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The Genesis Vision: A Creative Organic Universe

Dick, Steven. Cosmic Evolution: History, Culture, and Human Destiny. Steven Dick and Mark Lupisella, eds. Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Washington, DC: NASA SP-4802, 2010. A 38 page chapter online at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4802.pdf courses through past intimations, such as Alfred Wallace and Lawrence Henderson, of an innately bio-friendly universe, along with the long search for extra-earth signatures and neighbors.

Dick, Steven and Mark Lupisella, eds. Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Washington, DC: NASA SP-4802, 2010. An extraordinary online volume at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4802.pdf which gathers disparate contributions and versions that try to express a purposeful universe that is seen to be inherently favorable to life, mind and persons. The notable array of authors includes Eric Chaisson, Paul Davies, Kathryn Denning, John Smart, James Gardner, David Christian, and especially Mark Lupisella, see below. While this latest 2010 view bodes for a grand revolution from an old Ptolemaic machine to a waxing Copernican organic genesis, several papers struggle with an entanglement of these options. A critical missing piece still seems to be an explanatory generative source akin to a cosmic, parent to child, genetic code. Please compare with Clement Vidal, ed. The Evolution and Development of the Universe below for a similar significance ‘in the air.’

A few years ago, Stephen Hawking wrote, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” His bleak assessment reflects the prevailing view among scientists concerning the place of life in the universe. Traditionally, living systems have been regarded as a trivial and incidental embellishment to the physical world, of no particular significance in the over-all cosmic scheme of things. In this essay I shall argue that the orthodox view is profoundly wrong. Not only do I believe that life is a key part of the evolution of the universe, I maintain that mind and culture, too, will turn out to be of fundamental significance in the grand story of the cosmos. (Davies, 383) (Life, Mind, and Culture as Fundamental Properties of the Universe)

Lupisella, Mark. Cosmocultural Evolution: The Coevolution of Culture and Cosmos and the Creation of Cosmic Value. Steven Dick and Mark Lupisella, eds. Cosmos & Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context. Washington, DC: NASA SP-4802, 2010. A premier chapter in this online volume at http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4802.pdf by the NASA astrobiologist that is one of the best reviews of polar options from a “bio-resistant” universe, the default today, to a waxing sense of an innately fertile conduciveness for emergent life, intelligence, and persons. This approach is taken further, as Paul Davies herein also, to propose a “bootstrapped universe” whereof human cultural knowledge serves, by our conscious witness, to bring such a self-generating creation into full, actual being. As a result, the past centuries of our demotion to utter insignificance is reversed by a “cosmic promotion” of humankind to a rightful place of central, phenomenal importance. This influence can then extend on to “planetary, astrophysical, cosmological, ontological, and metaphysical” realms, in which regard we people are participants in a “self-synthesizing” universal creativity. For more writings, see Lupisella’s succinct paper in Bertka, Constance, ed. Exploring the Origin, Extent, and Future of Life. (Cambridge, 2009).

A potentially helpful distinction in many of these brands of cosmic worldviews is whether culture is in some sense “built-in,” or inherent in the universe, as part of the nature of the universe. On the spectrum shown in Figure 1, the bioresistant, biotolerant, biofriendly, and both weak and strong bootstrapped views would suggest that cultural evolution is not inherent in the nature of the universe, certainly that it is not an inevitable “cosmic imperative.” However, views characterized as teleological, pantheistic, and theistic would likely claim that culture is indeed part of the nature of the universe (i.e., perhaps as part of a trend of evolving self-organizing complex systems) and/or as part of a deeper conceptual metaphysical significance (e.g., spiritual or divine). This distinction is potentially important in that if culture is seen to be a deep manifestation and expected outcome of cosmic evolution, this would engender worldviews in which we are seen to be at home in the universe, to belong to the universe, to be an important part of its fundamental nature. This is a friendly universe, a cosmos in which many will feel a deep sense of comfort and belonging and perhaps a larger sense of objective meaning and purpose—which in turn can have an impact on how intelligent beings think and act in the world and if/how intelligent beings may ultimately influence the evolution of the universe itself. (332)

What we do with the potentially unlimited power of cultural evolution is a profound challenge—one that we face day-to-day on many levels, but that will increasingly be relevant on ever-widening scales as we begin to see ourselves in a long-term cosmic context and as cultural evolution begins to become a more cosmically relevant phenomenon. The forces of morality and creativity can give rise to a morally creative cosmos, a universe that goes beyond intelligence and technology, a universe that is deeply driven by the caring capacity of valuing agents and ultimately by a pervasive cosmic force of moral creativity—something to which all cultural beings might aspire.
Whether one thinks life and culture arose by chance or are instead a part of cosmic design, an argument can be made either way for the value of life, intelligence, and culture. Whether we are a kind of rare cosmic gem, part of a “cosmic fugue,” or perhaps a part of cosmic destiny, there is arguably some form of note¬worthy significance we can claim for life, mind, and culture. Either way, we can see ourselves as precious and meaningful, worth preserving, and worth developing to the greatest potential — for ourselves and the whole of the universe. (348)

The Evolution and Development of the Universe. http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.5508. The online proceedings of an October 2008 conference in Paris to presciently engage how to imagine and qualify a new kind of genesis universe that revolutionary scientific frontiers seem to imminently portend. The meeting webpage can be accessed at www.evodevouniverse.com, where full program and abstracts are available. The prime organizer and initiator was futurist John Smart. Participants included Francis Heylighen, Laurent Nottale (search), Borje Ekstig, Stanley Salthe, Gertrudis Van de Vijver, and John Stewart.

Select conference papers are also now published in the journal Foundations of Science, available in the 2010 volume 15, numbers 2 and 3. Please pair and compare this endeavor with the recent Cosmos & Culture NASA edition for welling signs at the cusp of a cosmic Copernican revolution.

A Learning Planet: An Integral Knowledge by Humankind

Oyama, Susan. Compromising Positions: The Minding of Matter. Barberousse, Anouk, et al, eds. Mapping the Future of Biology. Berlin: Springer, 2009. Reviewed more in A Quickening Evolution, a generous guide to historic and current intimations that nature is literally informational, textual, somehow encoded, at its essence.

Selcer, Daniel. Philosophy and the Book. London: Continuum, 2010. With doses of trendy postmodernism, a Duquesne University philosopher achieves an historical survey of imaginations of an inherently literal nature, such as Gottfried Liebniz’s encyclopedia and Jacques Derrida’s grammatology, and much before, in between, and beyond. At its crux may be seen a wonderment as to whether there might be a repetitive outline format that would serve to illume and arrange creation.

The “book of the world” figure may render nature intelligible by modeling natural philosophical investigation on scriptural exegesis. It may also serve to spiritualize a seemingly secular natural philosophical practice by framing it as the revelation of a still-hidden divine handwriting, thereby producing a textualization of nature that is, in fact, its metonymic investment with theological principle. (10)

Thus, the infinitely complex and mutually implicated relationships reflected in the structure of each of the terms are what generate the categories of the encyclopedia. Because every substantial proposition contains an entire world – because every truth mirrors the universe of knowledge from a particular perspective – the repetition of all truths in every truth and every truth in all truths….Rather than seek a model for the encyclopedia that avoids the problem of repetition, the Leibnizian encyclopedia takes conceptual repetition as its organizing principle. (81)

Baaquie, Belal and Frederick Willeboordse. Exploring Integrated Science. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2010. A large, illustrated volume by National University of Singapore physicists wherein 24 chapters – Universe, Numbers, Energy, Atoms, Molecules, Fluids, Materials, Polymers, Electricity, Odor, Sound, Photosynthesis, Vision, Biopolymers, Proteins RNA, DNA, Information, Nano, Complexity, Evolution, Relativity, QM I, QM II –each pose a question to engage the reader. For example ‘Information’ asks how do children come to resemble their parents. And notably as a contribution from a non-Western milieu, an inherent self-organization is tacitly allowed which impels and informs an emergent cosmic vitality.

Rather that the number of genes of an organism, it is the nonlinear manner is which genes interact that gives rise to how complex the organism is. (459)

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist. New York: HarperCollins, 2010. From a 21st century vantage, a British science writer looks back over the millennia to discern a broad, pervasive improvement in the human condition. While admitting its tragic trajectory, this real advance is in need of exposition today to counter an media apocalyptic gloom in the media. Fraught as we are with weapons, stupidity, and greed, by many measures, a consummate horizon ought to be appreciated that bodes for a earthwide eden, if we so choose. Ridley goes on to attribute this progression and vista to a ramifying, collective brain that overcomes individual whims in favor of social well being. (A similar view would be Nonzero by Robert Wright).

Organic Universe: An Animate, Amniotic Cosmos

Gates, James. Symbols of Power. Physics World. June, 2010. A renowned African-American physicist at the University of Maryland proposes that traditional geometric symbols known as “adinkras” might again serve to help illuminate nature’s creative informational qualities.

Could it be that codes, in some deep and fundamental way, control the structure of our reality? In asking this question, we may be ending our “treasure hunt” in a place that was anticipated previously by at least one pioneering physicist: John Archibald Wheeler. (39) As for my own collaboration on adknkras, the path my colleagues and I have trod since the early 2000s has led me to conclude that codes play a previously unsuspected role in equations that possess the property of supersymmetry. This unsuspected connection suggests that these codes may be ubiquitous in nature, and could even be embedded in the essence of reality. (39)

Vaas, Rudiger, ed. Beyond the Big Bang: Competing Scenarios for an Eternal Universe. Berlin: Springer, 2010. Due late December from the Frontiers Collection, it is touted as the first volume to cover the latest plethora of cosmologies, we excerpt the table of contents for a flavor. Alas life and persons who write books still seem to remain spectators.

Introduction: Beyond the Big Bang.- Cosmic Inflation: How the Universe Became Large and Plentiful.-The Big Bang Singularity: Conditions and Avoidance.- Big Bounce: Beyond the Threshold of Classical Cosmology.- The Emergent Universe: Arising from a Static State Without a Singularity.- Quantum Cosmology: Whence and Whither.- Quantum Origins: Gravitational Instability of the Vacuum and the Cosmological Problem.- Island Cosmology: The Universe from a Quantum Fluctuation.- Cosmology from the Top Down: Anthropic Reasoning and Prediction in a Quantum Universe .- Loop Quantum Cosmology: Effective Theories and Oscillating Universes.- The Holographic Universe: Space and Time in String Theory.- The String Landscape: Exploring the Multiverse.- Selection of Initial Conditions: The Origin of Our Universe from the Multiverse.- Cosmic Natural Selection: Status and Implications.- Self-Creating Universe: A Time Loop at the Beginning.- The Mathematical Universe: Eternal Laws and the Illusion of Time.- Eternal Existence: The Furthest Future.

Jensen, Henrik and Elsa Arcaute. Complexity, Collective Effects, and Modeling of Ecosystems. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Vol. 1195, 2010. In an edition entitled Ecological Complexity and Sustainability, Imperial College London mathematicians proceed with a dual purpose of showing how a “Tangled Nature” can in fact be explicated by an adept apply of complex system theories. They go on to perceptively note that such nonlinear phenomena is much the same subject as treated by statistical mechanics. This fertile melding across scales from galaxies to Gaia which is well underway, e.g., Dirk Helbing and Claudino Castellano herein, then portends more than another methodology. Rather what is implied is a new kind of universe distinguished by an independent, implicate spontaneity that explicate, natural phenotypes from molecules to a metropolis emerge from and exemplify. These worldwide collaborations over the past few years can now robustly qualify a cosmic Copernican revolution from a moribund Ptolemaic multiverse to a procreative genesis synthesis.

We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions among large numbers of components, leading to ecosystems that possess the prototypical characteristics of complex systems. We argue that statistical mechanics is at present the best methodology available to obtain a quantitative description of complex systems, and that ecology is in urgent need of "integrative" approaches that are quantitative and nonstationary. We describe examples where combining statistical mechanics and ecology has led to improved ecological modeling and, at the same time, broadened the scope of statistical mechanics. (E19 Abstract)

Complex Systems consist of a large number of interacting components. The interactions give rise to emergent hierarchical structures. Statistical Mechanics seeks to understand how properties at systems level emerge from the level of the system-components and their interactions. (E19) This will allow us to demonstrate how macroevolution can be modeled as emerging from the interacting microevolution, which consists of individual organism influencing each other and undergoing reproduction which is prone to mutation. (E20)

Licata, Ignazio. Almost-Anywhere Theories: Reduction and Universality of Emergence. Ecological Complexity. 15/6, 2010. The author is a physicist founder of the Institute for Scientific Methodology, Palermo, Italy, which is concerned with intersections of scientific worldviews and their cultural understanding. In such regard, this paper seeks to move beyond a “Theory of Everything” based on bottom level determinants to a complementary addition of dynamic interrelations at each and all risen, sequential realms of a creative evolution. A certain portal is said to be a proper appreciation of renormalization group theory, not easy to do, as a good way to express nature’s phenomenal self-similarity.

Here, we aim to show that reductionism and emergence play a complementary role in understanding natural processes and in the dynamics of science explanation. In particular, we will show that the renormalization group - one of the most refined tools of Theoretical Physics - allows (us) to understand the importance of emergent processes' role in Nature identifying them as universal organization processes, that is, they are scale independent. (Abstract, 11)

Thus, grasping the complexity of the world requires a theoretical scenario which reconciles the quantum veritas of reductionism with radical emergence processes. The key starting point to understand such scenario is that the world is not made of cellular automata, chess pieces or Newtonian particles, but it is fundamentally quantum-based, informationally open to the observer (entanglement and nonlocal information) and is affected by measurements. (14)

Strictly speaking, in QFT (quantum field theory), similarly and even more radically than in QM, a particle is not a nomological fundamental “object,” but an event fixed by a network of relations whose conditions of existence are set by the dynamics of the interacting fundamental fields. (15)

Hoffmeyer, Jesper. A Biosemiotic Approach to the Question of Meaning. Zygon. 45/2, 2010. In a topical section on “God and the World of Signs: Semiotics and the Emergence of Life,” the University of Copenhagen biologist continues his elucidation of life’s increasingly free ability to articulate and express itself. This evolutionary progression occurs by way of enhanced personal “relative being” beyond isolate objects. But per the second quote, although closer to truth, whence can an indispensible, essential “meaning” be found? (Also in the issue are papers by Andrew Robinson, Christopher Southgate, Bruce Weber, Robert Ulanowicz, and Terrence Deacon.)

The biosemiotic approach to the study of living systems is a logical consequence of the profound trend toward a semiotization of nature that characterized biology up through the twentieth century. (369) Let me confess outright that I do not believe (and Christian thinkers need no more believe) that the world is a fundamentally lawful place. I find it to be more consonant with modern scientific conceptions – building on nonequilibrium thermodynamics or nonlinear systems dynamics, complexity theory, and biosemiotics – that the world was indeterminate in the beginning and that the orderliness we find is the result of an ongoing process of emergence that has been operative through several billions of years. (385)

Skrbina, David, ed. Mind that Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millennium. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. A 21st century collection that aims to revive and affirm the perennial intimation, out of favor in the reign of moribund matter, that knowing sentience must fundamentally, obviously, ground and suffuse extant existence. From Greek hylomorphic vitalism to today’s “hylonoetic” dynamic systems theory, nature is to be seen as alive and aware in both its implicate and explicate realms. To the Australian philosopher Freya Matthews, this essence, deeply imbued in Eastern wisdom, escapes the West because of a pernicious mechanistism. Such “universal interconnectedness” thus serves to form and illume a “panrelational” reality. Some 19 chapters, including an overview and summation by the University of Michigan editor, offer a timely contribution. But must we await the passing of the Ptolemaic machine to a Copernican cosmic genesis until this once and future milieu can truly be admitted?

Some are prepared to go further and claim that this alleged brute emergence of mind – mind from mindless matter – is not only problematic, it is incomprehensible. This fact was recognized already by Epicurus, who argued that human will could not emerge from deterministic atoms, and therefore that atoms themselves possessed a small degree of will (hence, Panpsychism), Telesio, Patrizi, Gilbert, Campanella, Fechner, Paulsen, Clifford, Strong, Teilhard, and Wright all used versions of the same argument on behalf of panpsychism. (Skrbina,3)

Aschwanden, Markus. Self-Organized Criticality in Solar Physics and Astrophysics. http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.0122. A paper presented at the 2010 Interdisciplinary Symposium on Chaos and Complex Systems, in Istanbul, Turkey, which shows how nonlinear SOC, as a “universal and ubiquitous law” throughout nature, can be likewise found to hold for an array of celestial phenomena. The author’s forthcoming book on the subject Self-Organized Criticality in Astrophysics will be out in January 2011 from Springer.

On a most general level, SOC is the statistics of coherent nonlinear processes, in contrast to the Poisson statistics of incoherent random processes. The SOC concept has been applied to laboratory experiments (of rice or sand piles), to human activities (population growth, language, economy, traffic jams, wars), to biophysics, geophysics (earthquakes, landslides, forest fires), magnetospheric physics, solar physics (flares), stellar physics (flares, cataclysmic variables, accretion disks, black holes, pulsar glitches, gamma ray bursts), and to galactic physics and cosmology. (Abstract)

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