Home > Work > Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion
1 " I need not to show you the incapacity to predict in deterministic chaotic systems is emphatically not the same as the failure to prestate or predict Darwinian preadaptations. in the deterministic chaotic case, we know beforehand the state space of the system, in the simplest case, three continuous variables and their ranges. But in sharp contrast, we do not know beforehand the state space, or sample space, of the evolving biosphere and the emergence in the nonergodic universe of swim bladders. "
― Stuart A. Kauffman , Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion
2 " History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual. "
3 " This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative. "
4 " But Laplace’s particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings. "
5 " In short, given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere. "
6 " Thus we can accept the wonderful results of the neuroscientists, accept that the mind, via neural behavior, is classically causal, and refuse the conclusion that the mind is computing an algorithm. "
7 " history itself arises out of the adjacent possible. "
8 " And to come back to the economy for a moment, the lifetime distribution of firms is also a power law. Now "
9 " Yet the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years. "
10 " We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe. "
11 " A central failure of the “mind as a computational system” theory is that computations, per se, are devoid of meaning. "
12 " nonergodic "
