Peter Saltzstein finds that Chaos Theory yields unexpected philosophical results.
An interesting philosophical consequence of chaos theory is that it creates a second crack in the notion of a regular, predictable universe, but now at the level of our everyday experience. In the past we expected causation to result in repeatability, and repeatability to result in predictability. But chaos theory tells us that since complex dynamic systems are exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions, any attempt to perform repeated runs of such a system will be stymied if there is even the tiniest difference in the starting conditions of the system. Thus while one thing still follows another, this does not mean the result will be the same, even if the future is determined by the past.
We can also no longer view history as merely “one damn fact after another,” as Henry Ford is reputed to have called it. That the unfolding of complex systems depends on sensitivity to their initial conditions means that history may be no better known than the future. Since past events are themselves the result of chaotic behavior, their succession is going to be just as difficult to reconstruct as the future is to construct. As the poet Paul Valery puts it: “the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian” (Crisis of the Mind, First Letter, 1919).
Not only is history difficult to reconstruct, then, its complexity makes counterfactuals – or in common parlance, ‘what ifs’ – even more of a stretch to speculate on. Historians, philosophers, and we regular folks ask ourselves, “What if such-and-such had happened instead?” Take the counterfactual scenario, “What if JFK had not been killed?” It is claimed by some historians that President Kennedy was very wary of committing more than advisors to South Vietnam during the early 1960s. Had he lived and resolved that American troops would not be used in a war in Vietnam, could America’s Vietnam War have been prevented? And suppose Kennedy would have kept the U.S. out of war, what other events would have resulted? How could we tell? We don’t even know what combination of events would have been necessary for him to have lived, let alone their probability of occurring. It’s too easy to suggest that all he had to do was avoid the initial condition of being in Dallas on that fateful day. For what would have been involved in avoiding Dallas then; and what would have been the consequences of that for later history? Furthermore, even if Kennedy had not been killed, any policy he might have tried to adopt toward Vietnam would have been subject to strong countervailing forces, such as whether he would be reelected; whether he could count on the support of his own party; the interests of the military-industrial complex; concerns about the spread of communism; and the clandestine role of the Kennedy administration and the CIA in first supporting and then removing the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem; and this is to name just a few considerations that might have played a role in whether the Vietnam War would take place. Indeed, President Kennedy’s and his advisors’ role in supporting the 1963 coup that toppled Diem, has been credited by historian and national security analyst John Prados with making America responsible for the future of Vietnam.
Returning to the bigger picture of life itself, the fact that chaotic systems are extremely sensitive to initial conditions does suggest a certain creativity in nature, since such sensitivity makes possible a sort of ‘elbow room’, providing space for the results of natural processes to be unique, in the sense of non-repeatable in detail. The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that historical contingency in this sense plays as great a part in evolution as does natural selection. In Wonderful Life (1990) he said that if we could turn back evolution on Earth to its beginnings and restart the process with slightly different initial conditions, the organisms on our planet would look radically different.
Historical contingency may also play a role in the very laws of nature. In his book Time Reborn (2013), physicist Lee Smolin argues that the laws of nature themselves “emerge from inside the universe and evolve in time with the universe they describe.” He quotes favorably the renowned quantum physicists Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman on this point. Dirac notes that “At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus, we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of holding uniformly throughout space-time.” And Feynman observes that “The only field which has not admitted any evolutionary question is physics. Here are the laws, we say… but how did they get that way, in time?… So, it might turn out that they are not the same [laws] all the time and that there is a historical, evolutionary, question.” The universe could be an evolving chaotic system, even down to its laws. [continue reading]
