conscious purpose versus Tao

Milan Dobrojevic © ∞

Conscious Purpose versus Nature*

Our civilization, which is on the block here for investiga­tion and evaluation, has its roots in three main ancient civilizations: the Roman, the Hebrew and the Greek; and it would seem that many of our problems are related to the fact that we have an imperialist civilization leavened or yeasted by a downtrodden, exploited colony in Palestine. In this conference, we are again going to be fighting out the conflict between the Romans and the Palestinians.

You will remember that St. Paul boasted, "I was born free." What he meant was that he was born Roman, and that this had certain legal advantages.

We can engage in that old battle either by backing the downtrodden or by backing the imperialists. If you are going to fight that battle, you have to take sides in it. It's that simple.

On the other hand, of course, St. Paul's ambition, and the ambition of the downtrodden, is always to get on the side of the imperialists — to become middle-class imperialists themselves—and it is doubtful whether creating more mem­bers of the civilization which we are here criticizing is a solution to the problem.

There is, therefore, another more abstract problem. We need to understand the pathologies and peculiarities of the whole Romano-Palestinian system. It is this that I am in­terested in talking about. I do not care, here, about defend­ing the Romans or defending the Palestinians—the upper dogs or the underdogs. I want to consider the dynamics of the whole traditional pathology in which we are caught, and in which we shall remain as long as we continue to struggle within that old conflict. We just go round and round in terms of the old premises.

Fortunately our civilization has a third root—in Greece. Of course Greece got caught up in a rather similar mess, but still there was a lot of clean, cool thinking of a quite surprising kind which was different.

Let me approach the bigger problem historically. From St. Thomas Aquinas to the eighteenth century in Catholic countries, and to the Reformation among Protestants (be-cause we threw out a lot of Greek sophistication with the Reformation), the structure of our religion was Greek. In mid-eighteenth century the biological world looked like this: there was a supreme mind at the top of the ladder, which was the basic explanation of everything downwards from that—the supreme mind being, in Christianity, God; and having various attributes at various philosophic stages. The ladder of explanation went downwards deductively from the Supreme to man to the apes, and so on, down to the in­fusoria.

This hierarchy was a set of deductive steps from the most perfect to the most crude or simple. And it was rigid. It was assumed that every species was unchanging.

Lamarck, probably the greatest biologist in history, turned that ladder of explanation upside down. He was the man who said it starts with the infusoria and that there were changes leading up to man. His turning the taxonomy upside down is one of the most astonishing feats that has ever occurred. It was the equivalent in biology of the Copernican revolution in astronomy.

The logical outcome of turning the taxonomy upside down was that the study of evolution might provide an explana­tion of mind.

Up to Lamarck, mind was the explanation of the biologi­cal world. But, hey presto, the question now arose: Is the biological world the explanation of mind? That which was the explanation now became that which was to be ex­plained. About three quarters of Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique (1809) is an attempt, very crude, to build a com­parative psychology. He achieved and formulated a number of very modern ideas: that you cannot attribute to any creature psychological capacities for which it has no organs; that mental process must always have physical representa­tion; and that the complexity of the nervous system is related to the complexity of mind.

There the matter rested for 150 years, mainly because evolutionary theory was taken over, not by a Catholic heresy but by a Protestant heresy, in the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin's opponents, you may remember, were not Aristotle and Aquinas, who had some sophistication, but fundamen­talist Christians whose sophistication stopped with the first chapter of Genesis. The question of the nature of mind was something which the nineteenth-century evolutionists tried to exclude from their theories, and the matter did not come up again for serious consideration until after World War II. (I am doing some injustice to some heretics along the road, notably to Samuel Butler — and others.)

In World War II it was discovered what sort of complexity entails mind. And, since that discovery, we know that: wher­ever in the Universe we encounter that sort of complexity, we are dealing with mental phenomena. It^'s as materialistic as that.

Let me try to describe for you that order of complexity, which is in some degree a technical matter. Russel Wallace sent a famous essay to Darwin from Indonesia. In it he announced his discovery of natural selection, which coin­cided with Darwin's. Part of his description of the struggle for existence is interesting:

The action of this principle [the struggle for existence] is exactly like that of the steam engine, which checks and corrects any irregularities almost before they become evident; and in like manner no unbalanced deficiency in the animal kingdom can ever reach any conspicuous magnitude, because it would make itself felt at the very first step, by rendering existence difficult and extinction almost sure to follow.

The steam engine with a governor is simply a circular train of causal events, with somewhere a link in that chain such that the more of something, the less of the next thing in the circuit. The wider the balls of the governor diverge, the less the fuel supply. If causal chains with that general characteristic are provided with energy, the result will be (if you are lucky and things balance out) a self-corrective system.

Wallace, in fact, proposed the first cybernetic model.

Nowadays cybernetics deals with much more complex sys­tems of this general kind; and we know that when we talk about the processes of civilization, or evaluate human be­havior, human organization, or any biological system, we are concerned with self-corrective systems. Basically these sys­tems are always conservative of something. As in the engine with a governor, the fuel supply is changed to conserve—to keep constant—the speed of the flywheel, so always in such systems changes occur to conserve the truth of some descrip­tive statement, some component of the status quo. Wallace saw the matter correctly, and natural selection acts primarily to keep the species unvarying; but it may act at higher levels to keep constant that complex variable which we call "survival."

Dr. Laing noted that the obvious can be very difficult for people to see. That is because people are self-corrective systems. They are self-corrective against disturbance, and if the obvious is not of a kind that they can easily assimilate without internal disturbance, their self-corrective mechanisms work to sidetrack it, to hide it, even to the extent of shutting the eyes if necessary, or shutting off various parts of the process of perception. Disturbing information can be framed like a pearl so that it doesn't make a nuisance of itself; and this will be done, according to the understanding of the sys­tem itself of what would be a nuisance. This too—the prem­ise regarding what would cause disturbance—is something which is learned and then becomes perpetuated or con-served.

At this conference, fundamentally, we deal with three of these enormously complex systems or arrangements of con­servative loops. One is the human individual. Its physiology and neurology conserve body temperature, blood chemistry, the length and size and shape of organs during growth and embryology, and all the rest of the body's characteristics. This is a system which conserves descriptive statements about the human being, body or soul. For the same is true of the psychology of the individual, where learning occurs to conserve the opinions and components of the status quo.

Second, we deal with the society in which that individual lives—and that society is again a system of the same general kind.

And third, we deal with the ecosystem, the natural bio­logical surroundings of these human animals.

Let me start from the natural ecosystems around man. An English oak wood, or a tropical forest, or a piece of desert, is a community of creatures. In the oak wood perhaps 1000 species, perhaps more; in the tropical forest perhaps ten times that number of species live together.

I may say that very few of you here have ever seen such an undisturbed system; there are not many of them left; they've mostly been messed up by Homo sapiens who either exterminated some species or introduced others which be-came weeds and pests, or altered the water supply, etc., etc. We are rapidly, of course, destroying all the natural systems in the world, the balanced natural systems. We sim­ply make them unbalanced—but still natural.

Be that as it may, those creatures and plants live together in' a combination of competition and mutual dependency, and it is that combination that is the important thing to consider. Every species has a primary Malthusian capacity. Any species that does not, potentially, produce more young than the number of the population of the parental genera­tion is out. They're doomed. It is absolutely necessary for every species and for every such system that its components have a potential positive gain in the population curve. But, if every species has potential gain, it is then quite a trick to achieve equilibrium. All sorts of interactive balances and dependencies come into play, and it is these processes that have the sort of circuit structure that I have mentioned.

The Malthusian curve is exponential. It is the curve of population growth and it is not inappropriate to call this the population explosion.

You may regret that organisms have this explosive char­acteristic, but you may as well settle for it. The creatures that don't are out.

On the other hand, in a balanced ecological system whose underpinnings are of this nature, it is very clear that any monkeying with the system is likely to disrupt the equilib­rium. Then the exponential curves will start to appear. Some plant will become a weed, some creatures will be exterminated, and the system as a balanced system is likely to fall to pieces.

What is true of the species that live together in a wood is also true of the groupings and sorts of people in a society, who are similarly in an uneasy balance of dependency and competition. And the same truth holds right inside you, where there is an uneasy physiological competition and mu­tual dependency among the organs, tissues, cells, and so on. Without this competition and dependency you would not be, because you cannot do without any of the competing organs and parts. If any of the parts did not have the ex­pansive characteristics they would go out, and you would go out, too. So that even in the body you have a liability. With improper disturbance of the system, the exponential curves appear.

In a society, the same is true.

I think you have to assume that all important physiologi­cal or social change is in some degree a slipping of the sys­tem at some point along an exponential curve. The slippage may not go far, or it may go to disaster. But in principle if, say, you kill off the thrushes in a wood, certain components of the balance will run along exponential curves to a new stopping place.

In such slippage there is always danger—the possibility that some variable, e.g., population density, may reach such a value that further slippage is controlled by factors which are inherently harmful. If, for example, population is finally controlled by available food supply, the surviving individ­uals will be half starved and the food supply overgrazed, usually to a point of no return.

Now let me begin to talk about the individual organism. This entity is similar to the oak wood and its controls are represented in the total mind, which is perhaps only a re­flection of the total body. But the system is segmented in various ways, so that the effects of something in your food life, shall we say, do not totally alter your sex life, and things in your sex life do not totally change your kinesic life, and so on. There is a certain amount of compartmentalization, which is no doubt a necessary economy. There is one com­partmentalization which is in many ways mysterious but cer­tainly of crucial importance in man's life. I refer to the "semipermeable" linkage between consciousness and the re­mainder of the total mind. A certain limited amount of in-formation about what's happening in this larger part of the mind seems to be relayed to what we may call the screen of consciousness. But what gets to consciousness is selected; it is a systematic (not random) sampling of the rest.

Of course, the whole of the mind could not be reported in a part of the mind. This follows logically from the rela­tionship between part and whole. The television screen does not give you total coverage or report of the events which occur in the whole television process; and this not merely because the viewers would not be interested in such a re-port, but because to report on any extra part of the total process would require extra circuitry.. But to report on the events in this extra circuitry would require a still further addition of more circuitry, and so on. Each additional step toward increased consciousness will take the system farther from total consciousness. To add a report on events in a given part of the machine will actually decrease the per­centage of total events reported.

We therefore have to settle for very limited conscious­ness, and the question arises: How is the selecting done? On what principles does your mind select that which "you" will be aware of? And, while not much is known of these principles, something is known, though the principles at work are often not themselves accessible to consciousness. First of all, much of the input is consciously scanned, but only after it has been processed by the totally unconscious process of per­ception. The sensory events are packaged into images and these images are then "conscious."

I, the conscious I, see an unconsciously edited version of a small percentage of what affects my retina. I am guided in my perception by purposes. I see who is attending, who is not, who is understanding, who is not, or at least I get a myth about this subject, which may be quite correct. I am interested in getting that myth as I talk. It is relevant to my purposes that you hear me.

What happens to the picture of a cybernetic system—an oak wood or an organism—when that picture is selectively drawn to answer only questions of purpose?

Consider the state of medicine today. It's called medical science. What happens is that doctors think it would be nice to get rid of polio, or typhoid, or cancer. So they devote re-search money and effort to focusing on these "problems,^" or purposes. At a certain point Dr. Salk and others "solve" the problem of polio. They discover a solution of bugs which you can give to children so that they don't get polio. This is the solution to the problem of polio. At this point, they stop putting large quantities of effort and money into the problem of polio and go on to the problem of cancer, or whatever it may be.

Medicine ends up, therefore, as a total science, whose structure is essentially that of a bag of tricks. Within this science there is extraordinarily little knowledge of the sort of things I'm talking about; that is, of the body as a sys­temically cybernetically organized self-corrective system. Its internal interdependencies are minimally understood. What has happened is that purpose has determined what will come under the inspection or consciousness of medical science.

If you allow purpose to organize that which comes under your conscious inspection, what you will get is a bag of tricks—some of them very valuable tricks. It is an extraor­dinary achievement that these tricks have been discovered; all that I don't argue. But still we do not know two-penn'orth, really, about the total network system. Cannon wrote a book on The Wisdom of the Body, but nobody has written a book on the wisdom of medical science, because wisdom is pre­cisely the thing which it lacks. Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system—that system which, if disturbed, is likely to generate exponential curves of change.

Consciousness operates in the same way as medicine in its sampling of the events and processes of the body and of what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to enable you to get quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all, it may be money or power.

But you may say: "Yes, but we have lived that way for a million years." Consciousness and purpose have been char­acteristic of man for at least a million years, and may have been with us a great deal longer than that. I am not prepared to say that dogs and cats are not conscious, still less that porpoises are not conscious.

So you may say: "Why worry about that?"

But what worries me is the addition of modern technology to the old system. Today the purposes of consciousness are implemented by more and more effective machinery, trans­portation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides, and so forth. Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us. A pathology—a loss of balance—is threat­ened.

I think that much of what brings us here today is basi­cally related to the thoughts that I have been putting before you. On the one hand, we have the systemic nature of the individual human being, the systemic nature of the culture in which he lives, and the systemic nature of the biological, ecological system around him; and, on the other hand, the curious twist in the systemic nature of the individual man whereby consciousness is, almost of necessity, blinded to the systemic nature of the man himself. Purposive consciousness pulls out, from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole sys­temic structure. If you follow the "common-sense^" dictates of consciousness you become, effectively, greedy and un­wise—again I use ^"wisdom" as a word for recognition of and guidance by a knowledge of the total systemic creature.

Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. We may say that the biological systems-the individual, the culture, and the ecology—are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces "God" if you will.

Let me offer you a myth.

There was once a Garden. It contained many hundreds of species—probably in the subtropics—living in great fer­tility and balance, with plenty of humus, and so on. In that garden, there were two anthropoids who were more intelli­gent than the other animals.

On one of the trees there was a fruit, very high up, which the two apes were unable to reach. So they began to think. That was the mistake. They began to think purposively.

By and by, the he ape, whose name was Adam, went and got an empty box and put it under the tree and stepped on it, but he found he still couldn't reach the fruit. So he got another box and put it on top of the first. Then he climbed up on the two boxes and finally he got that apple.

Adam and Eve then became almost drunk with excite­ment. This was the way to do things. Make a plan, ABC and you get D.

They then began to specialize in doing things the planned way. In effect, they cast out from the Garden the concept of their own total systemic nature and of its total systemic na­ture.

. After they had cast God out of the Garden, they really went to work on this purposive business, and pretty soon the topsoil disappeared. After that, several species of plants became "weeds" and some of the animals became "pests^"; and Adam found that gardening was much harder work. He had to get his bread by the sweat of his brow and he said, "It's a vengeful God. I should never have eaten that apple."

Moreover, there occurred a qualitative change in the re­lationship between Adam and Eve, after they had discarded God from the Garden. Eve began to resent the business of sex and reproduction. Whenever these rather basic phenom­ena intruded upon her now purposive way of living, she was reminded of the larger life which had been kicked out of the Garden. So Eve began to resent sex and reproduction, and when it came to parturition she found this process very painful. She said this, too, was due to the vengeful nature of God. She even heard a Voice say "In pain shalt thou bring forth" and "Thy desire shall be unto thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."

The biblical version of this story, from which I have bor­rowed extensively, does not explain the extraordinary perver­sion of values, whereby the woman's capacity for love comes to seem a curse inflicted by the deity.

Be that as it may. Adam went on pursuing his purposes and finally invented the free-enterprise system. Eve was not, for a long time, allowed to participate in this because she was a woman. But she joined a bridge club and there found an outlet for her hate.

In the next generation, they again had trouble with love. Cain, the inventor and innovator, was told by God that "His [Abel's] desire shall be unto thee and thou shalt rule over him." So he killed Abel.

A parable, of course, is not data about human behavior. It is only an explanatory device. But I have built into it a phenomenon which seems to be almost universal when man commits the error of purposive thinking and disregards the systemic nature of the world with which he must deal. This phenomenon is called by the psychologists "projection." The man, after all, has acted according to what he thought was common sense and now he finds himself in a mess. He does not quite know what caused the mess and he feels that what has happened is somehow unfair. He still does not see him-self as part of the system in which the mess exists, and he either blames the rest of the system or he blames himself. In my parable Adam combines two sorts of nonsense: the notion "I have sinned" and the notion "God is vengeful."

If you look at the real situations in our world where the systemic nature of the world has been ignored in favor of purpose or common sense, you will find a rather similar reac­tion. President Johnson is, no doubt, fully aware that he has a mess on his hands, not only in Vietnam but in other parts of the national and international ecosystems; and I am sure that from where he sits it appears that he followed his pur­poses with common sense and that the mess must be due either- to the wickedness of others or to his own sin or to some combination of these, according to his temperament.

And the terrible thing about such situations is that in­evitably they shorten the time span of all planning. Emer­gency is present or only just around the corner; and long-term wisdom must therefore be sacrificed to expediency, even though there is a dim awareness that expediency will never give a long-term solution.

Morever, since we are engaged in diagnosing the ma­chinery of our own society, let me add one point: our politicians—both those in a state of power and those in a state of protest or hunger for power—are alike utterly ignorant of the matters which I have been discussing. You can search the Congressional Record for speeches which show awareness that the problems of government are biological problems, and you will find very, very few that apply biological insight. Extraordinary!

In general, governmental decisions are made by persons who are as ignorant of these matters as pigeons. Like the famous Dr. Skinner, in The Way of All Flesh, they "combine the wisdom of the dove with the harmlessness of the serpent."

But we are met here not only for diagnosis of some of the world's ills but also to think about remedies. I have al-ready suggested that no simple remedy to what I called the Romano-Palestinian problem can be achieved by back­ing the Romans against the Palestinians or vice versa. The problem is systemic and the solution must surely depend upon realizing this fact.

First, there is humility, and I propose this not as a moral principle, distasteful to a large number of people, but simply as an item of a scientific philosophy. In the period of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps the most important disaster was the enormous increase of scientific arrogance. We had discovered how to make trains and other machines. We knew how to put one box on top of the other to get that apple, and Occidental man saw himself as an autocrat with com­plete power over a universe which was made of physics and chemistry. And the biological phenomena were in the end to be controlled like processes in a test tube. Evolution was the history of how organisms learned more tricks for controlling the environment; and man had better tricks than any other creature.

But that arrogant scientific philosophy is now obsolete, and in its place there is the discovery that man is only a part of larger systems and that the part can never control the whole.

Goebbels thought that he could control public opinion in Germany with a vast communication system, and our own public relations men are perhaps liable to similar delusions. But in fact the would-be controller must always have his spies out to tell him what the people are saying about his propaganda. He is therefore in the position of being re­sponsive to what they are saying. Therefore he cannot have a simple lineal control. We do not live in the sort of universe in which simple lineal control is possible. Life is not like that.

Similarly, in the field of psychiatry, the family is a cyber­netic system of the sort which I am discussing and usually when systemic pathology occurs, the members blame each other, or sometimes themselves. But the truth of the matter is that both these alternatives are fundamentally arrogant. Either alternative assumes that the individual human being has total power over the system of which he or she is a part.

Even within the individual human being, control is limited. We can in some degree set ourselves to learn even such abstract characteristics as arrogance or humility, but we are not by any means the captains of our souls.

It is, however, possible that the remedy for ills of con­scious purpose lies with the individual. There is what Freud called the royal road to the unconscious. He was referring to dreams, but I think we should lump together dreams and the creativity of art, or the perception of art, and poetry and such things. And I would include with these the best of religion. These are all activities in which the whole individual is involved. The artist may have a conscious purpose to sell his picture, even perhaps a conscious purpose to make it. But in the making he must necessarily relax that arrogance in favor of a creative experience in which his conscious mind plays only a small part.

We might say that in creative art man must experience himself—his total self—as a cybernetic model.

It is characteristic of the 1960s that a large number of people are looking to the psychedelic drugs for some sort of wisdom or some sort of enlargement of consciousness, and I think this symptom of our epoch probably arises as an attempt to compensate for our excessive purposiveness. But I am not sure that wisdom can be got that way. What is required is not simply a relaxation of consciousness to let the unconscious material gush out. To do this is merely to exchange one partial view of the self for the other partial view. I suspect that what is needed is the synthesis of the two views and this is more difficult.

My own slight experience of LSD led me to believe that Prospero was wrong when he said, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." It seemed to me that pure dream was, like pure purpose, rather trivial. It was not the stuff of which we are made, but only bits and pieces of that stuff. Our conscious purposes, similarly, are only bits and pieces.

The systemic view is something else again.

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* This lecture was given in August, 1968, to the London Conference on the Dialectics of Liberation.

moonlighTao

Vladimir Kush, Moonlight Sonata

Final Movement. The passionate ardor of pianist "inspires" the instrument, the folds of curtain, and figures of spectators, creating a sensation of imminent takeoff. The music reaches its peak emphasized by the solemn red coloring of the painting. Its streams soar to the concave mirror of the moon, and, focused by it, return to the scene. The reflected flow carries the magical energy of the moon, causing mysterious transformations all around. We see as the spectators are shrouding themselves in spectral cocoons, or acquiring something like butterfly wings. The play of light patches on the piano and glimmering reflections on the curtain create a unique sensation of a butterfly fluttering its wings.

the complexity from KaliYuga to Tao - II

12. Heraclitus: “live of death, die of life”
In this union of notions logically complex, there is a relationship between life and death.
I often quoted the illuminating phrase of Heraclitus, from the VIth century b.C.: “live of death, die of life”. It became recently intelligible, from the moment when we learned that our organism degrades its energy, not only to reconstitute its molecules, but that our cells themselves are degraded and that we produce new cells. We live from the death of our cells.
And this process of permanent regeneration, almost of permanent rejuvenation, is the process of life. What makes it possible to add to the very right formula of Bichat, saying: “life is the ensemble of the functions that fight against death”, this strange complement that presents us a logical complexity: “Integrating death to fight better against death”. What one again knows about this process is extremely interesting: it has been learned rather recently that cells that die are not only old cells; in fact apparently healthy cells receiving different messages from neighboring cells, “decide”, at a given moment, to commit suicide. They commit suicide and phagocytes devour their remains. Like this, the organism determines which cells must die before they have reached senescence. That is to say that the death of cells and their postmortem liquidation are included in the living organization.
There is a kind of phenomenon of self-destruction, of apoptosis, since this term has been taken from the vegetal world, indicating the split of the stems operated by trees in autumn so that dead leafs fall.
On the one hand, when there is an insufficiency of cellular deaths following different accidents and perturbations, there are a certain number of diseases that are deadly in the long run, like osteoporosis, various types of sclerosis, and certain cancers, where cells refuse to die, becoming immortal, forming tumors and go for a stroll in the form of metastases (It can seem that it is a revolt of cells against their individual death that lead to these forms of death of the organism). On the other hand, the excess of cellular deaths determine AIDS, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease.
You see at which point this relationship between life and death is complex: it is necessary for cells to die, but not too much! One lives between two catastrophes, the excess or insufficiency of mortality. One finds again the fundamentally epistemological problem of generalized complexity.

13. On non-trivial machines
Living beings are certainly machines, but unlike artificial machines that are trivial deterministic machines (where one knows the outputs when one knows the inputs), these are non-trivial machines (von Foerster) where one can predict innovative behaviors.
We are machines, this truth was already in L'homme-machine of La Mettrie. We are physical machines, thermal machines, we function at the temperature of 37'. But we are complex machines.
Von Neumann established the difference between living machines and artificial machines produced by technology: the components of the technical machines, having the good quality of being extremely reliable, go towards their degradation, towards their wear, from the very start of their operation.
Whereas the living machine, made up mainly by components far from reliable, degrading proteins-and one understands very well that this lack of reliability of proteins makes it possible to reconstitute them non stop-is able to be regenerated and repaired; it also goes towards death, but after a process of development. The key of this difference lies in the capacity of self-repair and self-regeneration. The word regeneration is capital here.
One can say that the characteristic of innovations that emerge in the evolution of life (which are determined by environmental changes, or by the irruption of multiple hazards), such as the appearance of the skeleton in vertebrates, wings in insects, birds, or bats, all these creations, are characteristic non-trivial machines. That is to say, it gives a new solution to insurmountable challenges without this solution.
All the important figures of human history, on the intellectual, religious, messianic, or politic levels, were non-trivial machines. One can advance that all the History of Humankind, which begins ten thousand years ago-is a non-trivial history, i.e. a history made of unforeseen, of unexpected events, of destructions and creations. The history of life that precedes it is a nontrivial history, and the history of the universe, where the birth of life and then of humankind are included, is a non-trivial history.
We are obliged to detrivialize knowledge and our worldview.

14. To complexify the notion of chaos
We have seen how the notion of system brings us to complexities of organization which themselves lead us to logical complexities. Let us look now at the notion of chaos, as it appears within chaos theory, and which comprises disorder and unpredictability. The beat of the wings of a butterfly in Melbourne can cause by a succession of chain processes a hurricane in Jamaica, for example.
Actually, I believe that the word chaos must be considered in its deep sense, its Greek sense. We know that in the Greek worldview, Chaos is at the origin of Cosmos. Chaos is not pure disorder, it carries within itself the indistinctness between the potentialities of order, of disorder, and of organization from which a cosmos will be born, which is an ordered universe.
The Greeks saw a bit too much order in the cosmos, which is effectively ordered because the immediate spectacle, the impeccable order of the sky that we see each night with the stars, is always in the same place. And if the planets are mobile they also come to the same place with an impeccable order. However, we know today with the widened conceptions of cosmic time that all this order is at the same time temporary and partial in a universe of movement, collision, transformation.
Chaos and Cosmos are associated - I have employed the word Chaosmos - there is also a circular relation between both terms. It is necessary to take the word chaos in a much deeper and more intense sense than that of physical chaos theory.

15. The need of contextualization
Let us take again the “complexus” term in the sense of “what is woven together”.
It is a very important word, which indicates that the breaking up of knowledge prevents from linking. and contextualizing.
The knowledge mode characteristic of disciplinary science isolates objects, one from another, and isolates them compared to their environment. One can even say that the principle of scientific experimentation allows to take a physical body in Nature, to isolate it in an artificial and controlled laboratory environment, and then study this object in function of perturbations and variations that one makes it undergo. This indeed makes it possible to know a certain number of its qualities and properties. But one can also say that this principle of decontextualization was ill-fated, as soon as it was ported to the living. The observation since 1960 by Jane Goodall of a tribe of chimpanzees in their natural environment could show the supremacy of observation (in a natural environment) over experimentation
(in a laboratory) for knowledge. A lot of patience was necessary so that Jane Goodall could perceive that chimpanzees had different personalities, with rather complex relations of friendship, of rivalry; a whole psychology, a sociology of chimpanzees, invisible to the studies in a laboratory or in a cage, appeared in their complexity.
The idea of knowing the living in their environment became capital in animal ethology. Let us repeat it, the autonomy of the living needs to be known in its environment.
From now on, becoming aware of the degradations that our technoeconomic development makes to the biosphere, we realize the vital link with this same biosphere that we believe to have reduced to the rank of manipulable object. If we degrade it, we degrade ourselves, and if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.
The need for contextualization is extremely important. I would even say that it is a principle of knowledge: Anybody who has made a translation in a foreign language will seek an unknown word in the dictionary; but with words being polysemous, it is not immediately known which is the good translation; the sense of the word will be sought in the sense of the
sentence in the light of the global sense of the text. Thought this play from text to word, and from text to context, and from context to word, a sense will crystallize. In other words, the insertion in the text and in the context is an evident cognitive necessity. Take for example the economy, the most advanced social science from a mathematical point of view, but which is isolated from human, social, historic, and sociologic contexts: its prediction power is extremely weak because the economy does not function in isolation: its forecasts need to be unceasingly revised, which indicates us the disability of a science that is very advanced but too closed.
More generally, mutual contextualization is lacking in the whole of social sciences.
I have often quoted the case of the Aswan dam because it is revealing and significant: it was built in Nasser’s Egypt because it would make it possible to regulate the course of a capricious river, the Nile, and to produce electric power for a country which had a great need for it. However, after some time, what happened? This dam retained a part of the silts that fertilized the Nile valley, which obliged the farming population to desert the fields and overpopulate large metropolises like Cairo; it retained a part of the fish that the residents ate; moreover today, the accumulation of silts weakens the dam and causes new technical problems. That does not mean that the Aswan dam should not have been built, but that all the decisions taken in a techno-economic context are likely to be disastrous by their consequences.
It is like the deviation of rivers in Siberia that the Soviet government made and where the perverse consequences are more important than the positive ones.
It is thus necessary to recognize the inseparability of the separable, at the historical and social levels, as it has been recognized at the microphysical level. According to quantum physics, confirmed by Aspect’s experiments, two microphysical entities are immediately connected one to the other although they are separated by space and time. Even more, one arrives to the idea that everything that is separated is at the same time inseparable.

16. The hologrammatic and dialogical principles
The hologrammic or hologrammatic principle should also be advanced, according to which not only a part is inside a whole, but also the whole is inside the part; just as the totality of the genetic inheritance is found in each cell of our organism, the society with its culture is inside the spirit of an individual.
We return again to the logical core of complexity which we will see, is dialogical: separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo sapiens-homo demens, etc.
It is here that the principle of the excluded middle reveals its limit. The excluded middle states “A cannot be A and not A”, whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-Jewish, he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. It is here that the dialogic is not the response to these paradoxes, but the means of facing them, by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and the productive play, sometimes vital, of complementary antagonisms.

17. For the sciences, a certain number of consequences
Regarding sciences, we can see a certain number of consequences.
First of all, classical science is somehow complex, even when it produces simplifying knowledge. Why?
Because science is a quadruped which walks on the following four legs: the leg of empiricism made of data, experimentation or observation; the leg of rationality, made of logically constituted theories; the leg of verification, always necessary; and the leg of imagination, because great theories are products of a powerful creative imagination. Thus science is complex, produced by a quadruped movement, which prevents it from solidifying.
The objective knowledge which is its idea, resulted in the need of eliminating
subjectivity, i.e. the emotional part inherent to each observer, to each scientist, but it also comprised the elimination of the subject, i.e. the being which conceives and knows. However, any knowledge, including objective, is at the same time a cerebral translation starting from data of the external world and a mental reconstruction, starting from certain organizing potentialities of the spirit. It is certain that the idea of a pure objectivity is utopian. Scientific objectivity is produced by beings who are subjects, within given historical conditions, starting from the rules of the scientific game. The great contribution of Kant was to show that the object of knowledge is co-constructed by our spirit. He indicated us that it is necessary to know knowledge to know its possibilities and limits. The knowledge of knowledge is a requirement of the complex thinking.
As Husserl indicated in the 30's, in particular in his conference on the crisis of European science, sciences developed extremely sophisticated means to know external objects, but no means to know themselves. There is no science of science, and even the science of science would be insufficient if it does not include epistemological problems. Science is a tumultuous building site, science is a process that could not be programmed in advance, because one can never program what one will find, since the characteristic of a discovery is its unexpectedness. This uncontrolled process has lead today to the development of potentialities of destruction and of manipulation, which must bring the introduction into science of a double conscience: a conscience of itself, and an ethical conscience.
Also, I believe that it will be necessary to arrive more and more to a scientific knowledge integrating the knowledge of the human spirit to the knowledge of the object which this spirit seizes and recognizing the inseparability between object and subject.

18. Two scientific revolutions introduced complexity de facto
I already indicated how the concept of complexity emerged in a marginal fashion in a sphere of mathematicians/engineers. It should be indicated now that the XXth century knew two scientific revolutions which de facto introduced complexity without, however, recognizing this notion that remains implicit.
The first revolution, after the thermodynamics of the XIXth century, is that of the microphysics and cosmophysics that introduced indeterminism, risk-where determinism reigned-and elaborated suitable methods to deal with the uncertainties met.
The second revolution is that which gathers disciplines and restores between them a common fabric. It begins in the second half of the XXth century. Thus in the 60's, Earth sciences designed Earth as a complex physical system, which makes it possible today to articulate geology, seismology, vulcanology, meteorology, ecology, etc. At the same time, ecology develops as a scientific knowledge bringing together data and information coming from different physical and biological disciplines in the conception of ecosystems. It makes it possible to conceive how an ecosystem either degrades, develops, or maintains its homeostasis. From the 70's, the ecological conception extends to the whole biosphere, necessarily introducing knowledge from the social sciences.
Although ecology, at the biosphere level, cannot make rigorous predictions, it can give us vital hypothesis, concerning, for example, global warming, which manifests itself by the melting of glaciers in the Antarctic or the Arctic. Thus ecology, cosmology, and Earth sciences have become poly-disciplinary sciences, even transdisciplinary. Sooner or later, this will arrive in biology, from the moment when the idea of self-organization will be established; this will arrive in the social sciences, although they are extremely resistant.
Finally, the observer, chased by the objectivity postulate, was introduced into certain sciences, such as microphysics where the observer perturbs what it observes. In the case of cosmology, even if one does not adhere to what Brandon Carter called the anthropic principle, which holds account of the place of humans in the universe, one is obliged to conceive that this universe, among its perhaps negligible possibilities, had the possibility of human life, perhaps only on this planet Earth, but perhaps also elsewhere.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this billowing cloud of cold interstellar gas and dust rising from a tempestuous stellar nursery located in the Carina Nebula, 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. This pillar of dust and gas serves as an incubator for new stars and is teeming with new star-forming activity.

Thus, the common fabric between the human, the living, and the Universe can be restored, which implies a complex conception capable at the same time to distinguish the human from the natural and to integrate it.

Li Liwei

19. The insertion of science in History
In addition, there is the problem of the insertion of the Sciences in human History.
You know that there are two conceptions of history of sciences, the internalist conception and the externalist conception. The internalist mode sees the development of sciences in isolation, only in function of their internal logic and their own discoveries. The externalist mode sees them in function of historical and social developments which determine the scientific developments.
I think that it is necessary to link both, and this is appropriate for other developments than those of sciences. Thus, some wanted to understand the perversion of the Soviet Union starting from internal factors, such as insufficiencies of the Marxist doctrine, limitations of that of Lenin. Others wanted to impute it to external elements such as the surrounding and hostility of the capitalist powers with regard to the Soviet Union or former elements such as the backwardness of tsarist Russia. Whereas the true cognitive game is to link these two aspects in a dialogical fashion.
If one continues to place oneself from the viewpoint of modern Western history of science, one sees how from its marginal and quasi-deviating birth in the XVIIth century, it is developed in the XVIIIth, introduced in universities in the XIXth, then in states and companies in the XXth, and how it becomes central and driving within human history in the form of techno-science, and produces not only all the major elements for a renewed knowledge of the world and beneficial effects for humanity, but also formidable and uncontrolled powers which threaten it.
I don’t know if I am right or wrong in retaking an expression of Vico, but it is necessary for us to arrive to the “Scienza Nuova”. Very precisely, Vico inscribed the historical perspective at the heart of the scienza nuova. It is necessary to amplify the idea of scienza nuova by introducing the interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving a science that does not suppress disciplines but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science which can at the same time distinguish and connect and where the transdisciplinarity is inseparable from complexity.
I repeat it, as much as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of complexity, as much a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it.

20. The link between science and philosophy
The link between science and philosophy has been broken. Still in the XVIIth century, the great scientists were at the same time great philosophers. Certainly, they did not identify Science and Philosophy. When Pascal made his experiments in Puy de Dome, he did not think about the bet problem. But in the times of Pascal, Gassendi, Leibniz, there was not this cut. This became a frightening ditch. The ditch of ignorance separates the scientific culture from the culture of the humanities.
But the current has started to be reversed: the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems: Why is there a universe out of nothing? How was this universe born from a vacuum which was not at the same time the vacuum? What is reality? Is the essence of the universe veiled or totally cognizable?
The problem of life is posed from now on in a complexity that exceeds biology: the singular conditions of its origin, the conditions of emergences of its creative powers. Bergson was mistaken by thinking that there was an élan vital, but was right while speaking about creative evolution. He could even have spoken about evolutionary creativity.
Today we can foresee the possibility of creating life. From the moment when it is believed that life is a process developed starting only from physicochemical matter under certain conditions, in underwater thermal vents or elsewhere, one can very well consider creating the physical, chemical, thermodynamic conditions which give birth to organisms gifted with qualities that one calls life. We can also foresee the possibility to modify the human being in its biological nature. Therefore, we have to meditate about life, as we never did it. And at the same time we must meditate about our relationship with the biosphere.
Thus all the most advanced sciences arrive to fundamental philosophical problems that they thought to have eliminated. They do not only find them, they renew them.
If one defines philosophy by the will and capacity of reflection, it is necessary that the reflectivity is also introduced into the sciences, which does not eliminate the relative autonomy of philosophy nor the relative autonomy of scientific procedures compared to philosophical procedures.
Finally and especially, any knowledge, including the scientific one, must comprise in itself an epistemological reflection on its foundations, principles, and limits.
Still today there is the illusion that complexity is a philosophical problem and not a scientific one. In a certain way, it is true, in a certain way, it is false. It is true when you place yourselves from the point of view of an isolated and separated object: the fact that you isolate and separate the object made the complexity to disappear: thus it is not a scientific problem from the point of view of a closed discipline and a decontextualized object. But, as soon as you start to connect these isolated objects, you are in front of the problem of complexity.

21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity
It is here that a second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity appears.
Restricted complexity is interested essentially in dynamical systems called complex. That is to say, it constitutes its own field, within the field of sciences.
But generalized complexity not only concerns all fields, but also relates to our knowledge as human beings, individuals, persons, and citizens. Since we have been domesticated by our education which taught us much more to separate than to connect, our aptitude for connecting is underdeveloped and our aptitude for separating is overdeveloped; I repeat that knowing, is at the same time separating and connecting, it is to make analysis and synthesis. Both are inseparable, and our atrophy of the capacity to connect is increasingly serious in a globalized, complexified mode, where it is a matter of generalized interdependence of everything and everyone.
The International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium has formulated a declaration of interdependence which it would wish to see promulgated by the United Nations. We must think the interdependence in all fields, including the complex relation between the parts and the whole. We need to be able to face uncertainties of life whereas nothing prepares us for it. We need to face complexity, including for action, whereas one opposes the cautionary principle to the risk principle, while Pericles had truly expressed the union of the two antagonistic principles when he said during a speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war: “we Athenians, we are capable of combining prudence and audacity, whereas the others are either timorous or bold”. It is the combination which we need. Also, precaution needs today sometimes much invention.
We need to deeply reform all our way of knowing and thinking.

22. The principle of ecology of action
The principle of ecology of action is, in my opinion, central: from the moment an action enters a given environment, it escapes from the will and intention of that which created it, it enters a set of interactions and multiple feedbacks and then it will find itself derived from its finalities, and sometimes to even go in the opposite sense. The ecology of action has a universal value, including for the development of sciences, whose destructive nuclear consequences were absolutely unexpected.
Think that when Fermi elucidated the structure of the atom in the 30's, it was a purely speculative discovery and he had by no means thought that this could allow the fabrication of an atomic bomb. However, a few years later, the same Fermi went to the United States to contribute to the fabrication of the atomic bomb that would be used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When Watson and Crick determined the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA, they thought that it was a great conquest of knowledge without any practical consequences. And hardly ten years after their discovery, the problem of genetic manipulations was posed in the biology community.
The ecology of action has a universal value. One can think of examples in our recent French history: a dissolution of the Parliament by President Chirac to have a governmental majority led to a socialist majority; a referendum made to win general support led to its rejection. Gorbachev tried a reform to save the Soviet Union but this one contributed to its disintegration. When one sees that a revolution was made in 1917 to suppress the exploitation of man by his fellow man, to create a new society, founded on the principles of community and liberty, and that this revolution, not only caused immense losses of blood, destruction, and repression by a police system, but, after seventy years, it led to its contrary, i.e. to a capitalism even more fierce and savage than that of the tsarist times, and with a return of religion! Everything that this revolution wanted to destroy resurrected.
How not to think about the ecology of action!

23. Creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”
The reform of the spirit seems to me absolutely necessary.
Once that I had understood that the reform of thought, deep work that I carried out in La Méthode, is a necessity, I accepted the offer of a Minister of Education when he called me for the reform of the content of secondary education. I tried to introduce my ideas of reform of thought into an educational project. I saw its total failure-finally it did not failed, it was not applied!-That pushed me to reflect even more. I wrote a book called La Tete bien faite (The head well made), then on the initiative of UNESCO I made a book called Les Sept savoirs nécessaires a l’éducation du futur (The seven knowledges necessary in the education of the future).
Following a University which will be created on these principles in Mexico, I had the more restricted but maybe more necessary idea of creating “Institutes of fundamental culture”, which would be sheltered in a University or independent, addressing everybody, i.e. before University or during University or after University, students, citizens, members of trade unions, entrepreneurs, everybody.
Why the word “fundamental culture”? Because it is that what is missing. In fact, it is the most vital matter to be taught, the most important to face life, and which is ignored by education.

1. Knowledge as a source of error or illusion; nowhere the traps of knowledge are taught, which come owing to the fact that all knowledge is translation and reconstruction.
2. Rationality, as if it were an obvious thing, whereas we know that rationality knows its perversion, its infantile or senile diseases.
3. Scientificity. What is science, its frontiers, its limits, its possibilities, its rules. Moreover, there is an abundant literature, but which has never been consulted by the scientists who are recruited at CNRS for example. Most of the time, they do not know anything about the polemic between Niels Bohr and Einstein, the works of Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, etc.
4. What is complexity.

And also:

• A teaching on “what is the human identity and condition”, which is not found anywhere.
• A teaching on the global age, not only today’s globalization, but all its antecedents starting from the conquest of America, the colonization of the world, its current phase, and its future prospects.
• A teaching on human understanding.
• A teaching concerning the confrontation of uncertainties in all the fields: sciences, everyday life, history (we have lost the certainty of progress, and the future is completely uncertain and obscure).
• A teaching on the problems of our civilization.

That is for me the fundamental teaching that can aid the reform of the spirit, of thought, of knowledge, of action, of life.

24. I conclude: generalized complexity integrates restricted complexity
Unfortunately, restricted complexity rejects generalized complexity, which seems to the former as pure chattering, pure philosophy. It rejects it because restricted complexity did not make the epistemological and paradigmatic revolution which complexity obliges. That will be done without a doubt. But in the meantime, we see that the problematic of complexity have invaded all our horizons, and I repeat “problematic”, because it is an error to think that one will find in complexity a method that can be applied automatically to the world and anything.
Complexity is a certain number of principles which help the autonomous spirit to know. Whereas a program destroys the autonomy of the one who seeks, the problematic of complexity stimulates an autonomous strategy, obliges in the field of action-once that one knows that the ecology of action can pervert the best intentions-to reconsider our decisions like bets and incites us to develop an adequate strategy to more or less control the action.
In other words, in all the fields, I would say “help yourself and the complexity will help you”, which has nothing to do with the mechanical application of a program or a rule. It is a deep reform of our mental functioning, of our being.
These ideas now marginal, deviating, begin to constitute a tendency still in minority, or rather tendencies since there are several paths to go towards complexity. These ideas, these deviations, can be developed and become cultural, political, and social forces.
The probabilities of a global future are extremely alarming: our spaceship is pulled by four engines without any control: science, technology, economy, and the search for profit - all this under conditions of chaos since the techno-civilizational unification of the planet, under the Western push, causes singular cultural resistances and cultural and religious re-closings.
The planet is in crisis with all the possibilities, ones regressive and destructive, others stimulant and fertile, such as invention, creation, new solutions.

25. We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis
We should even apprehend the possibilities of metamorphosis because we have completely astonishing examples of it from the past. The change in certain places where there have been demographic concentrations in the Middle East, in the Indus basin, in China, in Mexico, in Peru, from prehistoric societies of hundreds of men, without cities, without state, without agriculture, without army, without social class, to enormous historical societies with cities, agriculture, army, civilization, religion, philosophy, works of art ... that constituted a sociological metamorphosis.
Perhaps we are going towards a meta-historical metamorphosis suitable for the birth of a society-world at a global scale.
I would say that complexity does not put us only in the distress of the uncertain, it allows us to see besides the probable, the possibilities of the improbable, because of those which have been in the past and those that can be found again in the future.
We are in an epoch of doubtful and uncertain combat.
That makes one think of the Pacific war, after the Japanese had broken into the Pacific Islands and had begun to threaten California, there was a gigantic naval fight over 200 kilometers along the Midways between the Japanese and American fleets: battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, planes. The global vision was impossible for both of them: there were sunken Japanese ships, sunken American ships, planes that did not find the enemy fleet; in short, total confusion, the battle divided in several fragments. At a given moment, the Japanese Admiral realizing his losses in battleships and planes, thought that they were defeated, thus called for retreat. But the Americans, who had lost as much, were not the first to think that they were defeated; after the Japanese retreat, they were victorious.
Well, the outcome of what will happen, we cannot conceive it yet! We can always hope and act in the direction of this hope.
The intelligence of complexity, isn’t it to explore the field of possibilities, without restricting it with what is formally probable? Doesn’t it invite us to reform, even to revolutionize?

the complexity from KaliYuga to Tao - I