Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

But Prigogine continued to be inspired by his initial curiosity; he gradually realized that the statistical unpredictability in the behavior of simple molecules might shed light on some of the basic problems of philosophy, such as the question of choice, of responsibility, of freedom. Whereas the physical laws of Newton and Einstein were deterministic and expressed certitudes that applied equally to the past and to the future, Prigogine found in the unstable chemical systems he studied processes that could not be predicted with certainty, and that could not be reversed once they happened. If you can say that the universe is deterministic, a kind of automaton, then how can we hold to the idea of responsibility? All of Western philosophy was dominated by this problem. It seemed to me that we had to choose between a scientific view which was negating humanistic tradition, or a humanistic tradition which was trying to destroy what we learned from science…I was very sensitive to this conflict because I came to science, to hard science, from the human sciences…. But what I learned from thermodynamics confirmed my philosophical point of view. And gave me the energy to continue to look on a deeper interpretation of time and of the laws of nature. So, I would say, it is a kind of feedback between the humanistic and the scientific point of view. The synergy between the humanistic and the scientific quest has served Prigogine well. In addition to illuminating basic thermodynamic proc...