Prigogine Redux:

Reviews of Order out of Chaos 
 

I’ve been an admirer of Ilya Prigogine (especially his book Order Out of Chaos) for many years.  What drew me to Prigogine is his defense of the commonsense idea that time is irreversible and moves from an unchangeable past toward an open and unknown future. Prigogine rejects the physicists’ claim that our sensation of time is illusory -- that the future already exists and is as unchangeable as the past, but that (because of our psychological and perceptual limitations) we can experience reality only in a certain sequence, and thus believe that we are experiencing a “flow of time” or movement into the future which really does not happen. The world described by Prigogine is a contingent historical world, in which the future is not completely predictable, the whole (in the present or future) is greater than the sum of its parts (in the past), and new things can come into being. (My writings so far on these topics are indexed here). 

Recently I’ve been informed (by Cosma Shalizi and by GC at Gnxp) that few physicists or other scientists have any interest in Prigogine’s popular writings or in his more ambitious theories in physics. Shalizi’s post pointed me to three critics of Prigogine: Heinz Pagels, John Maynard Smith, and J. Bricmont (of the famous Sokal Hoax).  

These critics seem to be talking about a different Prigogine than the one I read. What has always interested me is his generalist (or “popular”) philosophical conclusions (based on his studies of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics) about real-world time, causality, determinism, and so on.  The critics, by contrast, focus on specifically scientific claims or conjectures of Prigogine’s which have been refuted.   

Pagels speaks of the failure of Prigogine’s “Universal Evolution Criterion”, but he acknowledges that Prigogine had already abandoned that theory by the time he wrote Order Out of Chaos, which spoke only of far-from-equilibrium systems.  Second, while Prigogine does speculate in this book about the possibility of finding irreversibility even at the quantum level, he does this only at the very end of the book, clearly labeling it as speculation (or as a topic for future research).¹ When I read the book, I took this part with a grain of salt, subject to later confirmation -- which, it turns out, never came. So these particular criticisms are irrelevant, from my point of view. 

A second group of criticisms simply points out that Onsager, Turing, and  Boltzman got there first, and that Prigogine failed to acknowledge them. I can’t speak about Turing and Onsager, but Prigogine discusses Boltzmann at length, and I came away from my original reading of the book thinking that Prigogine’s message was that for almost a century, the world of science had failed to come to grips with the philosophical (or generalist) consequences of Boltzmann’s work (and also Poincaré’s work). Criticizing Prigogine for not acknowledging predecessors seems to represent the “we already knew that” stage of grudging reception.   

A third group of criticisms amounts to name-calling and guilt by association. The publisher had Alvin Toffler write the introduction to Prigogine’s book. I skipped it, but Bricmont did not, and in fact puts a citation from Toffler (rather than from Prigogine) at the head of his critique. Shalizi writes “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 (p. 257) suspects Prigogine of the kind of sentimentality or poeticism which has led others to Lamarckism or creationism. 

Against this I can only say that I don’t like Toffler and New Age thinking either, and that what I personally found in Prigogine was a validation of common-sense notions of temporality -- at the expense of physicists’ notions of timelessness and reversibility of time which still strike me as spacy, unrealistic, wishful (and even New Age).²

What has always been at issue for me is the role of temporality in the large-scale macro world of human life, and I think that that is also Prigogine’s main interest in the book. I took it to be his argument that thermodynamics should have changed the way we think about the world and about science -- in other words, in his popular writing Prigogine was talking mostly about the interpretation of thermodynamics, rather than the science of thermodynamics. In particular, Prigogine was saying that much of the world of our experience should be studied historically, and that we should not be trying to submit history or evolution to timeless laws. (Pagels, p. 98: “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”.) The scientific investigation of far-from-equilibrium reality will still be productive, but it will be a historical science of contingency and temporality (or irreversible time) rather than of determinism, reductionism, and timeless theoretical truth. In other words, Prigogine validates the commonsense understanding of history, but also says that that kind of historicity and unpredictability is not  limited to the human world, but holds in considerable areas of the biological and even pre-biological world.  

One of Prigogine’s arguments is that, because of the three-body problem, the future of the solar system is contingent and unpredictable in principle (and not just in practice), and that the study of the solar system is thus a historical one and not a theoretical one. Since celestial mechanics was the founding triumph of modern science, this is a big change in how we think about reality and science. 

Both Pagels and Bricmont seem to accept what I originally took to be the main point of Prigogine’s book – that our understanding of macro events cannot be modeled on our understanding of the laws of physics (or any other ahistorical theoretical study): 

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

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) 

Pagels claims that Prigogine was uncomfortable with the reversible / irreversible discontinuity, and wanted to push temporality down to the subatomic level. He is apparently right, but the main point I took from the book was simply that most of the world we know does exist within the far-from-equilibrium world of reversible time and should be understood contingently and historically: this point is not damaged by Prigogine’s failure to extend his paradigm into non-equilibrium thermodynamics, quantum physics, or cosmology. 

As long as I remember, the human sciences have been on the defensive against positivist attacks. By now the positivist dream of a unified determinist science explaining everything from quarks to the rise and fall of nations has been generally (but not universally) rejected. However, this rejection has been somewhat ad hoc, and there still is a hand-waving flavor to defenses of the human sciences against the charge that they are just “social work and butterfly-collecting”. In my opinion Prigogine’s interpretation of thermodynamics is just a fuller statement of the consequences of thermodynamics for knowledge, one which helps us to understand better one of the several reasons why the human sciences are different. Prigogine’s negative principle has been caricatured as obscurantist, but I think that he is right in arguing that it deserves a legitimate place alongside other fundamental negative scientific principles, such as the impossibility of squaring the circle, of building a perpetual motion machine, or of sending a message faster than the speed of light. 

As I have said, I am not able to rebut technical scientific criticisms of Prigogine, and by and large I have taken them as given. However, I am at this point not sure that Bricmont has responded adequately to Prigogine even at the scientific level. In his defense of Laplace, Bricmont apparently denies that Laplace was just wrong, and does not admit that because of the three-body problem Laplace could not have predicted, even in principles, the movement of the planets. He cites Laplace’s studies of statistics, but does not acknowledge that chaotic or non-linear systems do not converge to an average, but produce erratic and unpredictable results – i.e., are unpredictable in theory, and not just in practice.  Bricmont talks about “deterministic but not predictable” systems, as does Prigogine, but does not admit (as Prigogine does) that this amounts to a revolutionary redefinition of determinism – and in fact, a tremendous renunciation.³ 

In response to Prigogine’s talk of an  “end of certainties” or “disillusion with science”, Bricmont ends with a heartfelt cry: “When all is said and done, science and reason is all we have. Outside of them, there is no hope.”  

This is an overreaction. Prigogine is not talking about renouncing reason or science. At most, he’s talking about a renunciation of the simple positivistic faith that science can solve all problems and answer every question. In the same way, Foucault was not talking about physics: he specifically and explicitly focussed his inquiry on the weaker and more problematic “sciences” like criminology or psychoanalysis – sciences which Bricmont would also reject. For a long time a superstitious form of positivism has had tremendous prestige.⁴ As a result,  studies which should be historical are formulated as attempts to find scientific laws, and weak results are dressed up in scientific terminology -- often with the aim of gaining government funding and professional authority. For a variety of reasons, including those discussed by Prigogine, this period should be coming to an end. 

NOTES

[1] Shalizi, Pagels and Smith all say that Prigogine’s technical work has not proved useful to biologists and investigators of self-organization. Smith, however, seems more favorable to Prigogine than not – ate least he does endorse one of Prigogine’s main points (p. 257): “A physics which does not permit the occurrence of birth, life, and death (in that order) is bad physics”. (Does Stuart Kauffman’s “order for free” have something to do with Prigogine’s dissipative structures, and does the rejection of Prigogine involve doubts about Kauffman’s work?  -- not a rhetorical question.)

[2] Here are a couple of citations (more here and in the opening pages of Griffin):
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. (Davies, Paul, “That Mysterious Flow”, Scientific American, Vol. 287, #3, September, 2002, p. 47).

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. (Barbour, Julian, The End of Time, Oxford, 2000, pp. 323-4.)

Davies apparently takes this kind of metaphysical comfort fairly seriously, whereas Barbour seems to be having problems.  One of Prigogine’s strengths is that he helps us understand why this kind of wishful thinking is illicit, and why we are right in this case to refuse to accept this particular counter-intuitive consequence of physical theory.

[3] Sometimes Bricmont seems to regard unpredictive determinism as merely a consequence of subjectivity -- a limitation of our minds. I believe that he is wrong -- in the cases discussed by Prigogine, the unpredictivity is essential, since prediction would require an infinite amount of data. (Someone should do a study of the way physicists blame theoretical problems on subjectivity, and sometimes  use subjectivity -- as in the “Schroedinger’s Cat” parable -- to come up with a Mickey-Mouse solution of a theoretical problem.)

[4] The following citation makes it seem that Bricmont’s scientific model makes it difficult for him to have much respect for any form of human science: “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”. (Bricmont, #7).

 
Sources (pro-Prigogine) 

David Ray Griffin, Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, SUNY, 1986. 

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

Anti-Prigogine: 

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

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. 

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

Cosma Shalizi

My own writings and collections of citations:

http://www.idiocentrism.com/time.htm

http://www.idiocentrism.com/time2.htm

http://idiocentrism.com/time3.htm

Readings on History and Time

Readings from Prigogine

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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