Reinventing the Sacred

The brief mention of Stuart Kauffman's book Reinventing the Sacred on the Guardian's books blog sent me on a search for interviews and podcasts in order to find out more about what sounded like an particularly interesting alternate rationality. The first podcast-interview with the author that I came across was this one (right click to save). In this interview Kauffman outlines aspects of the argument that he makes in his book. Central to his thesis is a shift away from the deterministic, reductionist approaches that have produced many of the laws and theories associated with modern science towards a study of emergance and creative processes. The sacred referred to in the title of his book also marks a shift but this time in religious thought. Rather than the conception of a creator-god he suggests that we might think of creativity as god. That is creativity in all its manifestations; from the creative capacity of bacteria to respond to their surroundings to the adaptions of fish that produced our auditory system. Beyond the biological Kauffman sees a similar emergent creativity in economics and other cultural spheres. The videos below cover much the same territory as the podcast that I linked to above.