Back from my trip to India and Sri Lanka. While on the trip, did some
reading and thinking, in part stimulated by our exchange just before I
left, and here is the result:
In the course of my readings over the past several years (see
bibliographic list) about the exciting discoveries and developing
understanding in science, I have been haunted by two thoughts.
The first is that all of our recent deep insights into the fundamental
working of the universe are somehow connected. I speak here of a common
conceptual thread, not some simplistic One Big Idea That Explains It All.
The second is the troubling tendency to speak of so much of this new
modes of understanding in such negative terms -- a difficulty brought
into focus by David MacFadzine's challenge to me to "give your ideas a
title." Examples of this negative terminology are: Quantum Theory is
about non-classical indeterminacy. G”del proved the incompleteness of
logical systems.
So just, as I say, my troubles are set in focus, I go on a long trip
with lots of time, and use it discovering the genius of Karl Popper. And
there it is, all together, in a work that predates practically every book
on my reading list outside of Darwin. The connection. The positive
expression. And the title.
"The Open Universe."
Popper understood, way back in the 1940's, that modern science,
beginning with Darwin, was replacing the closed, static image of the
universe passed down to us by Plato, Euclid, and Newton with an open,
dynamic universe of endless possibilities and daunting responsibilities.
He used this to explore the way in which this closed image interacted
with the desire to create a similarly closed society, but we can apply
his terminology to the way we think about our understanding of the
universe itself with, I think, justification.
Popper understood that the prime motivation of philosophers and
scientists since Plato has been not to understand change, but to make it
go away. Because from Plato right down to Helmholtz they have always
feared change. Then Came Darwin, and the true dimension of that insight
still has not been completely explained or appreciated, not even by the
Holy Trinity of Dawkins, Dennett, and Gould. For Darwin demonstrated
that change was not necessarily a bad thing.
The Open Universe -- the only one in which our own existence is possible
-- is one in which change can mean developmental evolution, and not only
the entropic breakdown of order which is the only change that classical
science allows.
In an Open Universe of indeterminate ambiguity, in balance with
understandable laws of cause and effect, novelty, surprise, innovation,
and creativity are not only possible, they're automatic.
The idea of an Open Universe involves many other collateral ideas,
including the Auto-Catalytic Set of Logic, the Evolutionary Stable
Strategy, and the Emergent Universe, all of which I have adopted/stolen
from other, better writers, and would be happy to elucidate to those
interested. And even more happy to see these ideas criticized. After
all, as Popper explained, the proper attitude of the true scientist is
that of Socrates, the questioner, secure in the certainty that no one has
all the answers, and the best way to spend our lives is by learning.
The Open Universe rejects the current millennial fixation on the Ends of
things (The End of History, The End of Science, The Last Three Minutes),
all of which depend upon the closed notion that there is an Answer to All
Things (which Douglas Adams satirized so well in his Hitchhiker series).
It also rejects the false belief that just because there is no final end
to our quest for knowledge, there can then be no standard for measuring
the truth of a proposition.
I can think of no happier prospect than this: that the future is filled
with infinite possibilities. I can think of no more sobering thought
than that the responsibility for the future we actually realize rests
nowhere but on our own shoulders. Our descendents could command the
cosmos, or our line could end in two or three more generations. It's up
to us alone; there's noone looking after us. How exciting!
David: You are welcome to post this to the ListServe, and I welcome
reaction from one and all. I still can't sign on until I get my home
hookup, but seek some validation -- or shootdown -- of by ideas in the
meantime.
And I also welcome discussing more about putting more of this on an Open
Dialog web page. Wait 'til you see my plans for that!
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C. David Noziglia
Desk Officer for India and Sri Lanka
USIA Washington, D.C.
phone: (202) 619-4906
fax: (202) 619-5605
dnozigli@usia.gov
"Information is easier to produce and harder to control than stuff you
can drop on your foot." Wired Magazine
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