Self-Creating Universe: 3. Re-emergence of Emergentism

After the 1920s emergentism went into retreat, because of the success of mechanistic approaches to genetics following the discovery of genes and the molecular structure of DNA with Watson and Crick in the 1950s.  Also it was thought that psychology should be based on behaviorism, a mechanical approach emulating the method of physics.

But in the 1960s emergentism revived with neuroscientist Roger Sperry who

rejected a purely reductionist view of human consciousness and argued that mind emerges from, though is not identical with, brain function and, moreover, it possesses causal powers and so is not a mere epiphenomenon, or inactive by-product, of the brain.

Then Karl Popper and John Eccles argued that many of the properties of the living world are emergent.

Consciousness itself was characterized as 'an emergent property of animals arising under the pressure of natural selection', and the self-conscious mind of human beings was... 'an emergent product of the brain.'

But biology maintained a reductionist orthodoxy that everything was chemistry. But then C.H.Waddington proposed that "organisms must be studied as whole beings" and his student Brian Goodwin proposed that "order in living beings emerges by a process of self-organization and that new and more complex beings which emerge possess capacities that are not reducible."

Thus Terrence Deason writes that the atoms in our body may once been inanimate bits of matter.

Nevertheless together in your living body they now share a mode of existence that is quite distinctive and discontinuous from their separated inanimate existences.

This holism, that organisms are more than the sum of their parts, went nuclear in 1975 with physicist Fritjof Capra and The Tao of Physics. He argued that the basis of quantum theory had been anticipated in "Eastern philosophical traditions." In The Turning Point Capra asked us "to see the world, not as a collection of particles, but as a seamlessly connected whole."

This sort of paradigm shift had been anticipated in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that science advances not just by incremental discovery but also sudden transformation, an "unpredictable emergence of something new."

Reductionism and determinism still have their place, but meanwhile the holistic approach is becoming dynamic, expanding from the static analysis of how "complex wholes are constituted but with the ways they evolve, adapt, self-organize" and emerge. Not that anyone has come up with a "science of complexity."

And emerging from this is the notion of "self-organization." For a living system is self-organizing. And adaptive.

Another facet of the idea of emergence is a revision of understanding of chaos. The traditional meaning is Platonic, that order is the consequence of the impostion of order on chaos. But in the emergence era, it has shifted, that

a complex phenomenon such as a weather system or a living organism may be intrisincally deterministic and will demonstrate orderly patterns of behavior overall, but in detail, their behavior in undecidable.

They "are suspended uncertainly between order and chaos" and it is "this randomness which gives to chaotic systems a creative potential". This provides a way to explain nature's "remarkable capacity for producing an infinitely varied world of great, if fragile, order and beauty."

Canonical examples of emergence as explanation include the Big Bang creation story, and the day-to-day experience of "fluidity, color, temperature and friction", the differences in behavior between elements and chemical compounds, and the creation of life, the economy, and language. However, present science has established that the properties of chemical compounds "can be explained by the properties of electrons" as established by quantum mechanics.

Next: Emergence of Consciousness

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.

Self-Creating Universe: 1. The Cosmic Riddle

Can there be meaning in the universe without God? Modern science has seemed to invalidate the notion of God as the creator and minder of the universe; it has increased knowledge about the universe enormously, but it has not achieved much in explaining the meaning of life. Many people have tried and are trying to rectify this problem.

It is difficult not to be amazed at the creativity of the universe, how a "seed that can produce in a few weeks a beautiful flower." How human children "can develop complex capacities... without much drilling from... parents."

But is this miracle the work of a "divine creator" or something that arises "at a lower level from nature's own innate powers"? And if it comes out of nature, then how?

Clarke proposes a worldview he calls the

naturalist presumption... that we are situated within a real, natural world from which we have evolved... yet are able to use our evolved intelligence to make (some) sense of it and (some) sense of our lives.

The old way is the

 eternalist presumption which... locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world that we can experience through our sense.

But Clarke is not proposing mere materialism, for the the materialism that dominated in the Enlightenment has not seemed to work out so well.

More recently, the terrible wars and human suffering and the perpetuation of poverty, inequality, injustice, and prejudice into and beyond the twentieth century have led to an increasing sense of disillusionment in spite of the enormous social and political benefits that the Enlightenment has bestowed on the modern world.

So his naturalist presumption

gives a key role to mind and to spiritual values, not as echoes from a higher world, but as... nature's irresistible urge to create.

The encounter between naturalism and eternalism has spawned the idea of emergentism; it asks the question

how is it that out of the simple emerges the complex, whether it be molecules, viruses, plants, animals, the human brain, the conscious mind, human society, or the works of science, art, and literature?... How does order come out of chaos?

Traditionally, humans have answered this question with "God." But Clarke proposes to answer it with a naturalist presumption. But the problem is that if "God is dead" as advertised by Nietzsche, how do we recover meaning, from the materialist worldview that replaced the God-centered world?

In Clarke's emergentism there is something else. For instance, in biology. A "living organism" is made out of chemical elements, to "complex constituents... cells... organs... living beings... living communities."

At each level , new properties and laws emerge that cannot be understood or predicted from a full knowledge of the lower levels.

 Clarke experiences this as a paradigm of self-organization. Thus, according to Stuart Kauffman,

the creative power of nature and of the universe around us is 'so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude, and respect, that it is God enough for many of us.'

It is as if the "'sacred' can be brought down from heaven to earth.. without projecting the source of this creativity on to... [an] eternal realm of being."

Next:In the Beginning.

Suppose the First Black Woman Crossed the Aisle

If I were the First Black Woman that President Biden nominated to the US Supreme Court I would be insulted.

Because after all, when President Biden says he is going to nominate a black woman -- as in East Asians need not apply -- that's racism, straight up.

I suppose that whoever he nominates -- and I understand that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is the front runner -- she will be a faithful liberal vote, always voting with the other two women liberals on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Mind you, according to Instapundit:

Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.

So, a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class. 

That's really comical, representing a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class as the First Black Woman. A bit like First Black President Obama who was the son of an East African and a white woman, not a West African, from the people that were enslaved by other West Africans and sold to Brit slavers on the coast.

If I were the First Black Woman on the Court I would trot down to Justice Thomas after a day or two at the Court. And I would start to plot a bit of mayhem.

Because being a black woman I ain't gonna take no sh*t from nobody. Right Grrls?

But I doubt if she will. After all, she's a good little girl and went to Harvard and Harvard Law. You think she is going to break ranks and get combative?

For one thing, if you want to break the liberal ranks and start thinking for yourself you have to have done a bit of reading outside the liberal-lefty canon. You think that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has done that? I doubt it. My nickel says she has deadly boring ruling-class-conventional-wisdom opinions on everything.

Hey, if she had ever broken from the herd she wouldn't be the selection of President Biden to be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court. Because what liberals want now, what they have to have, is an absolutely reliable vote that will vote as a block with the other two liberal women justices. Until Hell freezes over.

Because that's all that our liberal friends have left.

Today Victor Davis Hanson writes about the ruling-class strategy of nihilism, that all the stuff they are doing is part of a dastardly plan.

But if you mention nihilism then for chappies like me you invoke the shade of Nietzsche, who wrote that nihilism is the second consequence of your God dying, as in:

God is Dead, followed by decadence, followed by nihilism, followed by the eternal recurrence, followed by the revaluation of all values.

Eternal recurrence? Think Groundhog Day.

But, see, I don't think that the current ruling class clamp-down and nihilism is a strategy. I think it is a consequence of our liberal friends's faith, in leftist politics, in government programs, in quotas, in mandates, in feminism, in LGBT.

And that the God of Lefty Politics has failed. And our lefty friends do not know what to do. Except double down on their lefty politics.

There is no politics without an enemy, and so our lefty friends are finding enemies under every tree and on every street. If the Great Society failed and it wrecked the lower-income family, then it can't be the programs that failed. It must be some enemy that sabotaged it. If Charles Murray suggests that the lower average IQ of blacks is a fact and thus we will never get "equality" then he is a saboteur and a wrecker and must be condemned. If the stock market crashed in 2008 it can't be the low-down liar mortgages that Democrats have championed since the 1930s. It must be greedy bankers. If the COVID administrative mandates aren't working it must be the anti-vaxxers that are to blame.

But don't expect the two liberal justices and the new addition, the black woman Harvard educated daughter of a lawyer, to understand any of that. They are clueless, and will remain clueless, until the whole society is collapsing around them. But they still won't get it.

And frankly, even if Judge Jackson has half a brain, she would be afraid to use it. Imagine the storm that would engulf her if she dared to step out of line. I am not talking about columns in The New York Times and insults from race hustlers. I am talking about removal from the Court. You think they wouldn't stoop to that?

I gotta bridge...

Reviewing and Extending Downstreamism

 Andrew Breitbart famously said that "politics is downstream from culture." But did you know that SciFi author  John C. Wright has said that "In the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion."

But is there something beyond religion? I like to misquote Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and talk about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

In other words, if you really believe in the importance of downstreamism, then you will agree that

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And if you don't agree with that obvious truth, there is no hope for you!

Now, I have been reading a book that reviews the whole of philosophy, religion, science, and spirituality in the last 200 years written by a Brit J.J. Clarke, The Self-creating Universe: The Making of a Worldview. It is telling us all about the post-materialist, post-mechanical worldview that issues from what I call the "German Turn" that begins with Kant. Clarke is talking about a worldview that he calls "emergentism,"

a radical strain of thinking which is advancing in fields such as evolution, complexity, chaos, and self-organising systems[.]

In other words, the way the world works is that some nobody -- it could be a nobody plant -- tries something new, and, wonder of wonders, it works. And that successful change changes the world. Not because it was forced on the world, but because it worked, and people copied the new idea. Because it worked.

So the way the world works is creativity, people creating new things, animals creating new things, plants creating new things, from the bottom up, not from the top down.

So, things just evolve.

But Clarke is an academic, so when he gets to religion and spirituality, he thinks that God is dead so let's reinvent spirituality as a creative enterprise. The old religious culture was based on an eternalist presumption, it

locates the source of values and meaning in an eternal reality beyond nature, beyond the world as we experience it through our sense.

The new worldview is what Clarke calls a naturalist presumption, it is

a way of thinking about the world in general which focuses its outlook, its values, its meaning on the natural world of which we humans are an integral part.

This includes both what we experience in the physical and living world and also the "world of inner sense," the mental world, and also culture and history.

But what Clarke tells us is that the old "eternalist presumption" is done, finished, because we educated advanced humans know that the old world of God and Sin and the promise of eternal life in Heaven has been replaced by the new world of emergentism and the naturalist presumption.

That is where I part ways with the noble professor.

Because not everyone lives in the world of the creative educated philosophy professor for whom God has died. And clearly, for Clarke, there is no reason to respect or make a cultural space for the old people that still live with the worldview of the eternalist perspective.

I say that for the ordinary middle class person the old eternalist presumption still works pretty well. You believe in God; you believe that if you live your life by the rules then you will go to Heaven. So, you live a life of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

But for the educated elite this old worldview is a superstition and verges on bigotry.

Actually, I believe, further, that for the lower class, a still earlier worldview applies. For the lower class there is no happy land of Heaven if you do the right thing. In the lower class, power is everything, and what you need to do is get with a powerful person, and shelter in his powerful shadow. The old Nordic and pagan and Greek and Roman gods seem to apply. The newer Christian God of sweetness and light seems to be a fantasy to the lower class person.

Now I say, starting at 3:00 am today, that for all levels of society, the following applies, using the downstream hierarchy.

Politics answers the question: who is my enemy?

Culture answer the question: who are we the people?

Religion answers the question: who is God?

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" answers the question: What's it all about, Alfie? 

Who is my enemy? For the serf it's the cruel master; for the Commoner it's the tribe or nation next door; for the educated creative it's the dumb white middle-class racist-sexist-homophobes whose religion is pure bigotry.

Who are we the people? For the serf it is the people enslaved and oppressed like me; for the Commoner it is the nation; for the educated creative it is the global community of educated and evolved people.

Who is God? For the serf God is the cruel master; for the Commoner it is the God who made Heaven and Earth and declared that it was good; for the educated creative the god is the creative thinker, artist, activist.

What's it all about? For the serf it is just to stay alive; for the Commoner it is to live a virtuous life and get to Heaven; for the educated creative it is to create something that changes the world.

To be continued.

Let's All Blog on "Mass Formation Psychosis"

It should not be remarkable that humans, as social animals, all join together in moments of danger. In normal times social animals cooperate in peaceable pursuits; in abnormal times social animals combine to fight the foe.

So it's not surprising that in the COVID era, sold by the rulers as an existential peril, that all good men and women have come together for the good of humanity.

Some have called this "mass formation psychosis" and I understand why. If you think that the mass formation has coalesced to fight a phony foe, then it is not a healthy thing, but a destructive thing.

In a piece at American Greatness Malcom Pollack regards our current society as especially prone to the call to mass formation.

It helps if there is "free-floating anxiety" of what tomorrow might bring. I must say that I feel that right now, but not about COVID. Instead I worry about the hell we are going to go through wringing inflation out of the economy, and the increasing desperation of our ruling class to hang onto power.

It helps if there is "social isolation" with many people having "no meaningful relationships in their lives." I guess. But I think that is always true.

Finally it helps to have "a crisis of meaning." Deaths of despair and all that.

But I think that the COVID panic has actually been perfectly normal and physical. There came news of a dreaded virus from beyond the seas. Our political leaders rallied us to fight this invisible foe: of course we responded.

And then, of course, narrative control -- censorship when you are on the other side -- steps in. The natural instinct of the ruling class, as it raises its sword to rally the troops, is that we all speak with one voice, and silence all those that distract us from the One True Path to victory.

My special experience in all this is that I experienced a different response from men and from women to COVID.

Men, I think, respond to the call to go out and fight. But in COVID, apart from the brave Essential Workers, there hasn't been much call for brave soldiers to fight the foe.

Women, I think, respond to the call by doing all the right things: masking and cleaning and isolating and doing all the recommended things to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. Notice, also, that women don't expect to be asked to risk their lives for the movement. Teachers unions were obviously more concerned about the safety of teachers than the safety of children.

I would say that since the first peak in infections and deaths passed in the summer of 2020 it was time to dial down the panic porn and reduce the social mobilization. Everyone wasn't going to die. We didn't have to hide in bunkers.

But, of course, political leaders love the rush that playing Henry V at Harfleur gives them. And bureaucrats love the opportunity to issue rules and let contracts for testing and even vaccine apps.

And in the general populace -- and especially with women -- there is clearly a mood to enforce compliance with the dictates issued from on high.

And when it's clear that we are not dealing with the End of the World, how do you dial down the Henry V act?

Very reluctantly.

So what is interesting at this stage of the mass formation cycle is:

the COVID Karens that still think we are all in existential danger

the administrative bureaucrats still issuing emergency edicts long after the emergency is over 

the politicians wondering how they can change the direction of march without causing chaos in the army. 

Otherwise, everything is fine. 

Remember "It's the Economy Stupid?"

Back in the day, they say, they had a big sign up in the Clinton 1992 presidential campaign headquarters: "It's the Economy Stupid!"

The idea, I assume, was that while all the people that politicians talk to are grifters and hangers-on, the voters are just thinking about the price of meat at Safeway this week and whether wages are keeping up with prices.

Oh and you'd better not mess with my Social Security and Medicare.

But I say that Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021 ignored that golden rule. Obama's stimulus package in 2009 was all about throwing money at teachers and setting up Obamacare rather than restarting the economy after the generational Crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The same is true of Biden's early stimulus package and subsequent "infrastructure" and Build Back Better packages. They had nothing to do with getting the economy on track after the disruption of the COVID scare. They were all about servicing elite Democratic constituencies and their demand for loot.

I suppose it is natural for the monarch in any regime to live in the bubble of his court, and not really pay enough attention to the real world outside. In the last few days, for instance, I have been writing about the willful failure of our ruling class to grasp the importance of the work of Charles Murray, that Great Society programs don't work and that the economy is favoring high IQ workers and really hurting ordinary average folks without standout talent.

My point is that, before the rulers hand out the goodies to their supporters, as all regimes have done since the dawn of time, they need to make sure that the Commoners and the peasants are doing OK.

And I would say that the Bidenoids are clearly acting as though the overall health of the economy, as experienced by ordinary Commoners, is not something that lordly courtiers need to concern themselves about.

I was reading Ben Stein at The American Spectator and he was talking about his dad.

Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was instrumental in helping the U.S. shift from a wartime economy to a wildly prosperous peacetime economy.

He served as a LTJG in the Navy, and then on a series of commissions and committees that planned how to get from huge wartime deficits under FDR — and rightly so, of course — to a sustained balanced budget peacetime economy[.]

Imagine that! The powers that be were thinking about how to transition from war to peace! And the result of their work was this:

I'd say that the reduction of federal debt from 1945 to 1980 was pretty decent. I'd say that the ruling class had its eye on the ball. But obviously, not since then.

I'd say, looking at the chart, that we are in for some unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in the next few years. The job of a ruling class is to make sure that any unpleasantness is confined to court circles and that it should not impacts ordinary Commoners and peasants.

Of course, that is to say nothing about the green agenda -- that I regard as a combination of ruling-class fashion parade and ruling-class moral preening. Greenology was referenced recently over at WattsUpWithThat in respect of how our greenie friends are in the early stages of turning the economy upside down in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable resources. They call it "deep decarbonization." As an engineer that worked for a while in electric generation planning, I am here to say that these chaps have no idea.

More than that, I say that our greenie friends are sending the economy off a cliff and you have no idea what we are going to experience when we hit the rocks at the bottom.

Except that fortunately the Germans are going to hit bottom first. And give us time to deploy our parachutes.

For those of us that have parachutes.

I don't know what the bottom line is for ignoring the "It's the Economy, Stupid!" My guess would start at losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But what do I know?