The Ghost in the Machine (30 page)

The three domains of creativity form a continuum. The boundaries
between science and art, between the AH reaction and the AHA reaction,
are fluid, whether we consider architecture or cooking or psychiatry or
the writing of history. There is nowhere a sharp break where witticism
changes into wit, or where science stops and art begins. The emotional
climate in the three domains shows equally continuous transitions. At
one end of the spectrum the coarse practical joker is motivated by
self-assertive malice; the artist at the opposite extreme, by the craving
for self-transcendence. The motivation of the scientist operating in the
middle region of the continuum is a well-balanced combination of the two:
ambition and competitiveness neutralised by self-transcending devotion
to his task. Science is the neutral art.
Science, the hoary cliché goes, aims at truth, art at beauty. However,
the criteria of truth, such as verification by experiment, are not as
hard and clean as we tend to believe. The same experimental data can
often be interpreted in more than one way -- and that is why the history
of science echoes with as many impassioned controversies as the history
of literary criticism. Moreover, the verification of a discovery comes
after
the act; the creative act itself is for the scientist, as for
the artist, a leap into the dark, where both are equally dependent on
their fallible intuitions. And the greatest mathematicians and physicists
have confessed that at those decisive moments, when taking the plunge,
they were guided not by logic, but by a sense of beauty which they were
unable to define. Vice versa, painters and sculptors, not to mention
architects, have always been guided, and often obsessed, by scientific or
pseudo-scientific theories and criteria of truth -- the golden section,
the laws of perspective, Dürer's and Leonardo's laws of proportion in
representing the human body, Cézanne's doctrine that everything in nature
is modelled on the cylinder and sphere, Braque's alternative theory that
cubes should be substituted for spheres. And the same is true, of course,
for literature, from the formal laws imposed on Greek tragedy to various
recent schools, and equally for the rules of harmony and counterpoint
in music. In other words, the experience of truth, however subjective,
must be present for the experience of beauty to arise; and vice versa:
an 'elegant' solution of a problem gives rise in the connoisseur to the
experience of beauty. Intellectual illumination and emotional catharsis
are complementary aspects of an indivisible process.
I have been trying in this chapter to give an outline of a theory of
creativity which I have developed in earlier work; and to carry it a
step further. An outline must necessarily be sketchy; all I can do is
to refer the interested reader to the original -- and to apologise for
having cribbed a few passages from it.
XIV
THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

The great questions are those an intelligent child asks and, getting
no answers, stops asking.
George Wald

Having travelled this far, the reader may protest that it is sacrilegious
to call the creation of a Brahms symphony or Newton's discovery of the laws
of motion an act of self-repair, and to compare it to the mutation
of a sea-squirt larva, the regeneration of a salamander limb, or the
rehabilitation of patients by psychotherapy. On the contrary, I believe
that this overall view of biological and mental evolution reveals
the working of creative forces all along the line towards an optimal
realisation of the potentials of living matter and living minds -- a
universal tendency towards 'spontaneously developing states of greater
heterogeneity and complexity' (Herrick [1]). These sober words of a great
physiologist point to one of the basic facts of life which science had
long lost from sight, and is still slow in re-discovering.
The 'Second Law'
The gospel of flat-earth science was Clausius' famous Second Law of
Thermodynamics. It asserted that the universe is running down like
a clockwork affected by metal fatigue, because its energy is being
steadily, inexorably degraded, dissipated into heat, until it will
finally dissolve into a single, shapeless, homogeneous bubble of gas of
uniform temperature just above absolute zero, inert and motionless --
the cosmic
Wärmetod
. Only in recent times did science begin
to recover from the hypnotic effect of this nightmare, and to realise
that the Second Law
applies only in the special case of so-called
'closed systems'
(such as a gas enclosed in a perfectly isolated
container). But no such closed systems exist even in inanimate nature, and
whether or not the universe as a whole is a closed system in this sense
is anybody's guess. All living organisms, however, are 'open systems',
that is to say, they maintain their complex form and functions through
continuous exchanges of energies and material with their environment.*
Instead of 'running down' like a mechanical clock that dissipates its
energies through friction, the living organism is constantly 'building
up' more complex substances from the substances it feeds on, more complex
forms of energies from the energies it absorbs, and more complex patterns
of information -- perceptions, feelings, thoughts -- from the input of
its receptor organs.

* The term 'open system' in this technical sense is of course quite
unrelated to the concept of infinite regress in open-ended
hierarchies.

'Hierarchical organisation on the one hand, and the characteristics
of open systems on the other, are fundamental principles of living
nature, and the advancement of theoretical biology will depend mainly
on the development of a theory of these two fundamentals.' [2] This was
written many years ago by von Bertalanffy, one of the pioneers of the new
orientation in biology, but it was not greeted with much enthusiasm. The
idea that organisms, in contrast to machines, were primarily
active
instead of being merely
reactive
, that instead of passively adapting
to their environment they were 'creative in the sense that new patterns
of structure and behaviour are constantly fabricated' (Herrick [3]),
was profoundly distasteful to the Zeitgeist. These 'open systems' which
were capable of maintaining themselves indefinitely in a state of dynamic
equilibrium sounded suspiciously like perpetual-motion machines -- ruled
out forever by that implacable Second Law. That this Law did not apply
to living matter, and was in a sense
reversed
in living matter, was
indeed hard to accept by an orthodoxy still convinced that all phenomena
of life could ultimately be reduced to the laws of physics. It was in
fact a physicist, not a biologist, the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger,
who summed up the position in his celebrated paradox: 'What an organism
feeds on is negative entropy.' [4] Now
entropy
('transformed energy')
is the name for degraded energy which has been dissipated by friction and
other wasteful processes into the random motion of molecules, and which
cannot be retrieved. In other words, entropy is a measure of energy waste,
of order degraded into disorder. Clausius' Second Law can be expressed
by saying that the entropy of a closed system always tends to increase
towards a maximum, when all order will have vanished as in the chaotic
motion of gas molecules;* so if the universe is a closed system, it must
eventually 'unwind' itself from cosmos into chaos.

* The word 'gas' was actually derived from the Greek chaos.

Thus entropy became a key-concept of mechanistically orientated science
-- its alias for Thanatos, the God of Death. 'Negative entropy', then,
is a typically perverse way of referring to the power of life to 'build
up
' complex systems out of simpler elements, structured patterns
out of shapelessness, order out of disorder. Equally characteristic is
the fact that Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics
(see
p. 98f
)
defined information as 'essentially a negative entropy'. [5] In modern
communication theory, entropy is equated with 'noise' which causes a
waste of information (it may be acoustic noise, like a hum on the radio
receiver, or 'visual noise', like the flickering of the TV image). Our
perceptions, then, become 'negative noises', knowledge becomes negative
ignorance, amusement the absence of boredom, and cosmos the absence
of chaos. But whatever the terminology, the fact remains that living
organisms have the power to build up ordered, coherent perceptions and
complex systems of knowledge out of the chaos of sensations impinging
on them; life sucks information from the environment as it feeds on
its substances and synthesises its energies. The same irrepressible
'building-up' tendency is manifested in phylogenesis, in the phenomena
of evolution by initiative, the slow progress towards more complex forms
and functions, the emergence of new levels in the organismic hierarchy
and of new methods of co-ordination, resulting in greater independence
from, and mastery of, the environment.
We need not be unduly upset about the use of negatives to describe
these palpably positive processes, because it merely reflects the
scientist's unconscious dread of falling into the heresy of vitalism,
of reverting to Aristotle's entelechies, Leibnitz' monads, or Bergson's
élan vital
. There would indeed be nothing to be gained by a romantic
revival of concepts which suffer from what Whitehead once called
'misplaced concreteness'. It seems wiser to stick to the more cautious
and non-committal formulations of that élan by hard-boiled empiricists,
who would nevertheless refuse to believe that the earth is flat and that
evolution from randomness to order is the work of random events. Let me
add to the list of those whom I have already quoted, Herbert Spencer's
Law of Evolution as 'an integration of matter . . . from an indefinite,
incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity'. [6]
The German biologist Woltereck coined the term 'anamorphosis' for the
primary and ubiquitous trend in Nature towards the emergence of more
complex forms; L.L. Whyte called it 'the fundamental principle of the
development of pattern';* Einstein rejected the concept of randomness by
his 'refusal to believe that God plays dice with the world'; Schrödinger
was led to postulate the existence of an ego which ultimately 'controls
the motions of the atoms'. [6b] Lastly, to quote von Bertalanffy again:
'According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the general direction
of physical events is towards decrease of order and organisation. In
contrast to this, a direction towards increasing order seems to be
present in evolution.' [7]

* 'Two major contrasted tendencies are evident in natural processes,
towards local order and towards uniformity of general
disorder.  The first is displayed in all processes where
a region of order tends to differentiate itself from a less
ordered environment.  This is seen in crystallisation, in chemical
combination, and in most organic processes. The second tendency is
displayed in the processes of radiation and diffusion, and leads
towards a uniformity of thermal disorder. The two tendencies
normally work in opposed directions, the first producing regions of
differentiated order and the second dispersing them' (Whyte [6a]).

 

 

In the present theory this directive factor is called the Integrative
Tendency. I have tried to show that it is inherent in the concept of
hierarchic order, and manifested on every level, from the symbiosis
of organelles in the cell, to ecological communities and human societies.
Every living holon has the dual tendency to preserve and assert its
individuality, such as it is, but at the same time to function as an
integrated part of an existing whole, or an evolving whole.

 

 

This much, I think, one can say with some confidence. Beyond that,
the beginnings of the evolutionary story are hidden behind the big bang
with which the universe started, if it started that way, or behind the
continuous creation of matter out of nothing, if that is the way it
is. Evolution, as the cliché goes, is a journey of unknown origin to an
unknown destination, a sailing along a vast ocean; but we can at least
map the route which has carried us from the sea-cucumber stage to the
conquest of the moon; and to deny that there is a wind blowing which
makes the sails move is not only a rash hypothesis, but also a sign of
metaphysical churlishness.

 

 

But whether we say that the wind, coming from a distant past, pushes the
boat along, or whether we say that it drags it along into the future,
is a matter of convenience. The purposiveness of all vital processes
-- the striving of the blastula to grow into a chicken, regardless
of the obstacles and hazards to which it is exposed, the resourceful
improvisations of animals and men to reach the target of their endearours,
might lead the unprejudiced observer to the conclusion that the pull of
the future is as real, and sometimes more decisive than the pressure
of the past. The pressure may be compared to the force exerted by a
compressed spring, the pull to that of an expanded spring, threaded on
the axis of time. Neither of them is more or less mechanistic than the
other. Modern physics is re-thinking its ideas about time. If the future
is completely determined in the Laplacian sense, then one description is
as valid as the other. If it is indeterminate in the Heisenbergian sense,
and there is an unknown factor operating within the air bubbles in the
stream of causality, it may be influenced by the future as much as by the
past. We ought to try to keep an open mind about causality and finality,
even if the
Zeitgeist
frowns on us.*

 

* It is interesting to note that Waddington in a recent book argues
in favour of a 'quasi-finalistic' view. [8]

 

 

The Swing of the Pendulum

 

 

In his book