GOOD WILL QUANTUMS PT. 2

I gave one definition of the word "potentiality" in Part One, but I was unaware when I gave the term a Jungian-Fryean connotation that it also had jargonistic applications in the world of quantum mechanics.  Not being heavily into quantum mechanics, I hadn't encountered the datum stated in the Wikipedia article: that David Bohm and Basil Hiley defined "quantum potential/ potentiality" as "an information potential which acts upon a quantum particle." I did not have this in mind when I invoked the metaphor of the quantum particle in the essay THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DYNAMICITY, but the Bohm-Hiley statement provides a strong parallel to one of my long-stated statements about the relationship of literary archetypes to the information that they can be made to convey, as referenced in JUNG LOVE, FIRST LOVE. 

When I wrote QUANTUM THEORY, I was simply seeking to provide symmetry. I had established that I regarded mythicity as a discourse within the combinatory mode, and it eventually occurred to me that dynamicity could equally be defined as a discourse, but one within the corresponding mode of the dynamic mode. In THEORY I cited various ways in which I perceived "power" as taking different discursive forms within various works within the same genres: comparing, for instance, the "poor discourse" of the Shooter-Zeck SECRET WARS to the "good discourse" of the Lee-Kirby FANTASTIC FOUR. In essence, I represented the two modes principally with reference to Jung's two "irrational functions" when I stated:

Mythicity= the discourse of symbolic constructions

Dynamicity= the discourse of quantum constructions.

I did not draw any parallels in THEORY between the symbolizing nature of the "intuition function," nor to the sensory nature of the "sensation function." I used the term "quantum constructions" simply because in physics the word "quantum" is defined as "the minimum amount of any physical entity involved in an interaction." Since I was speaking of both mythicity and dynamicity as relationships between literary phenomena, I coined the term "quantum constructions" as short-hand for the ways in which different entities interact with one another on the plane of dynamicity, be it through direct violence, like that of a superhero, or through indirect influence, as per my example of Ibsen's HEDDA GABLER.

However, in the ensuing months I continued meditating on the subject of the four potentialites that I extrapolated from Jung's four functions. Many writers (not least Jung) had opined that the rational function of thinking developed out of the irrational function of intuition, but not as much had been written about a corresponding relationship between the rational function of feeling and the irrational function of sensation. Indeed, my initial statement of the potentialities from FOUR BY FOUR might have suggested too much distinction between the four:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of sensations.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of discrete personalities.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of abstract ideas.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbols.

Slowly the logical symmetry settled in. If "symbolic constructions" are at the root of "ideational constructions," then there must be a parallel between the other two functions. What I initially called "quantum constructions" originally implied simply the perceiving subject's experience of his own body and other bodies as giving the subject either pleasant or unpleasant sensations. "Discrete personalities" was a reference was based in my understanding of Jung's interpretation of feeling as a more rational meditation as to WHY one's own body or other bodies became a source of a variety of sensations, including those situations in which the pleasant and unpleasant might intertwine. At the time I choose not to delve into PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES to review Jung's position, given that my extrapolation of the potentialities is not strictly Jungian anyway.

My solution to the problem of philosophical symmetry, then, is to propose that all four of the potentialities can be viewed as means by which the perceiving subject-- whether a real person or a literary construct-- sorts out different *QUANTA* of information that the subject encounters in the world. But the solution comes with another problem: how are these quanta at once alike and yet different?

One cornerstone of my theory is the rethinking of Aristotle's "pity and terror" into what I consider a more pleasing terminology: that of "sympathetic affects" and "antipathetic affects," as explored in this 2013 essay.  Another Wikipedia essay states that the term "affect" has in psychology assorted connotations.

Many theorists (e.g., Lazarus, 1982) consider affect to be post-cognitive: elicited only after a certain amount of cognitive processing of information has been accomplished. In this view, such affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions (Brewin, 1989). Some scholars (e.g., Lerner and Keltner 2000) argue that affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive: initial emotional responses produce thoughts, which produce affect. In a further iteration, some scholars argue that affect is necessary for enabling more rational modes of cognition (e.g., Damasio 1994).

Plainly the function of sensation as Jung and I conceive it is entirely "pre-cognitive," while that of feeling is "post-cognitive." It doesn't help me at all to use 'affect" in both senses, so from now on I will take the first-stated position: "affects" are *quanta* that belong to the post-cognitive function of feeling. In contrast, the function of sensation, being non-judgmental, is concerned rather with dynamicity in its purest state, as stimuli that either enhance or detract from the subject's life-quality. This brings me back to Kant's concept of dynamicity as "might" or "strength," and thus I reconfigure the earlier statement of the potentialities thusly:

The KINETIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of strength-quanta.

The DRAMATIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of affect-quanta.

The DIDACTIC (formerly "thematic") is a potentiality that describes the relationships of idea-quanta.

The MYTHOPOEIC is a potentiality that describes the relationships of symbol-quanta.

Within a fictional context, as stated before, all of these quanta are, unlike real energy-quanta, only real insofar as readers/audiences experience them as incarnations of the author's *WILL,* as stated in SEVEN WAYS FROM SCHOPENHAUER.  This "unified field theory" of the four potentialities will probably not inspire in critics the degree of enthusiasm quantum physicists experience as they cover a similar unification between the "four physical forces," but such a theory does make it somewhat easier to talk about the different forms of "will" which creators choose to emphasize.

As a closing note, I return to this statement from the first GOOD WILL QUANTUMS:

...I perceive a general principle: that density is the means by which the reader subconsciously rates one creator above another: because the reader believes that Creator A can better describe a set of relationships so "densely" that it takes on the quality of "lived experience."

But although "density/complexity" is the primary criterion of fictional excellence in any potentiality, there is a role for Raymond Durgnat's "aesthetic of simplicity." Simplicity is the mode or modes through whcih an author seeks to communicate complexity in a pleasing manner, so that the reader absorbs the complexity without the sense of having it forced down his throat. More on this point later.

WITH ENFOLDED HANDS

This essay's title is derived from that of a SF novelette from 1947, "With Folded Hands," by Jack Williamson.  "Enfolding," it seems to me, is a better word to describe the interaction of the three phenomenalities than "underlie," as used here:

...I'll be dealing in more detail with the ways in which the naturalistic inevitably underlies the other two phenomenalites, albeit without defining them.

Where "underlie" implies stratification and hence an arbitrary separation, "enfolding" has a more organic connotation. Aristotle famously illustrated his notions of teleology with the image of an acorn, within which the pattern of an oak tree is "enfolded," even though said pattern cannot be seen from the seed itself.

Continuing the seed metaphor, here's a cutaway I found online, this time of a wheat kernel:

I like this image just because it has three distinct parts to it-- germ, bran, and endosperm-- all of which are interdependent in the sense that you take one of them away, and you have no seed.

Now, as I've noted in my essays on Todorov, like this one, that his theory of metaphenomenal literature implies that "the Real" not so much "underlies" as "undermines" other phenomenalities, which are seen as examples of Freudian disavowal.

It's true that what I call the naturalistic cannot be avoided. Even the most marvelous constructs in literature depend on some form of causality. We as readers don't know how or why the Cheshire Cat disappears, but even though his smile lingers for a very long time, eventually it does go away, thus duplicating in essence what would happen if a real cat simply got up and left. All literary phenomenalities inevitably reference the principle of causal coherence.

However, even in real life there's some doubt as to whether causal coherence is the *actual" ground of all real-world experience. The late physicist David Bohm proposed the idea that physical existence, which he called "the Explicate Order," might be "enfolded" within a greater "Implicate Order:"

Bohm's theory of the Implicate Order stresses that the cosmos is in a state of process. Bohm's cosmos is a "feedback" universe that continuously recycles forward into a greater mode of being and consciousness.

Bohm believes in a special cosmic interiority. It *is* the Implicate Order, and it implies enfoldment into everything. Everything that is and will be in this cosmos is enfolded within the Implicate Order. There is a special cosmic movement that carries forth the process of enfoldment and unfoldment (into the explicate order). This process of cosmic movement, in endless feedback cycles, creates an infinite variety of manifest forms and mentality. -- THE COSMIC PLENUM, on the site Stoa del Sol.

In literature, of course, the Implicate Order would be the totality of what a given author's will seeks to express. Some authors might be entirely satisfied with depicting only the naturalistic aspects of phenomena. Others might hew closely to the naturalistic but would allow for just enough ambivalence about the intelligibility of that phenomenality to give birth to "the uncanny." And finally, a third type of author would be invested in things that are marvelous enough to defy both the causal principles of coherence and intelligibility-- though, as I say, it's not only impossible to create a fantasy pure enough to defy all the "rules," it would also be impossible for anyone to read or view it.

More on this theme as examples of enfoldment occur to me.

LET FREEDOM RIDE, PT. 1

In NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4 I reflected on the topic of "free will."  At times Stuart Kauffmann uses this concept accurately, as a way of expressing a subject's "agency."  However, his argument takes on some confused aspects thanks to his quotation of Aristotle.

If every event, mental or physical, has sufficient antecedent causes, then as Aristotle said, there can be no "unmoved mover." But free will is supposed to be just such an unmoved mover, free to do what it chooses, hence an "uncaused mental cause" of our actions. This led the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza, and others since him, to conclude that free will is an illusion.

For the time being I'll presume that Kauffman's summation of Aristotle is accurate on this point, but the use of the phrase "unmoved mover"-- usually employed as a description for a God who creates the universe out of nothing-- confuses the issue as to what would be involved in an "uncaused mental cause."

Following the logic of Kant expressed at the begining of CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, it should always be a given that even if there is a core of "agency" within a given subject, that subject is always vulnerable to the influences of the contingent world in which he exists.  It goes without saying that this "mover" can never be "unmoved."


What I believe Kauffman means to say is that the "free will" expressed by a subject's given choice of his actions is not ENTIRELY caused by contingent factors.  This would be the attitude expressed by psuedo-scientists like Mickey Marx (the subject's will to choose is a manifestation of his society) and Ziggy Freud (the subject's will to choose is a manifestation of his familial upbringing).  This attempt to reduce the will of the subject to an epiphenomenon spawned by a greater phenomenon would not have been possible until the birth of Western science, which as noted here took on greater cultural significance than ever before once science began to deliver to humankind an increasing control over the physical world.

Kant was as aware as anyone as to the influence of contigent physical factors, but he still believed that free will-- and by extension, the general concept of freedom-- was a factor in its own right, one subsumed by his categorial imperative.

Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.

Kant is problematic for moderns in part because of his rigidity about the nature of his proposed "universal law."  Still, Kant emphasizes, as Marx and Freud do not, that it is possible to exercise free will in spite of compulsion.  Marx and Freud, being pseudo-scientists, want to presume the primacy of compulsion, in order to promote their theoretical constructs.

One need not speak of being "unmoved," since this is tantamount to an imputation of omnipotence.  Kauffman is on surer ground to speak of an "uncaused mental cause," for in this view the subject's exercise of "free will" is an expression of its inner nature.  This nature, by Kauffman's own logic, is not something bestowed upon the subject by a creator-god, but is rather a concatenation of all those factors-- causal and acausal-- that have made the subject of an individual, willing creature.  One may say that a given choice has been "caused" by the nature of the subject, but it is "uncaused" in the sense of reductive science; i.e., it has not been produced by forces/phenomena outside the subject's compass. 

There is a possible objection to Kauffman's philosophy.  In REINVENTING THE SACRED he does not manage to show in what way his principal of "quantum coherence"-- proposed as a principle that may have contributed to the formation of the "open thermodynamic systems" of living organisms -- makes the subject's will an "uncaused mental cause."  In the view of most reductivists, if quantum-energy factors did influence the formation of life on our planet, those factors would just be another set of contingent influences, as much as the sun's radiation or the presence of oxygen.

Kauffman repeatedly explains his title by saying that humans do not need supernatural forces to explain life any more, but that humans should regard their own "agency" as sacred.  He repeats, again and again, that human systems of value are not irrelevant epiphenomena, that they do not lose their meaning simply because all humans are composed of subatomic particles.  But Kauffman is not able to say just how a given system of value remains significant.  If one society forbids any form of incestual marriage, and another society permits certain forms, surely both of these societies have assigned value to their cultural practices; both are results of "willing" and "agency."  By Kant's "universal law," one of these must be right and the other wrong. Kauffman does not say this, and in fact refutes Kant on this point.  But he does not solve the knotty problem as to how systems of value can contend with each other, and yet remain individually significant.

For a possible de-knotting, stay tuned for Part 2.

ADDENDUM: The de-knotting actually appears in the discussion of taste and intersubjectivity in KIRBY'S CHOICE PT. 2.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 4

At the end of Part 3 I wrote:

When I finish the book, it may be interesting to mount a comparison between Kauffman's two models, "classical" and "quantum," and Kant's two species of imagination, "productive" and "reproductive." We-- or maybe just I-- shall see.

Now that I've finished Kauffman's REINVEINTING THE SACRED, I'm still only able to offer such a comparison in theory, though I won't do so here.  Kauffman offers some general models for his "classic/quantum" synthesis, but he admits that his theory at present remains in a speculative phase:

...well-known facts about cells and recent quantum chemical theory raise the possibility that vast webs of quantum coherent or partially coherent degrees of freedom may span large volumes of a cell... What I describe now is partially known, and partially my own scientific speculation. (p. 216)

Though Kauffman cautions the reader to remember that as yet there has not been adequate experimental proof to support his speculation, he asserts that the reductionist paradigms have already proven fallacious: not only in respect to the early paradigm I mentioned-- Weinberg's idea that all biology reduces down to particle physics--  but also to the paradigm of the "mind-brain identity theory, in which first person experiences are identical with specific brain states."  Chapter 13 is devoted to demonstrating the problems with this "classical" reductionist schema, and suggesting, in keeping with his earlier remarks on "partial causality," that the human mind may mirror the nature of biological creativity as a whole:

The idea that the human mind is non-algorithmic raises the possibility that it might be acausal, rather than a causal "machine," and the only acausal theory we have is quantum mechanics. Therefore the mind may be partially quantum mechanical.

I remarked in Part 2 that I observed parallels between the attitudes of reductionists in physics with those in literary criticism.  By way of supporting this observation, I'll focus on just one of the philosophical problems Kauffman analyzes in the book; that of "free will."

If every event, mental or physical, has sufficient antecedent causes, then as Aristotle said, there can be no "unmoved mover."  But free will is supposed to be just such an unmoved mover, free to do what it chooses, hence an "uncaused mental cause" of our actions. This led the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza, and others since him, to conclude that free will is an illusion.

Obviously a history of the concept of "free will" is impossible on this blog, but I have found this online essay, CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON FREE WILL.  Among the essay's many capsule descriptions of philosophical stances, I found this one most representative of the attitude I myself see in literary reductionism:

Harriet Martineau, translator of the works of Auguste Comte and herself a founder of sociology, was another who struggled mightily with the free will meme. In the end, in spite of the alternatives provided by the philosophers of her time, she rejected the notion altogether. "In a practical sense," she wrote, "all the world is determined. All human action proceeds on the supposition that the workings of nature are governed by laws that cannot be broken by human will... The very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person to see that the constitution and action of the human faculty of Will are determined by influences beyond the control of that faculty".#10 She referred to the notion of free will as "that monstrous remnant of old superstition". Here Martineau was expressing the logical implications of a Newtonian causality as applied to the type of radical monistic philosophical stance then being developed by Ernst Haeckel #11. In so doing, she was repudiating the dualistic Kantian world view which had prevailed for almost a century.

 I draw attention to Martineau's remark that "the very smallest amount of science is enough to enable any rational person" to see that everything is "determined" by contingent causes and that therefore free will is a "monstrous remnant of old superstition."  I find this language to be highly elitist in that it posits a radical difference between "rational persons" and those who lack such rationality-- a division no less absolute that the division made by one such "old superstition" between "the sheep and the goats." 

The Christian religion, though it may have formulated the basic outlines of the debate on free will, certainly did not originate its dynamic.  Most if not all religions are grounded in some sense of causal consequence.  Choose X and you are saved or illuminated; choose Y and you are damned or condemned to meaninglessness.  The idea that "free will" was not a gift given to mortals to guide them on their path was tantamount to saying that it did not matter what men chose; their choices were determined by the factors of their experiences and their fundamental natures.

How did this anti-will position translate into literary criticism?  A literary critic, as much as a religious pundit or a philosopher, wants to have some way to convince others of the rightness of his path.  I propose that for many critics the validation  they sought was that of a perceived greater rationality.  One might know, intellectually, that one's rationality was as predetermined by contingent circumstances as another man's irrationality.  I submit, however, that just as religious proselytizers insisted that the "right choice" reflected adherence to some higher supersensual reality, literary and philosophical proselytizers insisted that people who "saw the light" with regard to the contingency of human existence were a cut above those who did not. 

It should be easy to find any number of critics, professional or amateur, who support this elitist "sheep and goats" attitude.  I know that I can find, and have found, this attitude in many of my favored targets-- Gary Groth, Noah Berlatsky, Chicken Colin.  But I hate to keep falling back on these "old reliables."  Ideally I would like to find and refute some critic, whether in the comics-game or not, who evinces this specific blend of reductive pessimism and covert self-glorification.

If all else fails, I suppose I could always go back to kicking at Theodor Adorno.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 3

I'll have to put off further analysis of modern critics for now, but want to touch on Chapter 12 of Kauffman's book, in which Kauffman engages with the concepts of cognitive science.

Given Kauffman's opposition to reductionist paradigms, it's a given that he opposes the paradigm of cognitive science, though not without admitting that it has had some successes in the experimental realm.  In my few meditations on the paradigm, I've also admitted that cognitive science-- the science that investigates the human brain on the model of a "problem-solving computer"-- has had some limited applicability.  In LURKERS ON THE THRESHOLDS I said:

Ideological critics, by their nature, must depend on the narrow reductionism of Marxist aesthetics or of so-called "cognitive science." These tools are not without proper use within the total sphere of literary criticism, but they are useful only in limited sociohistorical circumstances, and are useless for understanding what Jung called the constructive or amplificative abilities of the human mind.

My distrust for cognitive science comes down to a simple philosophical disagreement rather than from an experimental stance.  To me, though there may be limited insights that may be gained from the brain-as-computer model, one cannot get around the fact that the brain is not a computer.  Any attempt to treat this paradigm as reality rather than as a limited model are based in the ideology surrounding materialism/positivism.

As one might expect, Kauffman's objections to cognitive science are more technically complex than this.  Again, I must admit that I do not have the expertise to accept or reject Kauffman's arguments, but I'll record some of them here for future comparison.

According to Kauffman, there are two "strands" of cognitive theory that have developed since Alan Turing's invention of the "Turing machine" in 1936.  One strand involves "attempts to understand symbol processing by the human mind" in terms of algorithms, while the second-- distantly derived from the 19th-century movement "associationism"-- is called "connectionism" and deals with the idea the "trajectories of states that flow through one another in sequence"-- that is, the progression of information along the body's neural paths-- are governed by "basins of attraction and attractors."  Kauffman then asserts that while both of these hypotheses are vital to cognitive science, they do not mesh:

The symbol-processing first strand... does not readily carry out the pattern recognition... that is natural to the connectionist view.  Conversely, the connectionist picture of basins of attraction and attractors has a difficult time accomodating the symbolc processing properties of the first computational strand.

It's possible that these competing paradigms are, as the saying goes, just different parts of the same elephant, whose entirety is difficult to descry through the dark glasses of reductionism.  In any case Kauffman's main purpose is to defend the complexity of the human mind, less in the terms of Jung-- whom I invoke above-- than of Wittgenstein. 

The end of this chapter looks forward to a new schema meant to incorporate quantum theory, as opposed to a schema based in the reductionist physics of Galileo and Company:

But must conscious mind be classical [i.e., "related only to classical physics"], rather than quantum or a mixture of classical and quantum?

When I finish the book, it may be interesting to mount a comparison between Kauffman's two models, "classical" and "quantum," and Kant's two species of imagination, "productive" and "reproductive." We-- or maybe just I-- shall see.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING PT. 2

First, though it has nothing to do with the main point of this essay, I want to acknowledge that the site NEWFRONTIERSNERD has recapitulated my DEAD-ALIVE HAND essays for readers of Portuguese.  My thanks for the acknowledgment.

Back to Stuart A. Kauffman's concept of a biology which is "partially beyond natural law," first addressed here.  Kauffman says:

How could the physicist 'deduce' the evolution of the biosphere?  One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them.  This cannot be done.  We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere.  Thus  we do not know what variables-- lungs, wings, etc.-- to put into our equations.  The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.  You may wish to consider this an epistemological problem, i.e., if only we had a sufficiently powerful computer and the right terms to enter into the right equations, we could make such predictions.  Later, when we get to Darwinian preadaptations, I will show that the problem is much more than epistemological; it is ontological emergence, partially lawless, and ceaselessly creative.  This shall be the heart of the new scientific worldview I wish to discuss.

I confess that though I've now finished the first eleven chapters of REINVENTING THE SACRED, quite a lot of Kauffman's arguments are technically over my head.  That is to say, I can grasp easily enough the rudiments of his arguments about the role of "autocatalytic processes" in the advancement of evolution, and why that seems to him a better explanation for evolutionary progress than, say, microbiology's search for "information genes."  However, I'm not qualified to judge the highly technical subject matter, so I have no idea as to what a microbiologist would say in defense of the information gene-search.  I will say that Kauffman's tone in debating is one of moderation; that he ceaselessly praises the extent to which reductionist science has uncovered valid scientific data, but always qualifies that praise by urging that he feels that there is relevant data that has been passed over due to the limitations of the reductionist viewpoint.  Kauffman's simple reasonableness is certainly to be preferred over the militant reductionism of a Richard Dawkins or a Karl Popper (and I was quite pleased to see Kauffman state his non-enthusiasm for Popper after I felt both Dawkins and Popper got off a little too easily in Michael Ruse's MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES, examined here.)

But even without my being a wizard of (mathematical) odds, I can state that one way in which Kauffman's "new scientific worldview" impacts on my literary project is that many if not all elitist critics show some degree of investment in the old reductionist schemas.

Indeed, all of the critics I surveyed in the DEAD-ALIVE series-- one of whom is admittedly not alive to defend himself-- show a reductionist orientation in the ways they relate to the creativity they find in popular fiction.  Noah Berlatsky likes WONDER WOMAN for its lesbian wingdings and its kanga-riding Amazons, but he sneers at mere pulp adventure.  Julian Darius likes thoughtful superhero sagas but turns up his nose at "simple escapism."  At base they still view the world of escapism, as Tolkien famously noted, as an avoidance of social and/or intellectual responsibilities.  This, I believe, is rooted in the idea that devotees of popular fiction are indulging in a simple "instant gratification" process, one that implies a reductionist view of the very experience of literary narrative.

More to come in Part 3.

NATURAL LAWBREAKING

In the physicist Murray Gell-Mann's definition, a "natural law" is a compact description beforehand of the regularities of a process.  But if we cannot even prestate the possibilities then no compact descriptions of these processes beforehand can exist.  These phenomena, then, appear to be partially beyond law itself.-- Stuart A. Kauffman, REINVENTING THE SACRED, p. 5.

I've only finished the first four chapters of Kauffman's book, but already I see some felicitious overlap between his school of theoretical (and philosophically elaborated) biology with (1) Ernst Cassirer's concept of separate "forms" that are not reducible to one another, and (2) my own literary theories regarding (a) the interstitital category of "the uncanny" and (b) the idea of "super-functionality," which in my system aligns with Philip Wheelwright's concept of "plurisignative" language.

One of Kauffman's theme statements, expressed in the introduction, deals with his refutation of the over-reductive tendencies of most modern scientists, which Kauffman represents through a frequently referenced quote from Nobel prizewining physicist Stephen Weinberg:

All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.  

Kauffman dissents:

I shall show that 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. 

Since I have not finished the book, I won't recount Kauffman's logical proofs as to why the processes of biology, principally though not exclusively evolution, are not reducible to physics.  A quick summation would be that physics, stressing the randomness of particle motion, is incapable of explaining the development of what Kauffman calls "nonequilibrium physical chemical systems," that is, systems that maintain themselves in an active "doing" manner by taking in matter to function and grow.  Though this may sound to some readers like an endorsement of "intelligent design," Kauffman consistently denies the need for a supernatural creative force and advocates the concept of emergence, all elaborated through concepts of hard science. When the author starts explaining an obscure-to-non-scientists scientific principle like "chirality," I think it's a given that he doesn't belong in the New Age book section.

I won't dwell on the comparisons to Cassirer, except to say that Cassirer is noteworthy for having insisted that a form such as "myth" could not be reduced down to the concepts of theoretical, discursive knowledge.  What I find interesting is the phrase from the first quote, to the effect that the phenomena he describes-- by which he means a phenomenon like "natural selection," which "cannot be reduced to any necessary and sufficient set of statements about this or that set of atoms or molecules." 

In my essays on the NUM formula I've stressed the inadequacy of Tzvetan Todorov's system, which in effect recognizes only the world of "the real" and the world of "the marvelous," which is an imaginary offshoot/subset of "the real," in that the marvelous sets aside causality. Though Todorov uses the term "uncanny" to signify merely those works in which one does not know for a time whether marvels are real or not, I asserted that it should be used rather to denote those works that bend, rather than break, the rules of causality.  Works of "the marvelous" break with causality and works of "the naturalistic" remain within the causal domain, but "the uncanny" is a category "partially beyond law itself," in which "the law" regardling "the regularities of a process" is covalent with the laws of causality that impart a sense of regular phenomena to a reader.

The phrase "beyond law" does not connote for Kauffman-- any more than it does for me-- an escape from physical law, but rather from overly reductive concepts of physical law.  In a roughly similar manner, I find myself constantly defending the presence of "mythic" or "plurisignative" elements in popular fiction because the alternative philosophy -- that creativity matters only when it comes from the Right Side of the Tracks, i.e., Canonical-- or Would-Be Canonical-- Literature-- is a philosophy that seeks to reduce literature to a unitary set of formulas.  The self-serving viewpoint of a Clement Greenberg is a model that too many comics-critics choose to follow as a means of creating their own cloistered canons.  For myself, reading the work of Northrop Frye approximates the vision of a biologist like Kauffman, who is clearly fascinated the illimitable plenitude of biological possibilities; a plenitude that also compares well with Rudolf Otto's understanding of religion as containing an "overplus" that goes beyond emotions of fear and animal desire.

It's possible that as I read further in the book, Kauffman may disappoint me on some level.  However, I believe that my appreciation for the first four chapters will not be easily dimmed.