Quotes from Stuart A. Kauffman

History enters when the space of the possible is vastly larger than the space of the actual.

This web of life, the most complex system we know of in the universe, breaks no law of physics, yet is partially lawless, ceaselessly creative.

But Laplace's particles in motion allow only happenings. There are no meanings, no values, no doings.

We are agents who alter the unfolding of the universe.

In short, given continuous spacetime, there are a second-order infinity of possible histories of the biosphere.

Thus we can accept the wonderful results of the neuroscientists, accept that the mind, via neural behavior, is classically causal, and refuse the conclusion that the mind is computing an algorithm.

history itself arises out of the adjacent possible.

A central failure of the "mind as a computational system" theory is that computations, per se, are devoid of meaning.

And to come back to the economy for a moment, the lifetime distribution of firms is also a power law. Now

Yet the biosphere constructs itself, evolves, and has persisted for 3.8 billion years.

The biosphere explodes in diversity, creating more and more cracks in the floor of Darwin's nature until the cracks, ever expanding, become the very floor of nature, and nature herself.

We will talk of these things, for there is more to know than we know and more to say than we can say.

I need not to show you the incapacity to predict in deterministic chaotic systems is emphatically not the same as the failure to prestate or predict Darwinian preadaptations. in the deterministic chaotic case, we know beforehand the state space of the system, in the simplest case, three continuous variables and their ranges. But in sharp contrast, we do not know beforehand the state space, or sample space, of the evolving biosphere and the emergence in the nonergodic universe of swim bladders.