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Prigogine and the many voices of nature

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Abstract

Ilya Prigogine was not a systematic author: his ideas, covering a wide arch of areas, are dispersed in his many writings. In particular, his philosophical thought has to be reconstructed mainly on the basis of his works in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers: La Nouvelle Alliance (1979), Order out of Chaos (1984), and Entre le Temps et l’Éternité (1988). In this paper I undertake that reconstruction in order to argue that Prigogine’s position, when read in the light of Putnam’s internalist realism, can be characterized as an ontological pluralism. The main aim of this work is to show the striking parallelism between the philosophical views of Prigogine and Stengers and those of Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth and History (1981). This task will lead me to critically review Prigogine’s general scientific program: the attempt to establish the foundations of objective irreversibility.

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Notes

  1. This claim does not imply to ignore other influences and philosophical relationships. For instance, consider the influence of Whitehead’s thought on the theses of Prigogine and Stengers (Vihalemm 2007).

  2. In previous works I have argued that the problems of irreversibility and of time’s arrow, even if related to each other, are conceptually different (Castagnino et al. 2003). When analyzed from this viewpoint, the scientific work of Prigogine succeeds in solving the problem of irreversibility, but not the problem of the arrow of time, which consists in establishing a theoretically based, non-conventional difference between the two directions of time. In fact, any time-reversal invariant law, as that represented by the unitary group \( U_{t} \), leads to two time-symmetric solutions, one the temporal mirror image of the other. Then, by means of an argument completely analogous to that developed above, one can define a similarity transformation \( \Uplambda^{ - } \) that leads to a distribution function \( \bar{\rho }^{ - } \), which evolves according a Markov process, described by an operator \( W_{t}^{ - } \) and approaching equilibrium for \( t \to - \infty \); and there is nothing in the theory that establishes a non-conventional difference between the two solutions (see Lombardi 1999a).

  3. Strictly speaking, it is not the Gamov vector but the expectation value \( \left\langle {\phi } \mathrel{\left | {\vphantom {\phi {\Uppsi^{ \times } }}} \right. \kern-\nulldelimiterspace} {{\Uppsi^{ \times } }} \right\rangle \) what evolves in time, since the vectors \( \varphi \) belonging to \( \Upphi^{ \times } \) are functionals whose mathematical nature consists in acting on vectors \( \phi \) belonging to \( \Upphi \) (see discussion in Castagnino et al. 2006).

  4. As the approach of the early years, this proposal neither solves the problem of the arrow of time. The reason is that, again, two time-symmetric solutions can be obtained: for any decaying Gamov vector with complex eigenvalue \( z = \omega - i\,\Upgamma /2 \), there is a growing Gamov vector with complex eigenvalue \( z = \omega + i\,\Upgamma /2 \), and there is nothing in the theory that establishes a non-conventional difference between the two solutions (see Castagnino et al. 2005, 2006).

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Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to Jean-Pierre Llored, whose relevant observations have improved the final version of this paper. I also want to thank John Earley, Rom Harré, Eric Scerri, Pieter Thyssen and the participants of the ISPC-2010 for their interesting comments. This paper was partially supported by grants of the National Agency of Scientific and Technological Research (ANCYT), the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET) and the Buenos Aires University (UBA).

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    Olimpia Lombardi

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Lombardi, O. Prigogine and the many voices of nature. Found Chem 14, 205–219 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10698-011-9140-y

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