Spontaneous Order: Awakening the Sacred

As scientists begin to unlock the principles that order complex systems like ecosystems and economies, they are revealing the power of spontaneous order. But might they also be rediscovering the sacred?

[Physicist and Nobel Laureate Steven] Weinberg argued that to understand “big” phenomena we always peer downward: we travel from large objects like societies to groups, to individual people, to organs, to cells, to chemistry, to physics. Finally we might arrive at a set of ultimate laws that explain everything—Weinberg’s dream of a “final theory.” Causality points upward, from parts to the whole. Everything thus reduces.

Theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, in the vanguard of complexity sciences at the Santa Fe Institute, disagrees. In his book Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that we can find a new sense of the spiritual in the behavior of complex systems like the biosphere and the economy. These systems, Kauffman argues, cannot be reduced. Their complexity is beyond Weinberg’s final theory.

In a 1972 article titled “More Is Different,” Nobel Laureate physicist Philip Anderson argued against reductionism in physics. If we think of causality as an arrow, it does not just point upward from particles, thought Anderson. As the size and complexity of something increase, “entirely new properties appear” that cannot “be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles.” Things are not just the sum of their parts. More is different.

There is no way to define the possible functions of a box of Legos, since the function largely depends on the context and what has already been created. With each change, new combinations and possibilities appear that can disrupt previous functions. New forms become the pieces for still newer combinations and forms.

The economy works this way too. Think of all the possible uses of a simple screwdriver: open a can of paint, defend oneself in an assault, use as a paperweight, open coconuts on a desert island, and so on. The number of uses explodes exponentially as you include any new object that could be combined with a screwdriver (like an electric motor to make a drill). And, of course, the new form’s properties would depend, in some sense, upon the environment in which it’s used. For example, it would not be a drill in 1800, because electric motors co-evolved with the advent of electrical grids. Electrical grids created the possibility of the electric drill.

In markets, humans search through these endless networks of possibility, combining and recombining resources and technologies with never-ending freshness in ever-changing contexts.

The human economy is massively more complex than a box of Legos. The “econosphere,” as Kauffman calls it, roils with novelty and creativity, just like the biosphere. Markets are the collective expression of our creative work, and they are more than the sum of individuals that compose it. We do not fully understand them, and we cannot predict them. We never will, because things will always suddenly appear and change the course of their evolution. But in their creativity, Kauffman believes we can rediscover the sacred. To sacralize, after all, is to venerate the sources of creativity that are beyond any one mere human’s own powers of creation. For many in the past this was an all-powerful Creator God. For Kauffman, it is the natural creativity of the universe.

Source: “Spontaneous Order: Awakening the Sacred” The Freemen. Volume 63, No. 4. May 2013.

A system is complex if its degrees of freedom of movement is two or more. That is to say it has two or more choices or options it can take. See complexity theory or what’s sometimes known as chaos theory for more information.