From Chaos to Community

by David Ellis

This essay seeks to outline science’s potential contribution to an understanding of the “Emptiness” stage of M. Scott Peck’s four-stage  process of community building, which we began discussing in Community, Kingdom, and M. Scott Peck (January 12, 2013. The four stages are : Pseudo community, Chaos, Emptiness, and True community.)

This essay is also a dynamic work in progress: I will continue to revise and expand it as my thinking expands and hopefully is sharpened by your comments.

Approaches to Understanding

There are two approaches, by no means exclusive of one another, to understanding the nature and the cause of things. They are reductionism and wholism (also spelt “holism.”)

Reductionism takes things apart to see how they work. It works OK for simple things, but not for very complex things.

Wholism looks at the whole thing and at its (often dynamic, changing) environment, to see how it works. This approach is better at dealing with really complex things.

Science in general is strictly reductionist, but some esoteric branches of it (in particular, chaos theory, complex systems theory, and quantum mechanics) use wholistic methods. Religion tends to study concepts wholistically, in part because its concepts are generally metaphysical and not merely complex. Religion gets into trouble (with me, anyway) when it tries to make its points through reductionist arguments.

Science calls the environment of something under wholistic study the thing’s “phase space.” Phase space includes every possible state of the system; therefore, it is extremely complex. The complexity of phase space is manageable and manipulable only by allowing it to have multiple dimensions – not just the familiar four (three spatial + one time) of the space-time environment we easily perceive with our own senses and manipulate and move around in. The only way to examine multidimensional phase space is through mathematics.

There is no way of physically modeling a fifth dimension. To all intents and purposes, the fifth dimension is metaphysical. But mathematics can model in n dimensions, using equations. Thus, through mathematics, we can study at least some “metaphysical” phenomena on a scientific basis.

Emergence

Some things emerge in a seemingly metaphysical way. They just appear out of the blue. Think of a collection of words that turns into a book, or a collection of notes that turns into a symphony, or a chaotic, disintegrating pseudo community that turns into a true community. We can distinguish the before and after, but we can’t pinpoint the boundary in front of which the book, the symphony, or the true community did not exist and after which it did.

The question is, what happens at that fuzzy boundary? Subjectively, we may feel it, with a tingle growing up the spine, as an “Aha!” moment; as Enlightenment. Whatever “it” is, it seems to happen relatively quickly, and it seems to me to represent the instantiation of a new point of possibility within the phase space by turning the possibility into 100 percent probability—in other words, into certainty… into being.

I wish to reiterate that phase space is amenable to scientific inquiry.

Chaos and Complexity Theory

The specific approaches used to inquire into complex, chaotic systems are chaos theory and complex systems theory.

Chaos theory predicts that the flap of a butterfly wing in Beijing could theoretically precipitate a thunderstorm over Peoria a few weeks later, as the molecules set in motion by the wing flap jostle their neighbors, which jostle their neighbors in turn, and so on. But to track that would require tracking the trajectories—the phase spaces—of all the molecules all the way to Peoria. We can track exact trajectories in relatively simple, stable systems, but not in complex, unstable systems.

It’s not a matter of computing power; rather, it is a reflection of the observation that complex, unstable systems (like the weather, like the economy, like community) and the things—the new states of phase space—that emerge from them (a storm, a recession, a true community) are by their very nature probabilistic. And that makes them amenable to statistical analysis and description using the tools of complex systems theory, which have been proven valid and reliable in the other complex, chaotic domains of weather, economies, and more.

Hypothesis

I propose that the transition from Chaos to True Community occurs through an instantiation of a point of Emptiness which exists as a point of possibility in the pseudo community’s phase space. The instantiation is triggered by the inevitable entropy of the pseudo community which, by definition, is a closed system. The Second Law of Thermodynamics assures us that closed systems cannot avoid entropy—their energy, and therefore their dynamic being, must inevitably dissipate. True community, being wide open, is not subject to the Second Law.

But the old system—the old phase state—does not give up without a struggle. The struggle engenders chaos, which generates enough energy to push the system’s phase state towards Emptiness. A characteristic of that new state is that the bounds of the closed system are removed. There are no bounds, only empty space; a vacuum, inviting anything and everything in. The result: A new phase space—true community.

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Alpha and Omega: The Singular and Ultimate Communion

Yale philosopher Dan Dennett has said we cannot rule out the possibility in principle that our minds will remain forever cognitively closed to some domains, not because we are incapable of understanding but because “the Heat Death of the universe will overtake us before we can get there.” The Heat Death conjecture holds that being a closed (albeit infinitely expanding) system, the universe will suffer the consequences of the Second Law and temperature differentials between different parts of the universe will equalize, leaving no available energy to power life. Hence “Heat Death.”

But a more widely accepted theory holds that the universe will not go on expanding forever. Rather, it is like a gazillion balls thrown up into the air. They must eventually collapse back to the object exerting gravity on them. As they do so, they will become compressed, and the compression will generate enough heat to fry anything in its path; and everything will, in fact, be in its path.

Physicist Frank Tipler (respected for his contributions to science but derided as a crackpot by some for his efforts to explain Christianity through science) hypothesizes that technology will enable our reincarnation (but in more robust bodies) following which we will discover how to harness this unimaginable energy to carry us safely through to the very instant, the singularity, of the Big Crunch—the Omega Point, whereupon (says Tipler) we and God will become One. Complete.

Omega God is also, according to the Bible, Alpha God; and the Big Crunch, according to my interpretation of the science, is also the Big Bang. So began and so begins the physical and the metaphysical process of God Being and God Becoming.

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