Stuart Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and leading complexity scientist who has argued that the self-organization of organisms is as influential in evolution as natural selection. His seminal book on the subject is “The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Natural Selection in Evolution” (1993). He spoke recently with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels.

Nathan Gardels: Along with the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine, you are considered the pioneering scientist of complexity theory. What ties you two together is the discovery that the biosphere, our living world, is inherently “creative.” Both the thermodynamic properties of physics and the evolutionary properties of biology reveal that all systems in a state of disorder “far from equilibrium” (in terms of energy input and output) self-organize, not only to survive within the constraints of their environment, but to propagate as something altogether new.

You even trace the origins of living order — “the elan vital” — to what you call an “autocatalytic” process of the spontaneous interaction of molecules. As it evolves, this process is not deterministic but emerges in unforeseen or unprestatable ways. You call these states the “adjacent possible,” or innovative states waiting in the wings to be realized as conditions permit.

In short, the future is open and not pre-determined.

The culmination of your thinking now goes beyond these ideas to what you call the “Third Transition in Science” in your forthcoming book, “Origins: Cosmos, Life, Mind,” that does not follow the laws of either the Newtonian or Quantum paradigms with which we have become familiar.

Can you first explain in lay terms “autocatalysis” and the “adjacent possible” work, and how you arrived at your new insight based on those understandings?

Stuart Kauffman: What I call the “Third Transition in Science” takes us beyond the conceptual framework of Western science underlying all of physics, both classical and quantum, which posits that the universe can be understood according to laws from which the consequences can be derived. Indeed, this transition takes us beyond even Plato’s foundational concepts.

Kauffman: All this fails for the evolving biosphere. No laws entail the evolution of the biosphere. This failure and its implications are the Third Transition in Science.

Gardels: So, there is a realm where the laws that entail an outcome can be known and a realm where they cannot?

Kauffman: Briefly and astonishingly, yes. There is a Domain of Entailing Law, yet also A Domain of No Entailing Law.

Let me explain some critical concepts so that this is well understood:

• Living organisms are Kantian Wholes. A Kantian Whole has the property that the whole exists for and by means of the parts. The reader of this interview is a Kantian Whole. As the whole, you exist by means of your parts: lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, brain. Your parts exist and function only when integrated into the whole. All living things are Kantian Wholes. Most complex systems are not Kantian Wholes. A crystal is not a Kantian Whole. Its parts, the atoms, exist whether or not they are parts of the crystal.
  
• What makes this possible biologically is something very specific. Living cells are not just Kantian Wholes; they achieve what I call the union of “catalytic closure” and “constraint closure.”

Catalytic closure means that the molecules in the cell collectively catalyze one another’s formation, so the system sustains itself as a whole. Constraint closure goes further: The structures of the cell — membranes, enzymes, channels — constrain the flow of energy and matter, and the thermodynamic work done by those constrained flows rebuilds and maintains the very constraints that enable the work.

In short, the cell does thermodynamic work to construct itself as this specific system. There is no separate set of instructions, no software distinct from hardware. The organization of the cell is enacted, not executed. DNA, with its encoded protein synthesis, plays its role only within this already constraint-closed system.

• Given the concepts of Kantian Wholes with catalytic and constraint closure, we now have a non-circular definition of the function of a part. The function of your heart is pumping blood, not making heart sounds or jiggling fluid in your pericardial sac. The function of a part is that specific subset of its causal properties that sustains the whole.
  
• The same part may well have other causal properties that come to sustain the whole. These arise all the time in evolution and are called Darwinian “preadaptations,” or “exaptations.”

My favorite preadaptation is the evolution of the swim bladder from the lungs of the lungfish. When water got into such air-filled lungs, the ratio of air to water enabled the fish to detect neutral buoyancy in water. In this case, the same part — the lung — was repurposed to perform a new function: detection of buoyancy.

The next step is fundamental: From the use of lungs for air breathing, we cannot deduce their possible use as a swim bladder. From the use of an engine block as a paperweight, we cannot deduce its possible use to crack open a coconut.

This implies a profound consequence: The open-ended evolution of the biosphere is, in part or entirely, due to the evolution of novel functions by Darwinian preadaptatons. Yet we cannot deduce those predaptations. Hence, the evolution of the biosphere is not deducible and hence, not entailed. The vast evolution of millions of ever-new species with ever-new adaptations for the past 4 billion years is not entailed. No law entails the evolution of novel functions in the open-ended evolution of the biosphere.

Gardels: So, the huge step beyond Plato and the “eternal forms” of entailed systems is that the evolving biosphere creates possibilities that did not exist before?

Kauffman: Exactly. The phase space of the biosphere can and does create new possibilities. But we cannot deduce what those new possibilities are. The new possibilities cannot be prestated.

This evolving biosphere expands into what I call the “adjacent possible” that it creates. Hence, a next biosphere emerges that again creates and then enters its own new adjacent possible. Yet we do not know what is “in” the adjacent possible; we do not know the sample space of the process. Thus, we have no probability measure, nor can we define “random” or assess “risk.”

“There is no ultimate insurer of the total future. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means something more unsettling: Order exists, but it is partly made. Therefore, we are participants rather than spectators, co-creators rather than controllers.”

Most generally, evolution stumbles upon and sometimes seizes, by heritable variation and natural selection, new possible “uses” of its molecules and organs. Different uses of the same things are not ordered relative to one another. They cannot be deduced from each other. Further, we cannot fully list all possible exaptations because we cannot prestate all possible organisms, their capacities, requirements to survive and the affordances that enable survival.

These, then, are the three properties that define the “indefinite”: They are not listable, not orderable relative to one another and not deducible from one another. So, the indefinite is precisely the Domain of No Entailing Law, and the evolving biosphere lies within this domain.

Gardels: This all sounds like the Daoist notion of the unfolding, but unknowable, Way — but grounded in scientific inquiry?

Kauffman: I agree. It is very nearly the ancient Dao of China. “The Dao that can be said is not the eternal Dao,” [reads the opening line of the “Tao Te Ching”]. The major difference is that the Dao is eternal; the unprestatable adjacent possible of the biosphere is an unentailed becoming across time.

Gardels: To sum up: The evolving biosphere is an ever-innovating, propagating self-construction that cannot be deduced from a set of laws that predict a future outcome. As you have put it elsewhere, this means “there can be no ‘theory of everything’ that entails what comes to exist in the evolving biosphere. All we can know is that “the universe selects the rules that best enable its own becoming.”

Kauffman: Indeed, there truly can be no final theory if that theory is to include the evolution of our, or any, biosphere. And perhaps the deep structure of our laws does reflect their capacity for self-construction. Perhaps that may even be correct. Lovely, if true.

Gardels: For humans embedded and entangled in this process, we must come to realize we are not above and apart from our biosphere, but a participating “co-creator” in its continuous evolution. What are the implications for the self-understanding and responsibility of human civilization in this undetermined unfolding?

Kauffman: What it means existentially is the end of metaphysical insurance.

The West has lived with a kind of metaphysical insurance policy: All that is possible already exists. The world is a machine whose workings can be deduced. We can come to know, hence master, hence have dominion. This is Francis Bacon in 1620. Knowledge of the mechanical world for mastery, for dominion, for the ever betterment of humanity. If not me, then Reason. If not Reason, then God. If not God, then Physics.

The Third Transition, the “indefinite,” says: There is no ultimate insurer of the total future. That doesn’t mean chaos. It means something more unsettling: Order exists, but it is partly made. Therefore, we are participants rather than spectators, co-creators rather than controllers. We can guide and constrain but not command and entail. This is the emotional “shock”: It removes the hidden promise that “the future is already written somewhere, and we can come to know it.”

Humility then becomes rational rather than moralistic. Humility in this frame is not a virtue-signaling posture. It becomes epistemically and ontologically appropriate.

Because if the world is partly indefinite, then control is always partial, prediction is always bounded, and optimization tends to overfit to a world that won’t stay still.

So humility becomes a new realism: a sane stance toward a world that is creatively becoming in ways that cannot be foretold. This is not resignation. It is accurate orientation.

Gardels: The ontological break of this “Third Transition in Science” in how we understand being in the world raises anew foundational questions of origins and destiny that have driven the spiritual imagination since the first Axial Age more than two millennia ago. At that time, all the great religions and ethical systems arose in a synchronous fashion over six centuries across the world, from Confucianism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism, to Homer’s Greece and the Abrahamic prophets in the Middle East.

Are we on the cusp of the next Axial Age?

Kauffman: I think so, yes. The spiritual consequence, I would argue, is a new sacredness of participation. If the world is not fully given in advance, then Creation is not only “back then” but ongoing. The sacred is not merely a completed order; it is the act of becoming itself. That resonates strongly with Indigenous and process theologies: reverence for the creative unfolding, not worship of a finished blueprint.

A “Next Axial Age” could be framed as a spirituality of co-creation rather than dominion. And crucially, this spirituality would not be anti-science — it would be a new science understood as careful participation in a living, creative world.

Gardels: Curiously, this most advanced perspective of science seems to align with the intuition of Medieval mystics like Meister Eckhart and the echoes of his thought in later literature, such as Goethe.

Eckhart’s theological point of departure is the concept of Logos: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” As he saw it, the incarnation of the divine spirit in man — the Son — takes place through our human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God. Co-essences, so to speak.

Goethe, too, envisioned a dynamic, creative universe as a continuous divine activity in which humans were participants — creatio continua — rather than a static set of laws for all time. Being could not be deduced from the Word laid down once, but through the ongoing “deed” of action in the world. In Faust, the “Earth Spirit” declares: “At the whirring loom of time I ply, and weave for God the garment thou seeist Him by.”

Kauffman: Yes, Eckhart and Goethe echo both the Book of Genesis and very early Greek thought. The first words of Genesis can be read in two ways: God “created” in the past tense versus God “creates” in the continuous present. God created is a transcendent God, the Deist God of the Enlightenment. God creates is an immanent God; we are the becoming with God. This is also Eckhardt and Goethe.

Ancient Greece considered Eros and Logos: Eros is creativity — unprestatable and magical — and Logos is understanding. Later, Eros became merely the god of love. Logos absorbed Eros and mistakenly became Plato’s totalizing Logos, from which derived the deductive quality of Western science.

“The world is not a machine. We have no dominion. We must learn to collaborate with the rest of nature, living and abiotic. This is the Third Transition.”

It is fascinating that ancient Greece had two domains, Eros, a domain of no entailing laws, and Logos, which later became misinterpreted as the domain entailing of laws. We now rediscover a Domain of No Entailing Laws and a Domain of Entailing Laws. The Third Transition in Science was presaged by Eckhardt and Goethe.

Gardels: I’m wondering what “creative, responsible” participation by us humans looks like going forward?

Kauffman: We will have to discover this in the next century. At least this involves a spiritual transformation beyond Baconian mastery of the world as a machine; hence, from dominion for the ever-betterment of humanity to a post-Baconian world in which the world is no longer a machine but a living organism. To say it again, a recognition that emergence is not engineering.

Here we can achieve neither mastery nor dominion but are invited to participate with epistemic humility to preserve plural potentialities. As if with an immanent God, we all participate in the co-creation of reality. This invites a polycentric, overlapping commons with widely distributed governance. Not optimization of what we think we know, but wisdom and restraint.

Gardels: I know you are working with some other scientists on soil rehabilitation around the planet. But one area that seems most impactful going forward will be the use of AI, in particular, for planetary-scale computation that enables us to understand how Earth systems work, so as to better align with them to stabilize the biosphere against global warming.

Kauffman: I fully agree. There is vast promise: global overview, global ecosystem accounting, monitoring, and use in seeking Pareto optimality [a state of maximum efficiency in which all parties benefit mutually] across many prestated goals, domains and time scales. But AI cannot invent or predict new phase spaces with ever-new, relevant variables created by the evolving biosphere and global economy. We do co-create the unprestatable adjacent possible. Perhaps we can learn to garden the adjacent possible more wisely.

Gardels: To take a step back, for the philosopher Charles Taylor, the first Axial Age resulted from the “great dis-embedding” of the person from isolated communities and their natural environment, where circumscribed awareness had been limited to the sustenance and survival of the tribe guided by oral narrative myth. The lifting out from a closed-off world, according to Taylor, was enabled by the arrival of written language — the stored memories of the first cloud technology. This attainment of symbolic competency capacitated an “interiority of reflection” on the basis of abiding texts that created a platform for shared meanings beyond one’s immediate circumstances and local narratives.

Long story very short, this “transcendence” in turn led to the possibility of general philosophies, monotheistic religions and broad-based ethical systems. The critical self-distancing element of dis-embedded reflection further evolved into what the sociologist Robert Bellah called “theoretic culture,” to scientific discovery and the Enlightenment that spawned modernity. For Bellah, “Plato completed the transition to the Axial Age” with the idea of theoria that “enables the mind to ‘view’ the great and the small in themselves abstracted from their concrete manifestations.”

One consequence of humans’ dis-embeddedness from nature — the degradation of the biosphere — now threatens the basis of existence. It is a dialectical irony that this new awareness is possible only because a new symbolic competency has arrived on the scene through planetary-scale computation, enabled by artificial intelligence. In this way, the Earth is unveiled to the heretofore limited scope of human apprehension as one self-regulating organism sustained by the entwinement of multiple intelligences, from microbes to forests as well as humans.

As Benjamin Bratton, director of the Antikythera program at the Berggruen Institute, wrote in Noema, “The models that we have of climate change are ones that emerge from supercomputing simulations of Earth’s past, present and future. This is a self-disclosure of Earth’s intelligence and agency, accomplished by thinking through and with a computational model.” 

This self-disclosure implies a “re-embedding” of the axial transcendence that nourished the religious imagination millennia ago back into encompassing nature and relational community, this time out of knowledge instead of ignorance. This brings to mind your similar reflections upon how the past connects to the future when visiting the Lascaux cave paintings from 30,000 years ago.

In short, the comprehending amplitude enabled by AI portends that it may play a role in fostering a “New Axial Age” similar to what written language did the first time around. Such a reincarnation necessarily decenters humans in the cosmos and opens the way to “planetary sapience” — the synthesized intelligence of all life forms that are part and parcel of one self-regulating system and to which human technological capacities must align. Here, “planetary reason” conjoins with the religious imagination in what we might call the quest for “planetary homeostasis plus.”

Kauffman: Yes. Profoundly so. And the quest is not just about human technological capacities; it is more deeply about our own spiritual transformation. The world is not a machine. We have no dominion. We must learn to collaborate with the rest of nature, living and abiotic. This is the Third Transition. The Third Transition is fundamental and beyond computation.

Again, we are embedded in the unprestatable becoming of the living world. Reproducing cells do not compute themselves; through catalytic and constraint closure, they do thermodynamic work to construct themselves, without executing any description of how to do so. So does all of evolving life. Evolving life is a propagating, non-deducible construction, not an entailed deduction. Evolving life, at base, does not computationally describe itself and its world; it propagates itself, co-creating its evolving world. Emergence is not engineering.

If the first Axial Age, with writing, enabled dis-embedded theoretic contemplation, with the Third Transition in Science, we are again embedded in an ongoing becoming in which we participate.

Gardels: To stick with the awakening that comes with the Third Transition in Science, perhaps we can end with this aphorism by the existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

Kauffman: Superb.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and length.