Uploaded May 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Construction is Not Computation, and the World is Not a Theorem
Einstein’s theory of relativity overturned Newtonian physics in the early 1900s. Nevertheless “Newtonian” thinking has remained firmly entrenched in science. Certainly all scientists now agree that at the subatomic level and at near light speed, quantum physics overtakes Newtonian physics. But this has had very little effect on biology, and has done nothing to overturn the
“reductionist” view of science, which says that everything is merely the sum of its parts and all can be modeled by mathematics.
Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist Andrea Roli have written a new paper that proves evolving biology in principle cannot be reduced to computation. This is as devastating to materialistic science as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was to mathematics. In fact it is equivalent -because it shows that evolving organisms embody incompleteness. Induction not deduction. And induction cannot come from deduction;
therefore biology is not strictly computational.
Thus Kauffman and Roli have pulled the rug out from under ultra-traditional views of physics. (Not everyone is going to be happy about this.) Here, Perry Marshall and Stuart Kauffman jazz improvise on the vast implications of this new, holistic view of the universe.
You can read their paper “The World is Not a Theorem” at
tinyurl.com/stuartkauffman
Construction is Not Computation, and the World is Not a Theorem
Einstein’s theory of relativity overturned Newtonian physics in the early 1900s. Nevertheless “Newtonian” thinking has remained firmly entrenched in science. Certainly all scientists now agree that at the subatomic level and at near light speed, quantum physics overtakes Newtonian physics. But this has had very little effect on biology, and has done nothing to overturn the
“reductionist” view of science, which says that everything is merely the sum of its parts and all can be modeled by mathematics.
Stuart Kauffman and computer scientist Andrea Roli have written a new paper that proves evolving biology in principle cannot be reduced to computation. This is as devastating to materialistic science as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem was to mathematics. In fact it is equivalent -because it shows that evolving organisms embody incompleteness. Induction not deduction. And induction cannot come from deduction;
therefore biology is not strictly computational.
Thus Kauffman and Roli have pulled the rug out from under ultra-traditional views of physics. (Not everyone is going to be happy about this.) Here, Perry Marshall and Stuart Kauffman jazz improvise on the vast implications of this new, holistic view of the universe.
You can read their paper “The World is Not a Theorem” at
tinyurl.com/stuartkauffman
