Dissipative Structures and Bifurcations

Dissipative structures and bifurcations

Francis Baldewyns

Dissipative structures and bifurcations

Prigogine’s teaching

Editions du Prof 1

of Contents DissipativeTable structures and bifurcations A civilization of specialists

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The time to be and become

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Some maxims relating to the "Present" in chronological order of birth dates of authors

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Towards future system bifurcations

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Human harmonic frequencies

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Are the turbulences of the Bourse and that of molecules of a gas, for instance, likelihood phenomenons ?

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Would we only be physical and biological objects diversely modified which cannot prevent from being conditionned by our environment? We do not think so.

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What about the will to manage our life ?

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The principle of contradiction or opposition

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Would cultures only be systems composed of men like solids, liquids and gases are composed of atoms and molecules?

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Entropy and Neguentropy

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Changes of phase of liquid water to ice and ice to liquid water.

Analogy test between the water formed of H2O molecules and the society formed of human beings

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What about the speed of transformations?

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« Consilience », yes! Unity of knowledge, no!

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Culture and civilisation

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The evolution of Europe will not prevent from the "inevitable confrontation" of Europeans with themselves.

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What will be the next social bifurcations? To hope is to deny the future…

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations A civilization of specialists.

Paul Rostenne, a Belgian philosopher, two months before leaving us, drew my attention to a chapter in La Barbarie des Elites (Barbary of Elites)1 in which he wrote: « It is weakness and not strength that opens up the way for the future to life. » "It is a both physiological and psychological law, of which Toynbee has taken the imprint in the highest wisdoms. That of Christ: « The last will be first »; Then, that of the Tao : « Who prides himself on his work does not build something lasting ». And Toynbee concludes with relevance: "Such is the fate of the creative impulse » After reading this English historian, we conclude that the course of the tragedy is always the same: every being which has succeeded a chapter of its development finds inside its success a great handicap to create the next chapter.

Thus, history takes place in a cyclical form, since each stage of expansion succeeds that of decline, while at the same time preparing for a new development that carries the development of life further.

Paul Rostenne writes: « The stopped civilizations » have succeeded what the extinct animal species have succeeded: a perfect adaptation to the requirements of the environment, a stable equilibrium between provocation and response. This is the case of the Spartan civilization that, through a too perfect adaptation to the regime of war, to which it had to respond in order to constitute itself, rejected « as much as possible the infinite variety of human nature, to reach instead it an inflexible animal nature. » The Spartan has renounced to remain a man made in the image of God to become a warrior robot. A successful civilization is a civilization of specialists - the right man in the right place - but the specialization does not look into the side of man but into the animal that will always provide the most perfect models of specialization »2 This is the reason why today the unity of knowledge is called into question by the absence of concordance and validation of behavior in all areas, including that of thought, because in front of each problem a specialist is used. Although this practice proves effective for a body disease or for repairing a broken vehicle, it does not reveal any therapy on human existence and its destination.

The time to be and to become.

The bifurcations of a system occur when its imbalances are such that this system passes from the elastic state to the state of irreversible deformation. This obligatory passage allows the interactive elements that compose this system to reorganize in order to find a new equilibrium.

Civilizations do not escape this fundamental law. And they also know “dissipative structures” A dissipative system (or dissipative structure) is a system that evolves in an envi-ronment with which it exchanges energy or matter. It is therefore an open system, far from a thermodynamic equilibrium.

A dissipative system is characterized by the balance of its exchanges (exchange of energy, creation of entropy), and the spontaneous appearance of a break in spatial symmetry (anisotropy) which can sometimes reveal a complex Chaotic structure.

Where are our civilization and personal development now? In the elastic phase or in the nearfracture phase?

Since the beginning of the modern era, we have witnessed the development of sci-ence, where rigorous, objective and indisputable knowledge reigns supreme. During the twentieth century, scientific thought was led to replace the classical image of the world of Newtonian physics - a world determined rigorously and whose necessity made its law - by an image of a world in the making, in which contingency takes place next to necessity.

1 Rostenne, P., op. cit. note n° 86, p.67 2 Ibid

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Although we cannot deny the welfare brought by sciences, we must question the reason why, simultaneously with this welfare, are progressively collapsing the cultural values that man had taken so long to build.

“Because life itself is affected, all its values are shaking, not only aesthetics, but also ethics, the Sacred and with them the possibility to live life fully." 3 This upheaval was accentuated through the specialization of tasks and through the proliferation of all searches in order to be the first in the market for exchange values that does not necessarily go hand in hand with usage values.

Scientific methods have woven their webs in all fields, including those relating to the administration and management of men. This is commonly called the unique thought that has reduced us to being only “producers-consumers” subject to the developments of techno-science.

"While, like the swell of the ocean, all productions of the civilizations of the past ascended and descended together, as if by mutual agreement and without disjunction - knowledge producing welfare, beauty, and sacred light, illuminated everything - we were in front of what we had never seen : the scientific explosion and the ruin of man. Here is the new barbarism of which it is not sure this time that it can be overcome "4 This barbarism is the technical universe that proliferates in the manner of a cancer, self-inducing itself in the absence of any norm, in its perfect indifference to everything that is not itself i.e. the life of whom it is devouring.

The problem of the problems of our time must be posed in the following terms: will the Western elites succeed in detaching themselves from that civilizing form which does not concern itself with culture, in order to work in a new form? Or will it be surprised and fascinated on a corpse whose it will apply to mummify in order to hide its nothingness of an illusion of survival? After succeeding in its development, capitalism struggles to create the next chapter, so that the chances seem to be in reality against the "favorite" and in favor of the unknown horse.

"Human being never finds time to be and time to become," said Georges Poulet. And Paul Rostenne expressed this thought by the metaphor of the Chrysalide and that of the caterpillar: "As the caterpillar needs to be a caterpillar and the chrysalis needs to be chrysalis, modern man needs to be modern and take all forms and all the contents that he gives himself. As life successively destroys the caterpillar form and then the chrysalis form by aiming at the butterfly, life also brings man to its fullness through a series of stages that are not only physical - as was the case for Insect but above all spiritual5 ".

Culture is a culture of life; It transforms itself as does the caterpillar, it is at once the one which is subject of the transforming and the one which performs the transforming into an incessant movement.

And its whole organism, in perpetual transformation, permanently interacts with that of its fellows.

Human life, in the course of its evolution, generates new experiences; the human thus encounters new qualities of life, new altitudes of values that aspire to knowledge not as a utilitarian value but as an absolute value. "Culture is what is still left when we have forgotten everything." 6 It is the system that encompasses all the others; it is a container without which the content has no flavor.

This is not a misleading wrapping, as it is often the case with packaging on the capital market, goods and services market; it is on the contrary the first truth, the one which prevents barbarism from settling as hermetic conditioning and which prevents the bacteria from attacking the product that it protects. But this protection is fragile if we do not take care of it permanently, for "the most civilized peoples are as close to barbarism as the most polished iron of the Rust "7.

3.

Henry, M., La Barbarie, Grasset, Paris, 1987, p.9

4

Ibid. P.10

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Rostenne, P., La Barbarie des érudits, Editions Desclée and Cie, p. 105

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Citation of Edouard Herriot

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Comte de Rivarol (1753-1801)

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Man does not really have a past, because his consciousness makes him permanently live in the present, the events that have marked his life. Only the man hic et nunc really exists, and to live the present, he constantly needs to remember.

Constantly, man remembers and extrapolates. His past and his future are as-sembled one to the other to form on the time line two cones of opposite sense, conti-guous at their summit through a desertified point: his immediate present. These two cones ex-press the spatiotemporal fluxes of the events of the past and those of projections into the future.

Since, according to Aristotle, the past is no longer, since the future is not yet, since the present itself has already finished being as soon as it began to exist, how could there be a "being of time"?

Some maxims relating to the "Present" in ascending chronological order of the birth dates of the authors Cueille le jour présent, en te fiant le moins possible au lendemain.

Take the most advantage of the present day, keeping as little as possible the next day.

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero.

Horace 65-8 av. J.-C Odes, I, XI, 8 ___________________________________________________________________________ Et souviens-toi encore que chacun ne vit que le présent, cet infiniment petit.

And remember that each one lives only the present, this infinitely small.

Marc Aurèle (121-180) Pensées, III, 10 ___________________________________________________________________________ La vie, c'est le plaisir ou rien. ... Jouissons aujourd'hui, nul ne connaît demain.

Life is pleasure or nothing. ... Let's enjoy today, no one knows tomorrow.

Palladas d'Alexandrie Ve siècle Anthologie palatine, V, 72 (traduction R. Brasillach) ___________________________________________________________________________ Lorsqu'on est trop curieux des choses qui se pratiquaient aux siècles passés, on demeure ordinairement fort ignorant de celles qui se pratiquent en celui-ci.

When we are too curious about the things that were practiced in the past centuries, we usually remains very ignorant of those that are practiced in this one.

René Descartes (1596-1650) Discours de la méthode ___________________________________________________________________________ Les hommes qui, par leurs sentiments, appartiennent au passé et, par leurs pensées à l'avenir, trouvent difficilement place dans le présent.

Men who, by their feelings, belong to the past and, by their thoughts to the future, find it difficult to place themselves in the present.

Louis de Bonald (1754-1840) Lettre, à Joseph de Maistre, 22 mars 1817 La durée est essentiellement une continuation de ce qui n'est plus dans ce qui est.

Duration is essentially a continuation of what is no longer in what is Henri Bergson (1859-1941) Durée et simultanéité (P.U.F.)

Mon passé, c'est les trois quarts de mon présent. Je rêve plus que je ne vis, et je rêve en arrière.

My past is three quarters of my present. I dream more than I live, and I dream back Jules Renard (1864-1910) Journal, 23 mars 1901 ___________________________________________________________________________

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Les jours sont peut-être égaux pour une horloge, mais pas pour un homme.

Days may be equal for a clock, but not for a man Marcel Proust (1871-1922) Chroniques, Vacances de Pâques Paru dans le Figaro, 25 mars 1913. ___________________________________________________________________________ Sur la terre, deux choses sont simples: raconter le passé et prédire l'avenir.

Y voir clair au jour le jour est une autre entreprise.

On earth, two things are simple: telling the past and predicting the future. Seeing it clearly from day to day is another business.

Armand Salacrou (1899-1989) La terre est ronde ____________________________________________________________________________ Wether the vital function of a healthy 75-year-old man seen by a mathematician is f(x), then the integration of this function, which is in fact the activity he has produced during his life, can be expressed as an accumulation of infinitesimal moments whose sum corresponds to 75 (years) x 365,25 (days) x 24 (Hours) x 60 (minutes) x 60 (seconds) = 2.366.820.000 seconds



2.366.820.000

f (x)dx

0

The integral function extending from zero to two billion three hundred sixty six million eight hundred and twenty thousand seconds is a way of representing the life of a man of 75 years as the vital function f (x) accumulating an infinity of moments, each of them dx tending to zero.

The past really exists only insofar as it haunts our present. It is not amazing, there-fore, that the culture of men is imbued with the luminaries of the past, as revealed by this survey carried out by the B.B.C. To its listeners at the end of 1999, where it asked them who were the most famous Englishmen of the millennium. William Shakespeare took the first place, followed by Winston Churchill, the youngest of these celebrities, followed by William Caxton (1422-1491), the printer of the first book in England, and the two scientists Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton.

But culture is also ready to accept new concepts to give itself the illusion of progress, so that it accepts innovations without asking too much about their consequences.

Towards future bifurcations of systems The evolution of physicochemical systems is explained by their "self-organization". This is done whenever these systems, far from their position of equilibrium, undergo fundamental and irreversible fluctuations. It then takes place as a broken symmetry that Professor Prigogine calls a bifurcation8.

Between two bifurcations, the systems evolve deterministically; at the bifurcation, their behavior becomes probabilistic. Hence any extrapolation hypothesis beyond what seems to be the state of maximum entropy is futile.

Before humanity reaches the next point of organizational bifurcation, beyond the globalization that is under way, there are still many areas in which our corrective ac-tions can take place, starting with the establishment of a world democratic government.

The capitalist and bureaucratic experiences of the 20th century have taught us that if we forget the meaning of man in the application of the ways and means of these policies, the result is an alienating system. And we do not want it any more. Yet these two systems had their hours of glory and could still have them provided that we approach them differently from the Americans, for the former, from Russians and Chinese, for the latter.

8

Prigogine, Program « Names of gods » Belgian TV on the 9 September 1977

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Hans Jonas explains that "Central planning" avoids the mechanism of competition and therefore "the aberration of a market production aimed at exciting the consumer. Since waste is one of the wounds of our civilization, planning would have the advantage of an economic and social order not motivated by gain, on condition of avoiding "bad orientation from above, servility and reign of the sycophants coming from the base" 9 Systems of interest to the social sciences are articulated to each other and influ-enced by their preponderance in the motricity of the whole. This assembly appears to us as a complex mechanical structure formed of muscular gears, either directly by the main flywheel or by other gears actuated by it. By analogy, our society undergoes the result of various forces and lives the events produced by their reciprocal interactions: it is the history of men.

Situations of blockade in crisis situations, sometimes embellished by some funda-mental discoveries that make humanity leap for real progress, the history of our socie-ties does not unfold as a programmed digital machine works. The biosocial system, the political system, the economic system, the cultural system, the system of beliefs, values, ethical and aesthetic codes, all have relative autonomy from one another.

What is today the driving wheel of our society? The answer is obvious: the economic system. And how could we change our society by giving primacy to other systems closer to the human? This is the fundamental question to which it is more difficult to answer. Indeed, as Julian Huxley points out: "In the language of causality, the naturalist can sometimes discover only one definite cause for a phenomenon, the social scientist must always be satisfied with several partial causes. He must develop a system based on the idea of multiple causality"

9

Jonas., H., Le principe ResponsabilitĂŠ, Les Editions du Cerf, Paris, 1990

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Human harmonic frequencies The various quotations of La Mettrie, which I had the opportunity to recall in my essay entitled "La fin des hommes machines", would leave us a bitter taste if we limit ourselves to what they announce in the first degree, for we would then accept as a fatality our state of man machine.

On the contrary, we must target the ways of humanization of it. We want to be something else than a malleable material at our mercy. But this does not mean that we are distancing ourselves from matter, for this one also poses its conditions: itself does not allow to be manipulated without rules and it does not act without any impulse given to it. Let us refer to the theory of photoelectricity that Einstein explained in 1905 and thanks to which he obtained the Nobel Prize. He demonstrated that when the energy of a luminous quantum "h" reaches a precise value, equal to the work of extracting an electron from a precise metal surface, then, and then only, that electron leaves this surface. For this phenomenon to occur, the frequency must be equal to that of the electronic vibration of the illuminated metal. If this is not the case, the increase in light intensity will have no effect.

It is therefore the frequency that must be aimed at, since it is only a function of the nature of the metal chosen. This frequency cannot take all the imaginable values, but it is limited to the quantified values specific to the targeted metal.

Are the turbulences of the Bourse and that of molecules of a gas, for instance, likelihood phenomenons ?

Physicists also apply themselves to finding, in their discipline, the equations and ideas that best describe the reality of finance, the discipline producing the agitation of all speculators.

To describe the fluctuations of the markets and the fluctuations of men who animate them through their offers and demands, we can also refer to the physics of turbulent flows, whose profound analogies with the life of the Bourse (or the Stock Exchange) have intrigued JeanPhilippe Bouchaud: "A few years ago, I was interested in so-called tropical, extreme disorders; Most of the time nothing happens, then all at once we live big events whose big accidents. The financial markets also have intermittently bursts of activity which, over time, are organized in the same way as the tropical disorders. In appearance, these ones have nothing to do with them, but what is a turbulent flow if not a system where molecules interact with each other? » 10 Of course, the human being (whose the financier) is also conditioned by his own biological system. We know that, we are born with a genetic potential from which we can hardly modify the effects during our existence. And the neuronal structure of our brain, progressively constituted according to our experience and the conditions of the environment in which we evolve, will also have the consequence of living in a specific way for everyone of us.

Would we finally be as determined as Einstein thinks? According to him, we do what we want, but we cannot want what we want. For example, when you drive, you get the individual impression to master your vehicle while the strength of statisticians "demonstrates" that, in spite of whatever you might do, the road will kill anyway in France several thousand people each year. Despite the desire of everyone to be cautious and contradict these statistics, you will not basically be able to change this "natural law" 11 Determination of the society or not ? That’s the question.

10 Barthélemy, P., Le monde du vendredi 1 septembre 2000, Aujourd’hui, p. 19 11

Ibid.

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Would we only be physical and biological objects diversely modified which cannot prevent from being conditionned by our environment? We do not think so.

Georges Ganguilhem wrote: "A living being is not a machine that responds through movements to excitations, it is a machine that responds to signals through opera-tions"12.

Since it is enough for the herbivore to see and smell grass to start grazing on it, without the need to detect the action of sunlight on its alimentary virtues, I find that, in the animal, exists a sensory consciousness of the world strictly proportional to the activity required of it to satisfy its bodily necessity of food and well-being as well as the necessity of the species to reproduce itself.

Consciousness is essentially "attention," and attention is "interest," that is, perception, not of the object as such, but of the object as a necessary thing. Without this consciousness, the object is perceived vaguely, as in a marginal vision. And since conscious-ness is aware of what is important to me, and the precision of the perception of the object is limited to the need I have, if I choose a fruit to taste it, its color will affect me only If for me it means its succulence.

Consciousness thus appears in the beings, not as the ins-trument of apprehension of the real, but as the use of the instruments of apprehension which it can dispose of.

And it is not forbidden to think that the inadequacy between perception and consciousness, that never ceases detaching the "interesting" real from an uninteresting real ", determines, even in the most elementary consciousnesses, the less confused feeling by a distinction between the "given" and its truth. The truth of the grass for the herbivore is strictly its food quality as perceived by its sight and taste. But when he lies down onto it, his truth becomes what his feelings perceive. The alternation of these two truths of grass corresponds to the alternation of the two needs of food and rest. And if these two only needs are manifested to the herbivore in front of the grass, it will never have for him any other truth.

I want to believe that an action performed by a man requires, on his part, in addition to this sensory awareness, a knowledge of the object on which his action is directed and a knowledge of the influence of this object on all other objects - Belonging to the same system or to different systems - which could, in one way or another, produce an unfortunate consequence on the course of events that this man will be called to live.

Needless to say that the majority of men have a more developed consciousness than the herbivore and far from me the thought of wanting to discredit our species at this point.

Nevertheless, I would like to be sure that this majority is acting with enough perspicacity and restraint and that the needs of the human species for this majority are accompanied by the medium and long-term concern for welcoming and fulfillment of future generations.

Now, human consciousness is looking in two directions, one of which has nothing to do with the body and its needs. Something becomes conscious in the man who appears more essential, it is the call to a perfection of another order which envisages on his part an activity and efforts unrelated to physical activity and effort, and which can not expect any help from the bodily dynamism, quite the contrary.

Henceforth, the struggle is triggered in humanity between its conservatism which makes a brute of him and the transcorporeal dynamism which tends to tear it from its animality.

Henceforth, it becomes more and more difficult to live, since between consciousness no longer plays a mere imitation of the same to the same, but a tapped emulation that worries those that it does not entail. Today, every thought, every feeling, every individual act is carried by a conformity that is sufficient for its justification. The truth is no longer to remain what we are, but to become what we must be.

Let us not be afraid of marginality when we are different from what the mold of single thought expects of us. Let's live our singularity and our insubordination!

12 Ganguilhem, G., Awareness of Life, Hachette, Paris, 1952, p 180-181

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations What about the will to manage our life?

And here comes this turbo engine, which can be called "the will". Even if this engine is superbly designed and maintained, it can not avoid certain paradoxical sources that radiate towards it and condition it by concealing behind the discrete frequencies that suit it, Other subliminal frequencies that no longer vibrate in phase with him but insid-iously provoke irreversible deformations: they are the destructive stimuli of humanism, the conditioning, the producers of reflexes...

Man is not an improved metal plate or a differently modified material, nor an animal polarized on its necessity. First, it is a being with a single mind capable of finding the way to his own happiness if his will works and if he is taught to develop it and to dis-trust corrupting signals.

Man is matter, born of matter and incapable of ignoring it, but above all he is a free being who can decide his own destiny through his own choices.

Contrary to what Einstein said, it seems to me that man can want what he wants.

He is no longer merely a chemical compound formed by the combination of basic elements of the planet, in precise proportions, but above all he is a thinking material capable of modifying everything and himself.

The principle of contradiction or opposition After alluding to photoelectricity, I have to remind my students in business communication that physics and chemistry present other laws that challenge us on possible analogies between the behavior of atoms and molecules on the one hand, and that of men on the other. The former represent the constituent particles of matter, and the lat-ter the individuals that make up society.

In electromagnetism, for example, Lenz's Law states that "Any induced current is opposed to the phenomenon that gave rise to it". As far as chemical equilibria are concerned, the "Le Chatelier's Law" tells us that: "Any change in pressure or temperature or concentration of compounds in equilibrium with other compounds results in a shift of the balance which tends to nullify the effects of the change".

According to these two laws, we thus find that the material has a tendency to oppose the effects which are made to it. And the second principle of thermodynamics states that "physical events are generally directed towards states of maximum entropy and probability, of molecular disorder, the existing differentiations being leveled."

This is true insofar as we are dealing with so-called closed systems. Living beings and societies represent open systems, fed with energy-rich material, and can evolve to a high degree of organization, thus resisting the leveling due to increasing disorder. In other words, the energy that the living beings have accumulated and the information they have received allow them to oppose the inevitable thermodynamic disorder. But this production of order and "neguentropy" generates the complexification, and therefore the diversification, of both their embryonic development, the evolution of their species and the organization of their society. For example, the more ecological niches will be numerous and unoccupied at a given point in time the more occupiers of these niches will tend to diversify.

What is biologically true is also true from an organizational point of view: this diversification will inevitably lead to specialization and it will be difficult to convert when the societal system to which the living beings belong will be unbalanced. The contradictions and oppositions observed on matter thus appear also in societies where interactions no longer take place between atoms and molecules but between human beings situated in their environment.

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Would cultures only be systems composed of men like solids, liquids and gases are composed of atoms and molecules?

Here is another quote often heard in cybernetic circles: "Liquids and cultures reorganize when they undergo fluctuations that move them away from their state of equili-brium". A kind of non-equilibrium crystallography is then observed.

How far can this analogy between a solid, a liquid, a gas, and a society go? Professor Prigogine admits "that life is too complicated to be explained by physics and chemistry. (...) Physics must integrate the overall structures; As sociology cannot be made from a single individual (...) In the field of physics, we have to consider sets: many properties of matter are not defined at the level of a particle from which I cannot say whether I am dealing with a solid, liquid or gas (...) Because before, Sociology and Economics had only one model: the laws of Newton. (...) Today, human sciences can take other models: insta-bility, chaos (...) But everyone must remain cautious because the mechanism of decision, an essential element in the description of Sociology and Economics, is obviously very different in the case of molecules and in the case of man "13 Entropy and neguentropy If the notions of entropy and of neguentropy are deepened, we can see that the measurement of disorder and order only makes sense if we include the observed system in a superior one which is a closed environment. This image is not difficult to imagine, since today we see that our atmosphere is surrounded by an ozone layer that is, in a way, a limit to the closed system that contains us. Indeed, leaving aside the troubling hole discovered in this layer, it can be said that living beings and the societies they compose (open systems) are imprisoned biologically and "societally" in this closed system. There is reason to wonder, therefore, about what can happen when, cultural-ly, economically and politically, humans spontaneously reorganize themselves through creating order, neguentropy in the micro-environments in which they live in small groups (families, villages, businesses), i.e. in this multitude of open subsystems interacting with each other. If this order is given by a major and collective concern to restore stability, we are not really dealing with a spontaneous reaction, because it is reflective and rational and often requires action plans, sometimes binding, sometimes austere. But the human being, contrary to matter, is motivated by thought. As a first ap-proximation, let us accept the idea that these reactions are spontaneous.

On the other hand, if disorder arises from individual or collective dissatisfactions resulting in oppositions, uprisings, revolutions and even wars, there is more spontaneity, for in most cases their consequences are not really wanted.

The frequency of spontaneous increase in disorder is far greater than the frequency of spontaneous increase in order.

If "Spontaneously" is the appropriate adverb to express the passage from a given state (concerning the whole open system and its environment) to a more (or less) disordered state, then we encounter the application of the second principle of the thermodynamics in which S (entropy) increases with the disorder and decreases with order. dStot = dSi + dSe  0 13 Ilya Prigogine, Program “Names of gods”, Belgian TV, Edmond Blattchen, and “La fin des certitude” (The end of certainties)– Odile Jacob

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations dStot is the sum of the total entropy (internal open system + closed external system); dSi is the entropy of the internal system and dSe the entropy of the external system.

We note that the sum of the two measured entropy differences is always positive.

But dSi or dSe may be negative (neguentropy) while the other term is positive (entropy). One must necessarily create disorder in one system to create order in the other and it is always the disorder created in one that is superior to the order created in the other since the resultant of the sum of entropic differences dStot is positive.

Changes of phase of liquid water to ice and ice to liquid water.

Analogy test between the water formed of H2O molecules and the society formed of human beings Here are the two books that Professor Prigogine offered me at our meeting on September 10, 1997, during the recording of the television program "Names of Gods". They are complementary: one is scientific and exposes the mathematics specific to the systems studied, the other considers the indispensable renewal of the human and social sciences

Let us ask the question of spontaneity. For example, a cold steel ingot can not spontaneously become warmer than the environment in which it is located. But the reverse is true: steel siderurgical products in the hot phase spontaneously cool in halls of factories before cold treatment. Similarly, the solidification of water into ice is spontaneous at -1 ° C, the entropy of this system decreases and order is created (formation of geometrically ordered crystals); But the environment in which the water is found undergoes an increase in entropy greater than this decrease (outdoor disor-der increases more than order within water).

Another experiment: the fusion of ice is spontaneous to + 1 ° C; The entropy of water increases in the internal system studied, disorder increases.(The molecules of water are released from their Geometric order) but the external system from where heat is coming undergoes a decrease of entropy, lower than the in-

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations crease of internal disorder. In the diagram on the left, there is solidification of the water: the heat passes in the external environment where the Entropy Sext increases (more disorder) On the right of this diagram, there is fusion of the ice: the heat comes from the external environment where the entropy decreases (making more order).

What kind of analogy can we consider with the solidification of water into ice? This corresponds to an ordered crystallography of molecules with respect to the relative disorder of the liquid.

Unlike water molecules that are all alike and have no decision-making minds, humans can personally change the destiny of their lives at any time. However, we know numerous events where this spirit has been manipulated by the media and influential groups and has behaved in the same way as water molecules.

It is the case in any human organization that decides to put order in a given system in communication with its own environment.

Do they not say, "Spirits get hot, we must calm them down" ? Or: "The result of this venture is in the red, it will have to restructure"? Calming the minds in an internal system or restructuring it correspond to an increase in order, but often induce a lot of disorders in its environment. In this case, S int (Internal entropy) has decreased to the detriment of S ext (external entropy) that has grown.

What kind of analogy can we consider with the melting of ice and its transforming into water? The fusion of ice causes an increase in the disorder in the internal system, which will be greater than the simultaneous increase in order of the external system.

It is the same in any human environment that gives priority to the quality of life of the population at the expense of the profitability of internal systems, including companies.

Labor forces, for example, have struggled to improve their monetary situation. It is true that the disorder created in some companies has made them collapse and many of them have even disappeared, because their costs began to exceed their prof-its. In this case, S ext decreased to the detriment of S int which increased.

Globally, on the scale of our planet, the resultant of the order increases is less important than the increases of disorder.

Let us ask ourselves the question of the importance of the disorders and orders generated. For example, in the case of solidification of water to ice, it is also important to measure the disorder caused in the environment.

It is then found that the external environment will become all the more disorderly as it was initially ordered, for it is well known that the more the external environment is cold, the more it will be disorganized, a little in the manner of the bowling player who disorganizes more easily nine perfectly ordered keels, rather than three ones in disorder.

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations What about the speed of transformations Thermodynamics informs us about trends, but it remains silent regarding the speeds of transformation. Spontaneous transformations are sometimes very rapid (as is the case with the expansion of a gas), but this is not a general rule. A viscous oil spontaneously tends to flow slowly. Any disorder-producing process can occur at very low speed and sometimes even imperceptible. When, for example, disorders appear in our populations and societies, it is often too late to prevent from a revolution.

This was also the case in the economic field, where liberalism gradually wanted to shift the or-der to the fields that interested it (in order to increase the yield and profit) by not accepting to assume the disorder in the quality of life of populations due to consequences of its excesses. This liberalism began slowly but surely to destabilize us, but today its speed is galloping and it has no more limit.

In the ecology realm, in the United States, most of leaders prefer to pay for pollution rather than providing suitable solutions that might jeopardize their economy. It is also in the United States that this dual society has been created, where only the rich have the right to live: 50 million citizens are without social security. Thus, the economic wants to save the economic to the detriment of the planet and men.

Are the capitalist networks of multinational corporations not similar to this ordered crystallography of ice molecules ? And are they not constantly ready to restructure so that their "machine" operates at full capacity without worrying too much about the negative repercussions they will produce on the global system?

For humans, the disorders induced by hyper-ordered systems are measured in suffering, in slavery, in pollution, in malnutrition, in diseases, in poverty; In short, in physical and spiritual destruction. Absenteeism at work increases; alcoholism sets in; divorces are legion because the family unit is shaken and disturbed by insane schedules and by the import of daily con-flicts and problems from workplaces to households.

Professor Prigogine (for whom I use the present time, in spite of his recent death on the 28th May 2003) is also interested in interactions between men and God, judging from the choice of the symbol he chose for the program "Names of Gods " When he presented his pre-Columbian statue Meczala to us (Picture below), he said: "I really like this sculpture because it represents an interrogation, even a certain anxiety (...) In the civilizations of South America and Central America, the prevailing conception of art is that of a "biological" world in which the movement of the planets and the brilliance of the sun require energy: we have to nourish the gods; gods need men and men need gods14.

14 : From right to left : Ilya Prigogine, Paul Rostenne, Francis Baldewyns on the 10th September 1997

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations ÂŤ Consilience15 Âť, yes! Unity of knowledge, no!

In the preceding sub-chapters, we have sounded the alarm on the easy comparisons between some behaviors of man and society, on the one hand, of the molecules and states of matter, on the other hand. We have warned the reader of the indispensable prudence which must be respected in such comparisons.

Admittedly, "consilience" brings new elements able of "somewhat restoring the vigor to human sciences" and in particular by encouraging the bringing together of school disciplines in such a way that the present compartmentalization between them disappears in favor of a new creativity. We must dare to remove the intellectual boundaries to acquire a complete vision of the world. Otherwise everything is fragmentary and wobbly.

But it is not a reason for conditioning a science by another one and, in this, sociobiology must be careful not to refer to options that are too much a matter of Cartesian objectivity. The naturalist E.O. Wilson considers that the social and medical sciences are both facing urgent problems and he realizes that the former do not develop as fast as the second ones.

"Utopias are taken into consideration by the social sciences, which is not true for the natural sciences, and utopias must of course be based on existing trends. Although we are now persuaded that there is no future certainty, future conceptions can nevertheless influence human acts in the present.

University cannot refrain from such a debate in a world where the role of the intellectual necessarily changes and in which the idea of a neutral scientist is sometimes questioned ...

We come from a social past of conflicting certainties, linked to science, ethics and social systems, in order to arrive at a present of considerable questioning, including even questioning the intrinsic possibility of certainties.

Perhaps we are witnessing the end of a type of rationality that is no longer appropriate for our time ... We invite the social sciences to open themselves to these questions ... Responsibility to go beyond these immediate pressures must not only motivate those who work in social sciences.

It also falls to the intellectual bureaucracies - university administrators, associations of researchers, foundations, government agencies - in charge of education and research. We need to recognize that the main issues in a complex society cannot be solved by breaking them down into small parts that seem easy to master analytically, but rather by attempting to deal with these problems, to treat men and nature in their complexity and their interrelations "16 Culture and civilization We must first consider all that is in our power so that this globalization goes beyond the economic-financial character and takes the human into consideration. The tissue of the social organism will not be built from identical cells, but rather from an infinity of different cells that will have found between them the harmony of coexistence and peaceful convergence.

The next "dissipative structures", of which Professor Prigogine tells us that they correspond to "new spatio-temporal organizations" and where new phenomena appear, imply, however, the existence of catalytic stages. This is the case with enzymes in the biological system.

But what are these stages and enzymes in our social systems? Are they already at work?

Are they already reviving the work of regeneration? Or are they just preparing to participate?

Civilizations are systems in which all the elements interacting with each other undergo the same laws as the physico-chemical systems: these civilizations participate in the constructive role of the arrow of time.

15

A rare English term close to that of "coherence" used by E.O.Wilson in "UnitĂŠ de la Connaissance"

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations This means that it is not enough to give the time variable a positive or negative magnitude of the same absolute value - as Newton's classical physics does when considering the symmetry of the pendulum, for example. Space and time are no longer considered external and independent variables of the human being. Temporal symmetry does not exist at this level since it is now known that when an observer moves or remains motionless, the laws of physics are no longer the same.

By analogy with biological life, social life is a perpetual creation in progress. Wars, economic crises, fundamental discoveries, fashions, such and such art, are so many facts, situations and events fixed once and for all on the line of time. But every new action will take place only in the evolutionary system existing at the moment when it is accomplished.

Although culture and civilization are often synonymous terms, culture seems to be more concerned with mental activity, while civilization "is the behavior of a population of humans in a geographical region and at a specific time" 16 Our "culture", in the broadest sense - that is, education, parenting and the professional - is a system interacting with other systems. Civilization, in systemic terms, is therefore this super system which unites all the others. The history of a civilization can thus evolve through cultural changes. The most serious danger of periods of uncertainty such as ours, when we feel well something to prepare, but whose form or content we can not define, is that the panic-stricken men give themselves to the best account Possible cartoons of civilization that obstruct all the access routes to a genuine civilization. And this danger is all the greater because the disintegration is deeper and affects the more fundamental structures of human organization. This is, in my opinion, the case of our time, more than any other in the past, except perhaps the early Middle Ages with its questioning of the well-foundedness of religion, philosophy and politics.

The evolution of Europe will not prevent from the "inevitable confrontation" of the Europeans with themselves.

The first condition is to dare to confront our civilized state and to analyze in it what is foreign to us.

Indeed, the error of all civilizations is to believe themselves natural while they are artificial. A civilization does not define a human group, but rather the way in which it works to realize what it thinks to be its vocation according to its natural environment and against it. Every civilization finds itself in a state of tension between its nature and its vocation.

"Men of Europe, abandoned to the shadows, have turned away from the fixed and radiant point," wrote Albert Camus. They forget the present for the future, the prey of beings for the smoke of power, the misery of the suburbs for a radiant city, daily justice for a vain promised land... The secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life' Ten years later, Paul Rostenne, convinced by the correctness of Camus's remarks, is nevertheless more optimistic about taking into account the meaning of man, since he is persuaded that the creation of Europe will not prevent confrontation.

His optimism is not, of course, the "warrior" confrontation which European countries have experienced twice in the twentieth century, but the confrontation of man with himself, who will not necessarily find in this political construction the indispensable return to its own meaning: "European has gradually acquired the consciousness that his civilization is his work, that he embodies, in it, his most decisive options, that it constitutes the field of his freedom. He came to look at him through it as in a mirror whose brilliance depends on him.

So that he perceived more and more clearly, not really against what - or against whom - he was rĂŠsisting, but he was resisting, and that his actions were reactions and that he stiffened against a pressure. He felt that he was working on his civilization as if this were an entrenched camp.

16 E.O.Wilson, UnitĂŠ de la Connaissance

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations At the base of the European was a primordial refusal. This means that our civilization was moving towards a state of increasing tension between itself and its soul.

Tension to which no known revolution will bring any remedy or palliative and which will bring closer to the deadline of the confrontation."17 United Europe with a democratic government is of course an advance against the destructive nationalisms that the last century has known. In a few decades people will demand from their leaders always to work without forgetting "The sense of human" and not that of the machines through which a few percent of mankind find the means to dominate the majority of others!

What will be the next social bifurcations? To hope is to deny the future…

I suggest to the reader to click on the link that follows the photo of Professor Prigogine to start reading this other essay entitled "To hope is to deny the future" I thank you for your loyalty, dear reader.

Ilya Prigogine on the recording day of his program « Names of gods » (Edmond Blattchen) on the 10th September 1997

17 Paul Rostenne, Dieu et César, 1963, Editions Nauwelaerts

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Dissipative structures and bifurcations Ilya Prigogine, when he received the Nobel Prize in October 1977 Dedication of Ilya Prigogine on her book "La Fin des Certitudes" (The end of certainties) during the recording of his "Noms de dieux" program to which I was invited by Edmond Blattchen on September 10, 1997.

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