EFFICIENT CAUSALITY: DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind's ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System -- the like of which mortal eyes have never witnessed.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, p. 136)

What Baha’u’llah means by upsetting the world’s equilibrium by a vibrating influence is that humankind is moving—being shoved may be more accurate—into a higher complexity of life.  One way to see something of how this happens is by studying what are known as dissipative structures.  Progressive Revelation, by which I mean the appearance of not only a new, more complex, and higher consciousness, but also the infusion of higher energy vibrations of spirit, drives what de Chardin called the “complexification” of life.   He noted: “The phenomenon of growing consciousness on earth, in short, is directly due to the increasingly advanced organization of more and more complicated elements, successively created by the workings of chemistry and of Life.” (Pierre-Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man: 69)  How are processes in chemistry examples of increasingly advanced organization of life?

The term dissipative structure was coined by chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work on these structures.  Dissipative structures describes the dynamical, coherent space-time structures that form in open systems in which an exchange of matter and energy occurs between a system and its environment in a reproducible steady state.  This reproducible steady state may be reached by natural evolution of the system, by artifice, or by a combination of these two.  Examples in every day life include convection, cyclones, hurricanes, and living organisms. 

Open systems differ from closed systems, which lack any means to advance or have exhausted all internal power to transform.  A closed system is called intransitive for it can only stay in that state of equilibrium.  Only a power from outside will change it.  That was characteristic of the human world in the nineteenth century, thus the world’s equilibrium had to be upset or opened by Revelation.   

But open systems, because of their nonlinear, replicative iterative interactions with the environment, can form dissipative structures that exist as long as the system is held far from equilibrium due to a continual and rapid flow of energy or matter through the system.  (A simple calculation performed over and over again is iteration.  A nonlinear relation is a relationship that modulates. It does not repeat its iteration exactly or repeat the exact difference of ratio.  Thus, even when the action (iteration) remains the same, the result each time is a little different, so the relation changes over time.) 

A system that exists far from thermodynamic equilibrium efficiently dissipates the heat generated to sustain it, and has the capacity of changing to higher levels of orderliness.  It is in constant but orderly change.  Dissipative structure is a name for the patterns which self-organize in far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems.  (Science calls these self-organizing systems because they don’t see the higher order intelligence ordering them—a spiritual template to grow into and a vibrating influence retuning them.) The movement to a higher order creates irreversible processes, in chemical, biological, or social systems: even Nature itself evolves 

All open systems contain subsystems that continuously fluctuate or vibrate.  These systems are characterized by the spontaneous appearance of symmetry breaking and the formation of complex, sometimes chaotic, structures where interacting particles exhibit long range correlations.  At times a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so magnified by positive feedback that it eventually shatters the existing organization.  At such revolutionary moments, or "bifurcation points", it is impossible to determine in advance whether the system will disintegrate into "chaos" or pass through chaos and leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of "order". The latter case defines dissipative structures so termed because they need more energy to sustain them than the simpler structures they replace and are limited in growth by the amount of heat they are able to disperse.  This upsets existing equilibrium by infusion of higher energy from new order.

Dissipation bleeds a complex system of many conflicting motions, eventually bringing the behavior of many dimensions down to one.  But the outcome is not strictly determined, though parameters to a solution do exist.  Destiny, or final cause, exists but not as an “only this and none other” state.  Hiding within a particular system could be more than one stable solution, more than one way to newly organize and coordinate all things.  But a final form is not strictly destined from the outset, because in chaotic systems of nonlinear relations there is an orderly impulse and a disorderly impulse acting together and reciprocally.  They continuously decouple and couple, giving rise to turbulence and coherence simultaneously.  Instability and chaos always exist, because the universe is recreated at every instant.  But it is being recreated into new form according to fixed principles.    

Chaotic and near chaotic systems bridge the scales or levels of being and form.  When a system turns chaotic parts have infinitely many values, like the infinite potential states of a photon before a decision collapses it into one condition.  This cosmic soup of particles dances into and out of view with breathtaking rapidity.  Here is where complexity makes its appearance.  By complexity I mean a sequence of bifurcations of scaling, doublings and halvings and each bifurcation means that the pattern of repetition is breaking down a step further.  These are modeled mathematically as fractals.  

At bifurcation points and moments, where motions appear to join or converge, the surfaces divide, or diverge, forming separate levels or layers.  Each surface is really a pair of surfaces, so that, where they appear to merge there are really four surfaces, and four becomes 8, 8 becomes 16, on to infinity for all we know, but these likenesses create harmony and resonance.  There are infinite perfections within each organism and condition, but one condition cannot become another condition, because there are singular boundaries between realms of existence.  That is, the nonlinear dynamics of phase transitions create resistance fields of turbulence and levels of creation exist (solid-liquid-gas; mineral-vegetable-animal; body-soul-spirit).

All things are created in pairs.  If a photon splits into its pairs—particle and anti-particle—each one of the pair also periodically splits--bifurcates.  But at some point this periodicity breaks down into chaos.  But in the middle of chaos a new complexity forms, semi-stable structures and cycles appear until a new stability emerges, which go through their own accelerating cycle of bifurcations, revealing a hidden order there too.  (Remember “the world’s equilibrium hath been upset” and not just a part of the world.)  The universal pattern of complexity is that patterns appear simultaneously on different scales because they are within a coherent field.  Dynamic processes coagulate into stable forms when their vibrations slow down, or reach a kind of maturity, like a swirling cloud of cosmic gas slows into a planet.  These shapes are embedded as potentials in the fabric of motion, and these shapes achieve material form as they move through the ethereal fluid of the universe, which is divine thought, and experience a kind of friction.   

Thus chaos is also a function of perception.  The energy in systems exists on many levels, only one is the level of what we know as everyday perceivable objects.  On the microscales there are countless particles forming and reforming.  On macroscales there are particles—planets and other stellar objects—forming and reforming.  The operations of energy are processes of consciousness in action.  Systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom have infinite dimensions, infinite modes or processes of action. Only the Manifestation grasps all the connections in infinite systems.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle