Non-Linear Systems, Chaos, Complexity and Emergence 319
be time reversed and still be valid. In other words a process going
forward in time if time reversed would not violate Newton’s laws of
motion. This means that according to Newton’s laws of motion one
cannot tell in which direction time is moving. This according to
Prigogine represents a denial of the arrow of time and the widely
accepted notion that time has only one direction in which it can progress.
Prigogine argues for the irreversibility of time on the basis of many
phenomena in the physical world such as radioactivity, weather patterns,
the birth and death of living organisms, the origin of life on Earth and its
evolution, the evolution of stars, galaxies and the universe itself. We saw
that Newtonian physics had to be amended to take into account Special
and General Relativity effects through the introduction of 4 dimensional
space-time. Classical physics was amended once again to take into
account quantum effects and the need for a probabilistic description of
individual elementary particles. But although one had to sacrifice the
causal description of an individual elementary particle the statistical
behaviour of quantum particles can be easily predicted and is in total
agreement with empirical observations. Prigogine argues that chaotics
and complexity requires a third amendment in that non-linear systems are
indeterminate. Those not going quite so far as Prigogine would
nevertheless assert that the behaviour of complex chaotics system cannot
be predicted to which Prigogine might add, well that makes them
indeterminate. Einstein argued that quantum mechanics was incomplete
because it had to sacrifice causality saying, “God does not play dice.”
I wonder if he would argue against Prigogine’s position by saying that
self-organization is the clever mechanism by which God created this
universe of ours.
The focus of this book has been on physics and its description of the
physical world. However, embedded within the physical world are living
organisms subject to the laws of physics and among those living
organisms we find various levels of intelligence including the human
brain and/or mind. The brain is also subject to the laws of physics. The
descriptions of the world of living things belongs to another science,
namely biology and the description of the mental world of human
thought belongs to psychology and neuroscience with the former field
focusing on behaviour and the latter on the functions of the human brain.
But because biological organisms and the brain are subject to the laws
of physics and are composed of biomolecules there are some scientists,
the reductionists or physicalists, who believe all forms of life and