Prigogine, Is Future Given?

In the ongoing IPS discussion of complexity and pomo I provided these clips from Is Future Given? I also threw in a little Stengers, who co-authored Order Out of Chaos with Prigogine. One can draw many parallels with the OOOers, as well as the deconstructionists and the polydox crew.


"We have shown that the difficulties in the classical formulation come from a too narrow point of view concerning the fundamental laws of dynamics (classical or quantum)" (8).

"For classical physics and for quantum physics there is no privileged direction of time. Future and past play the same role.... The traditional description is deterministic, even in quantum theory....but the results obtained...contain certainly a large part of truth....[but] these descriptions are based on a too restricted form of dynamics" (10).

"It is remarkable that orthodox QM used classical integrable dynamical systems as a model.... For non-integrable systems the situation...is quite different....that is of systems for which we cannot construct a unitary transformation" (12-13).

"Integrable systems...refer in fact only to exceptional, ideal cases. We are living in a nature in which the rule is non-integrability" (16). That one has some serious implications reminiscent of ideal forms, etc.


In discussing some math with different premises (that I don't understand), he says it:

"has some very interesting new properties. First of all it is a non-local transformation. In other words, classically people were thinking in terms of points, but here we have to speak in terms of ensembles, collections of points. We cannot make a physics of points anymore, we have to make a physics of distributions.... This opens a whole new domain of classical and quantum physics" (15).

I'm reminded above about how a species is not a general category but is itself an "individual" and can only be apprehended by statistical distributions, not particular "points", as they do not share defining characteristics of some uniform whole.

Isabelle Stengers...has been mentioned frequently by OOO authors. I found one of her essays at Scribd, "Introductory notes on an ecology of practices." A relevant clip on physics:

"The way physics presents itself now, the way it defines 'physical reality,' is by way of persistent but now freely floating theologico-political claims referring to the opposition between the world as understood from an intelligible point of view (which may be associated with divine creation) and the world as we meet it and interact with it. As a result of defining 'physical reality' as the objective and beyond our merely human fictions, physics claims for itself....the secure position that they 'discover' physical reality beyond changing appearances" (183).

More from IFG:

"Electrons, photons are only observable because they interact and participate in irreversible processes. The basic idea of unitary transformation of integrable systems is that you could, in one way or another, eliminate interactions. But interactions are a fundamental part of nature which we observe, and in non-integrable systems, interactions cannot be eliminated" (17-18).

"We can describe dynamics from two points of view. On the one hand we have the individual description in terms of trajectories in classical dynamics, or of wave functions in quantum theory. On the other hand we have the collective statistical description in terms of ensembles represented by a probability distribution.... Traditionally, quantum theory was associated with Hilbert space, that is, with functions that are square integrable.... But when we go outside the Hilbert space we find...new solutions that can be no more implemented by trajectories or wave functions. We obtain, then, new dynamical laws that provide the microscopic basis for irreversible processes" (24-5).

"A fundamental problem of modern physics is the relationship between particles and fields.... Free quantum fields are integrable systems.... However, as there are no free fields in nature, interactions lead to nonintegrable systems. Nonintegrable fields are systems of an infinite number of degrees of freedom with persistent interactions.... The inclusion of irreversibility changes our view of nature. The future is no longer given. Our world is a world of continuous 'construction' ruled by probabilistic laws and no longer a kind of automaton. We are led from a world of 'being' to a world of 'becoming.'" (38-9).