The second law of thermodynamics says disorder always increases. But life looks like an exception, since living things are ordered and create further order. Physicists usually explain this away: order here is balanced by extra disorder elsewhere. Philosopher Dorothea Olkowski doesn’t dispute the law itself. Drawing on Ilya Prigogine’s work, she argues that order is not a debt repaid elsewhere, but the natural result of open systems exchanging energy with their surroundings. The real question, she suggests, is not whether the second law is wrong, but whether its classical, closed-system version ever described the reality of life at all. Through natural selection, life’s order overcomes reality’s chaos.
Language, Logic, and the Limits of Formalization
I would argue that I have been working with the idea of complex systems since grad school, although I certainly would not have been aware of that term nor of the multitude of scientists, philosophers, and others who engaged with what became complexity theory. My first introduction to the term “science of complexity” came from the work of the mathematician John L. Casti in his book Complexification: Explaining a Paradoxical World Through the Science of Surprise. With Casti, we encounter the concepts of catastrophe, chaos, lawlessness, irreducibility, emergence, and surprise, but he begins with the simple question of whether our language accurately reflects reality.
