ARTSENSE Acrylics Collection. n# 23. Order creeping out of chaos.
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In the eighties, scientists visualized reality as a process of unending change. This was without a doubt a radical departure from the traditional approach of causality that we inherited from the Greek scientists and philosophers. Remember Aristotle's “ultimate mover”, conceptualized as a logical stop to unending causalities. Well, the cyclical movement from chaos to order acted as a kind of stop to the traditional vision of a mover behind a cause.
It seems as if the need to stop unending causality disappeared simply as out of the absence of thought for what moved the cycle of chaos to order. What was indeed behind the chaos-order cycle? Was it its internal causalities, in that case the ultimate mover would remain solidly entrenched in the observer's psyche? Or was it some kind of acceptance of the old Chinese philosophic concept of Tao that gradually found its road in physical and chemistry hypotheses?
Ilya Prigogine the 1977 Belgian Nobel prize laureate of Chemistry posited that irreversibility and uncertainty are two fundamental features of our universe. Irreversibility is the property of an event which makes reverting back to the state before the occurrence of the event impossible, irreversibility thus implies a movement that goes forward. Uncertainty implies that change is not given by a pre-existing mover but by the reality of the forces on the ground in the system and their environment at the crucial moment of change. Taken together, irreversibility and uncertainty lead to the concept of self-organization.
In Wikipedia self-organization is referred to as a process by which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not always) display emergent properties.
Here we are thus with a definition of reality that corresponds to the vision that had been formalized some 5/6 thousand years ago or more into what we call today traditional Chinese philosophy. Scientists came to the principles of irreversibility and uncertainty by focusing deep into the internal mechanisms while wise meditating Chinese got a glimpse of the whole, that there is, which they integrated into the foundations of the Chinese civilization.