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Sacred Science
Can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?
By Mic hael Shermer
神圣的科学
--自然发生论能够打破还原论的魔咒使灵性回归自然吗？
作者：Michael Shermer
翻译：Runner

In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter- all with an aim toward discovering regularities that could be codified into laws of nature. So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to "imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the universe and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence."

在17世纪早期，当伽利略开始摇动钟摆，把球从斜面上滚下并且观测到木星的卫星时，一个机械世界观化身的精灵被他引到了世间--虽然他所做的这一切只是想要发现那些能够被整合到自然法则里的规律。
这种机械的世界观是如此深得人心，以至于到19世纪早期，法国数学家拉普拉斯都声称"设想有这么一种超级智慧，如果他在任何特定的时刻都可以知道自然界中存在的所有的力和作用，也可以知道组成这个世界的所有事物的位置......那么宇宙中最大的物体和最小的原子的运动都可以用同一个公式来概括了。对于这种超级智慧来说，一切尽在掌握之中。"

By the early 20th century science undertook to become Laplace's demon. It cast a wide "causal net" linking effects to causes throughout the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: "All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics." In such an all-encompassing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?

到20世纪早期，科学变成了拉普拉斯言论的卫道士，它布下因果的网络要把一切事物的原因和结果，过去和将来统统联系起来，还要把事物还原为组成事物本身的最小单位，从而解释世间的一切复杂现象。诺贝尔奖金得主，物理学家Steven Weinberg针对这种还原论的哲学立场讽刺地说到："一切作为解释的箭头都指向下，从社会到个人，到器官，到细胞，到生物化学再到化学，最后指向我们最底层的物理学。"在这样一个什么都能解释的宇宙里，我们又把上帝摆在什么位置呢？

Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred (Basic Books, 2008), Kauffman-founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory-reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says "breaks no laws of physics" and yet cannot be explained by them. God "is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures," Kauffman declares.

Stuart Kauffman，这位卡尔加里大学生物多样性及信息学研究院的主任，也是多样性理论的先驱，他给了我们一个回答：把神性自然化。在他的新书《神圣的再造》里面，Kauffman用一个更加包容的自然发生和自我组织理论把还原主义者们追溯原因的箭头朝上扳了过来。他解释说这个理论"没有破坏物理规律"但也不能被这些物理规律所解释。Kauffman声称，所谓的上帝其实是"自然、宇宙、生物圈和人类文化不断自我创造的能力的代称"。

In Kauffman's emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? "One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done," Kauffman avers. "We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables-lungs, wings, etc.-to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere."

在Kauffman的自然发生的世界里，还原主义理论与其说是错误的不如说是不完整。还原主义理论虽然在科学的发展中解决了许多重大的问题，但是还有许多诸如生命的起源、生物圈、意识、进化、伦理和经济等等的谜团并没有得到解决。例如，一个还原主义者会如何解释生物圈呢？"一种可能的方法是像牛顿一样，写出生物圈进化的方程并解决它。然而这是不可能的。" Kauffman断言道，"我们不可能超越时间去预测生物圈将会出现什么新的功能。因此我们不知道该把什么变量--是肺或者翅膀还是其它--代入方程。在牛顿的科学框架内我们可以预设变量，变量间的运算规则以及起始条件和限制条件，然后计算系统下一步的行为。但是这套框架体系并不能帮助我们预测生物圈未来的状态。"Kauffman还提醒说，这不仅是认识论上计算能力的问题，而且是一个本体论上不同层次不同原因的问题。当多样性达到一个更高的层次时就会出现完全不同的新生事物。

This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity. Similar ontological differences exist in the self-organized emergence of consciousness, morality and the economy. In my recent book, The Mind of the Market (Times Books, 2008), I show how economics and evolution are complex adaptive systems that learn and grow as they evolve from simple to complex and how they are autocatalytic, or containing self-driving feedback loops. It was therefore gratifying to find corroboration in Kauffman's detailed explication of why such phenomena "cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe." This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, "is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe."

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