Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky (1913-1972)

Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky (1913-1972)

Pioneer of the New Scientific Paradigm and the Bridge Between Natural Science and the Humanities

‘In the depth of the human being there is probably a common source... for religious belief, cosmic observation, scientific analysis and aesthetic experience. And in this common framework is grounded a deep relationship between science, art and religion, through which the human creative power comes to full expression’

(Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky, In the Crucible of Scientific Revolution)

 I was surprised to discover, that in the forward to the English translation of their book, Order out of Chaos, where Prigogine and Stengers mention their indebtedness to many researchers, that alongside Erich Jantsch, Pierre Resibois, and Leon Rosenfeld, appears the name Aaron proffesor Katchalsky, known in Israel by his Hebrew name, Aharon Katzir. Though it is never mentioned in the many eulogies written in Israel since his tragic death 50 years ago, in May 30, 1972, Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky, is one of the most important contributors to the new scientific paradigm. 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 in this field.

 In May of 1972, shortly before his death, 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, consciousness, 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 Weizmann Institute (Professor Orah Kedem and others) on heat conduction through membranes - living and artificial - 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 order far from equilibrium, could offer a valuable contribution to understanding the functionality of the brain, cognition and consciousness. In proposing this, Katzir for the first time connected his and Prigogine’s research, with the neurological sciences, brain research, and cognition. He blazed a path, which would influence future research, in physics, biology, neurology, and cognition for the next thirty years. Katzir outlined his vision that in the near future, there would be a need for a wholly new synthesis not only of all the sciences, but also of all social, cultural, and intellectual fields. This new synergy would serve the most monumental research ever undertaken by human thought: to understand the human being in its wholeness, as a being who combines in such a unique way the physical, biological, and neurological with emotional, cognitive, artistic, and spiritual creativity.

If we rely on the research done over the past decades – Katzir told the gathered scientists at the conference in 1972 - we are now in a unique position in human history. We can begin to approach scientifically, yet holistically, "the ultimate question," which is: what must be the physical and biological characteristics of the human brain in order to enable the operations of the human mind? That is, Katzir believed that the new scientific advances, the new paradigm shifts, would be able to support, in a non-mechanistic, non-reductionist way, a foundation for understanding scientific, philosophical, religious, and artistic creativity. On one hand, the brain must exhibit stable, balanced, and ordered states, to allow the mind to operate on a secure basis. On the other hand, creativity in all fields, not the least in scientific inquiry itself, forces the mind to be open to the new and unforeseeable, to spontaneous developmental processes, to randomness, and to mistakes. How and where does the brain make the shifts which allow these transitions from closed systems to open ones, from order to chaos, and from simplicity and stability to higher, more complex, and less stable orders? Or how does it jump back and forth from the mechanical to the biological, from the biological to the psychological-cognitive, and from the cognitive to the creative spiritual, while remaining open to the social environment, cultural interactions, and cosmic influences?

How do these changes take place? What exactly is the physical, neurological, chemical, 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, and yet linked to the surroundings? How do these open states let the inflow of energy, matter, information and meaning flow back and forth, in an active way, to develop through self-organization even greater

levels of integration, complexity and order, and achieve so many remarkable feats opposing the direction of classical thermodynamics and entropy? Only by means of such open brain processes can human consciousness be what it actually is, an active and energetic creative agent in nature, who creates worlds through science, technology, arts, social relations and culture, that have never before existed and are new and unpredictable - for good or ill.

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. For example, it makes absolutely no sense to ask: what is the color of a gold atom? Yet when we talk about complex systems, and especially living organisms, we pinpoint unique individual qualities and characteristics. What causes an immensely large group of atoms and particles to become and behave as one united system in which they are interconnected and interdependent, and moreover, how do they take on unique, common qualities (a piece of gold as real substance)? What gives a system the ability to self-organize itself, to design itself, to recreate itself, to become an individual substance? What makes the infinite atomic and cellular diversity, which constitute even the smallest organism, to become a functioning whole? What makes the human being into a personality, into a singular entity? And this is definitely not, according to Katzir, a ghost in the machine; he was looking for the scientific basis of 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 non-organized and chaotic, to the organized and back again, up to the level of an individual organism, we might begin to roughly understand the functioning of the most complex of natural systems, the human brain, which crowns its complexity by constituting the foundation for an experience of personal identity and social connectivity. "When does the individual begin?" asks Katzir in The Crucible of the Scientific Revolution. 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. 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 operating at the next higher level, the molecular level, which is created when the atoms form molecules.” And then Katzir quotes from the medieval philosophic classic The Guide to the Perplexed: "All the parts are similar and equal, there is no difference whatsoever between them. And the being of the whole [the original Hebrew term used here by Maimonides, Kibbutz, means ‘a gathering together’] is created through their interrelations.” That is, when the isolated particles are gathered together, they enter into an interaction of becoming, that allows the "creative emergence" of something that was not there at least explicitly before; a whole not only much greater but essentially different from its parts, a new material and a new function. And it gives expression to a singularity, self-creating and self-reproducing in and through its greater environment.

Katzir posed the following question to the listeners, whose initial surprise at the originality of the presentation, was replaced with increasing attention. Is it possible that complex chaotic systems achieve in a spontaneous way, a state in which myriad particles raise their amount of energy and information and become one functional, singular, entity? Is it possible, as Maimonides says, that in this situation the particles gather together in a Kibbutz formation, as if obeying a magic call, and re-assemble and re-emerge as one entity, which functions, behaves, and expresses itself as a singular self-identity, be it material, biological, psychological, social or spiritual?

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 an 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, Theta and Delta, 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 also probe the unique creative processes of the human mind.

Later at his talk at MIT, Katzir noted that Gestalt theory 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 ideas, 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 Berkeley, one of the most distinguished brain researchers today, presented a short film which demonstrated Katzir’s ideas. It showed that brain waves which are created in the smell buds of rabbits function in a dissipative way, which might suggest that this perceptual part of the brain is organized as an independent yet interconnected system, and that it shows a hierarchy of semi-autonomic levels, each of which has the power to develop high levels of organization as a result of sensory, emotive, and cognitive processes. "Katchelsky was excited like a child at his birthday party," Freeman remembers. He also said 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 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.” (Freeman was later to implement Katzir’s insight in his research of the olfactory processes and the brain as chaotic systems. See, for example, his highly interesting work: “How brains make chaos in order to make sense of the world,” Christine A. Skarda and Walter J. Freeman, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1987, 10, pp. 161–195.)

Those who were present at the conference will later express a feeling, shared by many there, that they were witnesses to one of those special moments, a real “event,” during which something occurs which can only happen at a great crossroad in time. Here different directions in science and thought met at an interdisciplinary intersection and began a process of mutual sharing and enrichment by means of which they planted a seed of new creative synthesis and contributed 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 dynamic and without equilibrium, a key may be found to future possibilities in the study of the mind? It was clear to everybody that the subject was worth studying and researching. 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. 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. However, on the thirtieth of May 1972, he was murdered during a terrorist attack at Ben-Gurion airport in Tel-Aviv. Two years after his death, the proceedings of the MIT conference were published under the title Dynamic Patterns in Brain-Cell Assemblies, which marked from then on, a central direction in the second scientific revolution in the natural sciences and in the development of the new scientific paradigm. In the creation of an intimate connection between the research of mind and consciousness and new ideas in physics, chemistry, biology and neurology, Katzir planted an invisible and 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 the creative spirit of humanity in the 21st century.

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