What do you think?
Rate this book
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion
Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 10, 2008
About the author
Stuart A. Kauffman
16 books164 followersStuart Alan Kauffman (28 September 1939) is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
January 22, 2010
I don't believe in God. I'm not able to. I'd have to have a serious portion of my brain cut out, or have my personality wiped or something to have faith in good faith (in an existential sort of way).
I do like the Bible, as a piece of post-modern 'meta-fiction' it can't be beat. Lots of little side stories, and unreliable narrator, major inconsistencies that illustrate the the death of the author and radical subjectivity in relation to a textual work, some songs thrown in just like Pynchon would do, and to top it all off an out of left field ending that stylistically throws a curve ball no one would see coming. As something to base ones whole way of life on though? No, I think I'd rather try to build a system of belief out of Infinite Jest or Ulysses first.
Many people point to the hippie main character of the last 1/3rd or so of the book as being someone really great and the entire basis for our morality and that if he disappeared from our cultural memory we would probably start trying to eat the leg off of the next person we saw on the street because we'd be so ethically bankrupt that immediate cannibalism would be the only logical response. I agree the hippie did some good things. I don't really buy into the miracles, but he had a good heart and his driving the money lenders out of the temple was spot on; but then I think that most everything I like about this character I also like about Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. Now I'm not about to go worship him, even though a) I am 100% convinced that he actually exists, and b) because he is one of those people whose existence in the world I can say makes the world a little bit less of a shit hole than it would be without him but c) I'm not inclined to think that d) civilization as we know it would collapse without him or e) that he is without fault, deserving of worship, or anything else like that.
I'm being flippant, but as I think of it more there really are lots and lots of similarities between Ian Mackaye and JC but I'll share those maybe another time, or in comments.
Why all of this? I don't know, it's sort of a disclaimer that I don't believe in God. In case if my recent reviews of Christian prayer books might have confused you about my stance here.
Anyway, on to the review.
This is a weird and unbalanced book. The first 90 pages or so had me groaning that he was going to do some slight of hand to bring in God, or revert to Cartesian Dualism or some other philosophically untenable 'skyhook'. Instead he just really seemed to be set on pounding the crap out of the idea that everything can be reduced to physics. Now I'm not a scientist, but I think that he's being very misguided in his aims here. I don't think that there is anyone who really believes that physics will answer all of the questions of the universe, life, meaning etc. He sets up a straw man of reductionism and spends about a 100 pages beating the shit out of it, but in the end he really isn't saying anything. Yes, knowing all of the physics involved in driving your car to the hardware store, getting all the equations and knowing physic things that would explain what all happened wouldn't allow anyone to know anything about why you went to the store, or even necessarily where you were going, but I don't think that physics would try to answer that kind of question. It's the wrong tool for the job of why one went to the store. But physics was obviously involved every step of the way. It would be the same thing as reading a newspaper under a microscope and only being able to make out all of the little dots that the newsprint is made of. Studying those dots isn't going to tell you what is on the sheet of paper if you don't look at it from the right distance... but you can't say that those dots don't make up the newspaper you are reading just because only studying the dots would tell you nothing of the larger shape they make up.
He likes to bring Wittgenstein in to help prove his point, and over and over again makes the point that one doesn't 'understand' legal language without knowing the specified meanings of the legal words. That the meaning is separate from the words. That might be true, but without understanding normal language one would not be able to understand the nuances of legal language. A deaf and dumb person could not be taught legal language without first being engaged in regular, everyday language first. Legal language can be reduced to regular language, it's part of the foundation. Just like physics is one of the foundations (maybe the foundation, I don't know) of the physical world. Just try to get to the store without physics being involved, without physics it doesn't matter what you want to buy there because it just won't exist and you won't get there (and you won't exist either).
But then he turns his focus away from his rabid attacks on reductionism and gives about a hundred pages of some very interesting theories about how consciousness could arise, general evolution, and the mind / body problem. I won't go into the details here, most of it is theories, but they are sound theories and don't involved any additions of spirits or skyhooks, but mostly involve things like what role quantum mechanics could play in our understanding of the mind, and some ideas that Daniel Dennett deals with in his very interesting chapters on design space and Borges in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. These hundred pages got the book the four stars.
But then he does something weird. He starts talking about the Sacred again. He has good intentions, sort of wanting to create a global awareness of our place in the world in hopes of making us all more responsible. Kind of an attempt to say that while we are just specks of dust in a vast universe, and while there is no God giving us meaning from above, there is something awe-inspiring involved, something we are all apart of that is miraculous that it transcends us and should be able to guide us to be a global community where we can all creatively thrive.... This is all fine and dandy, but then he wants to call this thing first the Sacred, and thinks that calling the infinite universe in all of its possibilities and wonders God. Not a God like in any religion, but God because it's a word we are all ok with.
Now, in our infinite wonderous world that contains in it a rich and complex language structure that allows for a really really large number of different combinations of letters that can make up words, why can't the author come up with something better than God to call the scientific wonders of the world that we are all a part of (which as I read more about the science of evolution I keep realizing more and more that the world is so much more interesting and awesome than I had ever imagined)? Who is going to like this idea? For a religious believer this is the equivalent of patronizingly patting them on the head. For someone who doesn't believe in God this is just idiotic, using a very loaded word with some really really bad connotations and fucked up belief systems attached to it but just saying that it no longer means that, and everyone will forget all of the words history. It would be like some academic deciding that nigger really is the best word for black people, but not nigger in any of it's historical uses, but as in a new great way that means to show all of the awesomeness of black people. Yeah, it wouldn't work.
Anyway that's some thoughts on this book. It was a more interesting book than I thought it would be, but also a little confusing, especially in trying to figure out exactly what the author was trying to accomplish. I suspect that he was sort of trying to cash in on the atheism / God cash cow that's currently a vogue of the publishing world, but that is cynical of me to say.
I do like the Bible, as a piece of post-modern 'meta-fiction' it can't be beat. Lots of little side stories, and unreliable narrator, major inconsistencies that illustrate the the death of the author and radical subjectivity in relation to a textual work, some songs thrown in just like Pynchon would do, and to top it all off an out of left field ending that stylistically throws a curve ball no one would see coming. As something to base ones whole way of life on though? No, I think I'd rather try to build a system of belief out of Infinite Jest or Ulysses first.
Many people point to the hippie main character of the last 1/3rd or so of the book as being someone really great and the entire basis for our morality and that if he disappeared from our cultural memory we would probably start trying to eat the leg off of the next person we saw on the street because we'd be so ethically bankrupt that immediate cannibalism would be the only logical response. I agree the hippie did some good things. I don't really buy into the miracles, but he had a good heart and his driving the money lenders out of the temple was spot on; but then I think that most everything I like about this character I also like about Ian Mackaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi. Now I'm not about to go worship him, even though a) I am 100% convinced that he actually exists, and b) because he is one of those people whose existence in the world I can say makes the world a little bit less of a shit hole than it would be without him but c) I'm not inclined to think that d) civilization as we know it would collapse without him or e) that he is without fault, deserving of worship, or anything else like that.
I'm being flippant, but as I think of it more there really are lots and lots of similarities between Ian Mackaye and JC but I'll share those maybe another time, or in comments.
Why all of this? I don't know, it's sort of a disclaimer that I don't believe in God. In case if my recent reviews of Christian prayer books might have confused you about my stance here.
Anyway, on to the review.
This is a weird and unbalanced book. The first 90 pages or so had me groaning that he was going to do some slight of hand to bring in God, or revert to Cartesian Dualism or some other philosophically untenable 'skyhook'. Instead he just really seemed to be set on pounding the crap out of the idea that everything can be reduced to physics. Now I'm not a scientist, but I think that he's being very misguided in his aims here. I don't think that there is anyone who really believes that physics will answer all of the questions of the universe, life, meaning etc. He sets up a straw man of reductionism and spends about a 100 pages beating the shit out of it, but in the end he really isn't saying anything. Yes, knowing all of the physics involved in driving your car to the hardware store, getting all the equations and knowing physic things that would explain what all happened wouldn't allow anyone to know anything about why you went to the store, or even necessarily where you were going, but I don't think that physics would try to answer that kind of question. It's the wrong tool for the job of why one went to the store. But physics was obviously involved every step of the way. It would be the same thing as reading a newspaper under a microscope and only being able to make out all of the little dots that the newsprint is made of. Studying those dots isn't going to tell you what is on the sheet of paper if you don't look at it from the right distance... but you can't say that those dots don't make up the newspaper you are reading just because only studying the dots would tell you nothing of the larger shape they make up.
He likes to bring Wittgenstein in to help prove his point, and over and over again makes the point that one doesn't 'understand' legal language without knowing the specified meanings of the legal words. That the meaning is separate from the words. That might be true, but without understanding normal language one would not be able to understand the nuances of legal language. A deaf and dumb person could not be taught legal language without first being engaged in regular, everyday language first. Legal language can be reduced to regular language, it's part of the foundation. Just like physics is one of the foundations (maybe the foundation, I don't know) of the physical world. Just try to get to the store without physics being involved, without physics it doesn't matter what you want to buy there because it just won't exist and you won't get there (and you won't exist either).
But then he turns his focus away from his rabid attacks on reductionism and gives about a hundred pages of some very interesting theories about how consciousness could arise, general evolution, and the mind / body problem. I won't go into the details here, most of it is theories, but they are sound theories and don't involved any additions of spirits or skyhooks, but mostly involve things like what role quantum mechanics could play in our understanding of the mind, and some ideas that Daniel Dennett deals with in his very interesting chapters on design space and Borges in Darwin's Dangerous Idea. These hundred pages got the book the four stars.
But then he does something weird. He starts talking about the Sacred again. He has good intentions, sort of wanting to create a global awareness of our place in the world in hopes of making us all more responsible. Kind of an attempt to say that while we are just specks of dust in a vast universe, and while there is no God giving us meaning from above, there is something awe-inspiring involved, something we are all apart of that is miraculous that it transcends us and should be able to guide us to be a global community where we can all creatively thrive.... This is all fine and dandy, but then he wants to call this thing first the Sacred, and thinks that calling the infinite universe in all of its possibilities and wonders God. Not a God like in any religion, but God because it's a word we are all ok with.
Now, in our infinite wonderous world that contains in it a rich and complex language structure that allows for a really really large number of different combinations of letters that can make up words, why can't the author come up with something better than God to call the scientific wonders of the world that we are all a part of (which as I read more about the science of evolution I keep realizing more and more that the world is so much more interesting and awesome than I had ever imagined)? Who is going to like this idea? For a religious believer this is the equivalent of patronizingly patting them on the head. For someone who doesn't believe in God this is just idiotic, using a very loaded word with some really really bad connotations and fucked up belief systems attached to it but just saying that it no longer means that, and everyone will forget all of the words history. It would be like some academic deciding that nigger really is the best word for black people, but not nigger in any of it's historical uses, but as in a new great way that means to show all of the awesomeness of black people. Yeah, it wouldn't work.
Anyway that's some thoughts on this book. It was a more interesting book than I thought it would be, but also a little confusing, especially in trying to figure out exactly what the author was trying to accomplish. I suspect that he was sort of trying to cash in on the atheism / God cash cow that's currently a vogue of the publishing world, but that is cynical of me to say.
April 6, 2013
In the final analysis, Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing the Sacred: a New View of Science, Reason and Religion,” [Basic Books, 2008] fails to deliver. Although this latest offering from Kauffman ranges over a wide variety of interesting scientific topics including reductionism, the philosophy of science, evolutionary theory, the chemical evolution of life and economic theory, it does not so much reinvent the sacred as rediscover what others have known for millennia.
Kauffman, a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, has written several books on the science of complex systems and emergence, including “The Origins of Order,” and “At Home in the Universe.” He is at his best when discussing evolutionary biology and the contributions that the emerging science of complex systems has made to our understanding of the origin and evolution of life, but tends to descend into incoherency when venturing too far afield from this, his area of expertise. The current book is no exception.
A very interesting section of the book includes chapters 4 and 5, “The Nonreducibility of Physics,” and “The Origin of Life.” His explanation in chapter 4 of Darwinian preadaptation is intriguing and he advocates forcefully for modification of Darwin’s original ideas and a retreat from the reductionist philosophy that reduces (for lack of a better term) everything to the fundamental particles of which it is composed. The discussion in chapter 5 of the propagation of linked processes is even more intriguing. Here he suggests that life evolved through a process of propagation of linked chemical reactions and that cells are “collectively autocatalytic wholes.” In other words, the self-amplifying process that drives the propagation of these simple organisms works on the entire linked structure of chemical reactions that make up the cell’s metabolism, not on individual molecules. This is an intriguing idea and he explains it well. Later in chapter 10, “Breaking the Galilean spell,” he delivers a forceful critique of intelligent design (ID). It is well known that ID is just creationism in disguise. Kauffman’s well-reasoned argument that autocatalysis can amplify otherwise unlikely events effectively obliterates the central thesis of ID that life is too improbable to have arisen on its own.
Despite the book’s positive features, I was, overall, disappointed in it. Large sections are difficult to read and have little or nothing to do with redefining the sacred. Chapters are included that seem to have nothing to do with the thesis of the book, such as economics – unless the take-away message is that we are to worship the “invisible hand” of the market. This and other such irrelevant chapters seem to be justified with the inclusion of one tacked-on sentence at the end of each chapter saying, essentially, “this is sacred,” because it is about creativity at the system level. I didn’t buy it.
Also, much of the book is devoted to what can only be described as a rant against the predominance of particle physics with Steven Weinberg at its helm. While I happen to agree with Kauffman about much of this, I think he does his cause a disservice by writing chapter after chapter on topics he doesn’t fully understand, in an attempt to bring down Weinberg and the other self-appointed priests of science.
For one thing, Kauffman still doesn’t seem to fully understand quantum mechanics. In an anecdote in chapter 13 he recounts a conversation with Murray Gell-Mann who urges him to learn some quantum mechanics. Kauffman certainly seems to have tried since the book is packed with discussions of it, but of the parts I know a bit about, he has made many mistakes.
For example, in chapter 2, “Reductionism,” he seems to claim that quantum events are not “real,” reserving this designation for “actual, real, or classical” events. What can be less real than the absorption of a photon of light by a chloroplast in a green plant? This fully quantum-mechanical event is as real as it gets. Later, in chapter 3, “The physicists rebel,” he says that “the reduction of classical thermodynamics to statistical mechanics remains incomplete,” as if this is an argument against reductionism – but the statement is nonsense. Thermodynamics cannot be “reduced to” statistical mechanics since the latter is merely a set of mathematical tools for averaging the behaviors of a large numbers of microscopic particles to get macroscopic properties such as the thermodynamic quantities of enthalpy or free energy.
The place he gets into the most trouble, though, is chapter 13, “The quantum brain?” I suppose he put the question mark in the title to wiggle out of responsibility for what he wrote there; he says, after all, that this chapter is “the most scientifically improbable thing I say in this book.” And that it is, so why include it? His description of consciousness as deriving from quantum coherent electron transport through water (a topic I know a thing or two about) is, quite simply, loopy. He cites real scientists doing actual theoretical work on this topic, but I am sure that none of them would say he is justified in making the leap to a theory of consciousness from their insights about this interesting physical phenomenon.
Finally, my strongest criticism about the book is that it does not live up to its title. Kauffman has not reinvented anything, much less the sacred. He seems to want to found a new religion, as evidenced by his frequent use of the word God to describe what he calls “the emergent creativity in the universe” and his frequent admonitions to “listen” as he describes how this creativity “invites” us to know the truth as Kauffman sees it.
It is clear that Kauffman is looking for a God he can believe in, and I wish him the best in finding one. I don’t think, though, that he should have written a book purporting to have found that God at what is clearly an early and still-confused stage in his spiritual journey. The God he proposes sounds very much like a “God of the gaps” to me. His argument seems to be that the evolution of the biosphere and human history are “partially indescribable by natural law,” so he introduces this God as explanation: “…God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.”
First of all, a God of the gaps will ultimately disappoint, when science fills those gaps – as we surely will, given enough time and resources. Second, the idea he puts forth did not originate with Kauffman, but he does not give credit where credit is due. He acknowledges (without clear attribution) “Jesuit cosmologists” who he says have similar ideas, as if these Jesuits are discovering the same ideas as Kauffman at the same time in history. Could he, perhaps, be talking about Teilhard de Chardin (nowhere referenced in the book) whose influential “The Phenomenon of Man,” written in the 1930s, seems to fit the bill? If so, Teilhard should have been at least mentioned, if not quoted. Finally, nowhere in the book are Hindu concepts mentioned, yet the grand finale of Kauffman’s theology (and it can only be called that) seems to describe an ancient Hindu belief: “Thus, we may wish to broaden our sense of God from the creativity in nature to all of nature, law governed and partially beyond natural law. Then all the unfolding of nature is God, a fully natural God.” This is Brahman, out of whose body the universe sprang forth -- according to the Upanishads, written thousands of years ago.
Finally, the most troubling and almost sad aspect of Kauffman’s new “religion” is his insistence that the God he wants us to believe in does not know we’re here. In the final chapter he makes it clear that anything resembling prayer is just “ourselves talking to ourselves.” If Kauffman is willing to go so far as to posit a God that can bring forth the universe through the amazing and awe-inspiring processes he describes in this book, why does he deny that such a God cannot be conscious in some sense of the term? Kauffman acknowledges that much of what he is proposing could fall under the title “Buddhism,” yet he would do well to read the writings of one Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy, who is quoted by Anne Bancroft as saying “I clearly didn't invent being a person. There is a personness writ large of which I am a small reflection.”
If this is the case, then, those talks with ourselves are like the murmurings of the cells in our body to each other, each little cell wondering if there is any purpose for her existence beyond the small one she can fathom or understand. We, of course, know that our heart cells and neurons and skin cells, each and every one of them, serve a higher purpose, even if each of those little cells can never fully know what this purpose is.
And this, ultimately, is what sacredness is all about. Those with faith believe that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, whether we can fully comprehend it or not. Kauffman has stumbled on one aspect of the sacred, but what he is pushing is far -- very far --from the whole wondrous truth.
Kauffman, a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute, has written several books on the science of complex systems and emergence, including “The Origins of Order,” and “At Home in the Universe.” He is at his best when discussing evolutionary biology and the contributions that the emerging science of complex systems has made to our understanding of the origin and evolution of life, but tends to descend into incoherency when venturing too far afield from this, his area of expertise. The current book is no exception.
A very interesting section of the book includes chapters 4 and 5, “The Nonreducibility of Physics,” and “The Origin of Life.” His explanation in chapter 4 of Darwinian preadaptation is intriguing and he advocates forcefully for modification of Darwin’s original ideas and a retreat from the reductionist philosophy that reduces (for lack of a better term) everything to the fundamental particles of which it is composed. The discussion in chapter 5 of the propagation of linked processes is even more intriguing. Here he suggests that life evolved through a process of propagation of linked chemical reactions and that cells are “collectively autocatalytic wholes.” In other words, the self-amplifying process that drives the propagation of these simple organisms works on the entire linked structure of chemical reactions that make up the cell’s metabolism, not on individual molecules. This is an intriguing idea and he explains it well. Later in chapter 10, “Breaking the Galilean spell,” he delivers a forceful critique of intelligent design (ID). It is well known that ID is just creationism in disguise. Kauffman’s well-reasoned argument that autocatalysis can amplify otherwise unlikely events effectively obliterates the central thesis of ID that life is too improbable to have arisen on its own.
Despite the book’s positive features, I was, overall, disappointed in it. Large sections are difficult to read and have little or nothing to do with redefining the sacred. Chapters are included that seem to have nothing to do with the thesis of the book, such as economics – unless the take-away message is that we are to worship the “invisible hand” of the market. This and other such irrelevant chapters seem to be justified with the inclusion of one tacked-on sentence at the end of each chapter saying, essentially, “this is sacred,” because it is about creativity at the system level. I didn’t buy it.
Also, much of the book is devoted to what can only be described as a rant against the predominance of particle physics with Steven Weinberg at its helm. While I happen to agree with Kauffman about much of this, I think he does his cause a disservice by writing chapter after chapter on topics he doesn’t fully understand, in an attempt to bring down Weinberg and the other self-appointed priests of science.
For one thing, Kauffman still doesn’t seem to fully understand quantum mechanics. In an anecdote in chapter 13 he recounts a conversation with Murray Gell-Mann who urges him to learn some quantum mechanics. Kauffman certainly seems to have tried since the book is packed with discussions of it, but of the parts I know a bit about, he has made many mistakes.
For example, in chapter 2, “Reductionism,” he seems to claim that quantum events are not “real,” reserving this designation for “actual, real, or classical” events. What can be less real than the absorption of a photon of light by a chloroplast in a green plant? This fully quantum-mechanical event is as real as it gets. Later, in chapter 3, “The physicists rebel,” he says that “the reduction of classical thermodynamics to statistical mechanics remains incomplete,” as if this is an argument against reductionism – but the statement is nonsense. Thermodynamics cannot be “reduced to” statistical mechanics since the latter is merely a set of mathematical tools for averaging the behaviors of a large numbers of microscopic particles to get macroscopic properties such as the thermodynamic quantities of enthalpy or free energy.
The place he gets into the most trouble, though, is chapter 13, “The quantum brain?” I suppose he put the question mark in the title to wiggle out of responsibility for what he wrote there; he says, after all, that this chapter is “the most scientifically improbable thing I say in this book.” And that it is, so why include it? His description of consciousness as deriving from quantum coherent electron transport through water (a topic I know a thing or two about) is, quite simply, loopy. He cites real scientists doing actual theoretical work on this topic, but I am sure that none of them would say he is justified in making the leap to a theory of consciousness from their insights about this interesting physical phenomenon.
Finally, my strongest criticism about the book is that it does not live up to its title. Kauffman has not reinvented anything, much less the sacred. He seems to want to found a new religion, as evidenced by his frequent use of the word God to describe what he calls “the emergent creativity in the universe” and his frequent admonitions to “listen” as he describes how this creativity “invites” us to know the truth as Kauffman sees it.
It is clear that Kauffman is looking for a God he can believe in, and I wish him the best in finding one. I don’t think, though, that he should have written a book purporting to have found that God at what is clearly an early and still-confused stage in his spiritual journey. The God he proposes sounds very much like a “God of the gaps” to me. His argument seems to be that the evolution of the biosphere and human history are “partially indescribable by natural law,” so he introduces this God as explanation: “…God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures.”
First of all, a God of the gaps will ultimately disappoint, when science fills those gaps – as we surely will, given enough time and resources. Second, the idea he puts forth did not originate with Kauffman, but he does not give credit where credit is due. He acknowledges (without clear attribution) “Jesuit cosmologists” who he says have similar ideas, as if these Jesuits are discovering the same ideas as Kauffman at the same time in history. Could he, perhaps, be talking about Teilhard de Chardin (nowhere referenced in the book) whose influential “The Phenomenon of Man,” written in the 1930s, seems to fit the bill? If so, Teilhard should have been at least mentioned, if not quoted. Finally, nowhere in the book are Hindu concepts mentioned, yet the grand finale of Kauffman’s theology (and it can only be called that) seems to describe an ancient Hindu belief: “Thus, we may wish to broaden our sense of God from the creativity in nature to all of nature, law governed and partially beyond natural law. Then all the unfolding of nature is God, a fully natural God.” This is Brahman, out of whose body the universe sprang forth -- according to the Upanishads, written thousands of years ago.
Finally, the most troubling and almost sad aspect of Kauffman’s new “religion” is his insistence that the God he wants us to believe in does not know we’re here. In the final chapter he makes it clear that anything resembling prayer is just “ourselves talking to ourselves.” If Kauffman is willing to go so far as to posit a God that can bring forth the universe through the amazing and awe-inspiring processes he describes in this book, why does he deny that such a God cannot be conscious in some sense of the term? Kauffman acknowledges that much of what he is proposing could fall under the title “Buddhism,” yet he would do well to read the writings of one Buddhist scholar, Joanna Macy, who is quoted by Anne Bancroft as saying “I clearly didn't invent being a person. There is a personness writ large of which I am a small reflection.”
If this is the case, then, those talks with ourselves are like the murmurings of the cells in our body to each other, each little cell wondering if there is any purpose for her existence beyond the small one she can fathom or understand. We, of course, know that our heart cells and neurons and skin cells, each and every one of them, serve a higher purpose, even if each of those little cells can never fully know what this purpose is.
And this, ultimately, is what sacredness is all about. Those with faith believe that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, whether we can fully comprehend it or not. Kauffman has stumbled on one aspect of the sacred, but what he is pushing is far -- very far --from the whole wondrous truth.
December 21, 2013
From an editorial point of view, this may be the worst book I've ever read – I'm not an editor, but I assure you, you become conscious of it when it's this bad. Kauffman is a scientist that I know and respect, and the subjects he's covering in here are my favorites, but god he is horrible as an author. The whole book is like a homework done at the last minute: extremely repetitive both with ideas and with stock phrases sometimes going up to 10 words; full of technical examples that Kauffman fails to communicate with long cryptic sentences substituting mathematics and charts; badly organized, with out-of-place paragraphs everywhere; flowing like a collection of non-related essays, failing to construct a narrative and to connect with the main theme of "reinventing the sacred"; extremely repetitive both with ideas and with stock phrases sometimes going up to 10 words – get it? It feels like nobody, including Kauffman, read it before it's printed – the abundance of typos, especially with people's names (Frank Geary, the architect?), supports this thesis. He even misquotes Searle's famous Chinese Room argument as the man in the room is just handing back the Chinese translation of a phrase submitted in English, whereas in the original argument he is answering Chinese questions in Chinese.
From a philosophical point of view, I'm disappointed as well. The outline of the book is like this:
Reductionism fails. There is emergence in nature. So nature is creative. [The first 90% of the book where Kauffman offers technical examples and his non-conclusive anti-reductionistic interpretations of them.] We can treat this creativity as sacred. We can even call it God. We as humanity can unite under this God and develop a new global ethics and save the planet and love each other and live happily ever after. [The last 10% of the book which is just childish, superficial and boring.]
I will not go into his specific arguments in favor of emergence because (1) most of the time he admits that they are non-conclusive and (2) it seems to me that most of the time he is taking epistemological limitations of reductionism (and of his own mind) as proofs of ontological emergence (even though he's aware of the distinction), with arguments like "It seems impossible to predict this, so it is emergent" or "I can't think of an algorithm that can make the creative moves human mind makes, so human mind must be non-algorithmic". It comes as no surprise when he joins Searle in dismissing the "mind-boggling" ideas of strong AI with lazy "I don’t think so"s.
A warning to prospective readers: Don't be fooled by the friendly generic title "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion" – you won't be able to get through this book if you're not already familiar with the reductionism-emergence debate in philosophy of science, and don't have some background knowledge in biology, thermodynamics, mathematics, statistics and quantum physics. And economics. And philosophy of mind. Yep. That would be all.
From a philosophical point of view, I'm disappointed as well. The outline of the book is like this:
Reductionism fails. There is emergence in nature. So nature is creative. [The first 90% of the book where Kauffman offers technical examples and his non-conclusive anti-reductionistic interpretations of them.] We can treat this creativity as sacred. We can even call it God. We as humanity can unite under this God and develop a new global ethics and save the planet and love each other and live happily ever after. [The last 10% of the book which is just childish, superficial and boring.]
I will not go into his specific arguments in favor of emergence because (1) most of the time he admits that they are non-conclusive and (2) it seems to me that most of the time he is taking epistemological limitations of reductionism (and of his own mind) as proofs of ontological emergence (even though he's aware of the distinction), with arguments like "It seems impossible to predict this, so it is emergent" or "I can't think of an algorithm that can make the creative moves human mind makes, so human mind must be non-algorithmic". It comes as no surprise when he joins Searle in dismissing the "mind-boggling" ideas of strong AI with lazy "I don’t think so"s.
A warning to prospective readers: Don't be fooled by the friendly generic title "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion" – you won't be able to get through this book if you're not already familiar with the reductionism-emergence debate in philosophy of science, and don't have some background knowledge in biology, thermodynamics, mathematics, statistics and quantum physics. And economics. And philosophy of mind. Yep. That would be all.
September 22, 2008
I'm really torn about this book. The author has some really, really interesting ideas about finding 'God' in our universe, where meaning and morals and values come from, things of that nature, but good GRIEF, I had to quit reading. The man takes one good idea, and then spends three chapters on it. And every sentence (I'm really not exaggerating, here) is something like this:
"The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone."
or
"Thus a single M-length peptide can be formed in M-1 ways by ligating other smaller peptides to form it."
Even my favorite book on string theory is easier to read than this. I found myself bored most of the time, and frustrated because I had to read a sentence several times to grasp the meaning, and even THEN, I didn't know what half the words really meant.
If this book were, instead, a three or four page essay, I feel he could have gotten all of his points across just as well, in fact BETTER, because I'd read the whole thing.
"The candidate criticality law is emergent and not reducible to physics alone."
or
"Thus a single M-length peptide can be formed in M-1 ways by ligating other smaller peptides to form it."
Even my favorite book on string theory is easier to read than this. I found myself bored most of the time, and frustrated because I had to read a sentence several times to grasp the meaning, and even THEN, I didn't know what half the words really meant.
If this book were, instead, a three or four page essay, I feel he could have gotten all of his points across just as well, in fact BETTER, because I'd read the whole thing.
September 26, 2009
This book is horrible. I say that reluctantly, because I think that many of the author's ideas are really quite profound, and the science he discusses is radical in form and implication. But this is a ravening horror of a book. There is so little organization that in any given chapter the text will refer to past chapters and future chapters in a completely incoherent way. The prose is unbelievably repetitive, with stock phrases sometimes showing up a dozen or more times in different contexts; sometimes he even uses the same complex example more than once. The examples, especially for esoteric mathematical or logical problems, are poorly presented and confusingly explained, often without really connecting them to the larger points.
The overall impression of this book is that it is written by a brilliant scientist but a poor communicator, with an absentee editor completely failing to bring any sense of structure to the book. What is kind of sad is that this would have made a brilliant article of ten or twenty pages, but the main body of the book makes for a frustrating read.
The overall impression of this book is that it is written by a brilliant scientist but a poor communicator, with an absentee editor completely failing to bring any sense of structure to the book. What is kind of sad is that this would have made a brilliant article of ten or twenty pages, but the main body of the book makes for a frustrating read.
March 7, 2010
Kauffman's idea of "creating our own god" is dangerous, particularly for women. The last thing women need is yet another god created from a male perspective (think mormonism for one of the most recent). And I can already see an incipient madonna-child fetish developing for Kauffman in several places in the book. End (temporarily) feminist rant.
On a different topic: It seems to me that all of Kauffman's emergent creativity is still based, when all is said and done, on particles/strings/waves moving around. What is wrong with that? Why should I be cringing in angst about all my human emergent creativity being based on reductionist "something down there?" We humans are creative, have morals, ethics and joy. What is, is.
And I think the dreadful term "spirituality," with all its supernatural woo woo connotations, should be dumped by secularists to be replaced by the delightful word "joy."
On a different topic: It seems to me that all of Kauffman's emergent creativity is still based, when all is said and done, on particles/strings/waves moving around. What is wrong with that? Why should I be cringing in angst about all my human emergent creativity being based on reductionist "something down there?" We humans are creative, have morals, ethics and joy. What is, is.
And I think the dreadful term "spirituality," with all its supernatural woo woo connotations, should be dumped by secularists to be replaced by the delightful word "joy."
August 21, 2011
I got more than halfway through this book before giving up. It's not a good read. It's poorly edited - not in terms of grammar and spelling, but rather in terms of organization and effectively conveying ideas. Based on the title, I expected something a little more qualitative instead of quantitative, but it's actually a spew of scientific babble. Sure, some of the connections he makes are neat, but not worth wading through all the repetitive and confusing verbiage. It kind of reminds me of late-night conversations about the interconnectedness of everything and how awesome the universe is, except that this book is no fun at all.
And honestly - the idea that religious people will happily switch over from worshiping God, capital G, to recognizing the beauty in nature and science and whatnot, and that will stop all the religious persecution and blah blah blah? Really? This guy needs to get out more and stop smoking so much weed.
And honestly - the idea that religious people will happily switch over from worshiping God, capital G, to recognizing the beauty in nature and science and whatnot, and that will stop all the religious persecution and blah blah blah? Really? This guy needs to get out more and stop smoking so much weed.
July 1, 2019
A lot of the science in this book I struggled with; eventually got a lot, but still missed a lot. What I did get, and what fascinated me, was the author’s writing about how creativity, complexity, consciousness emerges out of nature, and there should be awe & reverence for what we learn about the universe and what remains a mystery. The universe is not meaningless and religion is not needed to give it us meaning. The author gives the reader much to ponder with his view, one that I like and hold to, that we don’t need a Creator as much as we need a redefining of God and what is sacred to maintain awe and reverence without the baggage that comes with religion. As Kaufmann puts it, “We are beyond reductionism: life, agency, meaning, value, and even consciousness and morality almost certainly arose naturally, and the evolution of the biosphere, economy, and human culture are stunningly creative often in ways that cannot be foretold, indeed in ways that appear to be partially lawless. The latter challenge to current science is radical. It runs starkly counter to almost four hundred years of belief that natural laws will be sufficient to explain what is real anywhere in the universe, a view I have called the Galilean spell. The new view of emergent and ceaseless creativity particularly beyond natural law is truly a new scientific worldview in which science itself has limits. And science itself has found those very limits. In this particular lawlessness is not an abyss, but unparalleled freedom, unparalleled creativity…. We must live our lives forward, into that which is only partially knowable. Then since reason truly is an insufficient guide, we truly must reunite our humanity. And if so, we truly need to reinvent the sacred for ourselves to guide our lives, based on the ultimate values we come to choose. At last, we must be fully responsible for ourselves, our lives, our actions, our values, our civilizations, the global civilization.”
September 17, 2010
REINVENTING THE SACRED: A VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON, AND RELIGION BY STUART A. KAUFFMAN: Stuart A. Kauffman is the founding director for Biocomplexity and Informatics, is a professor at the University of Calgary, and is the author of The Origins of Order and At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred: A View of Science, Reason, and Religion, he attempts to create a natural linkage between science and religion, or at least between science and spirituality. On the one side there is religion and the idea that God created and controls everything, and on the other there is the cold universe of science explained by facts and the constant motion of microscopic particles; Kauffman says there is a third option, bringing these two opposing views together.
Beginning with a brief history lesson on science, Kauffman cites the age of reason and enlightenment as the time when scientists removed all sense of spirituality and creativity from science, with the move towards reductionism. Through reductionism, science boiled all life and reality down to its base, microscopic levels with the various atoms and their components. In the twentieth century reductionism went one step further, venturing into the world of sub-atomic particles and how it is the movement of these infinitesimal particles that is reality and existence as we know it, with future events and actions being predictable through this model.
And yet there are still events and occurrences, Kauffman says, that science was entirely unable to predict, such as certain evolutionary traits that animals and people develop, which should, under this reductionist paradigm, be predictable, and yet come as a total shock to scientists when they occur. Another example is with sociology and the economy: with our vast global population, science is unable to predict events occurring within populations and economies, even when precise models exist for them. It is here that Kauffman says there is something special going on, a spirituality of life that makes impossible, unpredictable things happen.
This is the crux of Reinventing the Sacred and at times Kauffman tends to repeat himself over and over with ideas already expressed, as well as sayings that become all to familiar. Nevertheless, Reinventing the Sacred does offer up some very original and refreshing ideas on how one can view the university in its astonishing complexity and brilliant creativity.
For more book reviews, and author interviews, go to BookBanter.
Beginning with a brief history lesson on science, Kauffman cites the age of reason and enlightenment as the time when scientists removed all sense of spirituality and creativity from science, with the move towards reductionism. Through reductionism, science boiled all life and reality down to its base, microscopic levels with the various atoms and their components. In the twentieth century reductionism went one step further, venturing into the world of sub-atomic particles and how it is the movement of these infinitesimal particles that is reality and existence as we know it, with future events and actions being predictable through this model.
And yet there are still events and occurrences, Kauffman says, that science was entirely unable to predict, such as certain evolutionary traits that animals and people develop, which should, under this reductionist paradigm, be predictable, and yet come as a total shock to scientists when they occur. Another example is with sociology and the economy: with our vast global population, science is unable to predict events occurring within populations and economies, even when precise models exist for them. It is here that Kauffman says there is something special going on, a spirituality of life that makes impossible, unpredictable things happen.
This is the crux of Reinventing the Sacred and at times Kauffman tends to repeat himself over and over with ideas already expressed, as well as sayings that become all to familiar. Nevertheless, Reinventing the Sacred does offer up some very original and refreshing ideas on how one can view the university in its astonishing complexity and brilliant creativity.
For more book reviews, and author interviews, go to BookBanter.
February 13, 2016
This book actually has much more scientific content than one would expect from its descriptions. Certainly, it offers a view of how we could see sacredness as a property of the evolving universe rather than a god outside of it. It also talks at length about things like collectively autocatalytic sets, something fairly technical that may help explain how life emerged in the first place. Being a complexity theorist who hangs out at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman also touches on other subjects such as economics, which nevertheless involve some of the same patterns and themes. In particular, a running theme is that of creative emergence, where the evolving world is constantly finding new ways to become. Kauffman sketches a reasonable model of how, without needing to break any laws of physics or add to them, these new phenomena can be quite novel and impossible to predict in principle.
In the last chapters, Kauffman goes back to the ethical and spiritual view he proposes. I have been thinking many of the same things, so obviously I approve. We need to take the world seriously and see it as sacred, and have ethical vision, but without a requirement to go back to old mythologies that used to play a role in that. A “scientific” world view may be narrow and exclusively reductionist, but there’s absolutely no reason for it to be.
In other words: We need spirituality, but what do we need the supernatural for? But, of course, even if you do believe there is a god behind it all, that doesn’t mean you can’t share in this view of majesty of the universe and the deeper understanding of it.
Somehow, the book works, though it’s a strange mix of different kinds of science and different kinds of philosophy. Most of it is good. I did think Kauffman was believing the wrong philosophers in his ideas of the problems in the philosophy of mind that he tried to speculatively answer. But overall I found it a very illuminating, interesting and inspiring tour through science and philosophy right up to the meaning of life, just the way I like it. People studying emergence (like myself) should also find it theoretically interesting.
In the last chapters, Kauffman goes back to the ethical and spiritual view he proposes. I have been thinking many of the same things, so obviously I approve. We need to take the world seriously and see it as sacred, and have ethical vision, but without a requirement to go back to old mythologies that used to play a role in that. A “scientific” world view may be narrow and exclusively reductionist, but there’s absolutely no reason for it to be.
In other words: We need spirituality, but what do we need the supernatural for? But, of course, even if you do believe there is a god behind it all, that doesn’t mean you can’t share in this view of majesty of the universe and the deeper understanding of it.
Somehow, the book works, though it’s a strange mix of different kinds of science and different kinds of philosophy. Most of it is good. I did think Kauffman was believing the wrong philosophers in his ideas of the problems in the philosophy of mind that he tried to speculatively answer. But overall I found it a very illuminating, interesting and inspiring tour through science and philosophy right up to the meaning of life, just the way I like it. People studying emergence (like myself) should also find it theoretically interesting.
September 4, 2010
Kauffman believes that natural selection and evolution are not enough to explain the beginning of life. He believes that, although it has not yet been proven, growing evidence supports that as systems grow in complexity, a spontaneous organization often occurs. He goes so far as to postulate that it is not entropy that increases with time, but rather the product of the total work done by a system times the diversity of work done. He believes that this emergence of organized systems is part of the way the universe is made. He states that although the laws of physics are not violated by emergence, they are not enough to explain it. He thus rejects reductionism, which holds that if we could know all the positions and velocities of all particles, we could predict all of history. He further says that emergence goes beyond quantum mechanics; it does not originate in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He concludes that rather than being a highly unlikely occurrence, as evolution alone would lead one to conclude, life is almost inevitable.
Kauffman's reaction to the emergence property of the universe is that of awe. For him it is all the god he wants. He says that it makes sense to call this wonderful property of the universe "God" because that is the word used by many traditions to name the most awe-inspiring and creating agent even though he does not believe this agent is a being.
Kauffman believes that emergence causes ethics to develop among all cultures. He further hopes that the awe, and I believe he would even say, reverence, that he gives to the creation of complexity, including life, can be the basis for an ethic that embraces common action for respecting the earth and life among those who believe that this creative force is a real being and those who believe as he does that no such being exists.
Whether you believe in God as a being or not, this book gives insight into a way of looking at the universe that is not limited to evolution. I, for one, am very interested in seeing where this research leads in the coming years.
Kauffman's reaction to the emergence property of the universe is that of awe. For him it is all the god he wants. He says that it makes sense to call this wonderful property of the universe "God" because that is the word used by many traditions to name the most awe-inspiring and creating agent even though he does not believe this agent is a being.
Kauffman believes that emergence causes ethics to develop among all cultures. He further hopes that the awe, and I believe he would even say, reverence, that he gives to the creation of complexity, including life, can be the basis for an ethic that embraces common action for respecting the earth and life among those who believe that this creative force is a real being and those who believe as he does that no such being exists.
Whether you believe in God as a being or not, this book gives insight into a way of looking at the universe that is not limited to evolution. I, for one, am very interested in seeing where this research leads in the coming years.
April 9, 2014
Kaufman's book is pretty worthless in terms of providing a new understanding of religion, but he offers some great arguments that our universe cannot be completely understood or determined solely from the laws of physics and chemistry (much to the consternation of reductionists). Instead, when new levels of organization arise-- such as biology-- living beings begin to shape themselves and its surroundings. While life is constrained by the laws of physics and chemistry, it is not fully determined by it. Real creativity and innovation take place on higher levels or organization, not by defying physical laws, but by shaping the trajectory of its development.
Human culture is a level of organization that arouse out of biology-- while it is still constrained by biological realities, cultural development follows some paths, but not others. The norms of culture, biology, chemistry, and physics all contribute to the development of the cosmos, and the higher orders cannot be collapsed, reduced, or explained away. They are all real, and they all produce measurable effects.
Human culture is a level of organization that arouse out of biology-- while it is still constrained by biological realities, cultural development follows some paths, but not others. The norms of culture, biology, chemistry, and physics all contribute to the development of the cosmos, and the higher orders cannot be collapsed, reduced, or explained away. They are all real, and they all produce measurable effects.
August 12, 2012
This books is challenging to read in that in the early chapters, it assumes a great deal of familiarity with chemistry and cell biology. Still, I find its three premises -- that scientific determinism is bankrupt, that the reality we experience is the product of aeons of spontaneous creativity, and that that principle of creativity is awe-inspiring and should be regarded as sacred -- compelling. Interestingly, to the extent that the new atheists have build their refutation of God on narrow and deterministic science, Kauffman's critique undercuts their work as well.
At first, Kauffman's explication of existence's inherent creativity is by turns ever more fascinating: molecules, clusters of molecules, cells, organisms, the full range of life. By the time he gets to society, culture, and economics, he struggles to find fresh ways to present the pattern he's articulating.
Still, a worthwhile and thought-provoking read.
At first, Kauffman's explication of existence's inherent creativity is by turns ever more fascinating: molecules, clusters of molecules, cells, organisms, the full range of life. By the time he gets to society, culture, and economics, he struggles to find fresh ways to present the pattern he's articulating.
Still, a worthwhile and thought-provoking read.
May 22, 2011
About half this book was written for a guy like me. About half of it was apparently written for someone smarter. About a fourth of this book was spent referring to other parts of its own text or repeating concepts already stated earlier. Regardless, I love it's heart and thoroughly enjoyed attempting to piece its premise together at a level I could comprehend and enjoy. His argument for "agency" entering the universe with biology is delightful.
It prompted me to set up a lunch date with an old nemesis of mine. I am hoping to re-engage my long standing losing argument against his confoundedly well articulated determinism and radical behaviorist philosophy.
Didn't tell him where or when we would meet. It had been predetermined. If he fails to show, I figure I win.
It prompted me to set up a lunch date with an old nemesis of mine. I am hoping to re-engage my long standing losing argument against his confoundedly well articulated determinism and radical behaviorist philosophy.
Didn't tell him where or when we would meet. It had been predetermined. If he fails to show, I figure I win.
May 17, 2022
Wow I feel like a hypocrite for finishing this. Usually I say if a book is bad and not fun, just DNF it. But I really thought this would pull it together at the end and make the slog through the terrible writing worth it. Alas reader, it was not worth it. I was planning on giving this book 2 stars as its premise was fascinating and there were several ideas that will probably stick with me. But gun to head, I don't think I could give you the book's train of logic or what it really was about. Admitting that is incredibly frustrating.
Also it pissed me off a little that he would devote so much writing to how economies work in a book about "REINVENTING THE SACRED" as if understanding them better would bring me long term spiritual peace. Instead this book brought me short term mental anguish.
Also it pissed me off a little that he would devote so much writing to how economies work in a book about "REINVENTING THE SACRED" as if understanding them better would bring me long term spiritual peace. Instead this book brought me short term mental anguish.
January 10, 2012
This book contains some quite interesting concepts in the realm of biology, as well as its startup conditions and overall principles of expression. It tries to restate the existential sacred as the act of creativity in life itself, a most noble of goals as far as any book is concerned. While the examples written within are great, life already is sacred to most people, the only thing to do is realize it. Opposed to that, the author is merely trying to lean the balance from other sciences in favor of biology when each science has its own right and importance. Differences are signs pointing to the spot where we should build a bridge.
January 11, 2011
Repeating, self-indulgent, prolix, ambitious to the point of presumption. About 10 years after Investigations, almost inexistent evolution in Kauffman's thought. Recycling of (his) old intuitions (some of which he could not support with strict proofs) within a very pompous framework of little originality (the title itself was already mentioned in At home in the universe's preface, and is not his).
July 17, 2016
I got this as a gift, and soldiered through it intermittently over about eighteen months. It's poorly written, and full of clunky repetition and badly explained scientific examples. Judging by his illustrious CV, Kaufmann is clearly the real deal in his field, but this hodgepodge of philosophy, spirituality and speculative science advances none of them. He seeks to bring science to humanists and theists; and to bring the sacred into science. These hackneyed arguments will do neither.
July 8, 2008
Builds a good case against naive reductionism ("everythingis reducible to physics" and "the future can be extrapolated from a complete set of all past conditions"). Argues that "agency" (which involves goal-directed action) is an evolutionary development by which biology transcends physics, and suggests (argument is not as developed) that volition/consciousness transcend biology.
Want to read
October 21, 2008Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere?
Amen, Stuart, amen! (I've never understood why the "natural" awe wasn't enough for believers. Why do we need to assign a supernatural cause?)
Amen, Stuart, amen! (I've never understood why the "natural" awe wasn't enough for believers. Why do we need to assign a supernatural cause?)
July 31, 2011
The last few chapters are quite moralising. But it’s not really the sentiments I object to. Kauffman’s heart seems to be in the right place. It’s his logic that’s the problem, some of which could be quite dangerous logic.
For full review please see: Reinventing the sand dune.
For full review please see: Reinventing the sand dune.
April 7, 2013
That was a rough read for someone without a physics or chemistry background. But once I got past the halfway point it got easier. I loved his conclusions a bout the connection of a god like presence that is not tied to religion and dovetails into science. WOrth reading but get ready to re read entire pages just to get your head around the concepts.
May 4, 2015
This book lost me when starting to describe natural processes as partially lawless. I have no doubt that novel behaviours emerge at certain levels of complexity, but to say that these phenomena are not reducible to physics seems short-sighted to me & says more about the practical limits of our comprehension rather than the underlying system. Maybe I'm just missing the point?
July 26, 2013
data + data + data = new agey vision of global sacredness
I am not really even criticizing what he ends with, though what he ends with is not very critical, but dear god I just don't get how scientists make these moves.
I am not really even criticizing what he ends with, though what he ends with is not very critical, but dear god I just don't get how scientists make these moves.
April 23, 2016
The author tries to pretend like he has invented some grand new worldview by using imprecise language to describe things like human consciousness and reductionism. He uses words like "god" to describe completely natural phenomena, which serves only to obfuscate rather simple facts.
January 24, 2020
I bailed on this book. Generally language doesn't trip me up, but this book is inaccessible to anyone without deeper roots in science, theology, and philosophy.
December 7, 2017
Reinventing the Sacred by Stuart Kauffman describes a scientific worldview that embraces the reality of emergence.[1] We live in a universe, biosphere, and human culture that are not only emergent but radically creative. Kauffman attempts to lay out the scientific foundations for agency and therefore value in the biological world.[2] He has a great deal to say about organized processes, for they are less understood than we might think.[3] We have as yet not theory for systems that do work to build their own boundary conditions, and thereafter modify the work that is done, and then modify the boundary conditions as they propagate organization of process.[4]
" An organized being is […] not a mere machine, […] but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind … "
—Immanuel Kant[5]
We live our lives forward, often without knowing, which requires all our humanity, not just "knowledge."[6] Much of what we do when we intuit, feel, sense, understand, or act is non-algorithmic.[7] Stuart Kauffman emphasizes that the human mind need not act algorithmically,[8] nor is it merely computational.[9] A central failure of the "mind as a computational system" theory is that computations, per se, are devoid of meaning.[10] Agency, meaning, value, and doing are real parts of the universe.[11] Astonishingly, "order for free," does exist.[12] Life itself seems to maximize self-propagating organization of process. It's a thought-provoking book!
Notes:
[1] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2010), p.5.
[2] Ibid., p.11.
[3] Ibid., p.35.
[4] Ibid., p.92.
[5] Ibid., p.88.
[6] Ibid., p.89.
[7] Ibid., p.235.
[8] Ibid., p.77.
[9] Ibid., p.195.
[10] Ibid., p.192.
[11] Ibid., p.78.
[12] Ibid., p.106.
" An organized being is […] not a mere machine, […] but it possesses in itself formative power of a self-propagating kind … "
—Immanuel Kant[5]
We live our lives forward, often without knowing, which requires all our humanity, not just "knowledge."[6] Much of what we do when we intuit, feel, sense, understand, or act is non-algorithmic.[7] Stuart Kauffman emphasizes that the human mind need not act algorithmically,[8] nor is it merely computational.[9] A central failure of the "mind as a computational system" theory is that computations, per se, are devoid of meaning.[10] Agency, meaning, value, and doing are real parts of the universe.[11] Astonishingly, "order for free," does exist.[12] Life itself seems to maximize self-propagating organization of process. It's a thought-provoking book!
Notes:
[1] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2010), p.5.
[2] Ibid., p.11.
[3] Ibid., p.35.
[4] Ibid., p.92.
[5] Ibid., p.88.
[6] Ibid., p.89.
[7] Ibid., p.235.
[8] Ibid., p.77.
[9] Ibid., p.195.
[10] Ibid., p.192.
[11] Ibid., p.78.
[12] Ibid., p.106.
December 9, 2020
As others have indicated, Kauffman is not the most elegant of writers, but one cannot claim that he is without passion. Reading the book I thought his term "reinvent" the sacred was likely to irk some, and it isn't until the last paragraph where he addresses his vocabulary. He isn't terribly persuasive, and yet....
And yet what Kauffman asks of us (humanity) is actually something I agree with, having come to more or less the same conclusion he has: that if there's any hope for us it's in the agenda he proposes. I think the likelihood that we'll achieve his vision is remote; I tend to think that the greatest works of philosophy, even as they aspire to define the present and future, generally describe conditions that have been defined by the past and are, thus, too late to change. Add to this the idea that for most people (at least in the Abrahamic tradition, I suspect) the divine is worshipped less for his creativity than for the psychological comfort He/She/It provides for those who'd otherwise freak out at the Pascalian abyss. He's less a Cosmic Da Vinci, and more of a Cosmic Parent. There's little in Kauffman's vision to arrest those primal fears. He's a French existentialist who extends his range from the first person singular to the first person plural.
This work is not the first book by Kauffman that I've read in the past year. There's a second author, who's probably never been mentioned in conjunction with Kauffman, whom I've also discovered in the past year: Michel Henry, a phenomenologist and idiosyncratic Christian. To me, the two authors' insights converge, and I recommend people pair them for an interesting fusion of ideas.
And yet what Kauffman asks of us (humanity) is actually something I agree with, having come to more or less the same conclusion he has: that if there's any hope for us it's in the agenda he proposes. I think the likelihood that we'll achieve his vision is remote; I tend to think that the greatest works of philosophy, even as they aspire to define the present and future, generally describe conditions that have been defined by the past and are, thus, too late to change. Add to this the idea that for most people (at least in the Abrahamic tradition, I suspect) the divine is worshipped less for his creativity than for the psychological comfort He/She/It provides for those who'd otherwise freak out at the Pascalian abyss. He's less a Cosmic Da Vinci, and more of a Cosmic Parent. There's little in Kauffman's vision to arrest those primal fears. He's a French existentialist who extends his range from the first person singular to the first person plural.
This work is not the first book by Kauffman that I've read in the past year. There's a second author, who's probably never been mentioned in conjunction with Kauffman, whom I've also discovered in the past year: Michel Henry, a phenomenologist and idiosyncratic Christian. To me, the two authors' insights converge, and I recommend people pair them for an interesting fusion of ideas.
February 23, 2024
Mr. Kauffman has a variety of good ideas and, if you are willing to wade through pages and pages of chaff, he will give you some food for thought.
Early on he criticizes 'reductionism', the idea that phenomena can be explained by looking at the constituents of the things participating in the event, and also chastises 'constructivism' the idea that you can use some fundamental ideas to build predictions of higher level phenomena. As he advances, he ruthlessly attacks constructivism, all the while calling it reductionism. He seems to believe that, as science fails to predict the future, or the pathways of life's complexity, or the complications of future economic development, then it's all a bust and we need to supply some wispy, sort-of-goddy-like visionary spiritually sacred stuff so we'll really understand life. Sorry I can't be more clear, but neither can he.
His definition of science seems to be "a bunch of rules we can apply" while mine is more "here's a model we can create today that best fits all the data". Who would expect that such a model could accurately predict everything that will ever happen, give that science changes continuously?
A much more clear and concise description of these problems and rewards of science was given years ago by Sean Carroll The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, which has not only more clear elucidation of the issues but also a number of proposed solutions.
Early on he criticizes 'reductionism', the idea that phenomena can be explained by looking at the constituents of the things participating in the event, and also chastises 'constructivism' the idea that you can use some fundamental ideas to build predictions of higher level phenomena. As he advances, he ruthlessly attacks constructivism, all the while calling it reductionism. He seems to believe that, as science fails to predict the future, or the pathways of life's complexity, or the complications of future economic development, then it's all a bust and we need to supply some wispy, sort-of-goddy-like visionary spiritually sacred stuff so we'll really understand life. Sorry I can't be more clear, but neither can he.
His definition of science seems to be "a bunch of rules we can apply" while mine is more "here's a model we can create today that best fits all the data". Who would expect that such a model could accurately predict everything that will ever happen, give that science changes continuously?
A much more clear and concise description of these problems and rewards of science was given years ago by Sean Carroll The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself, which has not only more clear elucidation of the issues but also a number of proposed solutions.
November 18, 2021
I became a fan of Stuart Kauffman while listening to the Beyond Belief conferences of 2006, 2007, and 2008. The theme of science meeting some of the emotional needs of people came up. This book is resonates with that theme.
Kauffman says that reductionism (an incredibly effective tool for science research and understanding) has led many lay people to feel like science is taking apart the things we love and providing a low level substitute that erases much of the meaning inherent in things. Kauffman argues that complexity and emergence give us reason anew to wonder at the composition of the universe, and how the things we love are constituted. [In the tradition of Spinoza], "God can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe. Such a view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity in the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred."
While not a soft, light-hearted, strictly spiritual book (it explores multiple themes in complexity theory in some depth, like the adjacent possible), it does try to say these principles give some account for how the incredibly things in our world came to be, life genes economics, etc.
Nice book. Any effort to appropriately spiritualize science is generally appreciated, for me anyway.
Kauffman says that reductionism (an incredibly effective tool for science research and understanding) has led many lay people to feel like science is taking apart the things we love and providing a low level substitute that erases much of the meaning inherent in things. Kauffman argues that complexity and emergence give us reason anew to wonder at the composition of the universe, and how the things we love are constituted. [In the tradition of Spinoza], "God can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe. Such a view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity in the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred."
While not a soft, light-hearted, strictly spiritual book (it explores multiple themes in complexity theory in some depth, like the adjacent possible), it does try to say these principles give some account for how the incredibly things in our world came to be, life genes economics, etc.
Nice book. Any effort to appropriately spiritualize science is generally appreciated, for me anyway.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews