First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....   more »

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

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(image courtesy www.idf.net)

Donna Haraway's cyborg manifesto is one of the most important text of cyber-cultural studies as well as feminist studies of the past twenty years. Her conclusion that she draws, "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess" is grounded in the following analysis of the cyborg given here by Carolyn Keen (rc):

"Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction" (150) "The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family" (151).

The cyborg does not aspire to "organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (150). The cyborg "is not afraid of joint kinship with animals and machines...of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (154). The cyborg is the "illegitimate child" of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism.

The cyborg thus evades traditional humanist concepts of women as childbearer and raiser, of individuality and individual wholeness, the heterosexual marriage-nuclear family, transcendentalism and Biblical narrative, the great chain of being (god/man/animal/etc.), fear of death, fear of automatism, insistence upon consistency and completeness. It evades the Freudian family drama, the Lacanian m/other, and "natural" affiliation and unity. It attempts to complicate binary oppositions, which have been "systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals" (177).

Haraway likens "cyborg" to the political identity of "women of color," which "marks out a self-consciously constructed space that cannot affirm the capacity to act on the basis of natural identification, but only on the basis of conscious coalition, of affinity, of political kinship" (156). "Cyborg" though, is grounded in "political-scientific" analysis. This analysis takes up most of the "manifesto." (Keen) ...    more »

A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

These observations ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect--a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled: "Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"   more »

If complexity metaphors can be problematic when applied to social phenomena because they often reduce historic inequalities of socio-economic status to mere patterns of self-organization, metaphors of increasing complexity can be misused when combined with socially constructed ideas of progress. Stephen Jay Gould at least thought as much and this review of The Game of Life outlines some of the problems with equating increasing complexity with directional progress rc ...   more »

4) Here are the final letters by Leonard Susskind' and Lee Smolin in their email debate re the Anthropic Principle.

Smolin: ... My main point is that string theory will have much more explanatory power if the dominant mode of reproduction is through black holes, as is the case in the original version of CNS. This is the key point I would hope to convince Susskind and his colleagues about, because I am sure that the case they want to make is very much weakened if they rely on the Anthropic Principle (AP) and eternal inflation. ...

Susskind: ... Finally let me quote a remark of Smolin's that I find revealing. He says "It was worry about the possibility that string theory would lead to the present situation, which Susskind has so ably described in his recent papers, that led me to invent the Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) idea and to write my first book. My motive, then as now, is to prevent a split in the community of theoretical physicists in which different groups of smart people believe different things, with no recourse to come to consensus by rational argument from the evidence." First of all, preventing a "split in the community of theoretical physicists" is an absurdly ridiculous reason for putting forward a scientific hypothesis.

But what I find especially mystifying is Smolin's tendency to set himself up as an arbiter of good and bad science. Among the people who feel that the anthropic principle deserves to be taken seriously, are some very famous physicists and cosmologists with extraordinary histories of scientific accomplishment. They include Steven Weinberg [2], Joseph Polchinski [3], Andrei Linde [4], and Sir Martin Rees [5]. These people are not fools, nor do they need to be told what constitutes good science. ...    more »

3) Here's Leonard Susskind's #2 to Lee Smolin #2:

...The issue here is not whether the usual phenomenological inflation was of the eternal kind although that is relevant. Eternal inflation taking place in any false vacuum minimum on the landscape would favor [in Smolin's sense] the maximum cosmological constant. But for the sake of argument I will agree to ignore eternal inflation as a reproduction mechanism.

The question of how many black holes are formed is somewhat ambiguous. What if two black holes coalesce to form a single one. Does that count as one black hole or two? Strictly speaking, given that black holes are defined by the global geometry, it is only one black hole. What happens if all the stars in the galaxy eventually fall into the central black hole? That severely diminishes the counting. So we better assume that the bigger the black hole, the more babies it will have. Perhaps one huge black hole spawns more offspring than 10^22 stellar black holes.

That raises the question of what exactly is a black hole? One of the deepest lessons that we have learned over the past decade is that there is no fundamental difference between elementary particles and black holes. As repeatedly emphasized by 't Hooft [10][11][12], black holes are the natural extension of the elementary particle spectrum. This is especially clear in string theory where black holes are simply highly excited string states. Does that mean that we should count every particle as a black hole? ...   more »

2) And here's Lee Smolin's #2 to Leonard Susskind #1:

I am grateful to Lenny for taking the time to respond to my paper. I will be as brief as I can in replying, especially as the key points are already presented in detail in my paper hep-th/0407213 ["Scientific alternatives to the anthropic principle"] or in my book, Life of the Cosmos or previous papers on the subject. -- For clarity I had in section 5.1.6 identified two arguments in Weinberg's papers. The first is the one I criticized in the summary. Susskind reponds, reasonably, by agreeing, and then raising the second argument. This argument is also criticized in detail in my paper, and it was perhaps a mistake not to include this in the summary I sent to Susskind.

This second argument is based on a version of the AP called the "Principle of Mediocrity" by Garriga and Vilenkin, who have done the most to develop it. Their version states that, "...our civilization is typical in the ensemble of all civilizations in the universe." -- This argument is discussed in full in sections 5.1.5 and 5.1.6. There I argue that the mediocrity principle cannot yield falsifiable predictions because it depends on the definition of the ensemble within which our civilization is taken to be typical as well as on assumptions about the probability distribution. I establish this by general argument as well as by reference to specific examples including Weinberg's use of it.

Can this be right if, as Susskind claims, Weinberg's prediction was found to hold? In fact, Weinberg's prediction did not work all that well. In the form that he made it, it led to an expectation of a cosmological constant larger than the observed value. Depending on the ensemble chosen and the assumptions made about the probability distribution, the probability that Lambda be as small as observed ranges between about 10 % and a few parts in ten thousand. In fact, the less probable values are the more reasonable, as they come from an ensemble where Q, the scale of the density fluctuations, is allowed to vary. While I am not an expert here, it appears from a reading of the literature [references in the paper] that to make the probability for the present value as large as 10% one has to assume that Q is frozen and fixed by fundamental theory. It is hard to imagine a theory where the parameters vary but Q does not, as it depends on parameters in the inflation potential. ...   more »

"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...   more »

I just came across this rather remarkably blog - while doing a Google search for "Higgs Boson /Frank Tippler" (go figure). Enjoy ...

Before I leave the sphere of Language entirely for today, our first day in “History of Literary Theory,” however, I’m going to ask you to focus with me in a very simple way on something I’ve been touching on repeatedly. It’s the way that human beings, even as newborn babies, possess something that I’m going to call “a set toward systemicity.” Newborns orient themselves to the faces of their birth mothers in the first minutes after birth in extraordinarily detailed ways. This has been closely documented. As soon as babies can focus their eyes (two weeks), they try to follow the trajectories of objects passing through their visual range.

If you think about the explosion of sensory inputs the baby must be experiencing when it emerges from the womb into this external world of light and sound and color and touch…. yet in the midst of this assault of chaotic sensory impressions, the baby already has seems to have an orientation toward “concerted” or “constituted” phenomena, toward “stuff that moves in concert” as distinct from “background.” They also know a lot about language structure and distinguish familiar voices. And the baby is already attending to these things months before it has learned the boundaries of its own body and distinguished where they leave off and the rest of the world begins, a process of separation, by the way, that happens through language, because it is through language that they emerging psychologically as a human “self ” that possesses an “I” capable of “knowing.” [Boy oh boy, do I have something to say about the convergence of Douglas Hofstdler’s work and poststructuralism!]

So the human mind is not stocked from birth with Innate Ideas, nor is it a tabula rasa, a “blank slate.” Plato was closer than John Locke, though, because human consciousness does innately set itself toward certain systematicities and orients itself to relevant coherencies, as though this chaotic and changeable world of physical sensations were lit up for us by flashes of white lightning, telling us what to pay attention to. As we notice patternings and fluid or dynamical “moving in concert,” that concertedness is of course not something apparent or apprehendable at any one instant in time. Already we are selecting and comparing and combining sensory impressions across time – whatever time may be – so that “time” is woven in some fashion into all of human “knowing,” from the outset. Language is acquired by human beings only because of this innate genius for orienting our awareness to dynamic coherences and patterns that are both temporal and formal in their constitution.

Furthermore, of course, this means human consciousness has some kind of profound entanglement with time: it is a “time-consciousness.” Time is for human beings always in some sense psychological time (as Augustine knew) – and this statement has nothing to do with it being “subjective” as opposed to “objective” and “external.” (Dated categories, unless they should be redefined and renewed.) Einstein introduced the human observer into physics in a much deeper sense than that; he showed that what we know through physics is always-already what we can know according to our attempts to make measurements, and he realized that this cut the link between genuine human knowing and any claims to an all-inclusive or universal knowing. ...   more »

"...Today, we are facing two crises, one in the biosphere and the other in human consciousness. If we are going to cope with the challenges facing the biosphere, there must be a new human consciousness. It must recognize we are as much part of this planet as the birds and trees, and evolve in response to that. Once we feel this, we will automatically try to preserve our planet.

Another way to reach this is that we must sense our unity, we must feel connected, both to each other and to the biosphere. ... To my mind, there is an almost miraculous acceleration of this new consciousness, which I sometimes refer to as planetary consciousness. Even in biological terms, I’m sure that the genetic code of the children born today is different from ours. As living systems are open, as there is always an energy interchange between them and their environment, the new generation’s DNA must have been modified by the crisis we are living through, perhaps making them more able to adapt and survive. ...

But still we need to buy time; to delay the coming of the ‘chaos point’ regarding the biosphere until this new consciousness has fully established itself. If the crisis happened today, we would be as unprepared for it as we were for the tsunami. -- This is where places like Auroville can play a vital role. For as this new consciousness spreads by what the scientists term ‘adaptive resonance, wherever you have a higher concentration of people who sense and act upon their unity, it can be picked up by receptive people anywhere. This is why those who are engaged in living and developing this planetary consciousness bear a tremendous responsibility for the evolution of all humanity. ...   more »

Part of my grad school study was with the System Dynamics computer simulation group under Prof. Jay W. Forrester at MIT. Working with the Club of Rome sponsored "Limits to Growth" global modeling project awakened me to the complex "world problematique" rushing tsunami-like out of humanity's future. This realization led to my ongoing concern with sustainability issues, which in turn was part of my motivation for co-founding SCIY. -- I'm happy to see that the Club of Rome continues with its important work. ~ ron

The Club of Rome’s mission is to act as a global catalyst of change that is free of any political, ideological or business interest.

The Club of Rome contributes to the solution of what it calls the world problematique, the complex set of the most crucial problems – political, social, economic, technological, environmental, psychological and cultural - facing humanity.

It does so taking a global, long term and interdisciplinary perspective aware of the increasing interdependence of nations and the globalisation of problems that pose predicaments beyond the capacity of individual countries. ...   more »

This looks like an interesting book. ~ ron

Once in a few billion years, the conditions are right for life to transcend itself into a higher level of existence. Having spent more than a billion years in the form of single walled bacteria-like (Prokaryotic) cells, a happy set of circumstances happened about 1.5 Billion years ago that gave rise to Eukaryotic cells with a well defined cell nucleus. Those were heady times, and the Eukaryotic cells then went on to create all multi-cellular creatures, including plants and animals including humans. The experience of what it meant to live life changed completely!...

The exciting times are back again! In this very century, mankind will invent the technologies that will give us capabilities we have thus far associated only with Divinity. What is lacking now is a level of wisdom, and unity of purpose amongst us humans. If we can develop this transcendental wisdom, and inculcate a joint sense of identity and purpose as humanity, ours is the opportunity to transform our collective existence into a vastly more powerful presence. ...   more »