Quotes About Prigogine

A note to confirmed pessimists: Prigogine's analysis is based on probability-theory and, hence, is not certain. Thus, if you have found these lyrical pages unduly alarming, take comfort in the thought that, although human success is highly probable, there is still a small chance that we can blow ourselves up or that your favorite apocalyptic scenarios might still occur, despite the general trend toward higher coherence and higher intelligence.

4) Prigogine's math indicates that the odds actually favor the optimists, since dissipative structures are more likely to evolve into more information-rich (intelligent?) forms than into more primitive or chaotic forms.

One of Prigogine's greatest contributions has been to create a new thermodynamics to describe living systems.The organizing activity of living, selforganizing systems, finally, is cognition, or mental activity. This implies a radically new concept of mind, which was first proposed by Gregory Bateson. Mental process is defined as the organizing activity of life. This means that all interactions of a living system with its environment are cognitive, or mental interactions.

there is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings, even those which at the moment appear the most advanced and esoteric and difficult to grasp, are meaningless outside their cultural context.

Prigogine and Stengers caution against leaping to genetic or sociobiological explanations for puzzling social behavior. Many things that are attributed to biological pre-wiring are not produced by selfish, determinist genes, but rather by social interactions under nonequilibrium conditions.

if Prigogine and Stengers are right and chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don't they de-chance it?

One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine's insistence that order and organization can actually arise "spontaneously" out of disorder and chaos through a process of "self-organization." To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in "equilibrium," systems that are "near equilibrium," and systems that are "far from equilibrium.