Spontaneous Order

Order in Spontaneous Behavior

Brains are usually described as input/output systems: they transform sensory input into motor output. However, the motor output of brains (behavior) is notoriously variable, even under identical sensory conditions. The question of whether this behavioral variability merely reflects residual deviations due to extrinsic random noise in such otherwise deterministic systems or an intrinsic, adaptiv...

Salter Hume without Spontaneous Order

The question whether it is possible to be both a Humean and a contractarian arises from the interpretation of Hume as a theorist of spontaneous order, a theory that is usually taken to be incompatible with contractarianism. I argue that this interpretation is unconvincing and anachronistic. The real reason why it is problematic to view Hume as a contractarian is not because he is proponent of s...

Human Ecology, Evolution, and Spontaneous Order

Ecological science addresses the relations between living things and their environments, and the study of human ecology the particular case of humans. However, there is an opposing tradition built into the foundations of modern science which separates living things and particularly humans, from their environments. Beginning in modern times with Descartes' radical separation of psychology and ph...

Michael Polanyi and Spontaneous Order , 1941 - 1951

Chaos and order in spontaneous mutation.

THIS story starts with one of those unanticipated turning points that mark the lives of most of us. Around 1960 I was working at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana using Newcastle disease virus (NDV), a tractable animal virus that infects chickens rather than humans. (Working previously with polioviruses, I had acquired extraordinarilyhigh serum titers against all three strains.) TheNDV plaque...