Arthur Noll
Once again, I must disagree with Dee Hock. However, I also agree with him on something, as we will get to later in this article. But I want to start with the disagreement, it is more fundamental. He feels that mechanism is an outdated view of the universe, which has lead to many of our problems. I cannot agree with this.
Let’s look at this from a slightly different perspective. Mechanism says that there are rules for how things move. Often they are called laws of physics. Now, rather than look at examples of these, let us try to imagine a universe in which there were no rules, no mechanism. A thought experiment. I could press a key on the keyboard, an ìA” for example, and I would not get an ìA”. No reliable mechanism. My brain would give a signal to my hands, and my toes would move, or perhaps nothing at all. No reliable mechanism. My whole body might come apart, no rules for the attraction of the various components. There would be nothing to say that gravity exists, the whole world would never have been. In fact, when you think about it this way, without mechanism, everything we take for granted would not be possible.
The universe, and the living things in it, operate according to mechanism. Things happen in repeatable, reliable ways. The idea that this is not so, leads to absurdities. Even those who claim that the laws of physics can be suspended, fill in the gap with other laws, mystical laws. No evidence of these have been found, but if they were to be found, they would be expected to follow rules. To do otherwise would be the vanishing of the universe as we know it.
What we can do, and often do, is miss-measure what is happening. We think we have seen the pattern of how things work, and are wrong. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a pattern, that there isn’t mechanism, it only means we haven’t seen it properly. Whenever a creature walks into a trap, this is what has happened. The mechanism of the trap has not been seen properly. What looks like a good thing, the bait, is actually a bad thing for the creature. The bait was not an easy bit of food for continued living. The smooth looking pathway ahead was not really safe passage to more food or shelter. There are unnoticed mechanisms actually there that will capture or kill.
It is the inability to see the mechanisms of things that lead a person to despairingly say that there is none. But blindness doesn’t mean that things don’t exist.
We see a pattern of movement sometimes, that we call chaos. We also see movements that we call orderly. We have an understanding of something we call creativity. What mechanism underlies these conditions?
For the first, chaos, think of what you see with regard to chaos. What I see is everything is going in many different directions, things are banging into each other, things are getting broken sometimes and sticking together other times. But what gets stuck together is likely to be just as quickly torn apart by something else. It seems at first that there is no mechanism, that it is all random. But closer observation shows mechanism. Things are still happening according to rules. The system has a lot of energy in it. The attractions and repulsions of the objects in the system are not large compared to their kinetic energy, and they are forced to bounce around with this energy. If things get hit in the right way, they may stick, they may break. But things are happening with such energy that as soon as something sticks, something else may hit it and tear it apart. Chaos is the result of lots of energy in a system.
If we take away some of the kinetic energy of the system, the objects are moving slower. Attractive forces bring things together smoothly, without breakage, or with only partial breakage. Things will go in orbit around each other, you get swirls and helix shaped movements. These movements can be like a dance, and we are apt to label it orderly. All the forces of kinetic movement, the forces of attraction and repulsion, are in balance. Order and harmony are the result of balance.
Creativity comes when something new appears. Two or more things are combined that haven’t been seen before in the system. If we have a system where everything is moving in a perfect dance, everything in its place, creativity means that something has to move out of its place, and come together with something else. For that to happen, something must have happened, either energy applied to move the object out of its movement and to join with something different, or the object lost energy to continue in it´s previous path, and something else ran into it, making something new. Dee Hock, and Bill Ellis, write of creativity on the edge of chaos, and this is partly correct. Creativity can happen in the loss of energy of a component of an orderly system as well, it can come on the edge of freezing, of the system losing energy. But it is a mechanistic thing. In a perfectly ordered, perfectly balanced system, there will be no creativity. If there is too much energy in the system, there will be chaos, with lots of creativity, but also lots of destruction. With chaos, there is more destruction than creativity. If there is too little energy, creativity is possible, but it may just be frozen in place. Western societies have looked to creativity on the edge of chaos. Eastern societies have often looked to the creativity that can come with slowing down, with meditation, sitting still, letting things come.
In seeing this pattern, other things are brought to understanding. It has often been noted that creativity can be linked with insanity. The mind of a creative person can be full of energy, plastic, unfixed on a certain reality. Many things seem possible. When the realm of what seems possible to this person goes beyond the accepted understanding of the rules of reality for the rest of the group, we call it insanity. But again, this is a matter of proper measurement. What the group calls insane might be a wrong measurement on their part. As I have written before, I feel that our monetary system of measurement is an inherently flawed system of measurement, which gives results that are not in keeping with the laws of evolution, that sustainability and energy efficiency are required. A person might be so fully involved with the measure of money that it is impossible for them to step back and look at it as one of many possible systems. They could easily see me as insane, that I see a reality that cannot be. I see them as blindly running into limits as the bird running into a window, and feel that their actions are insane, that they are not seeing the whole mechanism, not seeing traps and false paths. Both of us are coming from different views of reality. Who sees properly? We run the experiment and see. For this experiment, you bet your life on the outcome.
In my view, science can give a creative person an anchor. Creativity is possible, things can be brought together in never before seen ways, but it must happen within the laws of physics. For the path of life, things must happen within the rules of energy efficiency and sustainability. Creativity is inherently disruptive of existing order, if there is too much of it, we are getting too close to chaos, or freezing, for life to exist. Life exists in the balance of forces. Too much energy and we are torn apart, too little and we freeze. We need some creativity, to solve problems that come in trying to keep our balance. Picking up one foot to move forward, we start to fall, we are unbalanced. Creativity is the slight imbalance that enables us to solve problems, to move around them. But too much of it brings disorder, chaos, or if too many stop moving, spend hours and days in meditation, society will be frozen, not have enough energy to live.
The universe is a mechanistic place. If we haven’t found the mechanism, we just need to keep looking until we do find it.
We have the answers for our problems. Most of humanity has too much energy to be attracted to reading them, too much attraction to other things to try them. They move toward using more energy like the moth to the flame, like the pig to the food in the trap, blind to the trap, blind to the chaos that waits for them.
“Seek, and you will find, knock, and it will be opened to you.” Jesus of Nazareth