A New Dialogue on Yijing -The Book of Changes in a World of Changes, Instability, Disequilibrium and Turbulence

This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the Chinese worldview onequilibrium/nonequilibrium and yin-yang. Important terminologies and concepts thatconstitute Yijing have correlative aspects with irreversible thermodynamics and quantumreality- instability, nonlinearity, nonequilibrium and temporality. Ilya Prigogine is a Nobellaureate noted for his contribution to dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamicsystems far from equilibrium, complexity and irreversibility. His expressions, as argued inthis paper, resonate with the principles in Yijing. Thus, this paper attempts to re-stateexisting interpretations of Yijing’s ideas with reference to science. Understanding Yijing’sterms and concepts must be contextualised to account for its pervasiveness of temporalityand the change process. Otherwise, these cardinal concepts may be misconstrued as ahodgepodge of Eastern traditions with no relevance to modern science. This paperconcentrates on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on classicaland quantum levels using Yijing’s conceptual framework. It concludes that the dominant ideas in Yijing and ancient Chinese philosophy resonate with the current scientific belief – the end of certainty. Instability, far-from-equilibrium, irreversibility, probability, bifurcation, and self-organisation are intrinsic properties of nature appearing at all levels, from particle, protein folding, and DNA double helix to cosmological scales. Information is the basis of all changes, and the agency of change is the human (‘ren’) with a consciousness existing in the probability space between heaven (‘tian’) and earth (‘di’). Finally, this paper outlines a modelling approach with the self-organising human in the centre between heaven and earth, representing living systems as discrete dynamical systems presented with binary choices (yin-yang). The interplay of yin and yang lines in a hexagram is thought to reflect the changing dynamics of a given situation, and the interpretation of the hexagram is based on the relationships between the yin and yang lines based on informational availability. In this way, the concepts of yin-yang and information causality are central to Yijing's understanding of change and are clarified in this paper.