Time and History

Key authors: Whitehead (especially as explained by Harteshorne), Ilya Prigogine, J.H. Hexter, Stephen Jay Gould, Donald T. Campbell, John Gunnell, and perhaps Francisco Varela and Steve Odin.

The world of time, change, and contingency that we find ourself in cannot be reduced to any more fundamental, predictable reality except by destroying it entirely. In significant respects the future will be different from the present or the past. There are new things under the sun, and both unimaginable progress and unimaginable disaster are possible.

This is not another theory of time to put on the stack, but a description of the actual reality we live in. It applies to anything as large as a speck of dust or as small as a solar system.

Astrophysics and quantum physics are a different world, the ground of our world but one unaffected by anything happening it. At the cosmic or quantum level, we and our world simply have no reality at all. We are uninterpretable by physics and thus physically unreal, which does not mean that we could exist without physical bodies.

A fuller argument of this point

ANDERSON

Anderson, Perry, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, New Left Books, 1974.

"Heckscher once commented that "countries of the second rank" had no right to expect their history to be generally studied. Arguing that "every historical study should lead either to the discovery of general laws or to the discernment of the mechanisms of a major evolution", he concluded that the development of such lands as Sweden was only of significance insofar as it adumbrated or conformed to a wider international pattern. The residue could effectively be neglected: "let us not complicate the tasks of science unnecessarily". p. 173; citing Annales, March, 1932, p. 127."

BARBOUR

Barbour, Julian, The End of Time, Oxford, 2000.

Can we believe in many worlds? The evidence for them is strong. The history of science shows that physicists have tended to be wrong when they have not believed counterintuitive results of good theories…..Soon after I started writing this book, Princess Diana was killed, and Britain – like much of the world – was gripped by a most extraordinary mood. Watching the funeral service live, I did wonder how seriously one can take a theory which suggests that she survived the crash in other worlds. Death appears so final. pp. 323-4

BATESON

Bateson, Gregory, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Ballantine, 1972.

The state of mind or habit of though which goes from data to dormitive hypothesis and back to data is self-reinforcing. There is, among all scientists, a high value set on prediction, and, indeed, to be able to predict phenomena is a fine thing. But prediction is a rather poor test of an hypothesis, and this is especially true of "dormitive hypotheses"." p. xx

BJELLAND

Bjelland, Andres, "Evolutionary Epistemology, Durational Metaphysics, and Theoretical Physics", in Griffin, 1989.

"The past, as causally efficaceous, is immanent to the present; the present, though emergent and novel, conforms to, but is neither necessitated by nor identical with its past. The past is not so efficacious that it excludes the emergence of novelty; if it were, it would exclude its own character as past. The novelty of the present is not a novelty that excludes contextual conformation with the past, for the physical present is novel in virtue of, and not in spite of, elementary memory." p. 68

BLUMENBERG

Blumenberg, Hans, "An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance of Rhetoric", in Baynes, Kenneth, Bohman, James, and McCarthy, Thomas (eds.), Philosophy: End or Transformation, MIT, 1987, pp. 429--458.

"The decisive difference lies in the dimension of time; science can wait, or is subject to the convention of being able to wait, whereas rhetoric -- if it can no longer be the ornatus of a truth -- presupposes, as a constitutive element of its situation, that the "creature of deficiency" is compelled to act..... To see oneself in the perspective of rhetoric means to be conscious both of being compelled to act and of the lack of norms in a finite situation. Everything that is not force here goes over to the side of rhetoric, and rhetoric implies the renunciation of force." p. 437

"The axiom of all rhetoric is the principle of insufficient reason.... It is a correlate of the anthropology of a creature who is deficient in essential respects. If man's world accorded with the optimism of the metaphysics of Leibniz, who thought that he could assign a sufficient reason even for the fact that anything exists at all, rather than nothing.... then there would be no rhetoric, because there would be neither the need nor the possibility of using it effectively." p. 447

BRAUDEL

Braudel, Fernand, On History, Chicago, 1980.

"A perilous world, granted, but one whose spells and dangerous enchantments we will have exorcised by having charted those great underlying currents which so often run silently, and whose true significance emerges only if one can observe their working over great spans of time. Resounding events often take place in an instant, and are but manifestations of that larger destiny by which alone they can be explained." p. 4

"They have set us progressively farther along the path of transcending the individual and the particular event, a transcendence long foreseen, foreshadowed, glimpsed, but fully accomplished only in our time." p. 10

"Take the word "event": for myself I would limit it, and imprison it within the short time span; an event is explosive, a nouvelle sonnante ("a matter of moment") as they said in the sixteenth century. Its delusive smoke fills the minds of its contemporaries, but it does not last, and its flame can scarcely ever be discerned." p. 27

"I myself, during a rather gloomy captivity, struggled a good deal to get away from a chronicle of those difficult years (1940-5). Rejecting events and the time in which events have taken place is a way of placing oneself to one side, sheltered, so as to get some sort of perspective, to be able to evaluate them better, and not wholly believe in them." p. 47

Braudel: "ruptures", p. 45; "rifts and reversals", p. 46; "discontinuities", pp. 73, 89.

"Like any historian I am attracted to the unique event.... Moreover, I believe that there must always be thousands upon thousands of such unique occurences" p. 67

BRICMONT

J. Bricmont, ”Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science?''  

But why should anybody in those fields worry about what happens in physics or chemistry? …..Humans or societies are so many scales above molecules that modifications in the basic physical laws is (probably) almost irrelevant for the understanding of human actions. The main problem of the social sciences is to exist as sciences, i.e. to discover theories that are well tested and that explain some non-trivial aspect of human affairs. The only thing that people working in those fields might learn from the natural sciences is a general scientific attitude, what one might call the epistemology of the Enlightenment: a critical mind, not to rely on authorities, to compare theory with experiment, etc.... But there is no need to ape what happens in the exact sciences. (Bricmont, #7) 

“When all is said and done, science and reason is all we have. Outside of them, there is no hope.”  
 

CAMPBELL

Campbell, Donald T., "Evolutionary Epistemology", in The Philosophy of Karl Popper, ed. Schilpp, Open Court, 1974.

"1. A blind-variation-and-selective-retention process is fundamental to all inductive achievements, to all genuine increases in knowledge, to all increases in fit of system to environment.

2. In such a process there are three essentials: (a) Mechanisms for introducing variation; (b) consistent selection processes; and (c) mechanisms for preserving and/or propagating the selected variations. Note that in general the preservation and generation mechanisms are inherently at odds, and each must be compromised.

3. The many processes which shortcut a more full blind- variation- and- selective- retention process are themselves inductive achievements, containing wisdom about the environment achieved by blind variation and selective retention.

4. In addition, such shortcut processes contain in their own operation a blind- variation- and- selective- retention process at some level, substituting for overt locomotor exploration or the life- and- death winnowing of organic evolution." p.421

Campbell, Donald T., "Variation and Selective Retention in Sociocultural Evolution", in Social Change in Developing Areas, Barringer, Blankster, and Mack, etc, Schenkman, 1965

"Today, the most exciting current contribution of Darwin is in his model for the achievement of purposive or ends-guided processes through mechanisms involving blind, stupid, unforesightful details. In recent years.... Ashby, Pringle, and others have pointed out anew the formal parallel between natural selection in organic evolution and trial-and-error learning. The common analogy has also been recognized in many other loci, as in embryonic growth, wound healing, crystal formation, development of science, radar, echolocation, creative thinking, etc." p. 26-7

COVENY

Coveny, Peter and Highfield, Roger,  The Arrow of Time, Fawcett. 1990.

1990 piece from the New Scientist by Coveney

CRUTCHFIELD / CHAOS COLLECTIVE

Crutchfeld, James P., Farmer, J. Doyne, Packard, Norman H., and Shaw, Robert S.: "Chaos", Scientific American, December, 1986, pp, 46-57.

"The existence of chaos effects the scientific method itself. The classic approach to verifying a theory is to make predictions and test them against experimental data. If the phenomena are chaotic, however, long-term predictions are intrinsically impossible..... Chaos brings a new challenge to the reductionist view that a system can be understood by breaking it down and studying each piece.... Chaos demonstrates, however, that a system can have complicated behavior that emerges as a consequence of simple, nonlinear interactions of only a few components.... For example, even with a complete map of the nervous system of a simple organism, such as the nematode studied by Sidney Brenner of the University of Cambridge, the organism's behavior cannot be deduced. Similiarly, the hope that physics could be complete with an increasingly detailed understanding of the fundamental physical forces and constituents is unfounded..... Chaos is often seen in terms of the limitations it implies, such as a lack of predictability. Nature, however, may employ chaos constructively.... Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides for a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws." pp. 56-7.

DAVIES

Davies, Paul, “That Mysterious Flow”, Scientific American, Vol. 287, #3, September, 2002.

“The most straightforward conclusion is that both past and present are fixed”.p. 42.

“The flow of time is subjective, not objective” p. 47

“There is no agreement among physicists how this transition from many potential realities into a single actuality takes place. Many physicists have argued that it has something to do with the consciousness of the observer, on the basis that the act of observation causes nature to make up its mind.” p. 47

“Some researchers, notably Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine, now at the University of Texas, have suggested that the subtle physics of irreversible processes makes the flow of time an objective aspect of the world. But I and others argue that it is some sort of illusion" p. 47

"And what if science were able to explain away the flow of time ? Perhaps we would no longer fret about the future or grieve about the past. Worries about death might become as irrelevant as worries about birth. Expectation and nostalgia might cease to be part of the human vocabulary. Above all, the sense of urgency which attaches to so much of human activity would evaporate….[T]he past, present and future would literally be things of the past." p. 47.

ELIADE

Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Bollingen, 1954.

GEORGESCU - ROEGEN

Georgescu - Roegen, N., The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Harvard, 1971.

"The reason that compelled Plato to exclude all qualitative change from his world of arithropomorphic ideas is obvious. The issue of whether motion too is excluded from this world is not discussed by Plato. But we can be almost certain that he had no intention -- for there was no need for it -- of conceiving that world as motionless. He thus implicitly recognized that an arithromorphic structure is incompatible with qualitative change but not with locomotion, even though he admitted that change consists of either." p. 63

"Risk describes the situations where the exact outcome is not known but the outcome does not represent a novelty. Uncertainty applies to cases where the reason why we cannot predict the outcome is that the same event has never been observed in the past and, hence, it may involve a novelty." p. 122

GLEICK / MANDELL

Gleick, James, Chaos, Viking, 1987.

"Such an intelligence, Laplace wrote, would embrace in the same formula the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes. p. 14

GOULD

Gould, Stephen Jay, Wonderful Life, Norton, 1989

"I call this experiment "replaying life's tape". You press the rewind button and, making sure to thoroughly erase everything that actually happened, go back to any time and place in the past -- say, to the seas of the Burgess Shale. Then let the tape run again and see if the repetition looks at all like the original. If each replay strongly resembles life's actual pathway, then we must conclude that what really happened actually had to occur. But suppose that the experimental versions all yield sensible results strikingly different than the actual history of life?" p. 48

"I believe that the reconstructed Burgess fauna, interpreted by the theme of replaying life's tape, offers powerful support for this view of life: any replay of the tape would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the pathway actually taken. But the consequent differences in outcome do not imply that evolution is senseless, and without meaningful pattern; the divergent route of the replay would be just as interpretable, just as explainable after the fact, as the actual road. But the diversity of possible itineraries does demonstrate that the eventual results cannot be predicted at the outset..... [This approach] represents no more nor less than the essence of history. Its name is contingency -- and contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinacy by randomness. " p. 51

Gould, Stephen Jay, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Harvard, 1987.

GRIFFIN

Griffin, David Ray, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, SUNY, 1989.

"Relativity physics has shifted the moving present out from the superstructure of the universe, into the minds of human beings, where it belongs." (citing F.C.W. Davies, 1976, p. xii.)

"Relativity is a theory in which everything is "written" and where change is only relative to the perceptual mode of human beings (citing Costa de Beauregard, 1966, p. xii).

GUNNELL

Gunnell, John, Political Philosophy and Time, Chicago, 1987.

"When Herodotus, speaking through Croesus, warns that "there is a wheel on which the affairs of men revolve and that its movement forbids the same man to be always fortunate", he is not implying that history is caught in a cycle of cosmic revolution and eternal return, for he understands the course of man's life as a linear succession of days, each of which is unique, leading on to death; "man is wholly accident"" p. 112

"For the Greeks, this is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order" p, 114

"If then human life is a circle, and a circle has neither beginning nor end, we should not be "prior" to those who lived at the time of Troy nor they "prior" by being nearer to the beginning." p. 232

"The analysis of the "now" and the idea of time as number apply primarily to the type of change which Aristotle.... restrictively defines as locomotion; that is, movement from place to place as distinguished from absolute change, which involves creation and loss of substance and changes of quality and quantity." p. 234

"Finally, even beyond the notion of time as the dimension of change, Aristotle comes to regard time as a destructive force; things made by man or nature remain stable or persist only to the extent to which they overcome time which carries all things away." p. 236

"For Plato and Aristotle history had a meaning only insofar as it was the realm of disorder and decay." p. 241

"For much of political philosophy from Plato to Rousseau society or the subpolitical realm appeared as the great beast to be tamed by the imposition of political order. Society was the realm of anxiety, instability, uniqueness, and temporality; it was the scene of necessity, the arena of the passions, and the root of human disorder. Despite the intellectual gulf which separates Plato and Rousseau, both ultimately understood the political as a means of containing society and abolishing history" p. 249

Harteshorne, Charles, Whitehead's Philosophy, Nebraska, 1972.

HARTESHORNE / WHITEHEAD

Harteshorne, Charles, Creativity in American Philosophy, Paragon, 1984.

"Process philosophy takes creative becoming rather than mere being as the inclusive mode of reality.... Process philosophy takes becoming as creative in precisely the sense in which determinism denies creativity. Creativity is the production of new definiteness. It is the ultimate or universal form of emergence. For strict determinism, the definiteness of the world throughout all time is already settled and the future seems indefinite only because of ignorance. The notion of timeless truths about particular events has the same implication. For Whitehead.... reality is in the making and classical determinism is false. We human beings (in some degree, all creatures) are helping define a new reality otherwise not fully definite. p.104

Harteshorne, Charles, Whitehead's Philosophy, Nebraska, 1972.

"Every event contains more or less determinate desires, expectations, fears, purposes, hopes, and these involve generality, indetermination as to the exact details which may fulfill or disappoint or somehow be relevant to them. The planned or feared event as outlined in the plan or fear is never so individually definite as the event which comes to pass at the time in question, and this greater definiteness of the subsequent event remains exactly that, no matter how complete the preservation of the earlier event. Indeed, it is only if the preservation is complete that the precise indeterminations of the past in its hopes and fears can be retrospectively seen for what they were when present. On the other hand, the fulfillment or disappointment, felt as such, of a purpose or hope includes the memory of the purpose or hope, plus details not foreseen in the anticipatory state and not contained in it as preserved in memory, as to how things "came out".

Clearly logic allows the asymmetric relationship required. A can be in B though B is not in A. In fact, there would otherwise be no distinction between general and particular; for the general is that which does not imply other things unless they are of equal generality,whereas the particular contains the general as an abstractable feature. Why should not this asymmetrical structure of universal-particular be essentially an aspect of the structure of time?.... The foregoing doctrine can be expressed as the contention that "the cause is never equal to the effect", the latter always being the richer. If my hat requires God and God requires my hat (at least as an illusion or "appearance"), the logical status of the one is as dependent or independent as the other."
pp. 85-6

"Independence means asymmetrical contingency (or "asymmetrical determinism"; the noninvolvement of the effect on the cause....)" p.96

"Is there any freedom of indeterminacy in reality? Yes, and in all cases, since events never strictly depend upon or imply their precise successors. And here Whitehead furnishes perhaps the neatest, strongest argument for freedom ever proposed. The subject prehends not one but many prior activities..." p. 126

"Entailment is not necessarily (or normally) reversible." p. 157

"Whitehead's indeterminism is implicit in what has been said. If the new unity were deducible from the old, it would logically be no addition at all, and the degree of multiplicity would not be "increased". Any causal laws used for the deduction must be viewed as mere abstract aspects of the previous multiplicity; and in any case. how can a law prescribe just how a set of items is to be embraced in an equally new unitary item?" p. 163

"Each such entity prehensively sums up it predecessors (but not its successors). This asymmetrical organicity was first made into a formal, clearly stated category (so far as I know) in Process and Reality." p. 169.

"Causal conditions limit what can happen to a more or less narrow range of possibilities. Thus what happens is always more determinate than the conditions imply." p. 175

HEXTER

Hexter, J.H., The History Primer, 1971, Chicago.

"What the erroneous notion of historians and others that prediction of the future is impossible boils down to is (1) that total prediction of the future is impossible; (2) that precise prediction of many future events is impossible; (3) that among the future events not precisely predictable are especially those that from a sense of anxiety and uncertainty, itself a consequence of this unpredictability, men most desire to predict precisely ; but (4) the prediction of future events is not only often possible but is often accurate, precise, and important; and (5) historians and others have deluded themselves on this point not because such predictions are rare and unimportant, but because although very important indeed, they are both easy and commonplace." p. 45

KELSEN

Kelsen, Hans, "Causality and Retribution" in What Is Justice?, California, 1960.

"The law of the arche here established a monarchia, and arche means not only "beginning" but also "government" or "rule". It is surely no accident that the philosophy of nature flourished at a time when the influence of oriental despotisms was gaining strength in Greece." p. 305

"Here for the first time in the thinking of mankind the notion of an immanent law which governs the whole of the universe is comprehended. But, though generalized, it is still essentially the law of retribution." p. 307

"And if in Demokritos, and elsewhere in the old natural philosophy, aitia means cause, one must not forget that this word originally mean "guilt"." p. 314

"The problematical character of the statement that the cause must be equal to the effect, and vice versa, is also evident in the related idea that a cause has only one effect and that an effect is traceable to only one cause.... "Cause and effect are", as Goethe said, "an indivisible phenomenon". That we nevertheless separate them from one another, even oppose them to one another, that we purposely isolate from the continuous chain of innumerable elements two alone as the cause and the effect which is imputable to the cause alone, is due to the age-old habit of interpreting nature according to the principle of retribution. This principle connects only one event, characterized as wrong, with another event, the punishment, likewise precisely determined and clearly separated chronologically from the first." p. 316

"If one sees the essence of the law of causality in the fact that it determines the future, even if only for a Laplacean intelligence, one confirms, perhaps unconsciously, the normative origin of the law of causality." p. 321

LADURIE

Ladurie, Emanuel LeRoy, The Territory of the Historian, Chicago, 1979.

"An event can be a means of innovation, an accidental transition as it were -- governed by remote factors, and with delayed action in time -- from one structure to another. p. 130.

LASLETT

Laslett, Peter, (in Hexter, 1961, "Foreword")

"Now it is natural, though it may not be justifiable, to suppose that great events have great causes."

LENNON

Lennon, Kathleen, Explaining Human Action, Open Court, 1990

"Arguments which establish that mental (construed as intentional) kinds cannot be reduced to physical kinds do not necessarily rule out psycho-physical laws, and therefore do not necessarily rule out causal explanation at the intentional level." p. 104

LE POIDEVIN

Le Poidevin, Robin and MacBeath, Murray, eds., The Philosophy of Time, Oxford, 1993.

MACINTIRE

MacIntire, Alisdair. After Virtue, Notre Dame, 1981.

"I want to argue that there are four sources of systematic unpredictability in human affairs, The first derives from the nature of radical conceptual innovation.... The invention of the wheel cannot be predicted...." p. 89

"[T]he unpredictability of certain of his own future actions by each agent individually generates another element of unpredictability as such the social world.... insofar as the observer cannot predict the impact of his future actions on my future decision-making, he cannot predict my future actions any more than he can his own.... Another way of making the same point would be to note that omniscience excludes the making of decisions." p. 91-2

"A third source of systematic unpredictability arises from the game-theoretic character of human life." p. 92

"I now turn to the fourth source: pure contingency. J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra's nose: had her features been perfectly-proportioned, Mark Anthony would not have been entranced.... One does not have to accept Bury's argument to see that trivial contingencies can powerfully influence the outcomes of great events...." p. 95

MUSSER

George Musser “A hole at the heart of time”, Scientific American, ol. 287, #3, September, 2002.

“Thus the second law is not so much a fundamental truth as a historical happenstance, perhaps related to events early in the big bang.” p. 49.

ODIN

Odin, Steve, Process Metaphysics and Hua-yen Buddhism, SUNY, 1982

"An event is in fact a substance with unique and irreducible selfhood in that it is a self-creative experience constitutive of its own novel and aesthetic unity." p. 73

PAGELS

Pagels, Heinz, "Is the irreversibility we see a fundamental property of nature?'' (review of Order Out of Chaos) , Physics Today, Jan. 1985, pp. 97--99.

How is it possible that from the microworld of reversible time emerges the observed macroworld of irreversible time?  p. 97

“In Einstein’s words, this “myth” [basic myth of science according to Pr.] is the view that “the general laws of physics…. claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever” and that “it ought to be possible to arrive at the description…. of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction”. p. 98

PARFIT

Parfit, Michael, "Before Noah, there were the Lake Missoula Floods", Smithsonian, April, 1995, pp 46-75.

PARR

Parr, Hector, Time, Science, and Philosophy, Lutterworth, 1997.

“Almost everything of significance that happens in the universe is irreversible, and the reason for this time-asymmetry cannot be found in the fundamental laws of physics” pp 54-5

“Whenever possible we should visualize processes as a static four-dimensional model in space-time rather than as a moving three-dimensional picture.” pp. 54-5

Chapter Three maintained that our belief in a “now”, which continually moves, and which divides a region of certainty which we call “the past” from one whose contents are still uncertain which we call “the future”, is an illusion, arising only because we have brains which can store the past and not the future. In possessing this faculty we are certainly untypical and may possibly be unique;  here may be no structures anywhere in the universe apart from the brains of living beings on earth (and some of man’s own inventions, such as books, video cameras, and computers) where accurate records exist of past events; and in the absence of creatures with memories there is no such thing as “now”. p. 140

Our present viewpoint, with its insistence that wrong conceptions of time can invalidate much of our thinking, renders such stories even less plausible. The idea of a God, so appalled at the plight of the Israelites that he takes the extreme action of suspending the laws of Nature to avoid a catastrophe that He had not foreseen, presupposes that God suffers from the same blinkered view of history as we ourselves, a view imposed upon us by our physical brains, constrained by the principles of thermodynamics. pp. 145-6

PEIRCE

Peirce, Charles Sanders, ed. Buchler, Philosophical Writings, Dover, 1955.

"Tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology". p. 339

"The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing has been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to say what the movements of any particular model would be on a certain hypothesis regarding the constitution of this class of bodies, Clausius and Maxwell were yet able, eight years before the publication of Darwin's immortal work, by the application of the doctrine of probabilities, to predict that in the long run such and such a proportion of the molecules would, under given circumstances, acquire such and such velocities.... In like manner, Darwin, while unable to say what the operation of variation and natural selection in any individual case will be, demonstrates that in the long run they will, or would adapt animals to their circumstances." p. 7

PRICE

Price, Huw, Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point, Oxford, 1996.

PRIGOGINE

Prigogine, Ilya, Order Out of Chaos, Bantam, 1984.

"We believe that it is precisely this transition to a new description that makes this moment in the history of science so exciting. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that it is a period like the time of the Greek atomists or the Renaissance, periods in which a new view of nature was being born." p. 2

""Primary" laws control the behavior of single particles, while "secondary" laws are applicable to collections of atoms or molecules. To insist on secondary laws is to emphasize that the description of elementary behavior is not sufficient for undertsanding a system as a whole." p.8

"One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is a flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing and understanding." p. 20

"One widely-studied example was the three-body problem, perhaps the most important problem in the history of dynamics. The moon's motion, influenced by both the earth and the sun, is one instance of this problem. Countless attempts were made to express it in the form of an integrable system until, at the end of the nineteenth century, Bruns and Poincare showed that this was impossible....Although this discovery was not clearly understood at the time, it implied the demise of the conviction that the dynamic world is homogeneous, reducible to the concept of integrable systems. Nature as an evolving, interactive multiplicity thus resists reduction to a timeless and universal scheme." p. 72

"What is remarkable that, despite their exceptional character, integrable systems dominated science until the 1950's, and they still constitute the main subject of most mechanics textbooks. Their great historical role and their undoubted pedagogical value are certainly a partial explanation of this paradoxical situation." p. 93

"In dynamics, a system changes according to a trajectory that is given once and for all, whose starting point is never forgotten (since initial conditions determine the trajectory for all time). However, in an isolated system all non-equilibrium situations produce evolution toward the same kind of equilibrium state. By the time equilibrium has been reached, the system has forgotten its initial conditions -- that is, the way it had been prepared." p. 121

"Irreversible processes have an immense constructive importance: life would not be possible without them" p. 125

"How, for example, could Darwinism -- the statistical selection of rare events -- be reconciled with the statistical disappearance of all peculiarities, of all configurations, described by Boltzman. As Roger Callois asks, "Can Carnot and Darwin both be right?"" p. 128

"The processes that define chemistry -- chemical reactions characterized by reaction rates -- are irreversible through and through." p. 131

""Order through fluctuations" models introduce an unstable world where small causes can have large effects, but this world is not arbitrary." p. 206

"Indeed, history began by concentrating mainly on human societies, after which attention was given to the temporal dimensions of life and geology. The incorporation of time into physics thus appears as the last stage of a progressive reinsertion of history into the natural and human sciences." p. 208

"For many years physicists remained reluctant to accept such a "historical" description of cosmic evolution.... The whole story appears as another irony of history. In a sense, against his will, Einstein has become the Darwin of physics. Darwin taught us that man is embedded in biological evolution; Einstein has taught us that we are embedded in an evolving universe. Einstein's ideas led him to a new continent, as unexpected to him as America was to Columbus." p. 215

"Demonstrations of "impossibility" have a fundamental importance. They imply the dicovery of an unexpected intrinsic structure of reality that dooms an intellectual enterprise to failure.... Thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics are all rooted in the discovery of impossibilities, limits to the ambitions of classical physics. Thus they marked the end of an exploration that had reached its limits. But we can now see these scientific innovations in a new light, not as an end but a beginning, as the opening up of new opportunities." p. 216

"Thus the paradox: the reversible Schroedinger equation can be tested only by irreversable measurements that the equation is by definition unable to describe.... Schroedinger's equation does not describe a separate level of reality; rather it presupposes the macroscopic world to which we belong." pp. 228-9

"[Einstein]: 'Michele has left this strange world just before me. This is of no importance. For us convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is an illusion, albeit a persistent one'." p. 294

"As long as the second law is considered to express only improbability, it has little theoretical interest. You could always hope to overcome it with sufficient technical skill. But we have seen that this is not so, At its root is a selection of possible initial states.... it is only after the symmetry-breaking that any probabilistic interpretation becomes possible." p. 297

"It is only the unification of dynamics and thermodynamics through the introduction of a new selection principle that gives the second law its fundamental importance as the evolutionary paradigm of the sciences.... The world of dynamics, be it classical or quantum, is a reversible world....No evolution can be ascribed to this world; the "information" expressed in terms of dynamical units remains constant. It is therefore of great importance that the existence of an evolutionary paradigm can be established in physics -- not only at the level of macroscopic description but also at all levels." p. 297

"Today we believe that the epoch of certainties and absolute oppositions is over. Physicists have no privilege whatever to any kind of extra-territoriality.... In his Themes Merleau-Ponty also asserted that the "philosophic" discoveries of science, its basic conceptual transformations, are the result of negative discoveries, which provide the occasion and starting point for a reversal of point of view. Demonstrations of impossibility, whether in relativity, quantum mechanics, or thermodynamics, have shown us that nature cannot be described "from the outside" as if by a spectator. Description is dialogue, communication, and this communication is subject to constraints that demonstrate that we are macroscopic beings embedded in the physical world." p. 299

"Classical science denied becoming, natural diversity, both considered by Aristotle as attributes of the sublunar, inferior world. In this sense, classical science brought heaven to earth. However, this apparently was not the intention of the fathers of modern science. In challenging Aristotle's claim that mathematics ends where nature begins, they did not seek to discover the immutable concealed betneath the changing, but rather to extend changing, corruptible nature to the boundaries of the universe. In his "Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems" Galileo is amazed at the notion that the world would be a nobler place if the great flood had left only a sea of ice behind, or if the world had the incorruptible hardness of jasper...." p. 305

"The questions we have investigated have led us to emphasize aspects that differ considerably from those to which Kuhn's description applies.....The past one hundred years have been marked by several crises that correspond closely to the description given by Kuhn -- none of which were sought by scientists. Examples are the discovery of the instability of elementary particles, or of the evolving universe. However, the recent history of science is also characterized by a series of problems that that are the consequences of deliberate and lucid questions asked by scientists who knew that the questions asked by scientists had both scientific and philosophic aspects." pp. 308-9

Prigogine, Ilya, Exploring Complexity, Freeman, 1989.

"Suppose now that because of some perturbation, the pattern of oscillation -- the normal heartbeat rhythm -- is upset. Since the human system is subject to a great many perturbations every day, if the heart functioned as a pendulum does, fibrillation [failure of the heart to beat regularly] could well have occured in the embryo, before birth. But the heart is not like a pendulum [i.e., the heart is not a conservative, reversible system] it does not "remember" the effect of a perturbation by permanently changing its pattern of oscillation; if no permanent damage has occured and the cause of perturbation is removed, the heart resumes its normal rhythm." p. 20

"But in a nonlinear system adding a small cause to one that is already present can induce dramatic effects that have no common measure with the amplitude of the cause." p. 59

"Indeed, the instability of motion associated with chaos allows the system to explore its state space continuously, thereby creating information and complexity" p. 192

"The property of asymptotic stability which permits a system to forget accidental perterbations does not apply to conservative dynamical systems." p. 195

"As noted by Norbert Weiner: in any world within which we can communicate, the direction of time is bound to be uniform and irreversible." p. 197

"In the world of unstable dynamical systems we can only look through a "window" in the outside world. We witness here the breakdown of the ideal of complete knowledge that has haunted Western science for three centuries." p. 197

"Randomness presents an adaptive value in the organization of the society." p. 233

"What is the best balance between fluctuations, which allow discoveries, and accurate determinism, which allows immediate exploitation?" p. 235

"Contrary to the molecules, the actors in a physico-chemical system, or even the ants or the members of other animal societies, human beings develop individual projects and desires. Some of these stem from anticipations about how the future might reasonably look and from guesses concerning the desires of other actors.... In other words, is past experience sufficient for predicting the future, or is a high degree of unpredictability of the future the essence of the human adventure, be it at the individual level of learning or at the collective level of history making? The developments outlined in the preceding chapters suggest that the answer to this question should lean toward the second alternative." p. 238

RORTY, A. E.

Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, The Identities of Persons, California, 1976

RORTY, R.

Rorty, Richard, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1981.

"Physicalism is probably right in saying that we shall someday be able, "in principle", to predict every movement of a person's body (including those of his larnyx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body." p. 354

SAHLINS

Sahlins, Marshal, Islands of History, Chicago, 1985.

"And because signs are engaged by interests in projects, thus in temporal relations of implication (not simply simultaneous relations of contrast), their values are risked, so to speak, syntagmatically as well as paradigmatically. Such interested uses are not imperfect merely, by relation to Platonic cum cultural ideals, but potentially inventive. We have seen how Hawaiian chiefs were able to recognize their traditional mana in the fancy goods of European merchants, as opposed to the coarser stuff or domestic utilities. The goods offered in trade were factored according to the chiefs' self-conceptions. By an interested metaphor on celestial brilliance, whose logic was motivated in the traditional culture -- as discovered, however, in the existing situation by a certain intentionality -- the meaning of mana was changed." p. 151

SHALIZI

Cosma Shalizi: "Ilya Prigogine", Oct. 2002, 12:17

This led to him becoming, all at once, the patron scientist of New Age twinks, of post-modern I-know-not-whats, of some anti-post-modern I-know-not-whats (like Frederick Turner), and of Alvin Toffler”.

SMITH

Smith, John Maynard, "Rottenness Is All",' a review of Order Out of Chaos collected in Did Darwin Get It Right? ().

SPENCER-BROWN

Spencer-Brown, G. Laws of Form, Dutton, 1971.

"Of course, as everyone knows, the paradox in this case [the square root of minus one] is resolved by introducing a fourth class of number, called imaginary, so we can say that the roots of the equation above are plus or minus i, where i is a new kind of unity that consists of the square root of minus one.

What we do in Chapter 11 is extend the concept to Boolean algebras, which means that a valid argument may contain not just three classes of statement, but four: true, false, meaningless, and imaginary. The implications of this, in the fields of logic, philosophy, mathematics, and even physics, are profound.

What is fascinating about the imaginary Boolean values, once we admit them, is the light they apparently shed on our concepts of matter and time. It is, I guess, in the nature of us all to wonder why the universe appears just the way it does. Why, for example, does it not appear more symmetrical? Well, if you will be kind enough, and patient enough, to bear with me through the argument as it develops itself, in this text, you will I think see, even though we begin it as symmetrical as we know how, that it becomes, of its own accord, less and less so as we proceed." p. xv-xvi.

STENGER

Victor Stenger’s summary statement on timelessness

A longer piece by Victor Stenger (from his “Timeless Reality”, Prometheus Books, 2000)

 TOULMIN

Toulmin Stephen, Human Understanding, vol. I, Princeton, 1972.

Toulmin, Stephen, and Goodfield, Jane, The Discovery of Time, Harper and Row, 1965.

"Both Aristotle and Plato toyed with [the hypothesis that] once every few thousand years, the sun, moon, and planets returned to the same relative positions, and began to follow again the same cycle of configurations; and so perhaps the cycle of political fortunes also had its own definite period, keeping the recurring cycles of political change in step with the movement of the heavens. If that were so (Aristotle remarked) then he himself was living before the fall of Troy as much as after it; since, when the wheel of fortune had turned through another cycle, the Trojan war would be reenacted and Troy would fall again. " p. 54

"The physical sciences had stood aside from the historical revolution which had transformed the rest of natural science, taking it as axiomatic that certain aspects of the world remained fixed and permanent throughout all other natural changes; and though by the mid-twentieth-century, the list of these timeless enitities -- or "eternal principles" as the Greeks had called them -- is much shorter than it was in 1700, the existence of unchanging physical laws, at least, is still recognized as one enduring aspect of the natural world.

During the eighteenth century, the orthodox picture of physical Nature was that stated by Isaac Newton at the end of the Opticks. This involved permanent features of five different kinds.... During the twentieth century, the list of changeless physical entities has drastically shortened.... Newton's original five categories have thus been cut down to one: the fixed Laws of Nature.... The outstanding question now is, whether the Laws of Nature themselves -- the last ahistorical features of the physicist's world-picture -- will in their turn prove to be subject to the laws of time...." p. 247-250

VARELA

Varela, Francisco; Thompson, Evan; Rosch, Eleanor, The Embodied Mind, MIT, 1993

"It should be noted that such histories of coupling [histories of living forms in relation to their environment] are not optimal; they are simply viable. This difference implies a corresponding difference in what is required of a cognitive system in its structural coupling. If this coupling were to be optimal, the interactions of the system would be (more or less) prescribed. For continuing to be viable, however, the system must simply facilitate the continued integrity of the system (ontogeny) or its lineage (phylogeny). Thus once again we have a logic that is proscriptive rather than prescriptive; any action taken by the system is premitted as long as it does not violate the constraint of having to maintain the system and/or its lineage. Yet another way to express this idea would by to say that cognition as embodied action is always toward something that is missing; on the one hand, there is always the next step for the system in its perceptually-guided action; on the other hand, the actions of the system are always directed toward situations that have yet to become actual." p. 205

VARELA

Varela, Francisco, Principles of Biological Autonomy, North Holand, 1979.

"In fact, the dominance of control views in contemporary systems theory makes it closer to a theory of system components that to one of systems as unities (totalities)." p. 90

"The wholeness of a living system is, in everyday encounters, construed as unpredictability. The more difficult it is to reduce a system to simple input/output control. the more likely it is that we will deem it alive." p. 103

WHITEHEAD

Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, The Free Press, 1978.

""Creativity" is the principle of novelty. An actual entity is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the "many" that it unifies." p. 21

""Becoming" is the transfer of coherence into coherence.... "Determination" is analysable into "definiteness" and "position", where definiteness is the illustration of select universal objects, and "position" is a relative status in a universe of actual entities." p. 25

"But eternal objects, and propositions, and some more complex sorts of contrasts, involve in their own natures indecision." p. 29.

WITTGENSTEIN

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,

'I' is not the name of a person, nor ‘here’ of a place, and ‘this’ is not a name. But they are connected with names. Names are explained by means of them. It’s also true that it is characteristic of physics not to use these words.  p. 123, #410.

ZEH

Zeh, H.D. The Physical Basis of the Direction of Time, 4^th ed., Springer, 2001.

[In Boltzman’s words, entropy is] a grand fluctuation in an eternal universe. p. 81.

Why the beautiful spacetime symmetry of Maxwell’s and Einstein’s theories is of limited validity represents the greatest mystery of present-day theoretical physics. p. 200.

There is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science. p. 198; see also Prigogine, OOC, p. 293.

LINKS:

Asymmetry in the weak interaction kaon transformation (quick version, 2000):
http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/html/timetravel.htm

More on weak interaction kaon asymmetry (Lee and Yang, n.d.): http://www.ph.surrey.ac.uk/partphys/chapter6/transformations.html

More (2000):
http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/chapters/05/2.html

Two versions of a description of charge, parity, and time symmetries (2003):
http://www.lbl.gov/abc/wallchart/teachersguide/pdf/Chap05.pdf

Violation of time symmetry implies nonzero dipole moment for the neutron (n.d.):
http://minoserv.maps.susx.ac.uk/~nedm/cryo/cryo1.htm

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