L’ipotesi panpsichista di Stuart Kauffman. Divenire e creatività nell’universo

One of the great puzzles of contemporary science is to explain how life emerged from inorganic matter. According to Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist at the Santa Fe Institute, reductionist thinking is no longer enough: life that is born and evolves is not a machine and its creativity and imagination require us to look at it in a new way, as organisms, as a totality. No law of motion, in fact, can ever account for the possible configurations of a biosphere, for the infinite interactions between the living beings that populate it and between these and the physical world. Kauffman proposes a new Weltanschuung of the universe, which has infinite creativity at each of its different levels, atomic and sub-atomic, physico-chemical and biological, since it functions in a complex manner as a set of unpredictable, a-causal and self-organised open systems in which there is room for free and responsible action; Hence Kauffman will speak of a panpsychism that involves everything, electrons exchanging photons, non-equilibrium chemical reaction systems, singlecelled organisms, multi-celled organisms, right down to the human being and the eco-nomic-social systems created by this.