Stuart Kauffman: Enablement and adaptation

“My deep hope,” writes biologist Stuart Kauffman “[is that] we can find our way Beyond Modernity, but do so as an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process that disrupts our cultural and civilizational roots.”

Key themes in Kauffman’s recent synthetic work include radical emergence, an end to the dominance of the physics worldview, and the re-enchantment that lies beyond Modernity. I’m referring to sources such as his 2012 paper with coauthors Giuseppe Longo and Maël Montévil (“No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere”), his NPR blog posts, this Lifeboat post (from which I took the above quote), and an October 2011 video from the New England Complex Systems Institute, embedded below.

Kauffman’s notes for this talk are posted at NECSI, and mine below supplement, rather than repeat.

I think, in a way we can’t articulate, we are lost in Modernity. And I think there’s an unrest [in] that we sense this but don’t know what to do. …

To use an American expression, the fact that the biosphere is enabling its own directions of becoming “blows me away.” And I have to say I find it enchanting. Somehow it’s utterly empowering. …

We think we live, since Newton, since Aristotle, in the nexus of causes, and we do. Equally important, the biosphere-and-we live in the nexus of enablements and ever-new niches. And we create the niches that enable. …

The world does, in fact, by this radical emergence, as Heraclitus said, bubble forth. …

If there is an adjacent possible, how is it changing over time? It looks like it’s getting bigger. That is to say, it’s easier to invent something now than it was 50 thousand years ago. How come?

We need a theory of niche creation as a function of the number of things that are around making their worlds with one another. My bet is that the adjacent possible is growing, and a dream of mine — and it is a dream — is that the biosphere is growing its adjacent possible, as a secular trend, as fast as it can.

It ties into engineering because, whether you like it or not, you are enabling ever-new adjacent possibles: whether they are airplanes flying into buildings, or people meeting needs or using your artifacts for things you never would have thought.

We must begin to think what wise enablement is, and how we will do it, and how we will adapt to correct our mistakes.

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