The Nature of Consciousness

Piero Scaruffi

(Copyright © 2013 Piero Scaruffi | Legal restrictions )
Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Origin of Regularity

Prigogine's bifurcation theory is a descendent of the theory of stability initiated by the Russian mathematician Aleksander Lyapounov. Thom's catastrophe theory is a particular case of bifurcation theory, so they all belong to the same family. They all elaborate on the same theorem, namely Lyapounov's theorem of 1892: for isolated systems, thermodynamic equilibrium is an attractor of nonequilibrium states.

Then the story unfolds, leading to dissipative systems and eventually to the reversing of Thermodynamics' fundamental assumption, the destruction of structure. Order emerges from the very premises that seem to deny it.

 


Back to the beginning of the chapter "Self-organization and the Science of Emergence" | Back to the index of all chapters