C O M P L E X I T Y 19© 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Harold Morowitz is Robinson Professorof biology and natural philosophy atGeorge Mason University. His booksinclude two mongraphs, Energy Flow inBiology and the Beginnings of CellularLife, four textbooks, and a number oftrade books including The Kindly Dr.Guillotin and Mayonnaise and theOrigin of Life. In 1993 he was appointedDirector of the Krasnow Institute forAdvanced Study at George MasonUniversity.

BY HAROLD MOROWITZ

Metaphysics, Metaphor,Meta-Metaphor, and MagicClassifying the vocabulary of the information disciplines into four categories

© 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Vol. 3, No. 4CCC 1076-2787/98/04019-02

T he second half of the 20th century has seen the development of a number ofconcepts in the natural sciences that can be characterized as informationalrather than dynamical. These constructs did not just burst on the scene, but have

deep roots in the work of Charles Saunders Peirce, Ludwig Boltzmann, Henri Poincare,Leo Szilard, and others. Many of the constructs have pointers to the entropy measureof statistical mechanics. In retrospect, we can regard Boltzmann’s H theorem as an at-tempt to bridge the gap between the dynamical and the informational.

From many sources in the natural sciences, researchers have generated post-entropic concepts of information, order, complexity, organization, chaos, coarse grain-ing, cybernetics, systems theory, simplicity, fractals, emergence, and others which gobeyond the paradigms of dynamics. Consensus as to what are the best formulation ofthese concepts has not yet been reached. A body of contemporary research deals withattempts to understand and use the ideas listed above in a number of disciplines. Adeep understanding of the informational reaches into the epistemic foundations ofnatural sciences and asks what they have to tell us about the world.

However, the themes of informational physics have had a much broader impactthan might at first be expected for such a technical subject. The ideas have somehowresonated with a search for understanding in the social and biological sciences and asearch for new ideas in the arts and humanities. The pathway from the world of naturalscience to other areas has been largely the work of popular science writers who haveconsidered the technical material, often through interviews with the practitioners, andthen translated it into a more accessible syntax. In some cases, the popularization hasbeen through trade books written by the same scientists who usually work at a moretechnical level.

In the process of moving from the practitioners of one domain to scholars and re-searchers in other domains, the constructs of the information sciences have tendedto function as metaphors, and the relation between the metaphorical and technical

use of words is not always easy to discern. The relation depends, in part, on the under-standing of the basic concepts by individuals who employ them in other fields.

Of the many papers that cross the desks of the editors of Complexity, it has beenpossible roughly to classify the uses of the vocabulary of the information disciplinesinto the metaphysical, the metaphorical, the meta-metaphorical, and the magical. Meta-physics is used here in an Aristotelian sense; that is, we are not dealing with physics perse, dynamics, but we are dealing with our understanding of physics, which reachesinto the cognitive. Thus, it is beyond physics in the spirit of the early philosopher. The

20 C O M P L E X I T Y © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

studies of this category are exemplified inthe volume Complexity, Entropy, and thePhysics of Information, edited by W. H.Zurek (Addison-Wesley, 1990). The vigorof that volume attests to the sense inwhich this aspect of physics is a very ac-tive research field. This metaphysicsreaches from the dynamical to the cog-nitive: In an analogous sense, there mightsome day be a metabiology whichreaches out from the neurosciences to thecognitive.

A nother series of studies modelsphenomena in earth sciences, bi-ology, and social sciences using

constructs from “metaphysics” employ-ing selection, fitness, and a series of prun-ing algorithms. The models provide lev-els of emergence which may becompared with observation. Since therelations are nonlinear and the numberof agents is large, the outputs are, at best,analogs of the observations. The relationbetween theoretical predictions and ob-servations are thus metaphorical ratherthan rigorously numerical. I believe thisis the sense of metaphor in the bookComplexity, Metaphors, Models and Real-ity, edited by George Cowan, David Pine,and David Meltzer (Addison-Wesley,1994).

This use of “metaphors” is new to sci-ence. The very willingness to deal withmetaphor represents a confidence thattheory beyond the linear domain hascontributions to make outside of thosedisciplines that were approachable byclassical theoretical physics. The modelsmust deal with agents that obey the lawsof traditional physics. Applying fitnessrules, genetic algorithms, neural networktheory, and other pruning devices im-poses a cognitive feature onto theory thatcannot be developed from purely dy-namical considerations.

This marks a major change. Thirty tofifty years ago, it would not have been re-

spectable to use the word “metaphor” ina physics department seminar. Meta-phors were for the English department.The Cowan, Pine, and Meltzer volume in-cludes work by a number of distinguishedphysicists.

The excitement generated by themetaphor studies with promises of treat-ing new domains of problems led to asecond wave of complexity theories. Thisis the domain that I have labeled meta-metaphor. The problems treated here arevery broad, moving into psychiatry, edu-cation, and the whole gamut of societalrelationships. In this domain, the pri-mary sources are the literature ofmetaphor and the popularizations ofmetaphysics. There is a steady loss ofrigor and gain of range as one movesaway from metaphysics.

The words used in meta-metaphoroften are the same as those used in meta-physics and metaphor, but they are notused with the same precision. The meta-metaphor scholars are at times impatientabout going back to the very difficult, for-mally demanding metaphysics papers.They are acutely aware that butterflywings in Beijing affect the weather in NewYork, but they have not thought aboutaveraging over the wing beats of all thebutterflies in the world as well as the fanmotions of all the performances of Ma-dame Butterfly.

In spite of these difficulties, the rheto-ric of meta-metaphor may be of inter-est in seeking ways to look at all man-

ner of complex problems. The rhetoricmay be of heuristic value, but it is diffi-cult to evaluate.

At another level, the vocabulary ofinformatics is used almost without regardto the primary meaning. This usage doesnot go from meta-metaphor to meta-physics to seek for meaning, but relies onthe words themselves because theysound sophisticated, deep, and scientific.

This is a kind of word magic, where wordsthat have acquired meaning in some do-mains are appended somewhat willy-nilly to whatever the author is interestedin. Sometimes old ideas are resurrectedby reworking in the new syntax. This isclearly the work of a magus.

W hat renders the classificationambiguous is the difficulty ofevaluating scholarly writings

and placing them in one of the four cat-egories. What’s an editor of Complexity todo? In the first instance, I would suggestthat our primary domain is metaphysicsand metaphor. This, of course, speaks tosubject, not to quality. We want to pub-lish good metaphysics and good meta-phor and to reject less-than-quality writ-ings in those domains, as in all others. Theunderstanding of the physical, math-ematical, and computational underpin-nings, or “metaphysics,” as we have des-ignated it for purposes of this essay, is thesine qua non of a science of complexity.The new science of complex adaptive sys-tems lies in the area of metaphor. It marksa real novelty of current science com-pared to the past, and it brings the physi-cal, biological, and social sciences closertogether because of shared techniques.

As metaphor moves into meta-meta-phor, I begin to get nervous about includ-ing it, because verification and falsifica-tion become much more difficult, and theevaluation of theories tends to becomehazy.

Identifiable word magic, while it maybe of literary value, clearly lies beyond ourrealm. It may be an interesting linguisticstudy in the diffusion of technical jargoninto the broader world of discourse, butit is beyond the range of validation, sincethe core meanings of constructs havebeen blurred. Our taxonomic scheme,while far from perfect, provides somemodest guidance into the complex worldof the complex.