Two Arrows of Time

Wilber's View

Wilber opens Sex, Ecology, Spirituality with a historical diagnosis of why the Great Chain of Being fell apart, and the mechanism he gives is a genuine physics/biology conflict, not just a cultural or religious one. Classical mechanics (Newton, Kepler) is time-symmetric — its laws don't care which way the clock runs. But thermodynamics discovered a real "arrow of time": entropy only increases, a dispersed ink drop never regathers, and the Second Law says the universe is a clockwork running down. Then Darwinian biology discovered the opposite arrow: evolution is irreversible in the other direction, moving from simpler to more complex, "winding up" rather than down. Two sciences, both genuinely empirical, pointing in flatly opposite temporal directions — and, Wilber argues, this (not the older mind/body split) is the specific historical fracture that split matter from life from mind into the "two cultures" of modern thought, since neither classical Cartesian dualism nor reductionism nor epiphenomenalism could paper over a contradiction in the actual results, not just a difference of perspective.

His resolution is that 20th-century complexity science (Prigogine's dissipative structures, self-organization, "order out of chaos") closes the gap: matter itself, under far-from-equilibrium conditions, spontaneously organizes into higher-order structures — so the physiosphere's arrow and the biosphere's arrow turn out to point the same direction after all, once you look at the right part of physics. This is a clean, well-supported historical narrative and a genuinely important scientific point (entropy and self-organization are both real, and both matter to any complete picture). What's worth flagging as more Wilber's own framing than settled history: the tidy sequencing — Great Chain intact, then shattered specifically by two-arrows incompatibility, then reunified by complexity science — does a lot of narrative work to set up his larger argument that traditional holism was basically right all along and modern science is now "catching up" to it. The two-arrows problem is real; whether it's the hinge on which the entire Western worldview turned is a much stronger claim, and one he asserts more than demonstrates.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

But in thermodynamic processes, "time's arrow" is absolutely central. If you put a drop of ink in a glass of water, in a day or so the ink will have evenly dispersed throughout the water. But you will never see the reverse process happen—you will never see the dispersed ink gather itself together into a small drop.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

And the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics added a dismal conclusion: the direction of time's arrow is downward. Physical processes, like the inkdrop, always go from more ordered (the inkdrop) to less ordered (dispersed throughout the water). The universe may be a giant clockwork, but the clock is winding down … and will eventually run out.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

And in the biosphere Darwin (and many others) noticed that there is also a crucial time's arrow. Evolution is irreversible. We may see amoebas eventually evolve into apes, but we never see apes turn into amoebas… But obviously, the direction of this time's arrow was diametrically opposed to time's arrow in the (known) physiosphere: the former is winding up, the latter is winding down.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

…both physics and biology were supposed to be part of the new natural sciences, relying on empirical observation, measurement, theory formation, and rigorous testing …But although the methods of physics and biology were similar, their results were fundamentally incompatible, saddled, as Laszlo put it, with "the persistent contradiction between a mechanistic world slated to run down and an organic world seeming to wind up."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

As several researchers have noted, "not until the puzzle of the two and opposing arrows of time was resolved in the late twentieth century was there a sound basis for bridging the gap between matter and mind, the natural world and the human world, and thus between the 'two cultures' of modern Western civilization."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

…under certain circumstances matter will "wind itself up" into states of higher order, as when the water running down a drain suddenly ceases to be chaotic and forms a perfect funnel or whirlpool… The two arrows have joined forces.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 1, "The Web of Life"

See Also

• great-chain-of-being — the unified picture this split fractured, and that Wilber argues complexity science lets us recover
• Systems Theory and the Sciences of Complexity — the 20th-century science Wilber credits with rejoining the two arrows
• flatland — what's left when the arrows are rejoined but interiority is still omitted from the picture
• holons — self-transcendence (tenet 2c) as the holon-scale version of the "winding up" arrow
• spirit-in-action — Eros as the drive behind evolution's arrow, in Wilber's own metaphysical (not just scientific) vocabulary