Creativity by Nature

August 17 2003  
  What does life have in common with thunderstorms, stars, and UU culture?
  In each case the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
  How does order emerge from disorder?  Explore Nature's many levels of
  mystery, change, creativity and beauty thru the eyes of guest
  speaker Neal McBurnett.  Shari Storm is the coordinator.


Today I'd like to play with some variations on the the theme
"Creativity by Nature".

The main variation is the question of just how creative nature can be.  Are
some things just too miraculous to happen all by themselves?  Does
nature need some help from God?  From some sort of Intelligent
Designer?  Or is nature not getting enough credit for its own energy and
powers of creativity?

[For his book entitled "How We Believe", Michael Shermer studied surveys of
the american people.  He says:

  It turns out that the number-one reason people give for why they
 believe in God is a variation on the classic cosmological or design
 argument: The good design, natural beauty, perfection and complexity
 of the world or universe compels us to think that it could not have
 come about without an intelligent designer.  In orther words, people
 say they believe in God because the evidence of their senses tells
 them so.  Thus, contrary to what most religions preach about the need
 and importance of faith, most people believe because of reason.

I don't know about you, but I like that.  It breaks some of my
stereotypes about believers.  ]

All my life I've been hearing the debate about life and Darwin and
evolution.  I generally got the notion that life had a lot of
things going for it, helping it to evolve into so many amazing
species, including humans.  Anything living was practically magical.
I.e. it was really complex, clearly adaptable, endowed with genes, able
to reproduce sexually and combine good traits of both parents, and son on.
So it has never been too hard for me to believe that biological evolution
could work without the need to add a supernatural force like god.

[later - occams razor]

One of the big challenges, though, was figuring out how life itself
got started.  Inanimate matter (water and wind and earth) was really
beautiful, but just didn't seem so capable of doing the trick.  It
seemed pretty ordinary, pretty sterile, with not too much inherent
creativity.  It was, well, dead.   So maybe the world needed some magical,
supernatural spark to get life started.

But in the last 15 years or so I've run across so many beautiful and
creative aspects of non-living things, that it is getting clearer and
clearer in my mind that there is less of a sharp line between life and
the rest of existance.  I'm seeing more creativity everywhere in the
world.  Things like fractals, research on self-organizing systems, and
our understanding of the beginnings of the cosmos via the Big Bang.
All of that makes it easier to imagine how life itself came to be,
naturally, with no supernatural help.  Intrinsic creativity.
Creativity by Nature.

I introduce this talk with a discussion of the natural and the
supernatural to try to clarify how I see different themes coming
together.  Though I personally approach things from a non-theistic
standpoint, I know there are many people who see things differently,
based on their own experiences and insights, and welcome a
supernatural force in the world.  And of course there are those who
just capitalize the "N" in Nature and make it a God that isn't
supernatural at all.  Ahh, Unitarians and Universalists - ya gotta
love 'em.  At any rate I hope the examples I talk about are
interesting no matter how you view them.

In fact, I think one of the things that brings us together is
curiosity and an interest in mysterious things like the questions I
raise today.  I find that both religion and science are focussed on
mysteries.  A common perception of science is that it is about what
many people are exposed to in school - i.e. that it is about learning
a bunch of facts - the answers to questions many of which are just
not burning questions in the minds of adolescents.

But I experience science as essentially what scientists do.  Research.
Finding answers to questions that interest them.  The pursuit of
mystery.  The thing that distinguishes it from other approaches is the
process, the scientific method.  Based on creating theories and trying
to disprove them with experiments.  Like all human pursuits it is an
imperfect process, but it is more open, and more successful at
achieving widespread agreement on the answers, than any other process
we have.  But it only applies to some problems....  Science is often
misapplied, I think, to questions of morality or stuff that is just
too complex or ill-defined for it to work.

And in my mind, philosophy and religion are there to pursue the
mysteries that science can't handle.  The ethical dilemmas, the
questions of meaning, and wrestling with complex human behaviors that
we can't study very well with experiments - love and war, art and
passion.  So both science and religion are tools for curious minds to
apply.

[Thinking about art and beauty, I just have to throw this quote in.

 "Today I saw a red-and-yellow sunset and thought, How insigicant I
 am!  Of course, I thought that yesterday, too, and it rained..."
 That's from Woody Allen. ]


Anyway, back to the mystery of how we all came to be.  Starting
with the notions of order and chaos.

There is a book titled "At Home in the Universe - the Search for the
Laws of Self Organization and Complexity" by Stuart Kauffman of the
Santa Fe Institute.  It introduced me to the notion that Life is a
balancing act between Order and Chaos.  At one extreme, total order is
when everything is rigid and predictable and highly structured.
Stifflingly so, in fact.  For example, a block of ice, a crystal, is
highly ordered.  Nothing can live in a state of total order.

At the other extereme is chaos.  In a state of chaos, nothing is
predictable, there are no rules or patterns.  And again, nothing can
live.

Life is the delightful sort of stuff that is both structured and
unpredictable.  Balanced between order and chaos.  And very creative.
You can think of order as being a solid, chaos as being a gas,
and life being in the middle - a liquid.

The nice thing is that this notion works in other realms besides
biology, to describe creative situations.  For example in the
political realm, an authoritarian state is very ordered, anarchy would
be a form of chaos, and in the middle we find democracy - the sort
of creative system I'd like to live in.  In the cosmic realm, an
asteroid is highly ordered and very predictable.  And not much
going on.  A big cloud of dust and gas, one of those beautiful nebulas
you can even see with your naked eye from a dark place, is pretty
chaotic and unpredictable, though full of potential.  And a nice
watery planet, not too close and not too far from a nice stable
star, is one of the most interesting places we know of.

So that leads us to another one of the big mysteries - where does
creativity come from?

A good place to start is with the new science of complexity.  The neat
thing about complexity is that you can easily design systems that have
simple rules, but very complex behaviors.  For example, chess is a
game with simple rules played on a very small board.  But the number
of different strategies is enormous.  Even grandmasters who spend
their whole lives playing chess don't know the best strategy.
Even much simpler games can also lead to behaviors that are hard
to distinguish from life itself in their complexity.

[But  [life] [] a fractal is a]

This is one of the discoveries that leads many people to think
that the basic principles of physics, simple though they are, at least
have the creative potential to lead to life.

So how about another mystery - organization - where does it come from?

[just natural selection vs kauffman: how improbable - found self
organization If I am right, this underlying order, further honed by
selection, augurs a new place for us - expected, rather ahan vastly
iprobable]

As I think my wife Holly will attest, from observing my life, if
nothing else, this can be a much harder problem.

And it leads to another fascinating book I've been reading, by Eric
Chaisson about "Cosmic Evolution".  Chaisson really takes the long, deep
view of what is going on, from the Big Bang to contemporary culture.
The thing that links the whole story together is a broad notion of
"evolution".  The word "evolution" derives from the Latin "evolvere",
meaning to unfold, to roll out.  It is all about change - the process
by which things form, adjust, diversify, [interact with their
surroundings, and son on.]

So besides talking about biological evolution - the way life forms
change over time, he talks about the evolution of the chemical
elements themselves.  And he talks of galactic evolution, and the
stories of stars.  And also the most current and important forces of
evolution driving human culture and technology.

Let me focus on a few examples.  One thing they all have in common is
the importance of the flow of energy.  We all know that life needs an
ongoing source of energy in some form.  Plants feed on sunlight.
Animals feed on the energy in plants or other animals.
And they need the right flow.  Too little energy and they wither
and die.  Too much and they can't handle it.

The same thing is true of other things that show signs of order.  A
very simple example is moving a paddle thru some water.  If you move
it at a moderate rate of speed, you'll see the water organize itself
in a common way - it forms a clean little whirlpool along each edge of
the paddle.  If you move it more slowly, the whirlpools don't form.
If you move it very quickly, you just get a chaotic splash.

[don't happen by themselves.  need flow of energy]

Here is a more surprising example.  Put a thin layer of water in a
pan.  If you heat it very evenly from below, with a high heat, it
boils.  It is unorganized and chaotic.  If you heat it just a tiny
bit, the heat flows gently thru it, but again there are no interesting
patterns - no consistent currents in the water.

But if you heat it at the proper rate, an amazing thing happens.  The
water becomes highly organized.  It forms a hexagonal pattern in the
pan, like a honeycomb.  I've got a picture up here that you can look
at later on.  In each little hexagonal cell, the water rises in the
middle, spreads out, and sinks down along the edges of the hexagon.

It is mysterious.  [You can call it magic.]  But it is also a basic
phenomemon of physics since you can plug in the laws of fluid dynamics
to simulate it and predict that it will happen.  The water has
incorporated the temperature difference and the flow of energy to
generate a hexagonal pattern.

[But it is really neat either way.]
[possible discourse on intentionality, etc.]

You see the same sort of thing over and over in the world.  Think
about thunderstorms.  Ah - very imposing, nearly lifelike things.
They were the stuff of much wonder and mystery in the world, since
ancient times.  Thunderstorms were often associated with the gods.
Like Zeus, the god of the thunderbolt.

A thunderstorm forms in much the same way as the hexagon in the pan.
The sun heats up the ground.  The ground heats the air next to it, and
the air rises, while other air comes in from the sides to take is
place.  A little convective cell is formed.  It sets the stage for
other creative processes.  Under the right circumstances, moist rising
air can form clouds, and clouds can form rain droplets and ice
crystals.  Friction can then generate static electricity and it can
get separated by air currents, setting up the conditions for
lightning.

So we get a pattern again.  A source of heat generates a flow of
energy, creating novel patterns.  And those patterns can lead to other
surprises.

The sun is another thing that is traditionally of god-like
proportions.  [For me, it is a wonderful natural icon well worth
worshiping.]  It is another one of those compelling systems going with
the flow, between order and chaos.  It draws on enormous amounts of
potential energy, the energy of the nebula that collapsed to form it
long ago and the potential energy of hydrogen, ready to produce a
fusion reaction under the right circumstances.  And in turn, the sun
provides the constant flow of energy - sunlight - that plants on earth
use to grow.  And of course those plants then provide energy - food
in this case - for other forms of life on earth.

My last example is in the cultural realm - it is in fact this
congregation.  [And the vote isn't in on whether that is of "god-like
proportions :-]

Like other human activities in the world, the congregation needs a
flow of energy to keep it going.  It needs people flowing thru the
doors, ideas flowing thru the committees, and dollars flowing thru the
bank account.  I think it draws strength in the long term from its
reliance on practices like openness and democracy and decentralization.
Probably too chaotic for some, and too highly ordered for others,
but I encourage you all to contribute to its organization and
supply energy.  Soon you'll have an opportunity to follow that
basic precept "From you I receive, to you I give, by this we
are fed, by this we live."

[most simple life actually seems pretty common in the universe]
Reverse of what I thought as a child.  Life sprang up just about
as soon as the crust cooled after the earth was formed.
A lot of people now think that the harder part is getting from
simple life to the sort of intelligent life that is able to
figure all this stuff out.  I'm really looking forward to
our continued exploration of Mars to see if we can find signs of
life there.


[ethics]

[increasing flows of energy, pace of change]
[eras - energy; matter; life; computer]

One of Eric Chaisson's final themes is that Life is an enormously
powerful process, even from the perspective of physics, especially
with the advent of modern technology and culture.  The pace
of change is so fast, though, that we don't have a very good
understanding of the risks that come along with that power.
And we need to remember that the process of natural selection
applies not just within species, but also among civilizations.

In his book "The Life Era", he puts forward his "principle of cosmic
selection: Those technological civilizations (of any type on any
planet) that recognize the need for, develop in time, and fully
embrace a global (even a galactic and then a cosmic) ethics will
survive, and those that do not will not."


I guess that final thrust is very much in line with my notion
that there is no intelligent design at work.  [Though you can
ask me later about the antropic principle which addresses
some of the same issues.]

I think we're all living in an amazing and uncertain time, and there
is no good reason to think that it has been planned out ahead of time.
I think we need to pay attention to the science, apply philosophical
and religous methods to agree on the proper moral and ethical
responses, and play our part in getting thru the steep part of
the learning curve, so that future generations will be able
to enjoy a civilization even more compelling than this one.