution—wrote at a time when it was impossible to incorporate information theory into their accounts.

The two aspects of Turchin's scheme of cosmic evolution which distinguish it from its well-known predecessors are its heavy reliance on cybernetics and its inclusion of the development of scientific thought in evolutionary development that begins with the inorganic world. The first aspect is one which is intimately tied to Turchin's own field of specialization, since for many years he was a leader in the theory and design of Soviet computer systems and is the author of a system of computer language. Turchin believes that he gained insights from this experience that lead to a much more rigorous

8 discussion of evolution than those of his predecessors. The second aspect of Turchin's account—the treatment of scientific concepts as “objects” governed by the same evolutionary regularities as chemical and biological entities—is likely to raise objections among some readers. Although this approach is also not entirely original—one thinks of some of the writings of Stephen Toulmin, for example—I know of no other author who has attempted to integrate science so thoroughly into a scheme of the evolution of physical and biological nature. Taking a thoroughly cybernetic view, Turchin maintains that it is not the “substance” of the entities being described that matters, but their principles of organization.

For the person seeking to analyze the essential characteristics of Turchin's system of explanation, two of his terms will attract attention: “representation” and “metasystem transition.” Without a clear understanding of what he means by these terms, one cannot comprehend the overall developmental picture he presents. A central issue for critics will be whether a clear understanding of these terms can be gained from the material presented here. One of the most difficult tasks for Mr. Frentz, the translator, was connected with one of these central terms. This problem of finding an English word for the Russian term predstavlenie was eventually resolved by using the term “representation.” In my opinion, the difficulty for the translator was not simply a linguistic one, but involved a fundamental, unresolved philosophical issue. The term predstavlenie is used by Turchin to mean “an image or a representation of a part of reality.” It plays a crucial role in describing the situations in which an organism compares a given circumstance with one that is optimal from the standpoint of its survival. Thus, Turchin, after introducing this term, speaks of a hypothetical animal that “loves a temperature of 16 degrees Centigrade” and has a representation of this wonderful situation in the form of the frequency of impulses of neurons. The animal, therefore, attempts to bring the given circumstances closer and closer into correspondence with its neuronal representation by moving about in water of different temperatures. This same term predstavlenie is also used to describe human behavior where the term “mental image” would seem to be a more felicitous translation. If we look in a good Russian-English dictionary, we shall find predstavlenie defined as “presentation, idea, notion, representation.” At first Dr. Turchin, who knows English well and was consulted by the translator, preferred the translation “notion.” Yet it seemed rather odd, even vaguely anthropomorphic, to attribute a “notion” to a primitive organism, an amoeba, or even a fish. On the other hand, the term “representation” seemed too rudimentary for human behavior where “idea” or “mental image” was clearly preferable. This difficulty arose from the effort to carry a constant term through evolutionary stages in which Turchin sees the emergence of qualitatively new properties. The problem is, therefore, only secondarily one of language. The basic issue is the familiar one of reductionism and nonreductionism in descriptions of biological and psychological phenomena. Since the Russian language happens to possess a term that fits these different stages better than English, we might do better to retain the Russian predstavlenie. In this text for a wide circle of English readers, however, the translator chose the word “representation,” probably the best that can be done. The difficulties of understanding the term “metasystem transition” arise from its inclusion of a particular interpretation of logical attributes and relations. Turchin

9 believes that it is impossible to describe the process by which a particular system develops into a metasystem in the terms of classical logic. Classical logic, he says, describes only attributes, not relations. For an adequate description of relations, one must rely on the Hegelian dialectic, which permits one to see that the whole of a metasystem is greater than the sum of its subsystems. The Hegelian concept of quantitative change leading to qualitative change is thus not only explicitly contained within Turchin's scheme, but plays an essential role in it. The behavior of human society is qualitatively different from the behavior of individual humans. And social integration, through the “law of branching growth of the penultimate level,” may lead eventually to a concept of “The Super-Being.” These concepts show some affinities to Marxist dialectical materialism, in which a similar differentiation of qualitatively distinct evolutionary levels has long been a characteristic feature. The British scientist J. D. Bernal once went so far as to claim that this concept of dialectical levels of natural laws was uniquely Marxist, when he wrote about “the truth of different laws for different levels, an essentially Marxist idea.” However, many non-Marxists have also advanced such a view of irreducible levels of laws; one should therefore be careful about terming a system of thought Marxist simply because it possesses this feature. Most Marxists would reject, at a minimum, Turchin's discussion of the concept of the Super-Being (although even in early Soviet Marxism “God-building” had a subrosa tradition). In Turchin's case we are probably justified in linking the inclusion of Hegelian concepts in his interpretation of nature to the education in philosophy he received in the Soviet Union. Soviet Marxism was probably one of several sources of Turchin's philosophic views; others are cybernetics and the thought of such earlier writers on cosmic evolution as Chardin and Vernadsky.

In view of the links one can see between the ideas of Turchin and Marxism, it is particularly interesting to notice that Turchin is now in political difficulty in the Soviet Union. Before I give some of the details of his political biography, however, I shall note that in this essentially nonpolitical manuscript Turchin gives a few hints of possible social implications of his interpretation. He remarks that the cybernetic view he is presenting places great emphasis on “control” and that it draws an analogy between society and a multicellular organism. He then observes, “This point of view conceals in itself a great danger that in vulgarized form it can easily lead to the conception of a fascist-type totalitarian state.” This possibility of a totalitarian state, of whatever type, is clearly repugnant to Turchin, and his personal experience is a witness that he is willing to risk his own security in order to struggle against such state. As for his interpretation of social evolution, he contends that “the possibility that a theory can be vulgarized is in no way an argument against its truth.” In the last sections of his book he presents suggestions for avoiding such vulgarizations while still working for greater social integration.

Turchin is wrestling in this last part of his interpretation with a problem that has recently plagued many thinkers in Western Europe and America as well: Can one combine a scientific explanation of man and society with a commitment to individual freedom and social justice? Turchin is convinced that such combination of goals is possible; indeed, he sees this alliance as imperative, since he believes there is no