"...the artist should know the given world. Imagination without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard of primitive art, the child's scrawl on the fence, and the crank's message in the market place. Art is never simple. ... I automatically gave low marks when a student used the dreadful phrase ... 'Art is simple, art is sincere.' Someday I must trace this vulgar absurdity to its source. A schoolmarm in Ohio? A progressive ass in New York?" --Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions 32-33)

The time is right to introduce general audiences to the important and productive relationship between the arts and science. In the past, unwillingness of many people to reduce artistic processes to physical processes made them disinterested in science, but recent work in, for example, the complexity sciences and developmental systems approach to evolutionary biology, abandon the classical tradition of reductionism. These sciences study the irreducible aspects of natural processes, and they have turned to many of the tools and concepts of humanities scholars (e.g. perspectivism, theories of representation and the roles of function and context) in order to conduct their research. Not only are humanities scholars' understandings of creative processes improved with the study of sciences, but scientists and artists benefit in their own work through their interaction with humanities scholars. The goal of this program series is to show that literary theory, poetics, narrative theory, and aesthetics is as relevant to an appreciation of our natural world as are evolutionary biology and physics.

Recent findings in science bring humanities, art, and science together. To put it briefly, the "post-classical" era of science is coming to an end. The humanities "science wars" are, for all practical purposes, over, and we are entering a new era in which productive collaboration between scientists and humanities scholars will be possible.

In the past, the perceived gap between the arts and sciences was due to the different forms of knowledge that the separate disciplines chose to pursue. To state the situation in the extreme, the arts investigated the realm of subjective knowledge. The sciences sought to establish objective knowledge. Artists tend to look at meaning holistically. Artists have argued that certain kinds of phenomena are (sometimes problematically) "more than the sum of their parts" because the relations between parts add "something more." Scientists have argued that all phenomena can be analyzed by breaking them down into the component parts and discovering the physical laws that govern each part; the whole is then a sum of the activity of the individual parts. In this view, scientists are reductionists; artists are anti-reductionists.

According to the reductionist-mechanistic view, complex systems are really just like any other kind of system and can be analyzed using linear equation because they are merely the additive consequence of multiple independent processes. The dependent variables (unknown quantities) are put on one side of an equation, and the independent variables (known quantities) on the other. The equations can be solved to make precise predictions about how the system will evolve. Reductionists believe it is theoretically possible (though practically impossible) to predict every event in the universe, given sufficient knowledge of the initial conditions. Thus, reductionists believe that there is no such thing as "mind" or "consciousness" that is qualitatively different from the mechanistic effects of physical brain functions. It follows, then, that the notion of self-hood is also illusory: human actions are merely the predetermined results of physical-mechanistic laws. The concepts of "art" and "creativity" and "intentionality" do not have much meaning in this view.

However, things have changed in the sciences. In the last twenty years, dynamical systems research, popularly known as the "complexity sciences," has shown that complex systems (e.g. living organisms, ecosystems, cultural groups) have emergent indeterminacy at intermediate scales and emergent order at large scales. They cannot be completely analyzed as the sum of local effects.[1] The overall large-scale behavior (wholeness) of complex systems is emergent and cannot be precisely predicted, especially over time. This gives scientists room to argue that "new" things do emerge. Nature is creative. Every event and human action was not prespecified in the initial universe. Art, the creation of new meanings, is possible.

"Emergent" phenomena are defined as systems that seem to require some form of subjective understanding insomuch as they cannot be explained in terms of scientific reductionism. To put it another way, such systems can be described qualitatively but not quantitatively. Mind as opposed to brain, the kind of self-organized complexity that characterizes life, and the meaning(s) of a literary work are three examples of emergent phenomena that involve stochastically interacting parts that spontaneously form organized wholes. These wholes are the contexts in which the parts function. A reductive or linear reading of a poem might assume that the known quantities, vocabulary, syntax, rhyme scheme, and semantics, having been determined will give the unknown quantities, the meaning. But artists have generally denied this possibility, arguing that parts of a work of art interact in an "organic" way that cannot be understood reductively. These arguments are centuries old and can be traced back to ancient teleology and study of self-organization. As Immanuel Kant defines an organism, every part exists:

for the sake of others and of the whole. The part must be an organ producing the other parts. Only under these conditions and upon these terms can such a product be an organized and self-organized being, and, as such, be called a physical end.[2]

Early 20th century analyses of the "organic" properties of a poem or a novel assumed that the parts of the work interacted to produce an irreducible whole that was (one of) the work's meaning(s). The deconstructive approach sought to discredit this form of criticism by attacking its teleological assumptions. Recent science focusing on nonlinear dynamics invites us to reconsider some concepts in teleology. According to complexity scientists, what might be called "emergent purposive behavior" or self-organization in complex systems does exist; however, it is not the result of static laws, but of emergent and dynamically stable patterns. This argument for intentionality in natural systems redefines intentionality.

Difficulties in "Proving" Emergence Exists

Although the study of "emergence" (both of self-organization and deterministic chaos) has had much critical attention in science and philosophy since the early nineties, most cases have not gone beyond epistemological emergence.[3] With epistemological emergence it appears to be impossible to understand the "global" behavior of a complex system by analyzing the "local" behavior of the individual parts. Thus, complexity scientists study and compare the qualitative behaviors of different dynamical systems as wholes.[4] These scientists may argue that one system is more "complex" than another. For example, they may argue that the human brain functions in a more "complex" manner than other primates' brains do. Such arguments are reminiscent of New Critics who attempted to advance the objectivity of subjective readings. Heated disagreements ensued. Likewise, there is little or no agreement among complexity scientists about the precise definition of "complexity." Whether or not a system seems more organized or more chaotic is usually determined by the scientist looking at the system as a whole and comparing it to other systems as wholes. Such evaluations are necessarily subjective. As many postmodern literary and cultural theorists have pointed out, the fact that some scientists speak qualitatively rather than quantitatively means that science now regards its models as metaphors and tools, informative as heuristic devices perhaps, but in no way representing the absolute "truth" of the object under study. This is what is meant here by the term "post-classical" science.[5]

Some scientists argue that complexity science is not a "real" science. As Steven Weinberg writes, in "seeking the laws of nature it is the essence of the art of science to avoid complexity."6 They believe that the apparent anomaly uncovered by nonlinear dynamics will eventually be resolved and science can return to a classical deterministic (reductive) paradigm. Although complexity scientists would argue that complexity cannot be avoided, they also must concede that emergence that is defined merely qualitatively is epistemological emergence. A case for ontological emergence would indeed require a quantitative definition of emergent properties. Therefore, the opposition between subjective (qualitative) and objective (quantifiable) forms of knowledge persists, even though some scientists have adopted an "artistic" approach to understanding complex phenomena.

A New Method for Measuring Emergence

Very recent advances in science show that reference to a subjective/objective dichotomy is misleading and may hinder our understanding of the way nature (and art) works. These theories are not very well known. Since they touch closely upon humanities studies, it will be important for scholars to be involved from the beginning in their development and dissemination. A public program involving humanities scholars, artists, and scientists will provide a well-balanced view of the issues. Theoretical physicists now claim it is possible to analyze emergent phenomena quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Their technique is revolutionary. Instead of interpreting a raw data stream by imposing a preformed model on the system as a whole, complexity scientists are beginning to look at a model stream, which is the actual behavior of an ensemble of parts in the system during the developmental process.[7] Unlike reductionist descriptions, this new approach, called Computational Mechanics, considers the relational aspects of the parts of the rule and the effect of the developing system's dynamics on the whole or end product.

With Computational Mechanics, the mode of representation--the language--used to describe a system under study is defined by the system itself. This takes the hypothesizing scientist out of the process and allows the system's own behavior to illustrate its own "theories" about itself.

To give an illustration of a model stream vs. a data stream, in a beating heart, the data stream is the fairly regular beat, the overall pattern. The regular beat (global behavior) is not a direct result of the activity of individual cells (local behavior). Heart muscle is made up of cells that each pulse randomly (i.e., spontaneously according to its own internal state). But since cells are correlated (i.e. the activity of one cell affects its neighbor's internal state), nonlinear relationships come to exist within a living heart (Winfree passim). This means that localized groups of cells self-organize and start pulsing in a patterned or rule-governed manner that is constrained by, for example, the size and number of cells in the system and the length of time necessary for adrenaline to diffuse through the system, etc. This is one of the great discoveries of so-called "chaos theory": apparently unpredictable global behavior is guided by hidden local rules. The rule might be a structurally complex string defining cell behaviors: on, on, off, on, off, on, wildcard, on, on, off (repeat), which includes opportunities for indeterminate activity. These strings of complex behaviors travel through the heart tissue in waves resulting in a fairly regular periodic beat that can speed up and slow down depending on the body's needs. The rule itself is not confined to particular cells. While the rule remains stable, there is fluidity in the cell ensemble borders that produce it. A dynamically stable rule results in an adaptable heartbeat. The adaptable heartbeat (the whole behavior) is an example of self-organization, of emergent behavior, that appears to be purposeful or designed in such a way as to create and then to sustain a cohesive and irreducible whole by sometimes resisting change and sometimes adapting to it.

This example is easily translated into any group of correlated cells: traders in a financial market, ants in a colony, organisms in an adapting population, neurons firing in a human brain, or individual artists working in a single genre. The degree of complexity of the rule that governs local behavior is constant and can be quantified. This measurement is "objective" in the sense that it is generated by the system it is defining, and it is subjective in the sense that some places in the string are more meaningful than in others. For instance, "off" is always followed by "on," but "on" may be followed by "on" or "off" depending on where a cell is in the string. In other words, context matters. Computational Mechanics' approach to emergence allows one to attribute relative objectivity to emergent behavior.

Jim Crutchfield, one of the original investigators of deterministic chaos some twenty years ago, announced at the National Academy of Sciences meeting in Boston 2001 that the "problem of representation [i.e. with its unavoidable subjectivity] has been solved." Computation Mechanics is an automated form of theory building. It is a theory of how theories may be constructed and thus is universally applicable to any system (allowing perhaps for, say, the development of more precise designation of states than simply "on" or "off"), in virtually any field, including economics, sociology, ecology, psychology, and even aesthetics.

Whether or not it is practically feasible to determine the local rule(s) underlying some complex whole behaviors is another matter. At this point, it is difficult to imagine how something so complex as the meaning of a poem could be described this way. A melody might be, but a sonnet would pose difficulties. We do not to advocate quantitative descriptions of art. We merely want to argue that emergence of an artwork's meaning is a relatively objective phenomenon. It is assumed that human brain processes in the creation of art operate according to the same laws of physics that everything else in nature does. The emergent meanings of artwork, however complex, cannot be categorically different from other emergent phenomena.

Most importantly, the discoveries made by Computational Mechanics represent a crucial correction to postmodern theories, which have supposed that, since all models of the world are constructed by language, they are radically subjective. To reiterate, before Computational Mechanics, according to the post-classical view, an emergent pattern was recognized by an observer who, looking at the data, imposed a preconceived model upon the pattern. We might also say that the observer was able to recognize the pattern only because he or she had a ready-made model (a Kuhnian paradigm) that happened to fit the data. Thus, one could not say the model of the pattern was objective. Some complexity scientists using a qualitative evaluation might try to argue that an orchid is more complex than a daisy because an orchid looks more irregular compared to a daisy. Such an evaluation is, as postmodernists have argued, constructed by the observer's subjective notions about regularity. In Computational Mechanics, the "model" of the pattern is found in what is called the "causal architecture" of the dynamical process itself, that is, the procedure that produces the pattern. The complexity of a system may be described quantitatively, and if a system has evolved from one state to another, the complexity of the two states may be compared. The scientist will be able to prove that something "new" has emerged. As Jeffery Goldstein puts it,

defining emergence in terms of an intrinsic computational capacity raises all sorts of scientific and philosophical issues, such as the philosopher John Searle's (1994) contention that [emergence of mind is a mere epiphenomenon]. Crutchfield's postulation... points to how emergence has the potential of generating self-maintaining mechanisms that serve to distinguish it from subjective impressions, serendipitous novelty, or merely epiphenomenal activity.[8]

Computational Mechanics' rejection of the subjective/objective dichotomy changes the way humanities scholars, scientists, and artists may work together.

Scientists Learn from Artists

It is most important to note that Crutchfield claims his original inspiration for these ideas came from process philosophy and the arts. Many artists have claimed to be able to illustrate a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, relying on the accumulation of variable impressions and experiences that interact/feedback to form an emergent, dynamic aesthetic "truth." N. Katherine Hayles was first to identify an affinity between Crutchfield's early work and Henry James' idea of the "figure in the carpet" ( i.e. the intention or meaning) in her book Chaos Bound. Crutchfield's later work is more obviously influenced by artistic sensibilities, and can be further compared to James. In "The Art of Fiction" (1884), James claims partial impressions (local knowledge) can reveal a truth about the whole of reality. [9] The "cluster of gifts" that "constitute experience" gives one the "power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern" (53). Likewise, in computational mechanics, there is evidence that the pattern of the whole is indirectly communicated to the local level because there is a change in the behavior of ensembles there, which become a model of the whole.

With Computational Mechanics there is now scientific evidence legitimizing the work of the thousands of complexity workers worldwide. These scientists have traditionally been receptive to humanities scholarship, which has alienated some of them from the larger scientific community. More scientists might become more interested in humanities scholarship and vice-versa. The topic of emergence, the varied tools of complexity science and its virtually unlimited applications in a number of disciplines can accommodate a whole host of perspectives and interests in the humanities.

Significantly, humanities scholarship will undergo an enormous change in the next few decades as the concepts of "radical subjectivity" will have to be re-evaluated in light of our new understanding of emergence. Dactyl Foundation's public program series will provide a forum in which these changes may be discussed.

Network Dactyl will also help set up a network of institutions (galleries, science centers, museums, interdisciplinary centers, and etc.) so that these presentations may reach a large and diverse national audience with a minimal amount of funding and planning. Affiliates so far include: The Center for Inquiry and The Flow Chart Foundation. Interested organizations should see our calendar for upcoming and passed events. If you wish to host an event in your forum, contact Victoria Alexander, Director of Programs for Thought at alexander@dactyl.org.

Semi-Monthly Art-Science Lectures and Presentations/Exhibitions

Semi-monthly presentations of think tank participants' research will be made at Dactyl Foundation. These presentations will be open to the public, informal, and will incorporate an artistic performance, art exhibition and/or discussion with a scientist on aesthetic concepts. Interested participants should send a proposal to Victoria Alexander, Director of Programs for Thought to alexander@dactyl.org. Describe your work with a 200-word abstract. Include the title of your presentation, the name of the scientist/artist with whom you would like to work, and explain how his or her work is related to your project. Please also submit a short bio, full CV, and a link to a more elaborate description of the project if one is available.

Currently, Dactyl Foundation offers a small honorarium of $250 for each participating Scholar, Scientist, and Artist. Funds for travel expenses are available to Scholars who receive the Dactyl Foundation Award for Aesthetic Theory. The role of each type of participant (Humanities Scholar, Scientists, Artist) is defined as follows:

Humanities Scholars Each semi-monthly presentation would feature (and be partly organized by) one humanities scholar who is conducting research in art/science. Ideally, the scholar would also be a practicing artist/writer in the field he or she studies, but this is not a requirement. The subject of the scholar's research must involve the understanding of, for example, artistic processes or aesthetic movements in terms of natural processes or scientific theories. That is, scholars may be historians or philosophers of science by training, but they must apply their research in science to issues in aesthetics. Alternatively, the Scholar may wish to offer a historical trend, form of social organization, or cultural development as an example of a creative process. To give an example of a possible program, a scholar might present a comparison between the scientific concept of "stochastic resonance" and theories about the mechanisms underlying creativity and originality in art.

Scientists Our Humanities Scholars will invite Scientists with whom they desire to collaborate and/or consult, but we will also have an open call for participants. Scientists must have a willingness to see humanities research in the arts as a tool for understanding natural processes -- instead of imagining the usefulness of art to be limited to illustrating scientific concepts. A scientist working with a humanities scholar on stochastic resonance and art might provide detailed examples with an audio demonstration.

Artists Humanities Scholars will invite artists whose work demonstrates the processes or methods that the scholar is studying in terms of natural processes or scientific theories. Ideally, the artists would be those who also have an interest in science and who could participate in the discussion (rather than be the subject of it). That is, participating artists would use science, not necessarily as a subject in their art, but as a tool for understanding the artistic process (e.g., exploring questions such: What is creativity? What is originality?). To continue the example given above, an Artist working with a Humanities Scholar on stochastic resonance might recall moments from his or her own creative process when a stochastic resonance was discovered, used and adapted.

*NOTE Visual artists must have deep knowledge of the science of image making, depending on his or her area of specialization, e.g. color theory, perspective, basic pigment chemistry, methods or materials, etc. Literary artists must have a comprehensive understanding of grammar, structure, and various formalisms. Our standards for identifying artists are as stringent as identifying scholars and scientists. The difficulty of the work should not be merely time-consuming or laborious, but should require years of experience and intimate knowledge of one's subject and materials. In other words, the artist's work must be something that not every one could do. Furthermore, the art must express some form of intention, having the qualities of both directionality and originality. That is, the work should be part of a language that has emerged, as described above, from local interactions of individual users, resulting in a system. In this sense, it would be directional. The work should participate in the "language game" -- to borrow a phrase from Wittgenstein -- playing by the rules. At the same time, the artist's "moves" within the game must change the rules. In this sense, it would be "original." In addition, the intention must be expressed by the work itself and should not require additional verbal interpretation or explanation, except, perhaps, a short title in the case of visual art. For these reasons, many abstract works and chance-operational works would not be sufficiently intentional.

Conclusion

The recent research in emergence is relevant, at a very basic and profound emotional level, to major philosophical questions: Is human thought "something more" that cannot be reduced to mechanistic description? Do we have free will? or are all our acts uniquely predetermined by physical determinism? Do artists intentionally create works of art? or are their works merely produced by the cultural/social/material environment in which they work? This program series is very much needed in the art and academic communities. As Gross and Levit made clear in the mid-nineties, in general, humanities scholars tend to have little knowledge of simple causality, how things work. This is unfortunate, since it is certainly important to any one trying to make claims about the origins or nature of forms, creativity, constructivism, perspectivism, representation, and etc.

Project Advisors

1. Professor John Johnston, Emory University, expert in contemporary issues in science. Specializes in modern/postmodern fiction; British and American Poetry; critical theory. Author of Carnival of Repetition: Gaddis's The Recognitions and Postmodern Theory and Information Multiplicity, Literature, Media, Information Systems. Currently working on two monographs. The first is entitled, The Lure of the Post-Natural: Information Machines in Contemporary Culture, a study of how the new information machines first introduced by Alan Turing cross and erode conceptual boundaries at the conjunctions of information processing and dynamic systems theory. Chapters on psychoanalysis and cybernetics, Artificial Life, evolution and complex systems theory, machinic vision, distributed systems in the new AI and CogSci, and new narratives of the Internet (collective intelligence, the virtual, the post-human). The second is entitled How it Changed: New Media and Complexity in Contemporary Science Fiction, a study of the new sites and agents of change, and particularly the role of new media, in contemporary science fiction.

2. Professor Timothy Lenoir, as a historian of 19th century German Biology, will provide a broad perspective on the philosophy of science, especially the reductionism/anti-reductionism debate. Professor of history of science and technology at Stanford, and chair of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Lenoir has written on the ways in which computer graphics, artificial intelligence, imaging, virtual reality, and robotics have transformed the work practices of fields such as biochemistry, surgery, and genetics. Lenoir has also been deeply interested in how computer mediated communication and new media are transforming our cultural imagery. Building upon his recent work on the history of virtual reality, computer graphics and computer-aided design, he has written about recent developments in architectural design, particularly in the work of a group of "post-architects" inspired by Peter Eisenman. Lenoir's recent writings also focus on the history of interactive simulation, particularly military simulations, and videogames. Recent publications include: Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Discipline, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997 and Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

Project Staff

1. Dr. Victoria Alexander,

Alexander is co-founder and director of the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities. She earned her Ph.D. in 2002 in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY and did her dissertation research in teleology, evolutionary theory, and complexity science at the Santa Fe Institute, a premier center for the study of complexity. Published in the Antioch Review, English Language Notes, Nabokov Studies, Pynchon Notes, and several other journals/magazines, Alexander has investigated chance and teleology in narrative by such diverse writers as Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Louis Begley, Henry James, Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov, C. S. Peirce, Thomas Pynchon, and Shakespeare. Her novels Smoking Hopes and Naked Singularity pursue similar themes involving coincidence and emergent intentionality. She has lectured at numerous institutions, science centers, museums, universities, private organizations, and conferences, and has taught writing at Hunter College, Mercy College, and the College of Staten Island. Her honors include a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, Italy), a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, two Art & Science Lab Residencies (Santa Fe), Alfred Kazin Award for Best Dissertation (GC, CUNY), and the Washington Prize for Fiction. Alexander's work investigates intentionality as an emergent phenomenon. It treats personal intentionality (free will), cosmic intentionality (teleology), artistic meaning or intention of artworks, cultural innovations, and evolutionary innovations as examples of similar kinds of naturalistic processes. She has organized a number of events, in a variety of venues, featuring the kind of programming here proposed.

2. Ms. Sharon Lattig, Doctoral Candidate, Graduate Center, CUNY. An expert in cognitive science and metaphor, Lattig's work brings recent advances in neuroscience to bear on the genre of lyric poetry. It treats lyric utterance as the expression of an embedded organism contending with a fresh environment. This neo-humanistic approach to literature, one which, in contradistinction to Western humanism, is truly universal yet remains dependent on cultural and individual relativism. The work draws from the subfield of neurodynamics -- the application of deterministic chaos to the mass action of the nervous system -- to forge an understanding of the dynamics of metaphor at the site of perception. Any readings of lyrical literature this approach spawns must be antireductionist. A deep familiarity with the complexity of poetry can then be used to critique scientific approaches and even to enhance an interdisciplinary understanding of mind. Lattig is published in Columbia Poetry Review, murmur, and Whatever. She received the CUNY, GC award for best dissertation prospectus in 2002. Lattig's role as Research Assistant will greatly enhance the Project's organization.

Selected Bibliography of Sources

Boden, Margaret. "What is Creativity?" In The Dimensions of Creativity. Ed. Margaret Boden. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 75-117.

Bricmont, Jean and Alan Sokal. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.

Crutchfield, James P. "Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence." In Integrated Themes, Santa Fe Institute Studies In the Sciences of Complexity XIX. Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1994. 479-497.

---, "When Evolution is Revolution: Origins of Innovation." In Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Interplay of Selection, Neutrality, Accident, and Function. Eds. J. P. Crutchfield and P. Schuster. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 101-134.

Crutchfield, James P., J. Doyne Farmer, Norman Packard, and Robert Shaw, "Chaos." In Scientific American 255 (1986): 46-57.

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." Trans. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Boston: Bedford Book, 1989. 959-971.

Goodwin, Brian. How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity. New York: Scribner, 1994.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities. New York: Harmony Books, 2003.

Gross, Paul R. and Norman Levitt. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science Johns Hopkins 1994.

Keller, Evelyn Fox. Century of the Gene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Koertge, Noretta ed. A House Built on Sand Exposing Postmodern Myths about Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Lenoir, Timothy. The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics In Nineteenth Century German Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Winfree, Arthur T. The Geometry of Biological Time. NY: Springer-Verlag, 1980

Barthes, Roland Barthes. "The Death of the Author." In Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968. 142-148.

Dimock, Wai Chee. "A Theory of Resonance." In PMLA 10 (1997): 1046-59.

Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003.

James, Henry. "The Art of Fiction." In The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Roger Gard. New York: Penguin, 1987. 186-206.

Notes

[1] See John Collier, "Holism in the New Physics," Descant 79/80 (1993): 135-154.

[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Chicago: Encyl. Brittanica, 1993).

[3]For example, R. Penrose and S. Hameroff, "What 'Gaps'?" Journal of Consciousness Studies 2 (1996): 98-111; A. Scott Stairway to Mind (New York: Copernicus, 1995): and J. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

[4] Michael Silberstein and John McGeever, "The Search for Ontological Emergence," Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999): 182-200.

[5] The beginning of the post-classical era of science may be located at the turn of the century with the discovery of deterministic chaos by Henri Poincare. See "Science and Method," American Scientist 85 (1903): 488. This work was largely ignored, however, and it was not until the rediscovery of deterministic chaos in the 1970s that Laplacean determinism was truly challenged. Some locate the beginning of post-classical era of science with the discoveries of quantum physics. See, for example, Arkady Plotnitsky, "Complementarity, Idealization, and the Limits of Classical Conceptions of Reality," Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory eds. Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnisky (Durham: Duke, 1997), 134-172. However, quantum mechanical systems can be described by linear equations, are predictable over large time scales, and can be fitted within classical determinism.

[6] "Is the Universe a Computer?" The New York Review of Books(October 24, 2002).

[7] See "Is Anything Ever New? Considering Emergence," in Integrated Themes, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity XIX (Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1994), 479-497.

[8] Jeffrey Goldstein, "Emergence as a Construct: History and Issues," Emergence 1 (1999): 64.

[9] All quotes by James are from "The Art of Fiction," Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984): 44-65.

[10] Boden has refined the definition of freewill based on recent findings in the study of complex systems. As Boden makes clear, intentionality is associated with unpredictability, and it is, apparently, an emergent phenomenon, involving behaviors that are not directly caused by environmental interactions. As Boden writes, autonomy involves "the extent to which response to the environment is not direct (determined only by the present state in the external world) but indirect (mediated by inner mechanisms partly dependent on the creatures' previous history)." "Autonomy and Artificiality," in The Philosophy of Artificial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 102. Also see David Kirsch, "Today the Earwig, Tomorrow Man?" in the same volume, 161-184.