Dissipate or Concentrate

One of the more elegant but ultimately meaningless descriptions of “life” is as the activity of dissipative structures. The phrase belongs to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-born Belgian physicist; he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for this description. So what is it that living structures dissipate? Energy. Prigogine studied what are called open systems, thus systems in motion but in disequilibrium. A river is such a system—a lake is not. He discovered that if you apply shocks to such a system, by further disarranging it, that intervention causes matter to organize itself. Let’s put a big boulder into the middle of a shallow, fast-flowing brook. The boulder compresses water between the bank and itself. Turbulence results. If the water keeps on flowing with the same force as before, vortices will form. They will retain their shapes while the water is flowing. Turbulence is water’s way of shedding, dissipating an excess of energy. In a manner of speaking, those vortices are alive—and remain so until the energy, produced by water and gravity, diminish. From such beginnings have arisen concepts such as the “self-organizing” character of matter. Life processes, therefore, are defined as dissipative structures at the chemical level. We are merely vortices in matter of a certain complex kind.

The meaningless character of this description arises because it views life as merely a byproduct of matter in the presence of energy. But life, of course, has a certain tricky originality as well. Vortices may form in brooks, but they don’t reproduce—certainly not by extraordinary complex routes requiring two sexes and the combination of two sets of DNA; or, at the simpler level, by separating twin strands of DNA and then, rebuilding them, parceling them out, one to one and the other to the other half of a dividing cell.

But life, surely, is a great feeder. Yes. It gobbles energy. It sheds, dissipates it not only in maintaining itself but in all kinds of other more entertaining activities galore—like texting with the thumb while driving a car. And this activity, the continuous use of energy, is certainly one description, and an accurate one, of what life does.

What’s in that energy? Suppose we make a slight adjustment to the conventional description. Suppose there is in energy—hidden within it somewhere—a subtle form of stuff that we need to develop ourselves as souls. Then, finding ourselves at the bottom of some vast dark cosmic chasm—probably because we strayed—and finding ourselves quite starved of the nutrition we really need, we began a process of concentrating energy in just the right way to extract that subtle substance from the coarse stuff reaching us from the sun—in order to help us climb out of the pit. And chemical civilization is born. In this slight adjustment of the materialistic view of life—without in any way changing its description—we introduce an intervention, our own. It is we who drop the bolder into that rapidly flowing brook—not mere chance. It is because we are involved, agents with a purposive nature, that life display a few more curious innovations, like reproduction, that we do not observe in the inorganic ranges.

Dissipate or Concentrate? What if our task is both. We dissipate the energy to get more that still holds the vital stuff we need to take wing out of the valley of the shadow.

Pondering Potential

In the last post I mention the concept of “pure act.” When I first encountered that idea—which refers to the nature of God—I imagined a kind of pure whirling motion at infinite speed, producing infinite light. That’s what my mind produced. The problem is that young people are exposed to such ideas in a kind of foreshortened sort of way. Even when you’re told that act here isn't some kind of flailing around but actuality, thus realized potential, the human mind, even grasping the ideas (or mine at least), isn’t really satisfied. When this pairing—potentiality and actuality—is explained, you realize that all they’re really saying is that “God has all possible perfections and isn’t waiting for them to manifest.” The mad whirling then stops and only the infinite bright light remains. Perfection doesn’t produce anything graspable.

This pairing, potentiality and actuality, is at the base of Aristotle’s concept of change. An existing something can only change because it has the capability for change—but that change is not yet realized. The word Aristotle used was dunamis, literally meaning, simply, capability. That word sounds strange until we spell it dynamis. Then suddenly we realize that we use the word ourselves in various ways—dynamic, dynamism, indeed also as dynamite. Aristotle used an ordinary Greek word for capability; potential comes from its Latin equivalent. His innovation came in characterizing something existing as having both entelechy (actualized potential) and energy (capability not yet realized). Here he gave an ordinary Greek word, meaning “at work,” a specialized technical meaning. We have entelechy right now—so does my coffee cup. We also still have dynamis in which a latent force, energy, is present.

Now the interesting aspect of potential—and why God does not have potential—is that something “not yet” or “asleep” or “as yet unrealized” can be seen both positively or negatively. Positively it is future perfection, if we’re lucky; negatively it is a privation. We’re still lacking its actual manifestation. But God lacks nothing at all. God is perfection. Therefore, alas, God has no potential.

In the twentieth century, we’ve actually proved the frightening energies latent in but a small amount of matter when it is actually released. Energeia is certainly present there, in potentiam. But do spare us, great wise men, any new demonstrations of Aristotle’s concepts in daily actuality; I’d hate to see another major city somewhere frozen in unreachable entelecheia deprived of its complement of energy.

The energy within the atom—the strong force that holds the nucleus together—is an interesting example of an actual and simultaneously potential energy in matter. Aristotle’s definitions nicely fit a region of reality he tended to dismiss. Atomic theories? Aristotle shook his head. The fascinating aspects of this kind of energy is that, so far as we can determine, it need not be renewed at regular intervals—as must the energy that keeps us going. What energy really is and where it arises—those are issues one ponders out here on the border. The dictionaries, whether of philosophy or physics, tend to produce a fog of circular referencing where you meet the word as its own definition after the fourth or fifth look-up.

Ah, Point of View

Is the cosmos really a wasteland? Or does it just look like that? Herewith yet another angle on the naturalistic view of life and everything. One unavoidable feature of that approach is that the cosmos, at minimum, has ranges (regions) where meaning in our sense, thus as displaying purpose, is undetectable; at maximum it means that the cosmos lacks meaning as a whole. Modern materialism votes for the latter. My own view differs. I feel that meaning is present in us but not, discernibly, in the inorganic realm, The limitations of our view are really my subject this morning, and I’ll get there soon, but to continue with the build-up: If meaning is present in us, it seems to me logical to expect it to be present beyond us as well, and “writ large,” too. This makes me a dualist in that I conceive of “carriers of meaning” and of “matter” as realities different in kind. Materialism envisions degrees of difference only. Thus it supposes that common elements, arranged appropriately and moved by energy, at some point suddenly break into consciousness. I find that view a great deal more difficult to swallow than belief in God; belief in God merely means that if I have consciousness and a sense of agency, that feeling must also have an origin. I didn’t cause my own awareness.

The notion of a dualism, of a passive and of an active principle, is deeply embedded in human thought. It’s there as prime matter and form in the Aristotelian stream, as the receptive and the creative in Taoist philosophy (or, Okay, call it poetry, if you like); it’s present as indestructible matter and immortal soul in traditional western thought, as particle and wave in physics. We even encounter it in matter; it is dualized as energy and matter, and the announcement of their equivalence in Einstein’s e=mc² is one of the moments of “revelation” in our times. Genuinely fascinating. Matter turns out to be a kind of congealed or crystallized form of energy; matter is therefore extraordinarily, if only potentially, energetic. The energy is still there, holding quarks together by the strong force and holding the particle-waves, the electrons, statistically hovering over atomic nuclei. The quarks themselves may be, for all we know, the tiniest balls of purest fire, and it isn’t all that outrageous to imagine the cosmos itself as a vast echo of a (for us) inconceivably great burst of energy. Indeed that is today’s orthodox doctrine concerning the origin of the universe, the Big Bang theory. The universe is running down, to be sure, hence we find its congealed, crystallized residues as solid matter—but only from a particular point of view—thus only as seen by creatures of our size. And that’s a potent qualifier, when I ponder it.

I enjoy vastly to enlarge or greatly to miniaturize the scale of things, the speed of time. Doing so reminds me that we may be living in a reality which is a whole, whole, whole lot greater than we imagine. Thus something that looks like a wasteland to us at our scale, may very well be full of fascinating meaning to another agency at a scale greater than ours. Similarly, processes that look extraordinarily mechanical to us—thus, for instance the chemical processes inside our cells—may be chuck full of agency. Sometimes I playfully think of that as “chemical civilization,” actually organized and managed by “little people.” Here is an analogy. Many decades ago now, long before superfast computers were available for modeling, at a research institute where I was working we used an inclined board on which we created grooves to represent traffic systems. We covered this board with glass and then poured rice kernels into this system to detect where traffic jams would likely occur at different times of day. We modified the design until traffic flowed with optimal smoothness at rush hours—and submitted that arrangement to our client. Rice kernels worked perfectly well to simulate cars each driven by a conscious person. From certain points of view, human behavior is altogether predictable statistically, and never mind free will, day dreams, genius, sainthood, and all the rest.

The cosmic vastness certainly looks like a wasteland to me. But, ah, point of view. To repeat what I said a few days ago, the ancients had an even more limited view than ours. Their thought, their speculation forms the background, the habituation that colors ours. For these reasons a “naturalistic” cosmology, under which we would seem to be out of place, fits what I perceive—but may not be the real truth of the matter. That is why cosmology is at best a kind of playground of the mind on very hot days as we watch the bees in the backyard.

On Fields and Energy

Throughout time people have used concepts drawn from what these days is called science and have then applied to the spiritual ranges of experience (or vice versa). Our time is no different from others except in the flavor of the thing. The “spiritual” is below the salt these days, disparaged, and held to be naïve and superstitious. And use of such concepts as “field” and “energy,” consequently, are used by writers on the spiritual or the psychic not because they actually communicate anything tangible or graspable—but because these words enjoy a kind of authority, the authority of Science writ large. The question arises. Is it legitimate to borrow scientific terms to describe psychic experiences? Let’s take a look.

My Dictionary of Physics defines “field” as “A region under the influence of some physical agency.” Interesting definition, when you think about it: a field is a chunk of space. A football field is therefore aptly named; it’s a piece of ground under the influence of football. But the word is actually used in another way when people write it. They use it to mean electric, magnetic, or gravitational force. Its use in New Age or “metaphysical” parlance, therefore, is simply an assertion that some kind of psychic force exists of such a nature that its influence extends over space. Telepathy or remote viewing are thus legitimately described as field phenomena in that some force conveys information between points not capable of explanation using the medium of light, sound, electrical transmission, or chemical signaling.

Let me next turn to the concept of “energy.” Here is the dictionary definition. It is “the quantity that is the measure of the capacity of a body or a system for doing work.” Work (W) turns out to be any kind of force that causes change in something else. By definition, when body A exerts force on body B, A loses W and B gains what A loses.

What I find fascinating here is that the terminology of science is pure abstraction; it is conceptual. Space may be huge (earth moon enclosure) or small (the region my little magnet affects). Force or work may be of all kinds of different kinds—my lifting of a heavy grocery sack or lightning striking a tree. These are mental constructs of generic applicability—but narrowly applied to three known physical forces by science when a field is mentioned. But they can be legitimately used anywhere else as well—wherever we perceive action, work or force exerted over any kind of space. The chief difference in using such terminology in physical science and in so-called metaphysical studies lies in the instrument used.

In studying psychic experiences, the only suitable instruments are minds. And there’s the rub. Their powers of perception are enormous, but their chief drawback is their singularity. We cannot check an individual mind from within. We cannot precisely confirm what it is perceiving. The individual may lie. The individual may misinterpret what he or she experiences. Objective knowledge is therefore very difficult to obtain. Minds are fantastic instruments but very difficult to calibrate precisely.

This difficulty—of supervision, of confirmation—has some odd side-effects. It causes us to limit the application of science to what we call the material level. But the matter-mind duality, as usually applied, may be a fiction. One way to put this may be by saying that we’re incapable of detecting mind in matter or matter in mind—and in both directions because our instruments are too coarse. What I’ve seen of reality—the patterns of things in general—persuade me that this is so. We’re drawing artificial lines based on our ability—or lack thereof—to produce hard evidence, capable of confirmation by third parties, for perhaps the most important range of reality we experience, namely the psychic. But there is really nothing wrong with using concepts like field or energy—much in the same way as science uses these for magnetic, electrical, and gravitational forces—for other forces that we can observe. What is wrong in “metaphysical” discussions is the sloppy and casual use of such concepts—or the attempt to snatch a certain phony legitimacy for our claims by appealing to authority. Scientists no more understand what an electromagnetic field is than I understand what a soul is. But we are both attempting to grasp the operation of invisible forces by some of the phenomena that they leave behind.