Self-Creating Universe: 2. In the Beginning

Emerging Speculations

Emergentism has a long history. Humans have been thinking about "creation, order, evolution, and chaos" for a while. There was the ancient Greek Anaximander

who suggested a kind of evolutionary cosmology in which things emerge spontaneously from a single primal substance and through a cyclical process of generation and destruction give rise to an infinity of worlds of which our own is but one.

Then Heraclitus, who "believed that nature must be understood as a process of ever-changing flux and change." The Roman Lucretius proposed that "Nature is free and uncontrolled by proud masters, and runs the universe by herself without the aid of gods."

But then came Plato. Influenced by Pythagoras, he "sought to demonstrate that the order, beauty, and harmony of the cosmos could be explained in terms of a set of relatively simple mathematical principles" and the "perfection of eternal Ideas or Forms."

Here we can see the opposition between the naturalist presumption and the eternalist presumption, between emergence and eternal order. Then Aristotle came along and split the difference. He believed in a First Cause, but also in "the dynamic processes of the natural world." Aristotle was interested in biology. However, Aristotle still believed in a world in which Nature "is a cause that operates for a purpose."

The Renaissance began the process of 

a long struggle to establish a purely naturalistic way of understanding the world and of making sense of human existence without the presumptions of an eternalist cosmology.

First, it rediscovered ancients like Epicurus, and also, through the age of exploration, the philosophies of India and China. Brahmin thinking allows for "spontaneous evolution out of unconscious being;" Buddhism allows for a universe "undergoing constant change, eternally renewing itself"; Taoism allows things to "create themselves from their own inward reflection."

Initially, the Renaissance was eternalist, with Newton advertising "the wonderful uniformity of the natural world... 'the effect of... a powerful ever-living Agent." But then came Kant. First,

he constructed... a dynamic cosmology which pictured the universe arising through purely natural causes from an original vortex of material particles.

Then, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant proposed a way to differentiate "organisms and mechanisms." Organisms are self-organizing entities.

A living thing thus displays purposes, but unlike the watch, it has no purposes beyond itself... Moreover, the order within a living being, for example between its various organs, is not imposed from without either but emerges through the interrelationship of its parts and between the parts and the whole.  

Kant inspired Schelling to develop his Naturphilosophie, driven by an immanent spirit, Geist.

Geist emerges and becomes actual through the self-organizing, time-bound processes of nature itself. "We must think of the emergence of the world" was his manifesto for a new evolutionary philosophy of nature.

This immanent process was emphasized by Goethe, "for whom... life... was seen as a matter of striving, movement, development and growth. Darwin developed the idea of the "evolution of species," and Hegel developed "a philosophy of universal becoming in which the world self-creates out of dynamic, ever-changing processes".

From Being to Becoming

Richard Baumer, historian of ideas, sums this shift as "a transformation from being to becoming, from a static to a dynamic view of nature". And this is reflected in understanding politics, science, technology, and culture as "a tale of transformation... full of strife, ingenuity and change." Schopenhauer, of course, experienced all this change as the "source of our woes" and Spencer as an evolution to more complex forms. But Marx saw evolution as a struggle between opposing forces, "the struggle of real people and real social classes."

While philosophy and politics and evolutionary science all experienced a universe of change, in physics as late as 1900, William Thompson could say that "there is nothing new to be discovered in physics now." Newton's mechanism reigned supreme. But then Roentgen's x-rays and Marie Curie's radioactivity showed that "atomic elements were not immutable." And then came relativity and quantum mechanics. Paul Davies:

When quantum theory was properly developed in the 1920s it turned science upside down and swept aside many deeply entrenched assumptions about the nature of reality.

And yet Nietzsche had already prophesied "nature as a continuum of energies and as 'a play of forces and waves of forces... a sea of forces flowing and rushing together'". Thus in the 1920s Whitehead would "place the flow of time and process at the centre of his philosophy." And Heidegger proposed that being was not timeless, but "being-in-the-world of conscious human persons who... are thrown into the world." Thus reality is not eternal, but temporal.

These revolutions in science, culture, and society were, in turn, leading towards completely new worldviews... that penetrated deeply into the fabric of everyday lives.

The Coming of Emergentism

It was G.H. Lewes who coined the term "emergence" in his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind.

[H]\e held that more complex phenomena such as minds and living beings could not be explained solely in terms of less complex, nonliving things but represented new emergent phenomena which he took to be more than the sum of their simpler component parts. 

John Stuart Mill had already noted that poisonous substances such as sodium and chlorine combine into table salt, which is "life-supporting."

Henri Bergson in his 1907 Creative Evolution:

It emphasized the temporal and ever-changing, constantly flowing nature of the world, and the continuous creation in nature of new life forms.

Bergson influenced three British thinkers, including C.D. Broad. Broad proposed physical reality composed of levels of ascending complexity, where the higher cannot be deduced from the lower. In particular "the properties of the conscious mind cannot be deduced from physical processes." Consciousness is an emergent property. 

The zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan rejected the Darwinian notion that "nature makes no jumps." He

took the view that evolution is relatively discontinuous, making irregular jumps rather than by regular and smooth transitions.

Against Wallace, who believed in a supernatural cause for evolution, Morgan called for "evolutionary naturalism." Meanwhile Samuel Alexander proposed that God is the goal of history, rather than its prime mover. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed the "progressive emergence of ever higher, yet more integrated and more perfect levels of being" with each level a new synthesis in which human thought, the noosphere, emerges from the living world, the biosphere.

Next: Re-emergence of Emergentism.