Correspondence with Scientists: Dr. Stuart Kauffman

Dr. Stuart Kauffman is a MacArthur award recipient, formerly of the Santa Fe Institute, and founding Director of The Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Canada. He holds a distinguished faculty position at the University of Vermont at their Complex Systems Center and is a Finland Distinguished Professor at Tampere University of Technology. In 2004, Dr. Kauffman came to Bennington College to give a lecture and I invited him to observe my work in the dance studio. He jumped right in and experienced the Emergent Improvisation structures. He has a true curiosity and adventurous spirit. From our conversations and my reading of his books The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe, Investigations, and Reinventing The Sacred, I was inspired to name “The Complex Unison Form.” This had been the first improvisational form that I had observed in an ensemble of dancers and it resonated so clearly with Stuart’s theory of order for free. This unusual visit with such a distinguished and brilliant person began a profound collaboration that is still current and vital.

The following are excerpts from a transcript of a filmed interview with Stuart and I by filmmaker Elliot Caplan in Burlington, Vermont in 2010. It was filmed for inclusion in the in‐progress “Convergence: The Emergent Improvisation Film.”

These conversations were casual and extemporaneous— thinking out loud.

SS: I was raised in a dance tradition where there was a choreographer, someone who created the steps for you, and then you did them. Improvisation was kind of considered messing around. So when I had trained dancers in a space and I said, “Randomly, let’s just start moving. I’m not a choreographer. I’m not the director. I’m just going to be on the outside observing,” what would always happen is that they would find patterns.

SK: You must have had a sense of amazement.

SS: Absolutely. When Bruce Weber introduced me to your work, and I read about your order for free, I thought, “I don’t know if this has anything to do with the scientific concept, but I do know that I’m in this room where we are randomly moving around and now there are patterns, and there’s real pattern recognition.”

SK: Would kind of crystallize.

SS: Absolutely. So I would go, “Oh, is this self‐organizing criticality?

Is this a moment where in this phase transition something actually shifts? Is it a moment of emergence, because a pattern is there that was not there before?” And so that made me really resonate with your ideas, because I thought maybe these structuring principles are deep. Because they are living things... well, clearly you discovered that they exist in living matter...

SK: Well, I discovered that they existed in computer programs.

SS: I mean, I observed it at least in an ensemble of dancers. I observed that it was real.

SK: This takes me to places that I haven’t gone, Susan. Is it ok if I try to go there?

SS: Absolutely.

SK: How can we speak language? I had a theory a long time ago that I still like, and it’s roughly the following: suppose on one axis I’ve got the number of sounds I can make, the number of phonemes, the diversity of phonemes. And on the other axis I’ve got how well I can mimic these sounds that you make. So now there’s a curve in this space, so that if I can’t make many sounds and I can’t mimic very well, we just do grunts, ok. But if we’re out beyond this curve, we get something that crystallizes. Here’s your crystallization into language. There’s something like the creativity in language in the creativity of the dance, right? There’s something much more fluid and open in the dance right? So somehow, when you’re dancing, it’s not that you’re mimicking one another’s movements. You are modulating your movements to form a pattern.

SS: When the dancers are doing it, it feels like we have this range of possibilities, and we’re modulating the constraints. We’re each working within our personal vocabulary and as we meet up with each other, certain tendencies or vocabularies are shared, which then seem to create patterns. And then we would acknowledge the patterns, and then we had a history of patterns...

SK: And a memory of them...

SS: And then we’d start modulating the memory, because there is such a range of possibilities within each pattern.

SK: Look at the words you’ve had to use, Susan. You’re right, of course, and you know it much better than I, but I can imagine it. In Newtonian physics, there are no possibilities. Let me show you. You’ve got the billiard balls moving on the table with the boundaries of the billiard table, right? And you know the initial positions and the momentum—that’s the mass times the velocity of the balls. That’s called the initial conditions. You know the boundary conditions of the table and you say to Newton, “Now what?” And he says, “Don’t be dumb, I’ve given you these three laws of motion in differential form. Integrate them. I’ve even invented the differential calculus and the interval calculus. Don’t bother me. You go do it.” So you integrate the equations of motion. What do you get? You get a deterministic way in which the balls will bounce around the table, right? And a couple of centuries later, LaPlace said, “If there were a vast intelligence that knew all the positions and all the momentum of all the particles in the universe, then knowing Newton’s laws, it could compute the entire future and the entire past of the universe.” There are no possibles. It is just the trajectory. It gets even worse with Einstein and general relativity because you have space‐time in a four‐dimensional block universe, and what are called “World Lines.” There is not even a future or a past trajectory anymore. There’s just an actual. There are no possibles. You have to get the notion of possible in for you to have a range of possibles, so I’m

SS: ...an order in complexity that we actually sense as aesthetic beauty.

SK: I hope so.

SS: Yes, I mean I don’t know.

SK: Let’s try to imagine two extremes. If you just kept doing the same thing when you’re improvising dancing, it’s dull. Or if you just wander around randomly—chaotic and no beauty. There’s some‐ thing in between. Jackson Pollock’s paintings, I’m told, have the property that if you grayscale them so that they’re pixels—some‐ body’s done this—and you look to see whether it’s a power law, it is. Somehow without his knowing what he was doing, he was building rules for himself such that he generated pink noise. What we think we know from the stuff on genetic regulatory nets is that critical networks in some sense have the richest behavior. Now we’ve got a problem that we don’t know how to define “richest.” On one side we have chaos. On the other side is dull repetition. At the edge of chaos, to get this richest behavior, you get something that shows pink noise.

SS: Your use of the words “ceaseless creativity” when you’re describing this moment at the edge of chaos...

SK: Let me throw a couple of other things at you, and see how you feel about this. Think of British common law. So it’s all done by precedent. I mean, there’s no legislature, just judges judging. The ones that are widely cited really influence the law a lot. Like Habeas Corpus, which I found out means, “I’m the judge and you will bring the person to me and I will judge. Bring the body to me.” Habeas Corpus is deep in our law. Imagine that you did the following perfectly do‐able study: just look at the statistics of precedent citations. There are a lot that are never cited at all, and there’s a few that are cited a lot. What if you got a power law distribution? I mean this is a perfectly askable question. What would it mean? So it’s a power law. It would mean that there is something deep about humanity that we build a kind of skeleton for ourselves—Habeas Corpus—a framework for ourselves around which we vary. Suppose that’s right. But the same thing is true in life. We have phyla and then species. I don’t know how to think about this but I feel like I almost do. What if what we do—and what if what you do when you dance in the improvisation—is build a framework that’s got some kind of deep structure and then you can play within it.

SS: Absolutely.

SK: And it’s somehow like the deep structure to a culture in playing with cuisine, like Chinese‐Cuban cuisine in New York, or improvisational dance. But don’t fiddle around with the deep roots of our culture, because we can only be in a world if we’re in a culture. Maybe there’s some deep way in which we construct it because it’s somehow, I don’t know what, but I’d like to think that it’s maximizing something, but what?

***

SS: I think—and this is from your latest book—your theories about the brain and the mind, and makes sense to me when I think about the dance, that the inclination towards ensemble building may have resonance with how we actually think. Because that is how we have a sense of this dynamic equilibrium in our thinking, in our physicality—in terms of health.

SK: Well yes, in terms of health, but let me ask you about the dance. It doesn’t repeat, right?

SS: Right. Well, here is where it gets tricky. Elements repeat... SK: Right. Elements repeat, but in larger and larger frameworks that repeat ever more rarely until there is a whole.

SS: Well, if we’re discovering patterns, I relate it to nature. So we’ve created an oak tree, but every time you plant the seed of another oak tree, it’s not going to be the same oak tree that happened over here. It looks different, even though you still know it’s an oak tree. So there are forms that we’ve created together that can be repeated, but they are never actually the same. The movements are different, but you can call it an oak tree because it’s different from the maple tree, which was another form. Now, if we’re exploring inside of them, we may come across a brand new pattern. For example, there is this form that I named after your idea order for free that I call Complex Unison...

SK: Thank you.

SS: You’re welcome... So Complex Unison starts from what I call a “gathering“ form, which is simple rules: you can walk, you can stop, and you can change your direction. So those always produce what I call “gathering” even though the patterns will be different every time. From gathering, they will start adding other movements that create unison patterns that start to create landscapes in the space, which means certain pathways occur, certain movements repeat themselves and the dancers can recognize similarities. Again, there is this space of possibilities.

SK: Yes, but what do you mean by landscapes?

SS: Landscapes are spatial patterns. They usually have to do with foreground and background. So there are elements that always appear so that we would call it a “landscape” as opposed to some‐ thing else.

SK: Could you find the same things in a Jackson Pollock painting?

SS: Well that’s a good question.

***

SK: And there’s something else that’s really beautiful: a trans‐ Turing system, when it goes back to being quantum. If quantum is the possible, it’s not deterministic. The universe opens up with possibilities for that system, right? Not like Newton with the billiard balls. Can you feel it?

SS: Yes.

SK: It suggests that the mind, and in particular the human mind, is the locus of the most open creativity in our chunk of the universe. The universe flashes open with possibilities, and that’s the adjacent possible—but it’s ontologically real. I’m in love with the whole thing. I’m just in love with it. Do I know that it’s right? Of course not. How could I possibly know that it’s right? I couldn’t. But it ties in to what you are doing too.

SS: Absolutely. And that’s why I say it resonates so well with an experiential process like I’m in. That’s all I understand. Because I feel like all those components are happening when the dancers are creating the ensemble work.

SK: I now have fifty pages of me struggling with a bunch of these issues. I don’t know what this is that I’m trying to invent. I don’t know what the “it” is that I’m trying to invent any more than you know what the dance is that you’re trying to invent. And that’s why I think—not to be purple about it—that we’re missing our deep humanity. I think our deep humanity is in this. This is why I think the sciences and the arts have to come together with everything else. I don’t think our culture serves our humanity. I think we need a spiritual rebirth.

SS: Absolutely. And I also think there’s an enormous connection to pleasure with this experience. That there is something so satisfying about a deep understanding of this ability to go into possibilities, and particularly in connection with other people. Because that is really the key—the ensemble.

SK: This is your dancers’ cry.

SS: The ensemble—this is the sum is greater than its parts, which is another reflection of it. Right? If it’s actually occurring in complexity in nature. When human beings form those kinds of connections, they create stronger bonds than if they were just lining up as individuals. There’s something about coming together...

SK: We make it together.

SS: That’s right.

SK: Right. And somehow or another I feel—don’t you feel some‐ thing like that? There’s something about these enabling constraints in which we build the worlds we build together.

SS: I think we want to build structures together. We have a deep need to build structure. And the question is... Well, you’re answering “Why do we do it?” and I’m curious about how we do it, in terms of watching it or observing it.

SK: Well, you know aesthetics gets treated by scientists as if it’s silly. Somehow it’s not silly at all.

SS: No, because in your explanation, it’s just different perspectives. You see, this is where I feel like this is so radical. It finally unites these things. Sciences have one way of thinking about things, and aesthetics or arts have another. If both are based on structuring principles that are some reflection of humanity or the deepest part of ourselves, if we were to understand some of what these structuring principles are, then we are really united.

SK: You’re doing it when your dance group dances.

SS: Right. I feel like I get a sense of what it means to want to build structures. And I want to know the difference when the structures are either too chaotic or too ordered, because then we don’t really want to connect. In fact, we can’t connect. If they’re too chaotic, we’re all over the place. And if we’re too ordered, nobody can move. We have no way to go into the adjacent possible. We have no way to be able to create something else.

SK: Wouldn’t that be neat if someone could really figure out what that means? It sounds right. You know there’s a term in Italian in a soccer game for the position on the field that has the greatest adjacent possible. It’s a very valued position. My knowledge of soccer isn’t good enough, but it’s basically that you have the most flexibility. I was trying to study it in chess, but I didn’t know what to look for, but there’s something there.