Dr. Kauffman's Clever Conjecture

"All you can do is do your best/ You can never know the outcome," says my friend the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. I've taken his powerful idea to heart in light of his compelling science. The deal is: I give up the illusion of certainty, move beyond the limitations of stripped-down reason, and accept the powerful role of emotions in sentient beings. And in return? I get LIFE -- messy, unpredictable, ever-unfolding, beautiful life.

I take inexpressible delight in the ring-side seat Dr. Kauffman has made available to all comers in his newest work, _Reinventing the Sacred_. For 350 years we've been mesmerized by reductionist orthodoxy: take things apart and apart and apart long enough and one day we'll know and predict everything. Now, the evolving richness of life, along with existential threats to it, demand our attention. Following life's lead, Dr. Kauffman puts science to work and invites us along for the ride.

Why mess with something that's held us captive since Galileo, Newton and Descartes? Evidence (along with that "existence" thing). Turns out, the universe isn't just the sum of its parts. In seeking to move science to the next level, Dr. Kauffman is also offering to restore some of life's juiciness which has been squeezed out by 350 years of reason and reductionism.

Understand, Dr. Kauffman is deeply respectful of the amazing accomplishments of the Western science on which he's building. And he's downright nice about inviting the reigning queen of the sciences - physics - to be part of the new science he's trying to shape. It's just that he thinks the current story is not the full story, perhaps not even the most important part.

And those of us who are not scientists have as much or more skin in the game of what Dr. Kauffman calls "breaking the Galilean spell" as scientists do. We're all utterly saturated by reason-driven, reductionist science ... and thinking. The crushing problems we confront require that we bring our entire humanity to the problem-solving tables. That includes intuition, emotions, experience ... and the "meaning" that got written out of the reductionist rulebook long ago.

Dr. Kauffman's ideas are beautifully simple and wonderfully complex (he's a complexity scientist, after all). Why can't physics and the old ways of thinking get us to the evolution of the biosphere? Because life is forever becoming. Emergent. Constrained, but not defined, by known rules.

So you see? I am OBLIGED to do my best. Thanks Galileo, Newton and Descartes; now it's Darwin's turn.

Oh. And THE MEANING OF LIFE? (long drumroll)
Living. Forward. Into our futures. The best ways we can.

You'll find Stuart Kauffman talking about both his book _At Home in the Universe_ and his newest one, _Reinventing the Sacred: New Views of Science, Reason and Religion_ at our "Paula Gordon Show" website .

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