A synthesis of the philosophy of physics by Mariano Artigas

Author: Gabriel Zanotti
Published in: Quaerentibus Year 6, No. 10 (January-June 2018), pp. 65-77.
Publication date: 2018
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.

summaryIn this article we review the main notions of Mariano Artigas's Philosophy de la Física. We start from his notion of order and how this notion solves the dichotomy between atomism and substantial form. From there we show the relationship between Modern Physics and finalism, chance and the existence of God, thus resolving, with Artigas' help, old dichotomies between creationism and evolutionism. The article also suggests that the notion of indeterminism in Artigas is compatible with the notion of indeterminism used by Popper for the realist and indeterministic Philosophy of Quantum Physics. In summary, the article shows that Artigas is an essential author for the dialogue between current Physics and the creationist thought of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Index 

1. Introduction

2. The notion of order and substantial form

3. The self-organisation of the subject

4. Self-organisation and indeterminism

5. Self-organisation, indeterminism, objective propensities and quantum theory

6. Self-organisation and the existence of God

7. Self-organisation and divine providence

8. Conclusion

9. Notes

Introduction.

The goal of this work is very humble: on the one hand, to expose the main thesis of Philosophy of the Physics of Mariano Artigas, and, on the other hand, to show to those who dedicate themselves to the natural sciences that the dialogue between St. Thomas, current Physics and Faith is perfectly possible with the help of this author¹.

The reader will have noticed that I am talking about Philosophy of Physics and not about Philosophy of nature or Philosophy of the sciences. I do so because the author, from his Philosophy of nature of Thomistic origin, has enriched the philosophical presuppositions of current Physics itself, without limiting himself to the mere commentary of St. Thomas' commentary on Aristotle's Physics. In turn, the author has developed his Philosophy of science, a moderate inductivist and realist Philosophy in dialogue with Karl Popper.² but this is not what we want to develop here. We are rather interested in the ontological instructions that Mariano Artigas develops for the physical world. We have commented on Mariano Artigas's Philosophy of science in other opportunities³.

2. The notion of order and substantial form.

Let's start with the basics: the notion of order.

In his Philosophy of nature, order says relation of elements or parts with respect to an end, as a quasi-transcendental of all that is physical⁴. This notion is so broad that Artigas needs to unfold it in three elements⁵:

1. Structuring. All order, if it is a relation around an end, implies a founding structure of the elements around an end, an end that (for now) can be a final cause or a formal cause. As if to say: the structure of the sides around four points is what defines that something is a square or a quadrilateral (the example is mine). We will return later to the notion of structure.

2. Patterns, that is, Structures repeated. A regularity, such as we find in plants and animals, where there are elements that are always arranged in the same way. Of course this is all within the limits of a limited knowledge of a possible limited part of the universe, but it is a starting point.

3. Organisation. As in Aristotle, living beings are paradigms of order. For they have a supra-order, an order of order that Artigas calls organisation: cells are already an order, but they organise themselves into tissues, into apparatuses, systems and finally into a living organism. Artigas argues that this distinction between order and organisation is core topic to conceive of the universe as organised, because it can contain different kinds of orders subordinate to the main organisation.

In his La inteligibilidad de la naturaleza, Artigas does not forget the tendency to entropy⁶that is, philosophically defined as a tendency to dis-order (by the loss of energy) in any closed physical system, compensated precisely by the organisation of the universe. Therefore, the question core topic would be: why order and not dis-order? A question that Artigas will answer later with his thesis of the self-organisation of the subject.

In The Mind of the Universe⁷Artigas, quoting Kuntz, states again that without some subject of order, the physical would be equal to absolute chaos, and the latter would be equal to nothingness. Therefore, the very notion of entity, in Physics, implies an order, a quasi-transcendental order, because the opposite would be absolute entropy and with it the collapse of the universe into nothingness. Artigas' notion of order is coherent with the realism with which he presupposes that our intelligence captures something of the nature of things.⁸ of the nature of things.

Of course, this forces Artigas to dive into a point core topic of his Philosophy of Physics, where the Philosophy of the nature of St. Thomas coexists with the current Physics.

Atomism, as the great programme of research of Leucippus, Democritus and Aristarchus, had been discarded by Aristotle and his notion of substantial form.⁹had been discarded by Aristotle and his notion of substantial form. As a great example of a programme of research regressive at one time and progressive later, atomism emerges again with Christian Neoplatonism and Neo-Pythagoreanism of the 15th and 16th centuries. XV and XVI¹⁰ ending "so far" in the famous periodic table and in today's delicate theories of micro-particles.

The problem between the atomists of that time and Aristotle is still present today. Aristotle does not see the notion of accidental order of the atomists as compatible with the order that exists in a substantial unity. St Thomas continues with this topic in two ways: one more ontological, when he distinguishes between the first substances and the entities of order, and the other more physical, with the theory of mixed bodies.¹¹.

According to the former, an order entity is formed by substantial units accidentally related by the category of relation. This serves to explain the order of artefacts, which are disassemblable into substantial units, but also for Philosophy social, because human society is indeed an order entity where persons (substantial units) are united in relation to an end, so society is neither an individual nor a sum of individuals.¹².

But returning to his Philosophy of nature, which was nothing more than his reading of Aristotle's Physics, St Thomas responds to topic of order with his aforementioned thesis on the state of potency close to the act of the elements in mixed bodies. Without being able to fail to notice that the elements, as a "natural minimum" are "something", but without wishing to fall, for this reason, into the plurality of substantial forms, St Thomas affirms that an element present in a substantial unity (as for example an animal) is that element in a "virtual" way: neither in potency of being that element, but neither in act in such a way that it constitutes a substance only united by the relation. "In a state of potency close to the act" is the notion coined by St. Thomas, with a very fruitful intuition for current Physics which, as a programme of research, would no longer admit a strict division between Physics and Chemistry, after the atomic theory covered from the simplest molecule to the most complex organism.

Artigas, with a finalist notion of nature that emerged from his notion of order, explains the plurality of atoms and molecules in the substantial form with his notion of dynamism and structuring. "Structure" coincides globally with that "order of orders" of which we spoke earlier:

"... The term structure is broader than the term guideline. There are Structures of many different kinds. In reality, any spatial and temporal arrangement of natural entities has a structure, since it is impossible for there to be no relationship between the different entities. This status is similar to what happens with the concept of order, which is closely related to that of structure. Indeed, the concept of order also has a great generality. Order is always relative to some reference letter, and many types of order can be distinguished according to the references adopted".¹³.

Later, Artigas extends this notion to the entire physical universe: "Structuring is found at all known levels, from the biological to the physico-chemical to the microphysical".¹⁴.

Ordering the relationship between dynamism and structuring, he explains:

"The dynamism of the physical world is immersed in Structures of subject spatio-temporal".¹⁵. "Physical dynamism is the unfolding of a spontaneity that is related to spatio-temporal conditions".¹⁶. In other words, dynamism coincides with the final cause understood as the unfolding of the potentialities proper to every physical entity from agreement to status, which is analogous (as we shall see later) to what Popper called objective propensities.

And he continues: "Dynamism produces structuring".¹⁷. That is, this deployment is ordered, it configures Structures that subsumes orders.

And he concludes: "The new levels of structuring have a dynamism and structuring of their own, which do not destroy those of the lower levels, but integrate them".¹⁸.

The notion of structure allows Artigas to move on to the notion of central system. Citing Hartmann, he argues that they are compatible with the notion of substantial form in Aristotle and states that "...At present, we are in a position to affirm that at the different levels of nature there are systems that are not reduced to a mere juxta-position of components, since they possess properties that are not found in the components, and they also possess a dynamism and a structuring that are proper to the system as such...".¹⁹.

This paragraph is fundamental, for the "components" are the elements virtually existing in the compound, and the "system as such" is the first substance, with its substantial form: its structure.

The notion of central system gives Artigas an evolutionary-growing way of considering the order of nature, as a growing "unum": "...In final, the notion of central system can be applied without difficulty to microphysical entities such as atoms, molecules and macromolecules; also to chemical substances formed by atoms that constitute a unitary structural and dynamic unity; and to living beings. As one moves up the levels of organisation, systems are integrated into larger systems of increasing complexity and peculiar characteristics; for example, in the most complex living organisms there are many sub-systems which have their own individuality, but which are nevertheless integrated into a higher structural and dynamic unit. The notion of central system is generic, and is realised from agreement in very different ways at different levels of organisation. Moreover, as we have already pointed out, there are unitary systems which, although they do not possess the full unity of central systems, can be considered as intermediate between central systems and simple aggregations; this is the case, for example, of the Sun and the other stars, and, to some extent, also of the Earth".²⁰.

3. The self-organisation of the subject

But if order is so important in the Philosophy of Mariano Artigas' Physics, how to explain its origin, as opposed to entropy? With one of his most important concepts: the self-organisation of the subject.

This self-organisation is conceptually emergent from the dynamism we saw in the previous point. Core systems have captured into a unity elements that would otherwise be "loose". Atoms make up molecules, molecules make up inorganic systems, the latter make up the basis Chemistry of organic molecules; the latter grow in levels of complexity, until they constitute cells, which then constitute tissues, organs and organisms that are a central system.

"In today's worldview, the idea of self-organisation plays a central role. Self-organisation corresponds to the training of Structures as result of the unfolding of natural dynamisms. It is therefore closely related to the characterisation of the natural in terms of dynamism and structuring. What is new today is that many phenomena of cooperativity are already known at the levels of physics and Chemistry, and that the physico-chemical instructions of biological phenomena are becoming better and better known. New forms of organisation can appear in systems that maintain energetic exchanges with the outside world; these are systems out of equilibrium, in which the collective behaviour of their components appears, so that under certain conditions a new form of organisation prevails. The phenomena of self-organisation reveal the existence of cooperativity, tendencies and directionality in nature...".²¹.

In 1992, when he wrote his first great synthesis, he had been even more specific: "...Self-organisation corresponds to the appearance of a structure that is not a copy of an external structure".²². This is core topic: "which is not a copy". He gives examples from current science: "...The scope of self-organisation phenomena is very broad: phase transitions of physical systems in thermal equilibrium (liquid-gas transitions, ferromagnetism, superconductivity), training of dynamic patterns in fluids (Bénard instability), the laser, the training of patterns in chemical reactions (Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction), phenomena in solid state physics (crystal growth), biological morphogenesis".²³.

And he then clarifies that this is the opposite of entropy: "...According to thermodynamics, in a closed system (without contact with the outside) entropy (disorder) increases. However, when there are energetic exchanges with the outside, new forms of organisation can appear.²⁴.

In his last great synthesis, Artigas parallels the theory of evolution with self-organisation. In other words, the universe would be nothing but the unfolding of an order, from the beginning of the Big Bang, in search of patterns, models, Structures, up to the higher biological organisms where the concept of the central system is given in its fullness. Artigas highlights the "information" in the universe: in the reproduction of living beings, in DNA, it seems as if the central systems can "read", "decode" specific patterns of action and organisation.²⁵. In other words, the current theories of the evolution of the universe and the evolution of living beings would only indicate a single tendency: self-organisation as a counterbalance to entropy. But not of chaos, but of a founding principle, in the way in which a power in act 1 is the ontological cause of the unfolding of that power, in act 2: "...Theories of self-organisation are sometimes interpreted as a test that order can arise from disorder. But total disorder, in the form of absolute chaos, does not exist. We cannot even get an idea of what it means. Science studies transitions from one form of order to another.... When we speak of the emergence of order out of disorder, it is to be understood as a transition between physical states that have different types of order and organisation".²⁶. As we can see, with this Artigas is going beyond the level of physical conjectures to go to the level of philosophical thesis as ontological presuppositions of Physics. What he is affirming is that evolution, as a tendency towards greater complexity of organisation, arises from a first cause, from a kind of power in first act, in which its unfolding is contained. At the physical level, this implies that, even if we do not yet have the conjecture by which the initial conditions of the universe passed from its initial conditions to its first stages of order, in those initial conditions were contained the causes of the later unfolding. Another philosophical question is whether those initial conditions had to be necessarily those and not others, a point we have not yet reached.

Having said all this, the following topic is: does self-organisation imply a deterministic notion of the universe? Does this self-organisation have levels of contingency?

4. Self-organisation and indeterminism.

In the face of physical determinism, Artigas replies: no. The reason lies in the recognition that a certain randomness has in the order of the universe.

" There are random factors in natural processes. The complexity of the factors involved in most processes is enough to show this. Coincidences of particular dynamisms are not a consequence for any of them. In this sense, the existence and relevance of random factors is unquestionable: in nature there is randomness, understood as a coincidence of independent causes".²⁷.

But this does not mean that chance is the ultimate cause of self-organising processes. The cause lies, as we have already seen, in powers in act 1, which can then encounter random factors in their unfolding. If a certain radiation causes the DNA of a bacterium to mutate and this leads to a certain evolutionary process, this means that the objective potentialities that will lead to the final result were already present in that bacterium.²⁸. The relationship between radiation and DNA can indeed be random, because it is about "...coincidences of particular dynamisms are not a consequence for any of them". This was already said by St. Thomas, even if he did not know the evolutionary hypothesis, in chapter 74 of the Against Gentiles, quoted by Mariano Artigas²⁹. The quotation of St. Thomas in particular has a peculiar ontological richness, for it is like an a priori demonstration of chance in nature. No efficient cause fully encompasses all effects. Hence, there remains a margin which it does not reach, and this, multiplied by each one, produces a necessary field of randomness: "It corresponds to the ordering of divine providence that there should be order and Degrees in the causes. And the higher a cause is, the greater is its virtuality and the wider its causality. But the intention of a created cause cannot go beyond the limits of its own power, for that would be in vain. Therefore it is necessary that the intention of a particular cause does not extend to everything that can happen. Now, chance and fortuity occur precisely because they happen outside the intention of the agents. Therefore, the order of divine providence requires that there be chance in things".³⁰.

Therefore, we see that before going to the topic of indeterminism for strictly physical reasons, Mariano Artigas has a Philosophy of Physics that will later be of great financial aid to give ontological foundation to the current conjectures on evolutionism, as we have already seen, and on quantum indeterminism, as we will see below.

5. Self-organisation, indeterminism, objective propensities, and quantum theory.

As we know, quantum physics has two rival interpretations: Copenhagen's, indeterministic and idealistic, and Einstein's, realistic and deterministic. Of course, we already know that the latter is in retreat in the face of Bell's Theorem, but that is not what interests us at the moment. Our question is: is a realist and indeterministic interpretation of quantum physics possible?

Artigas seems to be close to this position. In his Philosophy of nature with Sanguineti, when dealing with wave-particle duality, he does not see that this was opposed to the idea of real substance that they are defending: "...As far as our question is concerned, it is clear that the theories we are dealing with do not eliminate the philosophical problem of substance. The intimate connection between the corpuscular and wave descriptions of the microphysical subject , as well as the difficulties of reconciling the two descriptions, show once again that it is not possible to "imagine" the microphysical world by means of models taken from ordinary experience. Such "imaginative models" necessarily encounter limitations of various kinds. Of course, there is no difficulty in admitting that various energetic processes are always present in the physical constitution of subject : it is only logical that this should be the case. Nor is there any difficulty in thinking that what we call "elementary particles" result from energetic interactions: this would only be unacceptable to the advocates of a "mechanistic atomism", according to which there must be ultimate particles of the subject, which would be immutable, like absolutely rigid and impenetrable "corpuscles"".³¹. But later, in The Mind of the Universe, he makes a surprising statement, in relation to the self-organisation of the subject and the "action" of the elementary particles of agreement to their circumstance: "...Natural entities possess a dynamism that is very sophisticated. I would venture to say that all subatomic particles know all physics and Chemistry much better than we do. The reason is very simple: an individual electron can encounter a great variety of circumstances, and in each of them it will act agreement with its nature as a genuine electron. Electrons are an important part of every atom and every molecule that exists in the world, so they behave in different ways in practically an innumerable variety of circumstances".³².

This thesis has a B similarity with Karl Popper's interpretation of Quantum Physics.³³. It is no coincidence that Mariano Artigas was director of thesis of Josep Corcó Juviñá, who worked on Karl Popper's emergentism.³⁴

Popper, as is well known, was at agreement with Einstein's realism, although not with his determinism. And he was not, because what in Artigas is "action" and "circumstance" for Popper is "propensity" and "status". Towards the end of his life, Popper develops a theory of objective propensities, quoting Aristotle's notion of potency, without going as far as the notion of substance³⁵. Artigas' notions of dynamism and structuration may well be the ontological foundations of Popper's sweep of Aristotle's notion of potency. This power, for Popper, is given in a disposition, in a state, from which an objective propensity emerges, objective because it does not depend on an observer -as the Copenhagen School thinks-. In other words, every particle has position and momentum, objectively, although this is not observable for the human being, and this disposition and momentum depend on a status or specific state in which the particle is found.³⁶. That state is the one affected by ontological indeterminism. The particle is not a wave at the same time, but one has "fields of propensities" (realistically explained by the double slit experiment).³⁷.

Of course many will be against Popper, but what we want to stress is that, if someone wanted to give Popperian theory an ultimate metaphysical foundation, he has to turn to Artigas who, as we saw, quotation the per accidens of St. Thomas, which, as we saw, does not depend on an observing human being but on the very structure of the order of nature. This connection between St. Thomas, Artigas and Popper, at the ontological level, has hardly been sketched and would be worthy of a more extensive research programme.³⁸.

6. Self-organisation and the existence of God

Now, many believe that if the universe is self-organising, "then test" there is no creator God. Others, on the other hand, think that the thesis of the big bang "test" the existence of a God, or a creator God³⁹.

All these possibilities are epistemologically incorrect extrapolations from Physics to Metaphysics. The "way" of God's existence in St. Thomas is that the "finite" (he said "participated") requires a non-finite cause. St. Thomas' demonstration is not physical, but goal-physical: the real distinction between essence and esse implies that esse must have been "given" by a non-finite cause, that is, without distinction between essence and esse, "and that" we call God.⁴⁰. The "finite" has then nothing to do with the universe being finite or in-finite in time. Creation has nothing to do with time, but with the preservation in being of that which has⁴¹ in being of that which has a real distinction between essence and esse, which from the point of view of time could be finite or infinite.

Hawking's theories about the big-bang preceded by a big-crunch, and so on, infinitely in time, are no argument for denying that a non-finite cause, which we call God, is necessary. Artigas puts it this way: "As far as time is concerned, the models of the universe that have received increasing acceptance among scientists since the 20th century view the universe as having a limited age, which is usually estimated to be around fifteen billion years. The universe appears to have a history and an evolution from an origin in time. However, this does not completely solve the problem, since it remains to be explained what the origin of the initial big bang was: it will always be possible to think that it could have come from an earlier, different state of the universe's subject and energy. Science alone is not in a position to deny this possibility. Also in the case of time, a similar proposal to that of the theory of relativity has been formulated in relation to space. Specifically, Stephen Hawking has suggested that, from agreement with the hypothetical theories of quantum gravity, it could happen that the universe is limited in time, and that, at the same time, it would not be possible to point to a specific moment for its origin, because as it gets closer and closer to that moment, the concept of time itself would be altered. From the philosophical point of view the universe is finite because it is a collection of limited creatures. Strictly speaking, only God can be infinite. God's eternity is not an unlimited duration: God is outside of time and time does not exist independently of the universe. For these purposes, the spatial and temporal magnitude of the universe, whose being necessarily depends on God, matters little. On the other hand, when Christians admit that time originated with the universe, and that the universe is not of unlimited duration, they do so on the basis of revelation, not scientific or philosophical demonstration.⁴².

7. Self-organisation and divine providence.

The above point explains why Artigas has so easily overcome the dialectic between "design intelligent" on the one hand and "evolutionism" on the other. Artigas, without turning evolutionism into a necessary truth, explains it as a hypothesis in no way contradictory to Creation, including chance, so that the famous book by Monod⁴³ is no longer an argument "against" a Creator God. In other words: from God the Creator does NOT follow that evolutionism is necessarily true, but from the evolutionary hypothesis, as such, does NOT follow the denial of a Creator God . All this is explained by Artigas in point III of chapter 4 of The Mind of the Universe⁴⁴ and in point 2 of chapter VI of The intelligibility of nature⁴⁵.

Therefore, in order to affirm a creator God compatible with evolutionism, Artigas has no need to deny contingency, as Einstein did when he said (when debating with the non-realist interpretation of Quantum Physics) that "God does not play dice with the universe". Yes, there can be randomness, but that "per accidens" compatible with self-organisation, as we have already seen, and compatible with the Popperian realist-indeterminist interpretation of Quantum Physics. The non-necessary encounters in themselves between second causes, necessary, paradoxically, for a mutation in DNA, are in themselves casual but compatible at the same time with a Providence which, as we have already seen, admits the fortuitous (as well as the contingent and physical evil) within itself, as St. Thomas had explained. This is why Artigas brings up a famous paragraph of Aquinas where he seems to have hinted at the idea of an evolutionary self-organisation: ".... Nature is nothing other than the plan of a certain art, specifically a divine art, inscribed in things, by which those things move towards a determined end: as if he who builds a ship could give the pieces of wood to move by themselves to form the structure of the ship".⁴⁶.

8. Conclusion.

Mariano Artigas constitutes one of the best structured and inter-disciplinary philosophies of physics in the world today. I wonder if it is not strong anti-religious prejudices that make it less known than it should be for its intrinsic value. Its work, as we have seen, is an important milestone for overcoming the following antinomies:

a) Evolutionism and creationism.

b) Modern physics and finalism.

c) Atomism and substantial form.

d) Chance and the existence of God.

e) Infinite physical world in time and existence of God.

Artigas' work, like all the classics, is not to be repeated: it is a method, a spirit, a series of central thesis open to its own progress. That is the task that his disciples have the enormous responsibility of assuming.