Read that word in an absolutely fascinating excerpt from the new book Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman. Didn’t know what it meant either and it wasn’t in my dictionary. Tried to look it up in my digital OED but it locked up.
Courtesy of Google found that non-ergodic refers to a set or group or system, the universe say, that is incomprehensible by study of a single aspect or earlier state. Ever since the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding and evolving. One could not extrapolate its current state based upon its early arrangement any more than examination of a slice now would tell us much about the whole a billion years hence.
Kauffman is an atheist who wants to understand the nature of the universe. At its earliest why did the atoms combine as they did? Darwin’s theory of evolution tells us a lot about our biosphere, but what about before there was anything to evolve? How did the first reproducing cell form?
Framing the question with an example, he tells us that there are twenty different amino acids and 20 to the power of 200 possible combinations thereof to make a length 200 protein. It would have taken ten to the power of thirty-nine times the age of our universe to make each of them once. Why did the ones that formed come into being and not any of the other possible combinations?
Kauffman began his quest with genes. He earned his MD at UCSF and undertook research into genetic expression. He found that they exist “on the edge of chaos” and that “the proper functioning of an organism depends upon its self organization and regulation”. A trait does not come fully formed from a single gene, but from their interaction. “Health is just a moment of stability in a very uncertain cellular world.”
The principles of self-organization found in complexity theory play an important creative role in the evolution of the universe, our biosphere, our genome, and our existence. It describes the behavior of systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, but evolve unpredictably over time.
The above Mandlebrot fractal is an example of a complicated structure arising from a simple set of points, a formula, and repeated iterations. A slight difference in the points and formula would have led to significantly different evolution. (cf the butterfly effect)
“Thus a radical and I will say, partially lawless creativity enters the universe. The radical implication is that we live in an emergent universe in which ceaseless unforeseeable creativity arises and surrounds us. And since we can neither prestate, let alone predict all that will happen, reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives forward. This emergent universe, the ceaseless creativity in this universe, is the bedrock of the sacred that I believe we must reinvent.”
“What about all the aspects of the universe we hold sacred – agency, meaning, values, purpose, all life and the planet?…One response is that if the natural world has no room for these things, and yet we are unshakably convinced of their reality, then they must be outside of nature – supernatural…”
“The ground of our existence, then is not to be found in physics alone, but also in the partially lawless becoming of the biosphere, econosphere, culture that we self-consistenly co-construct.”
A universe not understandable by reductionism? Nor by a grand patron in robe and slippers? Kauffman gives us a radical appreciation of an unpredictable creativity that underpins and leavens our cosmos.
*Interesting (to me anyway) Kauffman was president (in 1961) of the same mountaineering club as was I (1974). Makes me wonder anew about the field of embodied cognition to which I referred in “Let’s Dance” 1/24/08 below. Kinesthetics, adventure, and cerebration can combine to powerful effect.
**Dang if he didn’t figure out how to get paid to sit around staring off into space while I still need my day job. Teaching at Harvard this spring, he heads the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary.
The Subtle Landscape 