The End of Certainty

In his 1997 book, The End of Certainty, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.
Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.
Prigogine asserts that Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times, first with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, then with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems.
[wikipedia]

animals

instinct is against language

twilight zone_temps du loup

and fathers forgot how to be fathers (that is to inspire and protect)
and mothers forgot how to be mothers (that is to love and give hope)
and the world was filled with orphans of all ages

dec_o_de
dec_i_de
dec_a_de

comparative epistemology

media systems

http://asweknowit.ca/dir/media_ecology

open sets

"Michel Foucault finds in Raymond Roussel's works and days an entire cosmos, whose principle of unity is the principle of the threshold, which is also the principle of the parenthesis. The Rousselian cosmos is replete with thresholds, microscopic and galactic. It is itself the vastest parenthesis, forever posed between the radical originality of a birth to which it owes its existence but can never authentically produce and the silent infinitude of a death that it ubiquitously foreshadows but can never encompass. Its cosmogony must remain something of a mystery as a consequence. So, too, its teleology. It is nevertheless, clearly divisible into two parts, two phases.In its youthful phase, it glows with the light of a radiant and sovereign sun.It is a place of relentless spectacle, of sheer visibility, but of a luminocity so intense that it can be disorientating, even blinding. It is thus a place in which what is most fully exposed has perhaps the best chance of remaining secret."