Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature by Ilya Prigogine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The authors’ enthusiasm comes out quite strongly. Congruent with their Kantian world view, they combine disparate fields of study in order to assemble “noumena causa” by which order can be achieved regardless of expression… this is a search for the pure logic of material relations found through the a priori field of mathematics. Thus this book jumps onto the bandwagon of the 20th century in order to disassemble time in order to bring order. This order must be of a symmetrical nature since equivalence of energy-matter difference has to be held in order for the true substantive relations of the universe to be beholden. Thus, they introduce theoretical energy to preserve this symmetry and “reverse time”. Because once the orders are established as purely reflexive one way or another way, the organizing relations hold and the arrow of time, which seems arbitrary, can truly be arbitrary.
Hidden in this view are the author’s interesting mix of philosophy, art and humanity into the material reality as a function of time/entropy… we are to find our place as a logical coherency with everything else. I am not sure they achieve this, although they dance around the role of the observer. I found some of their attempts to place human beings/observers in their schema a little confusing. Their attempt to include EVERYTHING at the end as long as it seemed to address what they were saying chaotic. Their attempt to order chaos leads to chaos! In the end though, this view is again complicated by their acknowledgement that the world remains a mystery, one that is distorted by endless renewals of paradigms and experimentations… they stick with the Kant here, by supposing a suprasensible order that we cannot understand… and then claiming that human beings have a place in that order that we cannot comprehend due to our finite limitations.
Their energy is infectious, bright and idealistic. Their conclusions are suspect because I am not sure what they are. Their exploration of science and math is interesting but it took them a long time to get going. It would have been better if they were able to make a clearer statement with less than a muddled statement with more.
