Complexity Theory and Schelling’s Problem

March 26th, 2007

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Posted by ChrisG at 4:10 pm

Spent Saturday at a workshop in Bath on the spiritual/theological implications of complexity theory. Which is not meant to imply, I hasten to add, the common creationist/ID thesis that there is such a thing as ‘irreducible complexity’ in nature which must necessarily lead us back to posit a designer for the universe. Instead, the link (according to the three main presenters) between religion and complexity science had more to do with something like a re-enchantment of nature (a non-vitalist re-infusion of creativity into nature, Naturphilosophie returning to overturn Cartesian presuppositions). Pantheism (or pan-en-theism, depending on your preference) was the key word: there were three Anglican vicars in the audience who obviously found themselves seriously drawn to what C.S. Lewis saw as the ever-present temptation of the Church and indeed of all human thought.

The most interesting of the three papers was perhaps that given by Michael Colebrook, a former ocean biologist and now writer on process theology, who set out from the Leibnizian question, ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’, to look at individuation from a complexity perspective, noting that reductionism in science had brought us to the position where the most basic laws of matter could be laid out, but nothing could be reconstructed from them. What was important was the history of their emergence, which reductionism could not account for. This naturalistic version of Krug’s challenge to Hegel led into what Colebrook presented as a vindication of pantheism, recounting the connection between emergence and the presence of constraint, with the nature of constraint being dependent, as theories of self-organising systems have it, on the precise form of order obtaining at a given level of organisation. This defeats the possibility of a general reduction to physics, as the presence of different levels of complexity yields superimposed sets of laws which govern only ‘above’ a given stratum of organisation.

Colebrook’s proposal was essentially (as I took it) to provide evidence for a thesis of immanence, and therefore for the truth of pantheism – that order is emergent in matter. There is no need to propose that a given set of constraints pre-exist the emergence of a particular form of order, as the constraints emerge from within the processes through which matter hesitates and stutters towards form. Iterative algorithms such as those behind Langton’s Ant provide examples of such processes, suddenly, after perhaps thousands of steps, suddenly making a transition from chaos to dynamic order. Constraint and stability – or if you prefer, identity understood as the endurance of a dynamic form over time – are the product of difference and chance variation. Colebrook illustrated one stage in his argument with a quotation taken from Schelling’s 1799 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie, which stands as a remarkable anticipation of some central threads of complexity theory, and includes the following:

Nature’s reality stems from herself – she is her own product – a whole which is organized out of itself and organized by itself.

It struck me, however, that the temptation of transcendence still remains, and that this has to do (a) with the transcendental problem of the genesis of constraint, or of identity on the one hand, and (b) with time as it is conceived in complexity theory. After all, the cosmological backstory with which complexity theory supplements itself tends to support the picture of a universe somehow emerging from fluctuations within uniformity. Further, the future that complexity presents is still often imagined as an empty one where any of several possibilities may be realised, with the constraints on what will be realised being the product of the past.

Colebrook’s story was one of transcendence, or rather, relatively isolated systems (to use Roman Ingarden’s terminology), emerging out of immanence – random variation. From here, we come to understand why there is something (particular and various actualisations of the potential for order) rather than nothing (ceaseless random variation). But if we take some inspiration from Schelling, rather than Leibniz, we might find ourselves asking a question which makes transcendence a problem again (and which might just save our three representatives of the Church from the sin to which they’d exposed themselves…). In his Lectures on the History of Modern Philosophy, Schelling points out, in the midst of laying into Hegel, that:

The whole world lies, so to speak, in the nets of the understanding or of reason, but the question is how exactly it got into those nets, as there is obviously something other and something more than mere reason in the world: indeed there is something which strives beyond these barriers.

Or, in relation to Colebrook’s presentation, we might ask: sure, nature’s capacity for self-organisation means that it can always come up with new constraints. But what about the constrainability of nature itself? What ‘constrains’ nature to be such that it is amenable to the generation of constraints? Here the theist has an open door.

Complexity theory, as a naturalistic theory of individuation, does not so much dispense with as bracket the theological. There are limits to its immanence. The question it cannot answer remains the Schellingian one: how does the world become determinable at all, not the Leibnizian one concerning the genesis of determinate beings. Ultimately, as the cosmological background Colebrook evoked makes clear, the question of beginnings seems to be posable from within complexity theory in a familiar form: first there was indeterminacy, then determinateness (’quantum fluctuations’). The temptation of transcendental illusion to which Bergson drew attention remains in the naturalistic schema: we assume that there is such a thing as indeterminateness because we work back from what is familiar to us – determinateness – and subtract those predicates that add determinacy until we are left without even the support of substance. But this in fact adds an assumption, in order to make sense of the series of subtractions: that indeterminateness exists (indeed, this illusion is there in Schelling’s question also: what comes before determinability?).

Time seems to be the key to understanding this problem, and the possibility of reversion to transcendence: complexity theory remains linear insofar as it presupposes a linear direction of different between past, present and future. The future is not, remains possible, until actualised – with this relation being visible in its purity in the aforementioned cosmology. There is indeterminateness and then there is the determinate, which holds determinability within it as potential for emergence. Where this relation holds, there always remains the suspicion that before the beginning there is the One who brings it about, who selects the universe of possibilities which will act as ultimate constraints upon the becomings of matter. But the idea of determinability includes within it something of futurity – ‘for-ness’, and so it is the possibility that the future is real in the problematic Deleuzean sense of virtuality that marks the real possibility of an account of individuation that refuses transcendence. To incorporate the reality of the future into ontology is perhaps the ultimate task for the temptation to pantheism.