A new kind of politics

Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, has still not been looked at critically or historically. It should be: it just might be as important a book as the author annoyingly says it is

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

When it first came out two-and-a-half years ago, Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science , received widespread notoriety. It is unusual for a science textbook to be the subject of so much popular attention, even if it's a book, like this one, explicitly written for a popular audience.

Unfortunately, much of the meaning in the content of Wolfram's book was quickly overshadowed by critical reaction to the author of that content, especially as the author comes across in the book as hugely egotistical and given to wild claims about his and his book's place in the highest firmament of science literature.

A scan of critical reaction to the book 30 months down the road reveals that not much has changed; that is to say, there still hasn't really been any critical reaction to Wolfram's quite radical assertions.

This may be because those assertions are truly new and every bit as meaningful as Wolfram promised they would be. If so, we are indeed standing at the precipice of a new science, one proposed to replace the 300-year-old science that has dominated since Isaac Newton's then-new and meaningful textbook, The Principles of Natural Philosophy , launched it.

But what concerns this newspaper is not so much what might be changing in the world of science, however dramatic and all-encompassing those changes may be. We are here wondering about what might change in economics and politics—in the world of social thought—as a result of these possible tectonic shifts in science.

For it is the case that all large movements in society, be they the invention and spread of capitalist economy, the notions of self-ruling autonomy, the creation of democratic methods of governance or conceptions about common and private property and so on, all have their antecedents in what was originally scientific thought. And new scientific thoughts, particularly those with widely sweeping implications for many branches of science, such as Kepler's optics, Newton's physics, Darwin's evolution, or Einstein's relativity, inevitably spill out into their larger surrounding societies, taking on unexpected forms in social, economic, and political thought, and leading to unexpected, and not always pleasant, results, like Malthusianism, eugenics, Nazism, Communism or laissez faire capitalism.

If Wolfram is right and he has launched a new science on the order of Newton's accomplishment, then without a doubt there will be social, economic and political creations following in his wake. These won't happen soon: it took almost 100 years for the liberty of will apparent in Newton's physics to filter through to social thought and evolve it to the point of setting the conditions for the French revolution, the world's first popular expression of political liberty.

The timing may not be at all certain, but what we can be certain about is the fact that the underlying principles of new scientific thoughts usually get translated intact into bodies of social, economic, and political thought, however long it may take for pronounced expressions of those principles to become apparent. Whenever this new social thinking spawned by Wolfram arrives, it will no doubt bear his distinct imprimatur, at least on the level of underlying principles.

So, what are the underlying principles to Wolfram's new science? And what, therefore, will be the underlying principles to the new social, economic and political movements that may well be on their way now?

The first and perhaps most important principle in the new science is that simple computer-like programs running over and over again are responsible for the creation and sustaining of the entire universe and every little part within it. The science of the last 300 years, by contrast, rests on the principle that elegant mathematical formulas are responsible for all of creation.

The difference is severe: because the prevailing science holds that all conditions of reality can be produced by mathematically-expressed and exquisitely precise formulas, like energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, or force equals mass multiplied by speed, and so forth, social thinkers began to imagine that all conditions of human reality must also be produced by mathematical formulas. If that was the case, then there was work to do discovering the mathematical formulas that determine which nations would have more or less wealth (Adam Smith's project), which people would suffer debilitation (Emile Durkheim's project), or which governance system would generate freedom (Marx's project).

If it is instead the case that simple programs are responsible for physical reality, then we can well expect new prophets of the stature of Smith, Durkheim, and Marx to arrive with new ways of describing wealth, happiness, and freedom. And just as Smith, Durkheim and Marx spawned political systems (capitalist democracy as in the West, nationalist socialism as in Germany, proletariat communism as in Russia, respectively), so too will these new thinkers spawn wholly new political systems.

Another key feature of Wolfram's science is its ability to perfectly account for the creation of randomness within closed systems. Mathematical models of the natural world almost invariably produce highly regular idealized pictures of reality. The fact that reality appears instead to us everywhere to be quite random is explained away by current science as the result of elements of randomness that arrive from outside these mathematical systems, making a mess of the results. The theory is that if all variables could be isolated and removed, a perfect cedar tree, for example, could be grown that would in every way be symmetrical and exhibit no randomness at all.

Mathematics-based science must believe this, since it starts from the assumption that perfect mathematical formulas create all reality, and when you run models of mathematical formulas, you always get perfect symmetry in the results—there is no randomness in a mathematically-derived universe.

But in Wolfram's new science, he can repeatedly show that a computer-like program-derived universe can spontaneously generate its own randomness. That is to say, it is entirely conceivable that a model of a closed system of simple programs could generate not some idealized and perfectly symmetrical cedar tree of the kind no one has ever seen, but in fact exactly the kind of random-looking spread of branches and needles of a cedar tree such as they actually are seen.

The results in the realm of social thinking couldn't be more dramatic. Much of modern economic theory is based on the idea that any randomness in the economic behavior of individual people or a national economy results only from pollution of the perfect mathematical economic system. Much of modern political thinking has been geared toward pushing the behavior of people and nations into idealized habits determined by the perfect mathematical economic formula in the belief that any randomness in that behavior was evidence of inefficiency, the removal of which would create yet more wealth and goodness.

But if Wolfram is right, then randomness in the economy is not a sign of inefficiency, but is rather intrinsic to the programs that lie underneath economic behavior. If that is true, then political movements meant to engineer (tyranny) or induce (freedom) individuals and nations into economic behavior that is free of all randomness and that most closely resembles the results of mathematical models is not at all the route to greatest efficiency or prosperity, but might in fact be a barrier to these desired outcomes.

There still remains, of course, much need for political movements, especially those founded upon ideas of how best to manage national economies. But wholly new political philosophies will likely result from Wolfram's new science when it's applied to economics, and when new economic theories arrive that suggest that randomness in fact is a sign of efficiency, rather than its lack.

Imagine, for example, a political party offering a platform to voters promising to set up a somewhat vast array of very simple computer-like programs of regular expenditures that will run over and over again with the aim of generating unpredictable and entirely surprising, seemingly random results in the economy. Imagine competing political parties offering different arrays of such sets of programs to generate different chances of randomness in different sectors of the economy.

It sounds otherworldly, but in fact isn't this how it seems the real economy, as opposed to the mathematically-idealized models of economists, actually works? Despite the efforts of modern economists and political parties they spawned to generate an ideal and perfectly efficient and predictable economy, people and nations go right on being very random producing all the time unpredictable and surprising, seemingly random, results in the economy. And we seem to like it that way.

No one has lived inside an economy such as has been described by modern economists as the perfect form, and when you think about it, no one would choose to. And yet, all our economic planning and all our political efforts are expended in one failed attempt after another to push us into just such a perfect, non-random, exquisitely efficient economy. Wouldn't it make more sense to have economists thinking of economies such as they really are, and political philosophies built around maximizing the use of resources in those real economies?

These are just two examples of what may be coming in social thought over the next number of decades or so as the principles of Wolfram's new science begin to penetrate other realms. Medical care, education, welfare and all other activities of the state could be in for radically new thinking about what they are intended to do, and how they can better do it.

Even questions such as the purpose of life may come in for radical revision: in our current science there is really no accounting for free will, since a completely mathematical universe can never generate its own randomness, and must at bottom be a totally pre-determined universe.

With Wolfram's new science, it is possible that randomness can be generated from within the system, even with perfectly stated simple and non-random programs. Wolfram's new science can thus account for free will like no science before it has. And religion, in its eternal conflict with science, is not in the end finally bent to science's certainty, as religious leaders have always feared would be their fate, but rather science is finally allowed to accept, and social, economic and political thought to embrace, the uncertainty of humanity, the necessary pre-condition to all religion.

Newton's Principia launched the enlightenment. For all these reasons, Wolfram's New Science may do no less.

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