Scientific Seeker Stuart Kauffman on Free Will, God, ESP and Other Mysteries

Few living scientists are as ambitious in their choice of problems as Stuart Kauffman. He is a polymath, with a degree in medicine and training in biochemistry, genetics, physics, philosophy and other fields. He roams across disciplinary boundaries seeking answers to the riddles that obsess him. Why is reality so beautifully structured rather than being a chaotic mess? How probable was life? Is evolution enough to explain life’s origin and diversity? How does a brain make a mind? How do minds choose? Kauffman has held appointments at many institutions, notably the Santa Fe Institute, a center for complexity studies where I first met him in the 1990s. He proposed that our scientific understanding of reality is radically incomplete, and that some sort of anti-entropy, order-generating force remains to be discovered. He spelled out these ideas in his books Origins of Order (1993) and At Home in the Universe (1995). In a 1995 article for Scientific American, “From Complexity to Perplexity,” and in my 1996 book The End of Science, I knocked Kauffman and others at the Santa Fe Institute, criticizing their work as possessing more style than substance. I quoted British biologist John Maynard Smith denigrating the computer simulations of Santa Fe-ers as “fact free science,” and physicist Murray Gell-Mann denying that science needs “something else,” an implicit rejection of Kauffman’s anti-entropy force. I’ve been reassessing Kauffman’s work lately after seeing a moving documentary about him, Thinker of Untold Dreams, by filmmaker Richard Kroehling. The film reveals how Kauffman has continued his quest for answers in spite of personal tragedies. In retrospect, I was far too hard on Kauffman. He may not have the answers yet, but he is asking the right questions, with courage and imagination. We recently had the following email exchange: