August 2010

The sacredness? According to Stuart Kauffman is the other face of the science fiction

An eccentric title for a book even more weird, but worth suggesting it as summer reading for some commitment. This is Reinventing the Sacred. A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion , Stuart Alan Kauffman, and in the Italian version by Mario Rasetti, just exit code editions, Reinventing the Sacred. A new vision of science, reason and religion . But for those who had desire and time, the advice is to read in the original edition, in paperback for a very short (320 page., $ 16.95). It is not always encounter a world-renowned scientist who can also present a write-bodied, exuberant, in a word "complex" as it is right to expect from one of the recognized masters of complexity. Because this is Stuart Kauffman, founder and director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics, professor emeritus of biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania, then to the Santa Fe Institute and currently at Tampere University of Technology, Finland.

Among the leading scholars of the origin of life, Kauffman is the author of famous books, such as at home in the universe Exploration and evolutionary . But this effort differs from its recent past, because it is basic to a head node of our present. They are matters of urgency, if not dramatic. Humanity has a future? Or his own intelligence technology will end with the self-extinction? Why is it necessary to rethink the associative life moving from an apparently unscientific so what is the sacred? And that means today to "sacred"?

These are questions that are shaking the wrists. Meanwhile, a petition reinventing the sacred is in itself a contradiction, seemingly sacrilegious. If God exists and if the world is an expression of its laws, then the sacred is not the subject of invention. But this contradiction is diluted in the light of recent history.

Religion and beliefs often produce conflicting views, but once they were separated by political boundaries, geographical, historical and cultural. Today, however, suffer a mutual collapse because of the irreversible process of globalization. The two cultures par excellence, science and faith can no longer afford to act as the blocks in the Cold War, a antithetical to the other, mutual, suspicious, bitter war of position.

If this state of affairs will last, the systemic collapse can not be avoided. From eminent biologist, Kauffman points out that the process of life is characterized dall'autoestinzione much as evolution. We are not so protected by virtue of some obscure privilege. The thousand daily large-scale catastrophic events, predation caused by the attitude of political and economic aggregates, only the alarm bells of a cataclysm of unimaginable proportions. A signal could be the growing success of that imaginary doubt catastrophic that captures the collective unconscious.

must therefore start from new bases. How? For Kauffman central notion is the sacredness of life. But what is the "life"? From the point of view of science's most advanced all living things have in common the fact that they are "autocatalytic entities". The term derives dall'autopoiesi of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, but if Kauffman is a philosopher, he is also chief scientist. His major contribution to biology is precisely in having demonstrated a basic property of living beings: life is not following algorithmic processes, that is to say, unpredictable and, above all, open. The stunning variety of life forms on our planet is just the infinitesimal portion of the development potential. None of them can be included in a hypothetical record of platonic forms.

The second basic principle is the co-evolution. There are no separate or isolated systems. On the contrary, all the transformations are played on the ground of mutual interaction. Third and even more powerful concept: the institutions and events that occur at a certain scale of the universe are governed by autonomous statutes, not inconsistent with the laws of physics, but not reducible to physical laws. This means rejecting reductionism and embrace the thought, "holistic". With the difference, compared to well-known advisers new age style to Fritjof Capra, that the scientific foundations of Kauffman are now very solid and incontrovertible.

In other words, the molecular organization, the emergence of life, the emergence of autonomous agents, the biosphere and man again, with all its history that has produced meanings, values, cultures and economic structures, entities are not reducible to simpler species that compose them, but instead are "agencies", with internal consistency.

All this apparatus of dizzying concepts seems far away by the urgency of re-foundation of the sacred, but it is not. This is shown by the splendid chapter on the path of morality. Also - says Kauffman - evolves with the passage of history, through resolutions of the emergence of innovative and unpredictable, which follow a mathematical law called "global Pareto Optimality", ie the 'global Pareto efficiency. "

the remote root, there are studies on income distribution of the famous economist Vilfredo Pareto. But it is quite unusual the fact that this mathematical analysis can be also applicable to the issue of appreciation of the different moral values \u200b\u200bin a concrete space of ethical choices. Therefore, the values \u200b\u200bevolve no less than the civilization which, however, means that evolution in the strict sense is not the enemy of morality, but rather one of its bases.

Even moving from very different scientific settings, there is a striking convergence. For example, the anthropologist Joseph A. Bulbul, a professor at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and one of the greatest scholars of the evolution of religion, argues that religious according to a precise adaptive design. The religious knowledge (and the sense of the sacred), even apart from the specific ideas, would be instrumental to the survival of the community. If you examine the various religious systems using the mathematical tools of game theory one discovers that they, surprisingly, always have a high adaptive value. The moral doctrines are therefore intrinsically linked to the survival of communities, even if you adopt a frame of reference neoevoluzionista!

In today's world, however, this consideration results in an extreme case, globalized the so-called "prisoner's dilemma." Kauffman warns the collapse and confusion of the various civilizations that goes by the name of "globalization" is not synonymous with global civilization. What is needed to create it?

We lack a global ethic. Moreover, even in Italy, the theologian Vito Mancuso, attentive to the voices that come from the world of science, warns that there is a deep need to return to the sacred dimension of politics, within a framework that provides for the negotiation of all instances .

But to open the breach was in fact the fantasy literature, and more than a century ago. That mankind must find a synthesis of all its cultural and ethical reasons, it became clear from the first steps of this irreversible process called "globalization." The differences, while necessary, languages, customs, traditions, will one day find a higher synthesis. Various were the narrative devices to justify it. Herbert George Wells, in the novel In the Days of the Comet (1906), envisioned a global cataclysm which would have arisen had the miraculous gift of a mysterious gas, which can act on all living things, directing them towards the common good: "The great awakening derived directly from the processing - Wells wrote - the last, the deepest, most extended, the most durable of all the great waves of religious feeling and to whom you give this name. " Well in advance of the concepts of Kauffman is this combination of a higher morality and the new perception of the sacredness of life.

Meanwhile Isaac Asimov proposed the political unity, economic and moral of the planet by means of a future physical and social engineering. Then, in the saga of Star Trek the unity of the Earth, placed in a planetary federation, is founded on an underlying concept of mutual acceptance of differences, in turn, by the exceeding of the struggle for survival. To obtain this necessary revolution without bloodshed must sit back and listen - Kauffman says - we need to refound the Eden, and need to rediscover a sense of reverence that puts the miracle of life. You get the same message in Avatar a pity it was wasted in a disappointing film.

Titles of journal articles or posters published

He passed the man who set himself on fire

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(Blowjob Livorno was a player who scored four goals in that game)

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Courier, 1997

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Il Messaggero, 2001

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