Now, if the butterflies would just appear out of nowhere ....

Reading complexity theorist Stu Kauffman's piece over at The Edge, "Breaking the Galilean Spell", in support of his new book Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, I certainly see what science journalist John Horgan is getting at when he expresses skepticism of complexity theorists because they have "failed to deliver on any of their promises."
At least, I think I see. Kauffman wants to stop being a reductionist, but he doesn't want to stop being a materialist.

Reductionism is inadequate reductionism. Even major physicists now doubt its full legitimacy. Biology and its evolution cannot be reduced to physics alone but stand in their own right. Life, and with it agency, came naturally to exist in the universe. With agency came values, meaning, and doing, all of which are as real in the universe as particles in motion. "Real" here has a particular meaning: while life, agency, value, and doing presumably have physical explanations in any specific organism, the evolutionary emergence of these cannot be derived from or reduced to physics alone. Thus, life, agency, value, and doing are real in the universe. This stance is called emergence. Weinberg notwithstanding, there are explanatory arrows in the universe that do not point downward. A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion. More, all this came to exist without our need to call upon a Creator God.

Something is missing here, ... and what is missing is magic. That is, if we want mind to come from mud, we need either God or magic. Kauffman doesn't want God and he hopes that "emergence" is the magic that just sort of happens.

Well then, I always find myself asking, why isn't life, and all kinds of stuff, spontaneously emerging all around us? It should be, if Kauffman is right, but it never is.

That said, I read his earlier book and enjoyed it. I just didn't believe it.

Chaos theorists stumped by butterfly effect?

In an interesting piece at Search Magazine (March 1, 2008*), science journalist John Horgan reflects:

When I began writing about science twenty-six years ago, I believed in what Vannevar Bush, founder of the National Science Foundation, called "the endless frontier" of science. I started questioning that myth in the late 1980s, when physicists like Stephen Hawking declared they were on the verge of a "final theory" that would solve all their field's outstanding mysteries.

Horgan, unfortunately for himself, drew the reasonable conclusion in The End of Science in 1996 that if we have discovered everything, there is nothing left to be discovered. Big Science was not amused, of course, but he stood his ground.

For example, in the recent piece, he noted,

The physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin grants that we might have reached "the end of reductionism," which identifies the basic particles and forces underpinning the physical realm. Nevertheless, he insists that scientists can discover profound new laws by investigating complex, emergent phenomena, which cannot be understood in terms of their individual components.

Laughlin is merely recycling rhetoric from the fields of chaos and complexity, which are so similar that I lump them under a single term, chaoplexity. Chaoplexologists argue that advances in computation and mathematics will soon make fields like economics, ecology, and climatology as rigorous and predictive as nuclear physics.

The chaoplexologists have failed to deliver on any of their promises. One reason is the notorious butterfly effect. To predict the course of a chaotic system, such as a climate, ecology, or economy, you must determine its initial conditions with infinite precision, which is of course impossible. The butterfly effect limits both prediction and explanation, and it suggests that many of chaoplexologists' grand goals cannot be achieved.

*The magazine was then called "Science and Spirit."

Also:

"The butterfly effect: Totally wrong? Not even wrong? Not even a butterfly?"

"End of science? Or end of materialism"?

(Note: The image is from Natural Resources Canada's Butterflies of Canada, and shows a Common Buckeye.)