Making Sense Of An Imperfect World

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'The order that we search so intensely in Nature is often a reflection of the order that we seek in ourselves.'

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'The order that we search so intensely in Nature is often a reflection of the order that we seek in ourselves.'

From time immemorial, faced with the complexity of Nature, man has searched for repetitive patterns, for some kind of order. This approach makes a lot of sense. All we have to do is look at the skies to see periodic motions, defining natural cycles to which we are deeply connected: the setting and rising of the Sun, the phases of the Moon, the four seasons, the planetary orbits. With Pythagoras and his followers, some 2500 hundred years ago, the search for ordered patterns was transformed into a search for a mathematical order: the patterns that we see in Nature reflect an underlying mathematical order, the mathematics of Creation. The philosopher's goal is to decipher these patterns, to reveal Nature's hidden code. As the world is the work of some kind of cosmic architect (not the Jewish-Christian-Muslim super God but a creative deity nonetheless), to unveil the secrets of the world is akin to unveil the "mind of God." Recently, I wrote how this metaphor remains very much alive today, being used by many scientists such as Steven Hawking and others.

The search for Nature's hidden mathematical code has been — and continues to be —extremely fruitful. It lies at the heart of reductionism, an approach based on the notion that we can understand the behavior of the whole by studying the individual parts. The results are expressed in laws, the so-called laws of Nature. These laws are the ultimate expression of Nature's order.

In reality, things are not so simple, a topic also addressed by my esteemed co-blogger Stuart Kauffman. In spite of its obvious usefulness, reductionism, as a method, has its limitations. Not everything can be traced down to the existence of an underlying order. There are many questions, or better, natural systems, that cannot be understood in terms of the behavior of their parts. The weather is an example. The human mind is another. The biochemical processes that define living organisms, from amoebas to people, cannot be understood in terms of simple laws, say, by using that molecules are made of atoms. Essentially, in complex systems we cannot reduce the one to its many bits. Using a clich??, the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Unpredictable behaviors emerge from the countless interactions between the system's many components. For example, the functionality of proteins depends on their folding abilities, that is, on their spatial conformations. Given the enormous size of these biomolecules, their folding patterns can be extremely complex, leading to different behaviors. To quantify them, and thus deduce how proteins work, is a major challenge. The workings of the brain cannot be reduced to the workings of individual neurons. Touching on a recent post by Kauffman, the emergence of mind cannot be understood from bottom-up, from a single neuron to billions of them. Complexity is the product of collective behavior, of patterns that unfold in space and time in irreducible ways. (Warning: this is NOT a creationist statement! What I mean here is that we can't understand these behaviors using a reductionist approach and not that we cannot have this understanding because it's beyond the reach of science!)

Complex systems need different laws, capable of describing the behaviors — ordered and not — that emerge from the cooperation of a system's many parts. The notion that Nature can be understood in its entirety through the diligent application of reductionism is in bad need of updating. A multiple approach, combining reductionist methods with others that explore the properties of spatiotemporal complexity is much more in line with the discoveries of modern science. Of course, we must always abide to the foundations of science, searching for empirical validation (i.e., experimental confirmation) of our hypotheses.

To accept the imperfection of Nature, that order is not the only guiding principle to explain physical reality, is a very large step in the right direction: science creates models to describe the world. These models are NOT the real world, only our representations of the world. The "truths" that we so admire are simply approximations to what is really going on. Symmetries are never exact. The order that we search so intensely in Nature is often a reflection of the order that we seek in ourselves. To me, what's most amazing about Nature is not its perfection but the fact that matter, after billions of years, evolved to a point where it assembled into entities capable of asking questions about existence.