ISSN 2291-5079 Vol 1 | Issue 2 2014 COSMOS + TAXIS Studies in Emergent Order and Organization COVER ART: Marshall P. Baron http://www.marshallbaron.com COSMOS + TAXIS Galactic Story, circa 1974–1975 Studies in Emergent Order and Organization Oil, 300 x 160 cm Made available courtesy VOLUME 1 | ISSUE 2 2014 of Merle Baron Guttmann IN THIS ISSUE Quality, Quantity, Granularity, and Thresholds of Emergence ....................................................1 Frederick Turner Two Different Theories of Two Distinct Spontaneous Phenomena: Orders of Actions and Evolution of Institutions in Hayek.....................................................................9 Stefano Moroni Hayek on Nomocracy and Teleocracy: A Critical Assessment .................................................24 Chor-yung Cheung Guiding the Invisible Hand: Spontaneous Orders and the Problem of Character.................................34 Lauren K. Hall Spontaneous Order Theory in a Heideggerian Context.......................................................45 Joseph Isaac Lifshitz Editorial Information ........................................................................inside back cover EDITORIAL BOARDS HONORARY FOUNDING EDITORS EDITORS Joaquin Fuster David Emanuel Andersson* (editor-in-chief) University of California, Los Angeles, United States Nottingham University Business School, China David F. Hardwick* Laurent Dobuzinskis* (deputy editor) University of British Columbia, Canada Simon Fraser University, Canada Lawrence Wai-Chung Lai Leslie Marsh* (managing editor) University of Hong Kong University of British Columbia, Canada Frederick Turner University of Texas at Dallas, United States CONSULTING EDITORS Corey Abel Peter Gordon Edmund Neill Denver, United States University of Southern California, United States Oxford University, United Kingdom Thierry Aimar Lauren K. Hall Christian Onof Sciences Po Paris, France Rochester Institute of Technology, United States Imperial College London, United Kingdom Nurit Alfasi Sanford Ikeda Mark Pennington Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel Purchase College, State University of New York, King’s College London, United Kingdom Theodore Burczak United States Jason Potts Denison University, United States Byron Kaldis Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Gene Callahan The Hellenic Open University, Greece Australia Purchase College, State University of New York, Paul Lewis Don Ross United States King’s College London, United Kingdom University of Cape Town, South Africa and Chor-Yung Cheung Ted G. Lewis Georgia State University, United States City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Technology Assessment Group, Salinas, CA, Virgil Storr Francesco Di Iorio United States George Mason University, United States Sorbonne-Paris IV, Paris, France Joseph Isaac Lifshitz Stephen Turner Gus diZerega* The Shalem College, Israel University of South Florida, United States Sebastopol, CA, United States Jacky Mallett Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo Péter Érdi Reykjavik University, Iceland Ashford University, United States Kalamazoo College, United States Stefano Moroni Evelyn Lechner Gick Milan Polytechnic, Italy *Executive committee Dartmouth College, United States www.sfu.ca/cosmosandtaxis.html COSMOS + TAXIS Quality, Quantity, Granularity, and Thresholds of Emergence FREDERICK TURNER School of Arts and Humanities, JO31 The University of Texas at Dallas 800 West Campbell Road Richardson, TX 75080-3021, USA Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.utdallas.edu/ah/people/faculty_detail.php?faculty_id=1201 Bio-sketch: Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Of his many books his latest is Epic: Form, Content, and History (2012, Transaction). Abstract: Hayek’s distinction between taxis—what is controlled or managed—and cosmos—what spontaneously organizes it- self—corresponds to two kinds of order in the world, the predictable and the emergent, the quantitative and the qualitative. A controller must know the outcome of his actions in advance, and such predictions must be based on probabilistic analysis based in turn upon quantitative and continuous differences in the world. Not all changes and differences in the world are so; spon- taneous emergence creates qualitatively new forms of order with new rules not to be deduced from the old. Yet quantitative changes can cross a threshold and suddenly amount to qualitative ones. Critical mass occurs with a sufficiently rich, complex, recursive and exponentially increasing body of feedback among the granular elements of a system, whose mathematical diffi- culty requires new kinds of solutions. For such a body of feedback to arise, relatively autonomous individualities or “counters” 1 with different strategies must compete with each other in ways described by game theory. The paper illustrates several such individualities and the results of their interaction in the inanimate, living, and social worlds. Keywords: “Amounts to”; analog; catastrophe; cosmos; creativity; critical mass; difficulty; digital, dynamical systems; emer- gence; feedback; freedom; games; granularity; Hayek; individuality; Polanyi; probability; prediction; Prigogine; quality; quan- + TAXIS COSMOS tity; Shannon; spontaneous order; Taleb; taxis; thresholds; time. Quality and quantity have long been thought by philoso- natural as continuities and predictable outcomes. Nobody phers to be separate universes. Since the time of Newton (except, by coincidence, habitual prophets of doom) pre- and Laplace, who presented a view of the physical universe dicted the recent banking and mortgage crisis; nobody could that was materialist, reductionist, and determinist, the only have predicted the evolution of the human species; I cannot way that philosophy could rescue the concept of freedom predict what insight I will come to in the course of compos- and with it the world of value, responsibility, meaning, ing this essay. and beauty was to export it from the world of matter and Certainly many events can be predicted. We can predict energy into some other realm—and hence the division in planetary eclipses; the interference pattern formed by a suffi- our universities between the sciences and the humanities, ciently large number of photons fired from a source through Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft. a double slit; the pressure of a given quantity of a given gas But the emergence of new order with qualitatively un- confined in a given volume at a given temperature; the effect precedented characteristics occasioned by the quantitative of an increase in the money supply on inflation; even the ef- crossing of natural thresholds questions any simple dual- fect of a well-known drug on the brain. Such events are con- ism. The presence of natural thresholds requires that the trollable by individual conscious design and thus potentially universe cannot be understood as composed only of smooth reducible to what Hayek calls taxis. But they do not by any gradients analyzable by probabilistic and statistical means. means encompass events that are either unpredictable by a “Catastrophes” and “cusps” in René Thom’s terminology— system less complex than they are, such as a human control- the appearance of radical breaks and discontinuities—are as ler, or constitutively unpredictable in themselves. Nonlinear QUALITY, QUANTITY, GRANULARITY, AND THRESHOLDS OF EMERGENCE dynamical systems, as Ilya Prigogine famously observed, are itself may be related to the threshold between the comput- the most salient sources of such unpredictability, as the ef- able and the incomputable. fect of their feedbacks collapses from the homeostatic to the Freedom and responsibility, art and poetry can be un- chaotic. But it is in the regime of the chaotic that new orders derstood in the light of threshold-crossing, and may indeed emerge, as locally stable equilibria. be traditional concepts and capacities that are our closest ap- The argument of this essay is that a cosmos depends on proach to anticipating threshold-crossings and understand- the presence of nonlinear dynamical systems at any level ing emergent spontaneous orders. The implications for the from the subatomic to the sociological, and that such sys- social sciences and for public policy, though they confirm tems both originate from and generate multiple and locally the insights of classical liberal thought about the limits of stable equilibria. Cosmic reality comes in semi-autonomous human planning, also suggest further perspectives and rich clumps, which can become the pixels of bigger and quite possibilities for the future. unexpected pictures, or the nodes of larger and previously unimagined networks, according to emergent orders that be- “THRESHOLDINESS” come possible once those relatively stable clumps are estab- lished. The clumping of quarks gives rise to a new language What Newton and Laplace, the heroes of quantitative sci- of subatomic particles which, when certain boundary condi- ence, could not have known was something that has only tions of temperature and pressure are crossed, can clump to recently become clear: that a quantitative difference, if close make atoms and molecules, granular individuals that can in enough to some great natural threshold or inherent and turn clump to make crystals and living organisms. The gra- constitutive instability in the world, can trigger a qualitative dients by which such boundary conditions are approached difference. Today’s market risk analysts, as Nassim Nicholas 2 can be smooth and quantitative,