The undelivered promises of chaos theory.

Wilson's defense of the idea of consilience inevitably brings up to mind the highly complex world of chaos theory:

The most interesting feature of chaos in populations is that it can be produced by exactly defined properties of real organisms. Contrary to previous belief, chaotic patterns are not necessarily the product of randomly acting forces of the environment that rock the population up and down. In this case and in many other complex physical phenomena, chaos theory provides an authentically deep principle of nature. It says that extremely complicated, outwardly indecipherable patterns can be determined by small, measurable changes within the system.

But, again, which systems, which changes? That is the nub of the problem. None of the elements of complexity theory has anything like the generality and the fidelity to factual detail we wish from theory. None has triggered an equivalent cascade of theoretical innovations and practical applications. What does complexity theory need to be successful in biology?

(Edward O. Wilson: p. 90)

In other words, the idea that complicated patterns of behavior may be explained by small, measurable changes (which is at the very core of chaos theory) is perfectly compatible with the idea of consilience. As a matter of fact, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science can be seen precisely as one attempt to combine them both. However, as Wilson points out, chaos theory has failed to deliver on its promises so far. Sure, there is still plenty of work to do in the field and we cannot completely rule out a sudden discovery that will revolutionize scientific knowledge, but the reality is that as of today it doesn't offer the answers that we are after.

Chaos and instability.

A common misunderstanding is to think that chaos and instability are the same thing. The two concepts may indeed be closely related sometimes, but are not equivalent.

Chaos and instability, concepts only beginning to acquire formal definitions, were not the same at all. A chaotic system could be stable if its particular brand of irregularity persisted in the face of small disturbances. (...) The chaos Lorenz discovered, with all its unpredictability, was as stable as a marble in a bowl. You could add noise to this system, jiggle it, stir it up, interfere with its motion, and then when everything settled down, the transients dying away like echoes in a canyon, the system would return to the same peculiar pattern of irregularity as before. It was locally unpredictable, globally stable. Real dynamical systems played by a more complicated set of rules than anyone had imagined.

(Gleick: pp. 48-49).

To a certain extent, we can use free market as an example. As a system, it's definitely chaotic but far from unstable. Sure, there are ups and downs (the infamous economic cycle) but one can hardly call a cycle unstable. After all, one of its most prominent characteristics is that it repeats itself.

Can science be creative?

For whatever reason, we usually don't think of science as a creative endeavor. It's supposed to be too cold, analytical, methodical and objective to be creative. Even parents tend to talk about their kids as having "artistic" or "scientific" aptitudes, meaning that they are creative or analytical, respectively. Things are just like that: black or white, creative or analytical. It doesn't occur to us that perhaps there is far more to science than what meets the eye at first sight. Sure, Kuhn already demonstrated several decades ago that things are not nearly as clear-cut as we'd like them to be. In his landmark work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) he explained how what we tend to view as "science" is actually normal science or "routine science", a set of practices, assumptions and, above all, an overall theoretical framework that underpins all research for a period of time. This normal or routine science is necessary both for the advance of the scientific discipline itself and the application of its discoveries to our daily lives. As it also happens in societies, a constant change of references and frameworks (a permanent revolution in the old Trostkyite fashion) can only lead to Sisyphus' fate, the constante reinvention of the wheel. However, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain moments when we need to break away from the past, destroy the old mold and view things from a completely different perspective. This is what Kuhn called a paradigm shift. Well, chaos theory definitely poses one of these challenges to the status quo.

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.

(Gleick: p. 43)

Needless to say, paradigm shifts have been happening far more often since the Enlightenment and Modernity —as a matter of fact, it could be argued that change and paradigm shifts are the very foundation of the modern era. We'll leave it for another time to discuss whether this is a consequence of the philosophical changes brought about by certain thinkers or perhaps something intimately related to the high degree of specialization and the intrinsic complexity of our own societies at this stage of civilization. In any case, it should be patently obvious by now that science can be every bit as creative as anything else, both in its practice and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from what it teaches us about the world that surrounds us. Everything is in place for a new era where perhaps science, technology and other disciplines usually interpreted as artistic or creative —including the so called soft sciences— could converge into a more unified type of knowledge —what Edward O. Wilson calls consilience.

Science is not an exact discipline.

A typical misunderstanding about science has it that it is an exact discipline, a field of knowledge where humans can achieve a perfect knowledge of their surroundings. In reality, the scientific method is definitely what brought us closer to real knowledge, but that does not mean that we have finally achieved it. Science, like humans, is way too imperfect. It is a discipline, like many others, plenty of tradeoffs.

The fathers of modern computing always had Laplace in mind, and the history of computing and the history of forecasting were intermingled ever since John von Neumann designed his first machines at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in the 1950s. Von Neumann recognized that weather modeling could be an ideal task for a computer.

There was always one small compromise, so small that working scientists usually forgot it was there, lurking in a corner of their philosophies like an unpaid bill. Measurements could never be perfect. Scientists marching under Newton's banner actually waved another flag that said something like this: Given an approximate knowledge of a system's initial conditions and an understanding of natural law, one can calculate the approximate behavior of the system. This assumption lay at the philosophical heart of science.

(Gleick: pp. 14-15)

The keyword here is approximate, and it is important not to forget it for an excess of arrogance can easily lead down the wrong path, as we learnt too often during the twentieth century. Well, chaos theory stresses precisely this, the limitations of our own knowledge, the precarity of what we know.

Inspired scientists change the whole landscape.

As it tends to happen in any major change of scientific paradigm, the very first chaos theorists behaved more like evangelists than scientists. They knew very deep inside that there was something wrong with the traditional way to understand the world. They (we) had come across too many random, irregular facts that did not fit into the neat picture of a classical theory dominated by reductionism, determinism and, above all, a mechanistic oversimplification. Reality was far more complex than that, and they knew it. However, they had no alternative theoretical model (that is, a paradigm) that could account for the new complex reality they saw.

The first chaos theorists, the scientists who set the discipline in motion, shared certain sensibilities. They had an eye for pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time. They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps. Believers in chaos -and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists- speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts:quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole. (...) As one physicist put it: "Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability".

(Gleick: pp. 5-6)

It is important to stress that the whole new paradigm of chaos theory was born more of a philosophical, religious or personal conviction than from real scientific evidence. After all, it cannot be an accident that at the very same time the idea of holism was also spreading throughout most Western countries to counter what was then viewed as the excessive mechanicism of our sciencitific endeavors. However, this is not to say that the chaos theorists lent themselves to the sort of wild theorizations that might characterize peoples in other fields such as philosophy or the social sciences. Far from that, their approach was always scientific in the sense that they made an effort to find the facts that would back up their ideas. It is important to keep this in mind in order to avoid the sort of exaggerate generalizations the New Age tends to do with chaos theory (and systems theory in general). A new paradigm can only be investigated into and promoted by people who are willing to break apart from the classical theories, but that is not to say (as we often hear and read) that the discoveries of the chaos theorists were already predicted by the great masters of Hinduism or Buddhism centuries ago. That is not only an oversimplification but also plainly false, the sort of make-believe that is so widespread among certain quarters of our pop culture. In spite of it all, this breakthrough does emphasize the importance of ideas and other sources of inspiration even in something as dry as the scientific work.

Chaos. Making a New Science.

This best-selling book first introduced the principles of chaos theory to the general public back in the mid-1980s. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. James Gleick manages to explain a broad set of highly ellaborate scientific principles without resorting to complex math, in the good tradition of American popular science literature. Along the way, it also portrays the experiences of those people who, separately, managed to converge in what today is considered one of the most important fields of scientific research.

Technical description:
Title: Chaos. Making a New Science.
Author: James Gleick.
Publisher: Penguin Books.
Edition: New York (USA), 1987 (1987).
Pages: 354, including notes, index and credits.
ISBN: 0-14-009250-1