The Ordained and the Organic

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, as I said in earlier installments in this Organicity series, has spiritual implications.

The spiritual mind, I suggested in The J.K. Rowling Effect, can be likened to a type of self-organizing system with a complex "phase portrait." Accordingly, it is prone to critical "points of instability" or "bifurcation points." I imagine that one of these spiritual bifurcation points corresponds to being born again, in evangelical Christian terms, or to the Dark Night of the Senses spoken of by Catholic mystics like St. John of the Cross.

The person who has experienced this crisis and crossed into new (for him or her) spiritual territory can easily believe that whatever is not adulterated by man's original sin is expressly ordained by God. The idea that all good things are divinely ordained chimes with the story of creation in the Book of Genesis, chapter 1, in which every living creature appears on the scene at God's immediate behest. No wonder those who live in this particular spiritual frame of mind have trouble with Darwin's theory of evolution.

Another point of spiritual bifurcation can follow later on: the Dark Night of the Soul, in which the seeker eventually ceases to be able to maintain that mistrustful, standoffish, all-things-must-pass attitude toward the events of this world. Now the material world exerts its own pull upon the spiritual mind, leading, in famous cases like that of Thomas Merton, to a Zen awakening.

I cannot claim a Zen awakening, but I have developed a deeper appreciation for the organic, as opposed to the ordained, aspects of this world. In fact, I think that the ordained/organic dichotomy is one of the key differences between two major basins of attraction of the spiritual mind.


A basin of attraction in a self-organizing system, such as I hypothesize the human mind to be, is like a drainage basin in the geography of a continent. In such a drainage basin, a river, lake, or some other prominent body of water toward which rainfall naturally gravitates, corresponds to an "attractor" in a self-organizing system.

For example, any rain that falls in the United States east of the Continental Divide and west of the Appalachians winds up in the Great Lakes or Mississippi River. Rain to the west of our mid-continent drainage basin heads for the Pacific Ocean. Rain that falls on the East is Atlantic-bound.

Likewise, in self-organizing systems there is a "virtual landscape" in which multiple basins of attraction exist, each comprising a discrete set of the totality of available system states. In any particular basin of attraction, some of the possible system states in that basin form an "attractor" toward which all the other system states in that same basin of attraction inexorably flow. If the system happens to be operating within a certain basin of attraction, but not on that basin's attractor, it will move to a state on the attractor itself. Once a state on the attractor is arrived at, all successive system states are also on the attractor.

Small or large perturbations can cause the system to jump unpredictably from one state to another. The new system state may or may not be in the same basin of attraction as the old. If the system is a reasonably stable one, small perturbations will usually leave it in the same basin. Larger perturbations can put even a stable, non-chaotic system in a wholly different basin of attraction.


The attractor in that new basin may be a "strange" (i.e., chaotic) one. Strange attractors are associated with mathematical "chaos." Some or all of the attractors in the abstract topography of a system at any moment in time can be "strange" attractors. In fact, some systems have just one single attractor: a "strange" one.

Systems whose attractor is "strange" ans whose future path in moving from one state to the next is chaotic will cycle back around and repeat an already-visited state only after visiting every other state available to the system. In chaotic systems of great complexity in which the number of available states is great, the time needed to cycle around and repeat a state can be a large multiple of the age of the universe.

Systems in chaos are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Any imprecision, no matter how tiny, in measuring the initial state of a system will render predictions about future states of the system increasingly unreliable as time goes on. What's more, the degree of predictive unreliability increases exponentially. This is why it is impossible to predict the weather more than a few days in advance.

Although, it is impossible to predict chaotic systems' long-term behavior, this behavior is nonetheless deterministic. That is, the system's initial conditions do in fact determine its entire future path. It's just that there is no computer in the world capable of doing the necessary computations precisely enough (or, for that matter, swiftly enough) to arrive at an accurate prediction.

Exogenous changes in the system's parameters can put an otherwise non-chaotic system in a basin of attraction associated with a strange attractor: chaos can come out of order, seemingly. But Capra makes clear that a chaotic, strange attractor is in fact orderly. Just because we can't predict the system's future doesn't mean that its future is random. It is in fact as deterministic as that of a system in a basin of attraction whose guiding attractor is a "point attractor" (a single destination state) or "periodic attractor" (an endless loop of repeating states). Barring external perturbations or changes to the fundamental parameters of the system, the future path of the system is set in stone.

Moreover, a self-organizing system's virtual landscape can exhibit change over time. Its configuration of basins and attractors can be revised, sometimes greatly, by even small changes in the numerical parameters of the nonlinear mathematical equations that describe the system (see Web of Life, pp. 135-137). This is another reason why systems that start in a stable and orderly basin of attraction can end up in another which may be chaotic, or vice versa.


But there is yet another source of indeterminacy and unpredictability in dissipative structures such as all living systems represent. This one interests me more than that associated with "chaos" and "strange attractors." The indeterminacy that occurs at the system's "bifurcation points" is apparently one that couldn't go away even if our computer models were to become infinitely fast and infinitely precise.

Capra discusses this topic in chapter 8, which deals primarily with the late Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine's theory of "dissipative structures." A dissipative structure is one through which there is a continual flow of matter and energy. The strength of the matter-energy flow determines whether the system needs nonlinear equations to model it, as opposed to just linear equations. In nonlinear equations, corresponding to a strong or swift flux of matter and energy through the system, all of the equations' variables are raised to the power of two or higher. Hence there are multiple possible solutions to the set of equations by which the dissipative system is modeled.

A system whose modeling equations are nonlinear maintains itself far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the state of maximum entropy. "Entropy" is the degree to which a system has "run down" toward the minimum possible level of order, as dictated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. For example, if you have a container with two compartments, one containing nitrogen and one oxygen, and you remove the barrier separating the compartments, the molecules will tend to mix into a single uniform distribution of nitrogen and oxygen.

Given sufficient time, that expected result — minimum order, maximum entropy — is almost certain to eventuate. It is the result of the motion of the gas molecules, and it happens faster when the gases are heated than if they are cool.

Although it may not be technically correct to put it this way, I think of the behavior of far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems, including living organisms, as "exporting" entropy: the heat energy they give off adds more to the disorder of the external environment than the amount by which the system itself reverses its own entropy. Accordingly, dissipative systems manage to take themselves in the opposite, anti-entropic, direction, at the expense of increasing the entropy in their surroundings. The further from thermodynamic equilibrium the system is, to more entropy it exports to its environment.

But a dissipative structure is typically able to arrive at any of multiple possible stable states far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The farther from equilibrium it is, the more nonlinear it is, and the greater the number of possible solutions there are to its set of equations (see Web of Life, p. 182). Capra describes it this way: "New situations may emerge at any moment. Mathematically speaking, the system encounters a bifurcation point in such a case, at which it may branch off into an entirely new state."


Here is where things get really fascinating ... and a bit confusing. At each bifurcation point, the system must "choose" — metaphorically speaking, since the system generally lacks intentionality — one of two or more possible paths. Which path it will choose is not knowable by an outside observer. The "choice" cannot be predicted, much less controlled, by an external agent. As Capra says, "There is an irreducible random element at each bifurcation point" (p. 183).

Even so, the branch of the path which the system will "choose" for its future trajectory at any given bifurcation point "depends on the previous history of the system," Capra says (p. 182). Unlike systems that can be modeled by linear equations, dissipative systems operating in the nonlinear range do not "forget their initial conditions."

This is, admittedly, a point which confuses me. My confusion comes to a head on page 191. In one place on the page, Capra says:

A bifurcation point is a threshold of stability at which the dissipative structure may either break down or break through to one of several new states of order. What exactly happens at this critical point depends on the system's previous history. Depending on which path it has taken to reach the point of instability, it will follow one or another of the available branches after the bifurcation.

At another point on the same page he says:

At the bifurcation point, the dissipative structure also shows an extraordinary sensitivity to small fluctuations in its environment. A tiny random fluctuation, often called "noise," can induce the choice of path. Since all living systems exist in continually fluctuating environments, and since we can never know which fluctuation will occur at the bifurcation point just at the "right" moment, we can never predict the future path of the system.

So, which is it? Does the system's history "choose" which branch the system will take, or does a random fluctuation make the crucial choice? Perhaps it is a combination of both, involving some probability function. All I can really say is that Capra is, to my mind, uncharacteristically unclear about the interplay of history and chance as they affect dissipative systems at critical bifurcation points.


An example of a linear dynamical system is that of a planet orbiting the sun. The shape of its elliptical orbit never varies, which means that we can run the imaginary "movie" of its motion backwards and forwards in time, with perfect predictability as to where the planet was on any given date in history and as to where it will be on a given date in the future. Its "initial conditions" — such as where the planet came from in the first place — make no difference.

Not so with nonlinear dissipative systems operating far from equilibrium. At their bifurcation points they take this branch or that as a result of the details of their unique histories and/or small random fluctuations in their environment. The most minute differences in their initial conditions or in their environmental circumstances will bias them in favor of branch A and away from branch B.

To me, their imperviousness to external prediction and control and the absolute autonomy of their unique histories and futures make their behavior trajectories organic rather than ordained.


Yet common sense tells us that we living beings — however autonomous, however unique, however unpredictable — exhibit an awful lot of expectability. Sons and daughters tend to look like their mothers and fathers. Identical twins tend to look like each other. Swans don't come from ducks' eggs.

We must all be something like fingerprints. Every human finger can be expected to possess a fingerprint. Yet each fingerprint is unique. Even identical twins have different fingerprints.

Fingerprints show up on fingertips, obviously, at some stage of human embryonic development. A human being in utero develops from a fertilized egg cell. During the process of development, the zygote — the fertilized egg — divides and makes two cells, then four, then eight, and so on. In the early embryonic stages, there are no detectable differences among the cells. Soon enough, however, the cells start to differentiate and form distinctive tissues and organs.

Presumably, if Prigogine's ideas about dissipative systems and their bifurcation points hold for embryos, the embryo is continuously "choosing" certain branches along its own developmental trajectory and discarding other equally available branches. Somehow, some combination of these "choices" results in the formation of ten unique fingerprints ... while at the same time (if the embryo is normal) guaranteeing that there will be ten fingers and ten prints.

Thus is there a mix of unpredictability (the distinctive loops and whorls the individual fingerprints will wind up having) and expectability (that there will indeed be fingers, and fingerprints).


I imagine that, as with other aspects of emergence in living dissipative systems, the human embryo has its associated "phase portrait," its own abstract topography of attractors and basins of attraction which account for its potentialities as it develops. This topography produces both comforting expectability and unpredictable uniqueness.

I also imagine that the same principles apply to the spiritual mind within each unique human being. Our spiritual paths are indeed individual and unique. Yet, at the same time, there are certain expectable patterns in our spiritual life. I suggest the commonality and expectability in our spiritual paths are due to certain basins of attraction universally present in the human spiritual mind.

Let me suggest three such basins of attraction. The first is the one characterized by not being "spiritual" at all, by having no particular religious beliefs, etc. This, canonically, is the state one starts out in and then leaves behind when (say) one is "born again," after which the former, non-spiritual state is typically thought of as having been a "godless" one.

The second basin of attraction of the spiritual mind is that in which there is a profoundly God-oriented (shall we call it?) "steady state" toward which the experiencer is pulled by an "attractor" which is, quite naturally, the experiencer sees as God or Christ or the Holy Spirit. (I am speaking in Christian terms; other religions have their corresponding equivalents.) The spiritual mind that is in thrall to this attractor wants more than anything else to experience God as ordaining every blessed outcome in this world.

The third basin of spiritual attraction corresponds to Merton's Zen awakening following his Dark Night of the Soul ... and (I hope) to my own spiritual embrace of the organic nature of life. Once one's mind is in that third basin, or so my feeling goes, it becomes important to see the things of this world as emerging out of organic, self-organizing principles that guide the evolution of dynamic, ever-changing, living systems. The question of worldly outcomes ordained directly by God becomes much less important when one is in this third spiritual basin of attraction.

Some questions arise: where do these three spiritual basins of attraction come from? By virtue of what occurrences do we move from one to another? Is the progression from seeing the world as "godless" to seeing it as "divinely ordained" to seeing it as "organically emergent" typical, and if so, why? Finally, is there any way to bridge the dichotomy between the last two, such that God can be seen as influencing or even directing the emergence of organic novelty in this world?

More about these questions in later posts ...

The J.K. Rowling Effect

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

I continue to be fascinated with Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, subtitled A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. For many days I have been struggling to figure out how I ought to discuss its spiritual aspects. The topic is complicated, to say the least.

Capra's "systems approach" to the life sciences has many names, one of which is "deep ecology," since all life is deeply interconnected with all other life and with every supposedly "nonliving" aspect of the physical environment. Capra writes, "Ultimately, deep ecological awareness is spiritual or religious awareness. When the concept of the human spirit is understood as the mode of consciousness in which the individual feels a sense of belonging, of connectedness, to the cosmos as a whole, it becomes clear that ecological awareness is spiritual in its deepest essence." (p. 7).

Capra's thinking resonates satisfyingly with what he calls the "perennial philosophy of spiritual traditions, whether we talk about the spirituality of Christian mystics, that of Buddhists, or the philosophy and cosmology underlying the Native American tradition."

But notice that Capra picks out "Christian mystics" as the delegates of monotheist religion to the halls of perennial philosophy. One reason is that traditional Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have very often supported, at the level of their theological presuppositions, "the fundamentally antiecological nature of many of our social and economic structures and their technologies [rooted in] the 'dominator system' of social organization. Patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and racism are examples of social domination that are exploitative and antiecological" (p. 8).

I'd like to agree two hundred percent with that radical assessment, but I can't:

• I am instinctively non-radical.
• The very philosophy Capra extols and I echo is intrinsically averse to drawing sharp distinctions, such as ecology-good/patriarchy-bad.
• If the schema "X is good and the opposite of X is bad" is intrinsically suspect as drawing too sharp a distinction, then any pronouncement of the form "the new way of thinking is right, so traditional religious/philosophical assumptions are wrong" is suspect as well.

Or, put it this way. The "new way of thinking" Capra describes inherently deprecates absolutism. Ergo, the claim "Absolutism is always a mistake" is ruled out for the very reason that it is absolutist.

Yet traditional religious thinkers are well known for claiming that their belief systems are founded on the bedrock of unassailable truth, no? How we "new" thinkers ought to feel about absolutely rejecting the absolutism of "old" thinkers is a puzzle.


It's crystal clear to me that the spirituality of the old thinkers is inextricably bound up with absolutist assumptions. One of these assumptions is that in any pair of opposites, the two terms are at war with each other. Light is at war with darkness; we need to be on the side of light. Good is at war with evil, and we need to be on the side of good. And so on.

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Capra, on the other hand, in his The Tao of Physics extols the Taoists' recognition that light-darkness, good-evil, etc., are poles of a single unity they call yin-yang. No matter how you slice it, that's a different kind of spirituality, based on a different set of underlying philosophical commitments.

Using the concepts of self-organizing systems Capra discusses in The Web of Life, the two kinds of spirituality can be seen as two distinct realms of stability in the abstract "phase space" of the mind.

Complex, self-organizing systems of all types manage to converge upon "steady states" of relative permanence and stability, even though they are open systems whose unceasing internal energy flow takes them far from thermodynamic equilibrium, in the deathlike state physicists call maximum entropy. In biological systems, a steady state of homeostasis prevails. Similar steady states are achieved in nominally nonliving, merely physical systems that likewise self-organize.

One of the most familiar types of self-organizing physical systems to us today is the laser. If you have a CD player or a DVD player, you depend on a tiny laser to read your discs. Laser light is "coherent" because the individual atoms emitting the light manage to coordinate the light emission among themselves. That doesn't happen in an ordinary light bulb. Coordinated light emission in a laser is an example of self-organization in a physical system.


This quality of stability in far-from-equilibrium self-organizing systems was puzzling to scientists until a few decades ago. In the 1960s, Nobel Laureate chemist-physicist Ilya Prigogine studied "dissipative systems" — systems through which there is an energy flow that holds them far from thermodynamic equilibrium — and found a number of common characteristics. Among the common characteristics of these dissipative systems is that "when the flow of energy and matter through them increases, they may go through new instabilities and transform themselves into new structures of increased complexity" (Web of Life, p. 89).

Stripped down to essentials, the idea here is that organisms, their internal organs, and their external societies are, as self-organizing systems far from thermodynamic death, capable of generating different patterns of organization, depending on how the energy flows through them. The available steady-state patterns a system may pass through are separated along the pathway of its evolution by critical points of transitional instability.

My thought is, accordingly, that the two spiritual outlooks which parallel what I referred to above as the "old way of thinking" and the "new way of thinking" are alternate steady-state patterns in the human mind. I personally have experienced a transition from a traditional Christian spirituality to a spirituality, akin to that of Capra, which I am calling the spirituality of organicity. In transitioning from one to the other, I have passed through a point of instability which I experienced as confusion, frustration, and a certain amount of guilt that I was not holding true to my Christian commitment. These negative feelings have been mixed with a certain elation that a mode of spirituality that seems to be more "me" is finally emerging in my life.

The spiritual mind is itself a self-organizing system with a complex "phase portrait," I am coming to realize. That is, it is like any other dynamical, far-from-equilibrium system in that its available "steady states" each comprise a set of points in abstract "phase space" that cluster around and gravitate toward a particular "attractor" in one "basin of attraction" or another. The spiritual-mind-as-system dynamically passes from one point in its phase space to another, but unless there is a change in the topography of the various basins of attraction, it tends to stay on one attractor, or at least remain in one basin of attraction.

But the topography can change (see Web of Life, pp. 135-137). Various things can cause the system to experience a "bifurcation," also known as a "catastrophe," in which there there may be a transition to a basin of attraction that didn't exist before. When the spiritual-mind-as-system comes to a point of bifurcative catastrophe, I imagine the experience will be one of spiritual confusion.

J.K Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, recently talked about the Christian imagery she quite intentionally put in her books, as well as her own Christian faith. According to this article:

But while the book [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows] begins with a quote on the immortal soul — and though Harry finds peace with his own death at the end of his journey — it is the struggle itself which mirrors Rowling's own, the author said.

"The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It's something I struggle with a lot," [Rowling] revealed. "On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it's something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that's very obvious within the books."

I take it that the interior struggle Rowling describes — "my faith is sometimes that my faith will return" — indicates that her own spiritual mind is subject to what I am calling bifurcative catastrophe. Hers concerns (at least in part) whether her Christian spirituality requires a belief in life after death. Whether there is indeed an afterlife and whether I myself can still call myself a Christian if I no longer am sure there is one are questions that have plagued me also.

I can't answer those questions for J.K. Rowling, but I can say that the spiritual "instability" that goes along with asking such questions is entirely natural and normal. I accordingly dub it and other natural and normal agonies of religious faith the "J.K. Rowling effect," in her honor.

The Web of Life

In The Tao of Organicity I broached the topic of "organicity," by which I meant the idea that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it has proceeded over the course of billions of years to develop physically, eventually to produce life and then conscious life. I said:

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra

In that post I indicated my interest in reading Fritjof Capra's book The Web of Life, which I am now deeply immersed in. The book turns out to be an extremely readable introduction to a paradigm of thought called, variously, "systems theory," "cybernetics," "deep ecology," "self-organization," "complexity," and like terms.

I recognize Capra's topic as containing most if not all of what I have already written concerning new ways of looking at the world in light of the theory of evolution in my Beyond Darwin blog. Specifically, the ideas of biologist Stuart Kauffman in books such as At Home in the Universe are, ahem, right at home in Capra's paradigm.

Unlike any other book I have read about what I choose to dub "the organicity paradigm," Capra's gives a wide-ranging overview of the history of this kind of thinking, which goes back well over a century in scientific and philosophical circles. I hadn't realized that. I thought it sort of emerged wholly formed in the 1960s, say, at about the point when the increasing ubiquity of computers was enabling scientists to study nonlinear dynamical systems in some depth for the first time; this was the origin, for example, of chaos theory.


But, no. Among the antecedents of that enterprise was that of the original cyberneticists, starting in about 1946 with the Macy Conferences in New York City, dominated by the likes of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, from the hard sciences and engineering, and Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, from the social sciences.

Norbert Wiener

Norbert Wiener was, according to Wikipedia, "the founder of cybernetics, a field that formalizes the notion of feedback and has implications for engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, philosophy, and the organization of society." It is interesting that the seemingly machine-oriented concept of feedback generalizes to how living organisms do what they do.

Wiener apparently was intensely aware of this link when he wrote the following two things:

[Feedback is the] control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance. (Capra, p. 57).

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. (p. 52)

Those quotes resonate with me. In my own spiritual life, I seem to be seeking to get away from my erstwhile Christian worldview in which God is seen as the Great Expecter who sits in judgment of my, and everyone else's, "performance." According to that worldview, God (who is by definition external to us, or at least "separate in being" from us) sets up standards of conduct for us to adhere to and finds us to be in sin if we don't adhere to them.

I presently am finding that that worldview stokes my sense of "existential guilt," the subject of My Existential Guilt and My Existential Guilt (Part Two) in this blog. My reaction seems to have been to undergo an ongoing dark night of the soul, which now leads me to embrace a wholly different stance toward reality.

The new stance is the one I am calling "organicity." I was moving towards it when I wrote the three posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series — to wit, in the "organicity paradigm" there is no need for an external Great Correcter to judge nature, human or otherwise.

What then can control whatever tendencies we may have to be unethical or immoral? After all, the idea of a Great Expecter/Corrector — a judgmental God — has long served the human race as a jim-dandy external control mechanism.

In the organicity paradigm, the control has to come from within: from our actual performance, not our expected performance. There has to be self-regulation, rather than regulation by dint of some written-down list of must-do commandments and must-avoid "deadly" sins. With self-regulation comes the self-organization that produces Wiener's "patterns that perpetuate themselves" amidst the "river of ever-flowing water" of this world.

Thus might we come to see ourselves as "whirlpools" rather than as "stuff that abides." Whirlpools, after all, maintain themselves for some period of time, according to their inner dynamics ... then dissolve back into the river.

I hope it is evident that it is not easy to reconcile my "organicity paradigm" with that of a world created and judged by a God above and beyond it. No matter that God is also said to be immanent within the world; he is of another substance entirely. In my present frame of mind I simply cannot see how to reconcile his existence with an "organicity paradigm." One of them has to go, and right now, for me, it is admittedly God who is being discarded.

The Tao of Organicity

One night a few nights ago I went to sleep a dualist. When I woke up the next morning, I was a dualist no more. Outwardly at least, it was as simple as that.

Inwardly, I have been fighting a losing battle to stave off whatever the notional opposite of dualism is — monism, I suppose — for many years. The battle is now over. Monism has won.

Dualism? Monism? What do these words mean, and why are they so important to me?

The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra

Fritjof Capra gives a clue in his well-known book The Tao of Physics. The book concerns the strong similarity between the time-honored worldview of the Eastern mystics, Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist, and modern physics, with its realization that atoms are not really made up of independent, objectively characterizable "particles" after all.

Moreover, the dualism which imagines the observer always to be separate from what is being observed, when one is doing a scientific experiment at the atomic and subatomic level, no longer holds. Rather, according to one interpreter of quantum theory whom Capra quotes (p. 139), "An elementary particle is not an independently existing unanalyzable entity. It is, in essence, a set of relationships that reach out to other things."

Even according to a different quantum theory interpreter who generally has little in common with the first (p. 138):

One is led to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existing parts ... We have reversed the usual classical notion that the independent "elementary parts" of the world are the fundamental reality, and that the various systems are merely particular contingent forms and arrangements of these parts. Rather, we say that inseparable quantum interconnectedness of the whole universe is the fundamental reality, and that relatively independently behaving parts are merely particular and contingent forms within this whole.

So it is an illusion to believe that there are two things, the observer (along with his chosen experimental apparatus) and the object being observed (such as an electron). In quantum physics, when the attributes of a so-called "elementary" particle (which is really no more that a pattern of probabilities that certain kinds of interconnections with other particles and systems will predominate) is to be measured, it first has to be prepared for the measurement operation ... and how it is prepared for observation and measurement determines its eventual measured characteristics.

The act of preparation needed to fix the particle's position with total precision prevents learning its momentum (hence its velocity) with equal precision. This quantum indeterminacy is unavoidable. Why? In the final analysis, imply because the imagined distinction between the observer and the observed is untenable.


False, too, are other classical dualisms. One of these, for better or worse, is that of "an intelligent and personal God who stands above the world and directs it" (p. 20).

In his first chapter, Capra gives a brief history of classical Greek thought, in which there was a shift from "the monistic and organic view of the Milesians" — Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, and others — to the view that above the fundamentally dead world of matter was a separate order of pure being, or of indestructible substance. Though mere matter underwent change, Being was eternal.

In that dualist view, what was pure and unchanging came to seem, with Plato and Aristotle, more real than anything that changed from one mode of imperfection to another over the course of time. The philosophies of Plato and, later, Aristotle, came to pervade Western Christendom down through the millennia.

The Judeo-Christian God, born in the Middle East in a different culture, merged into the European worldview at the time of the decline of the Roman Empire. The nascent churches of Christendom had embraced the neo-Platonism of Plotinus in the third century A.D., and later, during the Middle Ages, the now-regnant Church of Rome rediscovered the original, fourth-century-B.C. thought of Plato and Aristotle.


Before Plato, in Greek culture, the philosophy of Leucippus and Democritus sought to avoid the dualism between the mere "things" we know in this material world and what would become Plato's Forms and the Aristotelian idea of Being as the noblest degree of abstraction. The pre-Platonists did this by assigning the unchanging permanence Plato would allocate to immaterial Forms to certain physical items: the atoms, as originally conceived of by the Greeks. But if atoms, matter's building blocks, were "passive and intrinsically dead," what produced motion and change?

The cause of the motion was not explained [by Democritus and other atomists], but was often associated with external forces ... of spiritual origin and fundamentally different from matter. In subsequent centuries, this image became an essential element of Western thought, of the dualism between mind and matter, between body and soul. (p. 21)

So the thought of the West was, even before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on a slippery slope to dualism, leaving behind the insights of an earlier Greek philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus, who

believed in a world of perpetual change, of eternal 'Becoming'. For him, all static Being was based on deception and his universal principle was fire, a symbol for the continuous flow and change of all things. (p. 20)

It is this Heraclitean idea that you don't need a separate entity, spirit, to explain why "dead" matter undergoes change, that Capra extols as the lesson of modern science in The Tao of Physics. The same idea lies at the heart of Eastern religion, whether Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist. That "perennial philosophy" of mystical traditions, says Capra (p. 10), "provides the most consistent philosophical background to our modern scientific theories."


Capra's discussion carries a lot of weight, for me. But it's not ultimately the reason why my dualist assumptions crumbled into dust one recent night while I was asleep. I am more attuned to matters biological than matters physical ... which is why I feel I ought to read Capra's The Web of Life before too much longer (I've ordered it from Amazon).

Though I haven't read it yet, I have done a lot of thinking about the area of modern scientific inquiry which one scientist, derisively, calls "emergilent chaoplexity." (See "This Man Wants to Control the Internet," Discover, Nov. 2007, pp. 99 ff.) Chaos and complexity are both hot topics in science these days, as are the idea of "emergence" and that dubbed "consilience" by entomologist Edward O. Wilson.

In chaos studies, scientists have found that there is rampant disorder at the heart of many natural processes. This "chaos" has a mathematical basis such that, although we can never be certain what a chaotic system will wind up doing, we can be sure that it is on a path set by its initial conditions. The so-called "butterfly effect" means that a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil may inexorably cause a tornado in Texas.

The study of complexity takes chaos study a step further by locating in mathematical "space" not only a region of chaotic dynamics, but also one where life inexorably emerges from a dynamical source located at the very "edge of chaos." In our universe, the biological realm "emerges" ineluctably from the workings of "mere" physics in ways that can be expressed mathematically and modeled on computers.

Meanwhile, Wilson's "consilience" — the word which puts the "il" in "emergilent chaoplexity" — proposes a new "unity of knowledge" (see his 1998 book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which I also ought to read, but haven't). I gather that Wilson's main idea in showing how the various spheres of human knowledge today hope to "leap together" — the root meaning of "consilience" — is that reason ought at long last to replace mysticism ... which would seem to put him in opposition to Capra.

However, my thought is that "mysticism" is an ambiguous word, as is "reason." If you begin with an unquestioned assumption that spirit (if spirit exists) and matter are separate and dual, and that "mysticism" is a search for spirit, then it is easy for many of us to favor the matter side of this supposed dualism and call your stance the "rational" one.

Go all the way back to Heraclitus, though, and the dualism between mysticism and reason, as that between spirit and matter, disappears.

If the assumption that matter is dead and change comes from something apart from the material world is canceled, then it becomes eminently rational (yes) for so-called mystics to pursue scientific inquiries into how the cosmos works. And, since there is ultimately no way to separate out the individual consciousness that we house in our minds from all the rest of reality, it makes sense — for those who are so inclined; not all of us are — to experiment with altered states of mind, which is what the Eastern mystics have done since time immemorial.


The derisive phrase "emergilent chaoplexity" is one that I would prefer to replace with the word "organicity." I mean it to suggest that the cosmos is intrinsically organic in the way it proceeds over the course of billions of years to develop, and eventually to produce life and then conscious life.

Things are said to have an organic unity if they fit together harmoniously as necessary parts of a whole. Organic also means "characterized by continuous or natural development." These are the senses of the word I am interested in when I say I have almost a religious faith in the organicity of the universe.

I'll refer to that faith, then, as "the tao of organicity." In Chinese Taoism, the tao is the natural, spontaneous "way" of all things when left to their own devices and allowed to unfold without a lot of rules imposed on them from without. In my view now as a former dualist, my longstanding Christian faith was essentially a system of understanding in which God was an external rule-giver. Standing apart from nature, including human nature, and finding it/us "fallen" — or, since Adam's "sin," lacking in its original perfection — the God of the monotheists sought to "save" or "redeem" the world.

No wonder it was so easy to wed monotheistic ideas about God to philosophies from supposedly pagan Greece: both idea systems were fundamentally dualist (once Heraclitus and the Milesians were set aside in Greece). In the monotheist view, the material world is wholly distinct from a God who is basically spirit. Though God "became flesh" and was "made man" in Jesus Christ, in the Christian view, there is still a dualism such that Christ is like us in all ways but sin. That idea is undergirded by the idea that Mary, Jesus's mother, was born without the stain of Original Sin which the rest of us inherit from Adam and Eve — yet another dualism.

The list of monotheist dualisms goes on and on. God vs. world. Heaven vs. hell. Good vs. evil. Soul vs. body. Mind vs. matter.

In recent months, in this blog, I have tried to defend all the dualisms by means of some two dozen or more posts under the topic of Consciousness. My idea was that if it can be established that the attribute of the human mind which is variously called consciousness or sentience or subjective experience is indeed a distinct type of being from all the other, merely physical manifestations of mind/brain, then there is hope for all the other dualisms that are inherent in the Christian worldview.

Now, suddenly, I find myself on the other side of the fence, as it were, believing in my bones that dualisms are illusory.

In posts to come, I plan to discuss what has led me to this "sudden" insight, and where I think it will lead me now. But I must hastily note that this "insight" has not really been all that sudden. I have been flirting with it for well over ten years, at least since I first began trying to show how the ascent of complexity and such constructs as the "edge of chaos" in the halls of science today could be squared with Christian belief.

It did not take me long to twig to the notion that if Darwinian natural selection is abetted by self-organizing, complex systems whose dynamics unfold at the "edge of chaos," and if chaos is rightly associated in the Christian imagination with the evil workings of Satan, then there is every reason for Christians to resent the sciences of complexity as much as many of them have long resented Darwinian evolution theory.

Looking back, I realize that I never really overcame that difficulty, and the book I was trying to write under the assumption that it might reconcile Christian belief with the theory of evolution sort of petered out into nothingness. It never got finished, and today I can see why. The whole idea of an "edge of chaos" bridging the order-chaos dualism is fundamentally unchristian, if you stop to think how crucially dependent the Christian outlook is on the existence of a long list of dualisms.

I intend to extend these remarks about the anti-dualist Tao of Organicity in subsequent posts. Stay tuned ...