“Utopia is that which is in contradiction with reality”…
— Albert Camus
“All the actual character of consciousness is merely the sense of shock of the non-ego upon us” …
— Charles Sanders Peirce
“The primary element in any civilisation is a stable relation between man and his environment. When man becomes the plaything of abstract decisions, a civilisation can no longer be created”…
— Jacques Ellul
“The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Accordingly those characteristics which can be exhibited in this entity are not ‘properties’ present-at-hand of some entity which ‘looks’ so and so and is itself present-at-hand; they are in each case possible ways for it to be, and no more than that. All the Being-as-it-is [So-sein] which this entity possesses is primarily Being. So when we designate this entity with the term ‘Dasein’, we are expressing not its “what” (as if it were a table, house or tree) but its Being”…
- Martin Heidegger
[ LINK ]
Erwin Schrödinger, a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian theoretical physicist who developed a number of foundational principles in the field of quantum theory, including the Schrödinger Equation, delivered a series of public lectures at Trinity College, Dublin in 1943.
It was his attempt to synthesise an understanding of a range of fundamental forces and elementary particles in physics into a unified field theory — statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, general relativity, cosmology etc.
Schrödinger’s lectures focused on one important question:
“How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?”
These lectures formed the basis of his 1944 book — What is Life?
The book was anchored in 2 of the core elements relating to the nature of life.
Firstly, it focused on hereditary — a key characteristic of life-based on transmitting information — which he believed required substances in the cell (code-script) to be chemically stable.
He presented an early theoretical description of how the storage of genetic information could work.
Secondly, it highlighted the importance of self-ordering in a world of chaos.
This observation was based on how a living system fights the Second Law of Thermodynamics to create structure and information over time.
More recently, late US Philosopher Daniel Dennett extended these observations in his75th Anniversary Trinity College lecture of Schrodinger’s 1944 book.
Life depends on the oversimplification of a world of complexity — it is through generating & testing — or — oversimplifying & monitoring that life evolves.
Oversimplification gets you into the arena where you can learn from your mistakes by working out the implications and undertaking a reality check.
By the late 20th and early part of the 21st Century, these foundational evolutionary principles had been extended to form the basis of new theoretical frameworks for evolution and intelligence.
A desire to better understand how humans navigate the prevailing state of reality — complexity and uncertainty.
These frameworks included inter alia :
- United Air Force Colonel John Boyd introduced the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) in 1961 to US airforce combat operations;
- In the 1970s, Karl Weick, an American organisational theorist, introduced the concept of sensemaking into organisational studies. He explored how people try to make sense of organisations and how organisations themselves try to make sense of their environment. Weick paid attention to questions of ambiguity & uncertainty — how we frame & act in the unknown and give meaning to our collective experience. Since that time, the framework has been extended beyond the organisation as a way to build intelligent knowledge for decision-making. A further abstract decision-making and intelligence tool anchored in perception, context and patterns — a compliment to term logic and increasingly abstract forms of reason that have dominated decision-making since the Age of Enlightenment and the emergence of a mental structure forms of consciousness (refer — Jean Gebser) embraced by modern civilisations for the last 2,300 years (Aristotle));
- In the early 2000s, French Computer scientist Jean-Louis Dessalles and colleagues shaped a Cognitive Theory (Simplicity Theory) to explain how through observed drops in complexity, we make decisions on how to navigate Reality;
- Hungarian-American Investor and philanthropist — George Soros’s Theory of Reflexivity — outlined how human perception interplays with reality through feedback loops; and
- United Kingdom neuroscientist — Prof Karl Friston’s — Free Energy Principle — attempts to explain how biological systems maintain order (i.e. mitigate entropy) by minimising uncertainty ( surprise ) — an embodied intelligence — the interplay between the Mind, Body and Environment. Abstract models of reality are constantly being tuned through Bayesian analysis and thermodynamics (free energy).
At a broader systemic level, there were also some profound advancements.
These included:
- In 1995 Romanian-American Engineering Professor and a leading global academic in thermodynamics — Dr Adrian Bejan published a paper that outlined the Constructal Law. A law that changes everything and sees physics converge with the Natural World. A concept that bridges the gap between physics, evolutionary biology, the natural world, technology, and social organisations. The law states that for a finite flowing & moving system to endure (i.e. survive) over time, it must have the freedom to morph, change & move more and more easily. In essence, it captures the notion that to live is to move and change. A living system must evolve to provide easier and easier access to the currents that flow through it. The law applies to inanimate systems such as rivers and technology; it applies to animate systems such as the evolution of life, the growth of trees, human lungs, Olympic athletes etc. It also applies to social design, such as laws, government and social systems.
- In 2017 Olivia Judson, an evolutionary Biologist and writer, published an essay, The Energy Expansions of Evolution in Nature Ecology and Evolution. She set out a theory of successive energy revolutions that purports to explain how our planet came to have such a diversity of environments that support such a rich array of life, from cyanobacteria to daisies to humans. She divided the history of life on Earth into five energetic epochs, geochemical energy, sunlight, oxygen, flesh, and fire. Each epoch represented the unlocking of a new energy source, coinciding with new organisms able to exploit that source and alter the planet. The previous sources of energy stay around, so environments and life on Earth become ever more diverse — a “step-wise construction of a life-planet system.”
This multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the nature of reality, life, complex systems, physics, innovation and evolution culminated in a simple mathematical equation and principle that was presented for the first time by Prof. Stuart Kauffman — a US medical doctor, theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher in his 1996 book At Home in The Universe: The search for the laws of self-organisation and complexity and more recently in 2019 in a presentation titled The Shape of History.
“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself…[the adjacent possible] captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation”…
In the book, Stuart Kauffman illustrates the shear scale of the possible mathematical permutations via evolutionary biology by simply combining the 20 biological amino acids to form strings of proteins of 100 lengths.
A quote from the book:
“If such a tiny fraction of the potential diversity of proteins of length 100 have ever felt the sun’s warmth, then there is plenty of room for human explorers to roam. Evolution can have sampled only the tiniest reaches of “protein space.” And since selection tends to stick with the useful forms it finds, evolution’s search has probably been even more restrictive”…
- Stuart A. Kauffman, At Home in the Universe
He also extends Darwin’s Theory of Evolution by illustrating how the science of complexity is the engine of the biosphere.
It is through the interplay of self-organisation, selection and chance that if enough different molecules pass a certain threshold of complexity, they begin to self-organise into a new entity-a living cell.
The same The Adjacent Possible principles can apply beyond biology to the evolution of our biosphere, technology, human ideas, knowledge and innovation.
Welcome to emergence.
Refer — A third transition in Science? [ LINK ]
An evolutionary dance — embracing The Adjacent Possible — a flow — an interplay — between living systems, their agency and their environment in an increasingly complex world.
Reframing our understanding of Emergence — A Metaphysical Perspective — The Breath of Being
If as outlined in The Semiotics of Life — Consciousness and Beings relationship to Being if we accept that:
- Being is the most fundamental concept of Existence (i.e. everything in the act of Being); and
- all human knowledge and experience is mediated via our Being in the Worldand Consciousness — a mediation of meaning through signs . In other words, the meaning of Being understood by the Human Mind;
By combining Semiotics**** (i.e. mediation of the meaning of Being to the Human Mind) with Metaphysics (i.e. Study of Being — Science of Reality) could we arrive at a fresh perpective in explaining the phenomena of Emergence?
[ ****Note — Semiotics as the mediation of human consciousness’sphenomenological experience of Being — participating in a Mind Independent Reality — whilst — developing (mediating) a Mind-Dependent Representation ]
Emergence emerges from Being’s relationship to Being
Does Emergence emerge from Being’s relationship to Being?
Being’s way of revealing itself through Being — each step a new unfolding of consciousness — the interplay between what does it mean (Meaning), what can exist (Being), and what can we know (Knowing).
From a Heidegger phenomenological perspective, openness is a characteristic of Dasein (Human Being) — an openness towards Being and one that perceives the Being’s before it.
For example, when Human’s hear a sound they do not simply hear a raw sound but the Being of it (e.g. a bird sound). This Being is always open-ended, undefined until disclosed through engagement. This is consistent with Dasein’s role in making meaning**** emerge from raw potential.
[****Note: Peirce’s Semiotic Triadic could be viewed through a similar understanding of Being and mean-making. The Observer, Sign (e.g. Bird Sound) and Object (Bird) are in a semiotic triadic relationship of meaning-making — an intentional consciousness (Husserl). Therefore, Open-Ended Being could also be interpreted as an incomplete triadic where the Object is not present — a possibility of being. The pre-actualised state can be thought of as the ontological horizon — where Being is a field of possibilities not yet shaped into definite meaning. ]
So in this view, Being is not a static background, but something dynamically revealed through the relationship and existence of beings — especially those capable of reflection and understanding.
From that perspective, emergence could be seen as arising from the relational dynamic between Beings and Being.
A World where new realities (meaning, understanding, history, physical world (e.g. Hegel’s Second Nature) emerge as Beings come into relation with Being.
An understanding of the nature of Reality that was presented in Entanglement, Emergence, Being in the World and Divine Order — Physical Entanglement, Conscious Entanglement and Moral Entanglement and The Dawn of the Age of Meaning — Transcending the Crisis of Modernity and Post-Modernity.
Through the:
- entanglement of a Mind Independent Reality with the development of a Mind Dependent Representation of Reality (Conscious Self); and
- Being’s participation in Being (Heidegger)
This emergent dynamic relational process can be expressed as a Triadic process of expanding the frontiers of Consciousness (Meaning, Being, and Knowing):
- Semiotic Emergence — The Meaning of Being → New Relationships of Being: Through the process of Being in the World (Heidegger) and mediated via consciousness new possible (i.e. a preliminary hypothesis) relationships of meaning emerge. This type of reasoning is referred to as abduction**** (Peirce) and its meaning is mediated via signs that bridge the ontological (Being) and epistemological (knowing).
- Epistemological Emergence — Actualisation of Potential → New Knowledge: This is the dimension where the subject (Being) encounters, interprets, and discloses aspects of object (Being) leading to new knowledge and relationships, habits, laws and behavior.
- Ontological Emergence — Potentialisation of the Actual → New Habits: This inverts the flow. In other words, what has become actual (i.e. a knowing, a form, a structure,a law, a habit) of subject (Being) begins to manifest itself in the World through new types of object (Being). The realm of possibility is actualised thereby shaping the very conditions of Being.
The Breath of Being
“Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God”…
― CS Lewis
Semiotic Emergence is akin to an embodied breathing Being — Being in the World — Beings relationship to Being — the Semiotics of Life — Being’s way of revealing itself through Being.
Epistemological Emergence is akin to the inhaling breath — The Actualisation of Potential — The bringing of Being to the Mind — Mediating Being and Knowing through Meaning (refer to Aristotle, Kant & Peirce Categories).
Ontological Emergence is akin to the exhaling Breath — The Potentialisation of Actual — The bringing of our understanding of Being to the World — Creating new affordances (e.g. technologies), patterns (e.g. habits), and types of Being.
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