Surprise of Complexity and Complexity of Surprise: What Happened to Predictability? Limits and New Possibilities of Complexity for Physical, Psychological and Social Sciences

Rosalia Condorelli
2017 Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy  
Complexity, as emergent self-organization, is indicative of the end of a science which has always rooted its own aims, its own reasons, its own meaning in the most exalting project: making the uncertain certain, knowing order so to predict and control the future, what is unknown. Emergence, with its burden of surprise and unpredictability, and non-linearity meet at all levels, in physical, inorganic and material, systems as well as in living, human and mental systems. At this point, some
more » ... n could be raised: if this is true, if everything is emergent, surprising, unpredictable, where does this acknowledgment lead us? What is the sense of Science? What are its objectives? Does Complexity 'promises' and 'permits' us to better understand nature and the real behaviour of systems, or are emergence, surprise, and unpredictability really sic et simpliciter only alibis to hide our scientific failures? Are we at the end of Science? Complexity, as "essential unpredictability" opens up problems which all Sciences must face. Beyond the "Newtonian Metaphor" and Afterward? In 1997, Prigogine, Nobel for dissipative structures, publishes a well-known essay with a very evocative title. The End of certainty [1] highlights how modern science celebrates, through the complexity concept as emergent self-organization, the dialectic synthesis of the opposition between two categories, scientifically and culturally conceived as mutually excluding one another: order-disorder, determinismprobability, being-becoming, necessity-freedom, determinationunpredictability, and constraint-possibility. This dialectical synthesis (expressed even by the concept of deterministic chaos) characterizes the current scientific and cultural revolution, by revising the epistemological meaning of unpredictability and uncertainty, which are now converted into structural elements, that is, into inherent elements to the generator mechanism of real phenomena even if it is a deterministic mechanism. This is the end of Classic Science, the end of a science able to forecast, which sees systems as stable system, characterized by linear interaction relationships among its components, namely proportionality constants between input and output, by a linear determinism which is guarantee of predictability and controllability of events. From Aristotle to Décartes, from Newton to Einstein, uncertainty was considered the daughter of ignorance. The Newtonian-Laplacian Weltanschauung gives us an image of the world which is conceived like a gigantic clock, a gigantic 'accurate' mechanism. As only a machine can be, it is endowed with perfection, reliability and working predictability. A deterministic working mechanism, therefore, governs and makes system evolution predictable and even ensures the control over future events. As we said, the general assumption is that of a necessary structuring of phenomena as linear system, that is, governed by causal relationships of constant proportionality over time, and, therefore, stable, regular, incapable of
doi:10.4172/2161-0487.1000302 fatcat:x3zzxdqdhjb4rbdjtc5ekhjaba