Prigogine: the end of certainty

In his book, the end of certainty, Prigogine talks about irreversibility as a possibility. This is something that people have neglected when putting forward laws that describe how nature operates. He calls many laws deterministic in nature, in that, they can be bidirectional with respect to time. He however says that this bidirectional time is a very narrow minded view. It only takes into consideration the isolated experimental subjects and considers them free of the multiple other factors that are impacting on them.

I was involved with a functional behavioral analysis of a child with disruptive behaviors. In a functional behavioral analysis one tries to determine the antecedents that cause the behaviors and the consequences that either enforce or extinguish the behaviors. A hypothesis of the whole situation is made and that hypothesis is tested out. The parents are then given strategies to manage the behaviors from the hypotheses. The proof that those strategies work has been shown to the parents during the testing phase. Hypothesis like "the child can go to a non preferred activity if he knows that it is time limited and if it is followed by a preferred activity", is an example.

This kind of analysis of behaviors is fine if a behavior is only considered to be present and influenced by a limited number of antecedents and consequences. But the truth of the matter is that the true antecedents to a behavior are multiple and have a propensity to be unknown. Freud believed the majority of the decisions that a person was making were unconscious. When dealing with these many possibilities of environmental and psychological variability, it is essential not to "over simplify" or "over complicate"things to the point that incredulous demands be made of patients in "treatment".

Prigogine talks about phase space which would be very applicable to the scenario of the disruptive child. All the different possible behaviors of the child are represented in that phase space. Prigogine also talks about stable (determinism) and unstable (chaotic) equilibrium and details characteristics of those systems.

A beautiful example he uses is of Poincare who proved that dynamical systems are non integrable. An integrable system would be a static deterministic world without the possibility of freedom. Non integrability results from existence of resonances between degrees of freedom. What we have done with behavioral analysis is to put on deterministic glasses and translated the multi factorial world into a lesser dimension. The city of Oz was not really green.

Prigogine also talks about prevalent energies in a system. How potential energy is maximum in a state of equilibrium and free energy is at minimum in a state of equilibrium. Increasing energy in a system also increased the areas of randomness in it. He describes creativity as an irreversible phenomenon which has been associated with complexity. Any system in non equilibrium can spontaneously evolve in to increased complexity and any system in non equilibrium can lead to irreversible phenomenon, hence creation.

With this he comes full circle to creation as an irreversible process which creates a system of equilibrium for itself till of course it is pushed into non equilibrium again. It will get pushed into non equilibrium.

From this we glimpse a view of a world which is constantly oscillating in between equilibrium and non equilibrium. A world which is constantly changing due to chaos, organizing and disorganizing itself. And caught in the center is man who attempts to act like the universe, organizing and then disorganizing whatever it comes across. Creating and then uncreating. Cooking and then digesting. Being born and then dying.