THE THIRD WAVE
This mechanistic view of causality was—and still is—extremely useful. It helps us cure disease, build giant skyscrapers, design ingenious machines, and assemble huge organizations. Yet, powerful as it is in explaining phenomena that work like simple machines, it has proved far less satisfactory in explaining phenomena like growth, decay, sudden breakthroughs to new levels of complexity, big changes that suddenly fizzle out or, conversely, those tiny—often chance— events that occasionally mushroom into giant, explosive forces. Today the Newtonian pool table is being shoved into a corner of the cosmic playroom. Mechanistic causality is seen as a special case applying to some but not all phenomena, and scholars and scientists all over the world are piecing together a new view of chance and causation more in keeping with our rapidly changing views of nature, evolution, and progress, of time, space, and matter.
The Japanese-born epistemologist Magoroh Maruyama, the French sociologist Edgar Morin, information theorists like Stafford Beer and Henri Laborit, and many others are providing clues to how causation works in nonmechanical systems that live, die, grow, and undergo both evolution and revolution. The Belgian Nobel Prize-winner, Ilya Prigogine, offers us a staggering synthesis of the ideas of order and chaos, chance and necessity, and how these relate to causation.
In part, the emerging Third Wave causality arises from a key concept of systems theory: the idea of feedback. A classical example used to illustrate this notion is the home thermostat that maintains room temperature at an even level. The thermostat turns on the furnace, then monitors the resulting temperature rise. When the room is warm enough, it turns the furnace off. When the temperature falls, it senses this change in its environment and flicks the furnace on again.
What we see here is a feedback process that preserves equilibrium, damping down or suppressing change when it threatens to exceed a given level. Called “negative feedback,” its function is to maintain stability.
Once negative feedback was defined and explored by information theorists and systems thinkers in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, scientists began looking for examples or analogues of it. And with rising excitement, they found similar stability-protecting systems in every field from physiology (for example, the processes by which the body maintains its
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