עברית
In the author’s forward to the English translation of “Order Out of Chaos”, Prigogine and Stengers mention their indebtedness to many researchers, whose collective work created the basis for their study. They dedicate the book in memory of the scientists who passed prior to its publication. Among the names, alongside Erik Jantsch, Pier Resibois, and Leon Rosenfeld, appears the name Aaron Katchelsky who is better known by his Hebrew name, Professor Aharon Katzir.
Aharon Katzir, one of the most important contributors to the bridge between the cultures, was an original thinker and scientist, whose life was dedicated to the establishment of the state of Israel in many fields of culture and society. He combined a life of original scientific research, with the creating the foundations for scientific research in Israel, all the while taking responsibility for the general cultural and societal development of Israel, even before the state was founded.
Many years before the pioneering work of Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues became known, and before the popularity of the interdisciplinary ramifications of chaos theory, Katzir understood the revolutionary consequences here. In may of 1972, Professor Katzir led a special group of worldwide experts at MIT in a conference which, when viewed in hindsight, was a pioneering and groundbreaking event not only because of the breadth of the disciplines involved, but also with regard to its new approach to the connections between physics, chemistry, biology, and neurology, to the research in cognition, consciousnesses, and the brain.
Katzir explained to the attendees in the conference the evidence gathered through his research in network thermodynamics, and their applications for the understanding of complex systems in chemistry and biology. The research of Katzir and his colleagues at the Weitzman Institute (Professor Orah Kedem and others) on heat conduction through membranes- living and artificaial- confirmed Prigogine’s later discoveries because they could prove the role that small and sudden fluctuations played in complex and open physical and biological systems.
However, Katzir did not stop here. He predicted that it could be possible that the theory of Prigogine with regard to chemical open systems, which exhibit chaotic behavior in states fare from equilibrium, could offer a valuable contribution to understanding the functionality of the brain, cognition and consciousness. In proposing this, Katzir created a promising link between his and Prigogine’s research, and the neurological sciences, brain research, and cognition. He opened a path, which would influence future research, in physics, biology, neurology, and cognition for the next thirty years. In the course of the conference at MIT, May 1972, Katzir outlined for his audience his vision that in the near future there would be a need for a wholly new synthesis and synergy between the sciences and the research and real life in social, cultural and intellectual fields, which must include also philosophy, arts, and the further developments of human consciousness, in order to go forward with what he conceived to be the most monumental research ever undertaken by human thought: the understanding of the human being in its wholeness, as a being that combines and integrates in unique manner the various levels of existence, from the physical, biological, neurological, to the emotional, cognitive, artistic and spiritual creativity.
If we rely on the research done over the past decades- so did Katzir tell the gathering scientists at the MIT conference in 1972- we are now in a position at which we could not have been beforehand in human history: to begin to scientifically, yet holistically, approach the "the ultimate question", which is: what must be the physical and biological characteristics of the human bodily constitution and the brain as its apex, in order to enable the diverse and creative experiences and operations of the human mind? That is, Katzir believed that the new scientific advances, the new paradigm shifts, will be able to support, in a non-mechanistic, non-reductionist way, a foundation for understanding the scientific, philosophic, religious, and artistic creativity.
He outlined a research problem, which, broadly speaking, can be formulated in this way. On one hand, the brain must exhibit stable, balanced, ordered states, to allow the mind to operate on a secure and well known daily basis; but on the other hand, creativity in all fields- not the least in scientific inquiry itself- must be able to be open to the new and unforeseeable, to spontaneous developmental processes, to randomness, and mistakes. How and where does the brain makes the shifts, the “jumps”, which allow these transitions from closed systems to open ones, from order to chaos and to higher, more complex and less stable order (and back)? And he proposed the hypothesis that these jumps occur also in the phase transitions from the mechanical to biological, from biological to psychological-cognitive, and from cognitive to the creative level, which is also open to the social environment, cultural interactions, and cosmic influences? In order for these transitions to be possible there is a need, Katzir claimed, for a science that will demonstrate exactly how the brain is organized to allow such "phase transitions” and “qualitative jumps” from situation to situation, from one level of organization and action, to the other, that will explain the extraordinary flexibility and creativity of the human mind, and social and cultural evolution.
How do these changes take place? What exactly is the physical, chemical, neurological, and psychological process, which has the ability to allow such changes, from the mechanical realm which is completely oblivious of time and always strives for maximal entropy and closed, balanced states of energy and information, to states that are precariously open, unstable, yet linked to the surroundings, letting the inflow of energy, matter, information and meaning stream in and out, in an active way, and develop through self-organization to ever greater levels of integration, complexity and order, and achieve all these remarkable fits while (seemingly at least) opposing the downward leading direction of classical thermodynamics and entropy? But only by means of such brain processes can the human consciousness be what is actually is, an active and energetic creative agent in nature, which creates through science, technology, arts, social relations and culture, worlds that have never before existed and are new and unpredictable- for good or ill.
For example: what make an infinite number of insects, or birds, fish, cells or atoms into unified swarm? In classical physics the atomic and subatomic world is described as if all the particles (atoms and their parts) are identical and equally stripped of any special qualities. (It makes absolutely no sense to ask: What is the color of a gold atom?). Contrarily, when we talk about complex systems in chemical system and in living organisms, we talk about their unique individual qualities and characteristics. What causes a group of infinite number of atoms and particles to become and behave as one united whole in which they are instantaneously interconnected and interdependent, and, moreover, take on unique, common, qualities (a piece of gold as real metallic substance, bee colony as one being)? What gives a system the ability to self-organize itself, to design itself, to recreate and propagate itself, to become an individual substance or individual organism, forcing all its atoms, particles and forces to become one, singular, individual? What makes the infinite atomic and cellular diversity, which constitute even the smallest piece of matter or living organism, to become a functioning whole, what makes the human being into a personality, into a singular entity? (And this is definitely not, for Katzir, a ghost in the machine; he looked for the scientific basis of emergent, becoming, wholeness).
Katzir believed that if we could understand the secret of the transition from one level of organization and identity to the next, from the less-organized and chaotic, to the more organized, and back to chaos, in order to achieve a higher level of organization and complexity, up to the level an individual organism, we may begin at least in a rough way to understand the functioning of the most complex of all natural systems, the human brain, that crowns its complexity with constituting the foundation for an experience of personal identity and social connectivity. "When does the individual begins?" asks Katzir in his book "The Crucible of scientific revolution”. And he answers, “in the living organism it begins with the ordering of the single molecules into more complex systems, for example the cell, and the individual organism is a vast and infinitely more complex combination of myriads of cells. In the organic being the principle of individuation reaches its highest level. Now if the difference is not at the atomic level, it must be found operation at the next higher level, the molecular level, which is created when the atoms form molecules.” And here Katzir quotes Maimonides in “The Guide to the Perplexed”: "All the parts are similar and equal, there is no difference whatsoever between them. And yet the being of the whole [=Kibbutz, which means gathering together, in the Hebrew original] is one and the same through all their interrelations”; that is, when the isolated particles are gathered together, they enter into the mysterious interaction of becoming, that allows "creative emergence" of something that was not visible there at all before, a whole much greater and totally different then the sum of its parts, a whole in itself, a unique material, organic, human or cosmic individuality, ready to be integrated, in its turn, in yet greater wholes, and so on.
Katzir posed the following question to the listeners whose initial surprise at the uncommon connection of subjects was replaced soon enough with rapt attention: is it possible, Katzir asked, that in this way complex chaotic systems achieve in a spontaneous way, a situation in which myriads particles raise their amount of energy and information and become one functional entity? Is it possible, as Maimonides says, that in this situation, (without the need to study Marx and Engels…) the particles gather together in a Kibbutz formation, as if obeying a magic call, and re-emerge as one entity, which function, behaves, and expresses itself as singular self identity, be it material, biological psychological, social or spiritual?
Is it possible to anticipate as a result of the new research that this approach to the brain could clarify the ancient mystery, how is the difference created, which causes the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts? How is an “I” created through the infinite multitudes of particles, cells, membrane, and organs…? And how is one God created from all the gods? What lies in the secret of oneness that express itself thorough and in all multiplicities?
Many studies since the 70s show clearly that processes of this sort take place constantly in the nervous system and it could very possibly be that they are important partners in the creation of the needed physiological basis for the relations between brain, consciousness, and the mind. For example, following brain waves through the EEG shows a correlation between voluntary action, and small changes in brain function. Situations of concentration, awareness, focus, and also meditation, calmness, artistic pleasure, strengthen the slowest and largest brain waves, Delta and Theta, which means that they express a global pattern of transformation in the brain. Katzir suggested, therefore, that such radical changes may cause or underlie a widening or deepening of awareness, cognition and consciousness, and may allow us to probe also the unique creative processes of the human mind.
Later at his talk at MIT Katzir noted that the Gestalt theory has noticed long ago such changes and jumps in perception. Or in his words, "the transformation of the individual personality can take such sudden shapes like strikes of insights, grasping new idea, falling in love or experiencing something like Paul’s epiphany on the way to Damascus.”
Katzir’s words found many attentive listeners at the conference. Walter freeman from the department of molecular and cellular biology at Berkley, one of the distinguished brain researchers today, presented a short film which demonstrated Katzir’s ideas, showing that the brain waves which are created in the smell buds of rabbits are functioning in a dissipative way, which might suggest that also this perceptual part of the brain is organized as an independent yet interconnected system, and that it shows an hierarchy of semi autonomic levels, each of which has the power to develop higher levels of organization as a result of sensory, feeling and cognitive processes. "Katchelsky was excited like a child at his birthday party", Freeman remembers. Freeman says that Katzir played a short but crucial role as a catalyst, in the development of the new paradigm in the understanding of the mind and its function. "Today we are accustomed to say that the mind is a self-organizing system. It is not an automatic or a deterministic machine. I believe that this specific insight did not emanate only from Katchelsky’s vast understanding of science, but in yet deeper way it was a result of his philosophic, humanistic, and optimistic conception of the human being as a whole.”
Those who were present at the conference will later express a feeling, shared by many there, that they are witnessing one of those special moments, a real “event”, during which something occurs which can only occur at a significant crossroad in time. At such a time, different directions in science and thought meet at an interdisciplinary intersection and begin a process of mutual sharing and enrichment by means of which they plant a seed of new creative synthesis, and contribute to the creation of a new paradigm and world view. Could it be that in chaotic and dissipative systems, open to the universe and in a state of dynamic non-equilibrium, a key may be found to future possibilities in the study if the mind? It was clear to everybody that the subject was worth studying and research. Katzir was requested to organize and direct the continuation of the research in this direction and he was given the mandate to gather an international interdisciplinary team for this purpose.
The personal (Katzir’s life and scientific work) and the universal-human (the development of science in our time) met at a significant spiritual crossroad. And Katzir was there because he was one of the first to realize the significance and importance of this crossroad. When he returned to Israel from the conference at MIT, he was ready for a new and adventurous chapter in his research both as a scientist and in his creative life as a whole. But destiny took another, tragic, turn. On the thirtieth of May 1972 he was murdered during a terror attack at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv. Two years after his death, the proceedings of the MIT conference was published under the title "Dynamic Patterns in Brain-cell Assemblies”, which marked from then on a central direction in the second scientific revolution in natural sciences and in the development of the new scientific paradigm. In the creation of the intimate connection between the research of mind and consciousness to new ideas in physics, chemistry, biology and neurology, Katzir planted an invisible and rather unknown, yet potent, seed, which continues to play an important role in bridging the divide between the two cultures. The building of this bridge which is intended to stretch between the spiritual worlds, culture and human society, on one hand, and nature, matter, cosmos, on the other, is the great labor which is awaiting for the creative spirit of humanity in the twenty first century.