I. Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

B. Anthropocene Sapiensphere: A Major Emergent Transitional Phase

Taylor, Mark. Reconfiguring Religion. Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 77/1, 2009. We note this latest article by the now Columbia University Chair of Religion both for its engaging, here synoptic, content, along with interim Taylor books Confidence Games and After God, (search) But as many other takes, it seems to get caught up in the conflated bipolar versions of postmodernism, science, and theology that abound today. Belief re God and human, and Kantian teleology, are quite recast in 21st century complexity theories, but a perception of a greater reality and creation, surely vicarious but ultimately it would seem as a story of mother, father and child, still escapes imagination.

The study of biological and information networks has produced a model of complex adaptive systems that can be productively extended to social, political, economic, and cultural systems and networks. These networks have the same structure and operational logic regardless of the context or medium in which they are deployed. (112) In this webby world, the creator God dies and is reborn as emergent creativity deemed divine. (117)

Taylor, Mark. The Moment of Complexity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. A Williams College humanities professor sketches the outlines of a globally emerging network culture through a collage of art, architecture, and nonlinear science. The work offers a literate review of complex systems theory active in biological and mental processes and glimpses the transformation to a world wide intelligence.

Emerging self-organizing systems are complex adaptive systems….As the dynamics of evolving complexity are clarified, it not only becomes apparent that complex adaptive systems evolve, but it also appears that the process of evolution is actually a complex adaptive system. (156)

Kabbalah and Complexity: Two Routes to One Reality. www.neiltheise.com. This luminous posting by the Beth Israel Medical Center philosophical pathologist Neil Theise is reviewed more in the Religion and Science section.

Thompson, Evan. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. A significant work for a number of reasons. A University of Toronto philosopher, Thompson long collaborated with the late systems neuroscientist Francisco Varela. Along with psychologist Eleanor Rosch, they wrote The Embodied Mind (MIT Press, 1991). This present large volume carries forth the essence of Varela’s thought in several areas. Living entities are to be understood as autopoietic in kind for they have a self-produced bounded viability which constantly maintains itself. By so doing, organisms are engaged in a co-creative “enactive” process with their environment whereof each influences and forms the other. By this insight, life can be equated with cognition, and evolution seen as a grand learning process. Mind as broadly defined is not confined to a computational brain, but suffuses body and biosphere. Thompson thus adds another strong argument for the presence of these self-organizing systems at work prior to any mutative and selective effects.

The central metaphor for this approach is the mind as embodied dynamic system in the world, rather than the mind as neural network in the head. (11) Whether the system is a cell, immune network, nervous system, insect colony, or animal society, what emerges is a unity with its own self-producing identity and domain of interactions or milieu, be it cellular (autopoiesis), somatic (immune networks), sensorimotor and neurocognitive (the nervous system), or social (animal societies). (65)

In summary, the form or pattern of the autopoietic organization is that of a peculiar circular interdependency between an interconnected web of self-regenerating processes and the self-production of a boundary, such that the whole system persists in continuous self-production as a spatially distinct individual. (101) For my purposes it is enough to maintain that any living system is both an autopoietic and a cognitive system, for this thesis is sufficient to establish a deep continuity of life and mind. (127)

According to the enactive viewpoint, natural selection is an emergent consequence of autopoiesis, not its cause. This point is both logical and historical. Natural selection requires reproduction, but reproduction presupposes autopoietic unities that reproduce. Hence autopoiesis is logically prior to natural selection. (212) According to the viewpoint I am proposing, self-organization and natural selection are not opposed but are actually two interwoven aspects of a single process of enactive evolution. (215)

Tononi, Giulio. Consciousness as Integrated Information. Biological Bulletin. 215/3, 2008. In the lengthy quote below, th University of Wisconsin psychologist and founder of this now well accepted theory (see section above) wrote a unique consideration of what it might mean if human beings are personally and altogether able to flicker into knowledgeable awareness.

A useful way of thinking about consciousness as a natural property is as follows. We are used to the universe as a vast empty space that contains enormous conglomerations of mass, charge, and energy — giant bright entities from planets to stars to galaxies. In this view, each of us constitutes an extremely small, dim portion of what exists. However, if integrated information is an intrinsic presence, one could perceive a universe with occasional specks of human-like awareness. Thus one small corner of the known cosmos contains a remarkable concentration of extremely bright entities, orders of magnitude brighter than anything around them. Each bright light is the main complex of an individual person. I argue that such a consciousness-centric view is as valid as that of a universe dominated by mass, charge, and energy. Intriguingly, it has been suggested that information may exist prior to physical properties as John A. Wheeler’s it from bit theory proposes. This may well be true but if one considers an “integrated information.” (233)

Toolan, David. At Home in the Cosmos. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001. The late Jesuit theologian achieves a synthesis of Biblical tradition with an organically developing complex universe now reaching reflective consciousness through its human phenomenon. From this testament follows an “Earth ethics” put forth to inspire an ecological sustainability within a sacramental creation.

Trewavas, Anthony. Plant Behavior and Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. This lavish edition by the University of Edinburgh botanist assumes an innately fertile nature whence the same processes of self-organization, complex adaptive systems, modularity, pervasive networks, distinguish not only flora but all fauna from microbial colonies to brains and societies. Through many chapters, the presence, growth, and success of vegetation is graced by an analogous proactive cognizance, cooperation, quorum sensing, and more, as if personal selves. Persistent qualities of communication, quorum sensing, intelligence, awareness, which develop over time, are seen to recur from genomes to forests. A century and a half later, Darwin’s tangled bank is intelligible as a verdant extravagance of order and chaosity, a good example of the imminent scientific realization of a genesis uniVerse. For a succinct overview, see Plant Intelligence in BioScience for July 2016.

Tumer, Kagan and David Wolpert, eds. Collectives and the Design of Complex Systems. Berlin: Springer, 2003. Papers which explore complex adaptive systems, in so many words, as an effective approach for viable informational networks.

A collective is any multiagent system in which each agent adaptively tries to maximize its own private utility function, while at the same time there is an overall world utility that rates the behavior of the entire system. Collectives are quite common in the natural world, canonical examples being human organizations, an ecosystem, or organelles in a living cell. (31)

Turok, Neil. The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2012. Reviewed more in Quantum Cosmology, the Canadian Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics director steps up to make this major corrective statement of physical cosmology. A deep optimism pervades of a natural presence and purpose we are just beginning to fathom and avail.

Tymieniecka, Anna-Teresa and Atilla Grandpierre, eds. Astronomy and Civilization in the New Enlightenment. Analecta Husserliana. Volume 107, 2011. The lead editor of this volume and 1970s founder of the Springer book series is a Polish-American philosopher and professor who now directs the World Phenomenology Institute in Hanover, New Hampshire. One could muse that a second Copernican revolution, by a latter compatriot, today an organic “ontopoiesis” by its “logos of life,” may again be in our midst. In our 21st century, it occurs on a celestial scale from a Ptolemaic machine mutliverse, alien to life and hope, to an animate, conducive cosmos arising from matter and information to mind and spirit, of which earth and human are a creative phenomenon.

As part of the instant, often untoward, shift of books and journals from paper to online, a Google keyword search will access a Springer page where chapter abstracts can be viewed. By way of titles such as Tymieniecka’s “The New Enlightment: Cosmo-Transcendental Position of the Living Being in the Universe,” co-editor Grandpierre’s, a Hungarian Academy of Sciences astronomer, “On the First Principle of Biology and the Foundation of the Universal Science,” Paul Davies’ “Why is the Universe Just Right for Life?,” “Cosmopolis: How Astronomy Affects Philosophies of Human Nature and Religion” by Nancey Murphy, Means Kafatos’ “The Science of Wholeness,” (noted herein) and “Russian Cosmism and the Modern Theory of Complexity” by Helena Knyazeva, (also noted) among others, there begins to coalesce, in a nascent worldwide literature, a grand new genesis vision for the asking.

Ulanowicz, Robert. A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2009. In 1987 at a complex systems conference at the United States Naval Academy, I joined a small lunch group that included the author and Ilya Prigogine. Ulanowicz, now an emeritus University of Maryland theoretical ecologist, avidly engaged the Nobel laureate, who loved good discussion, about how to well articulate a dynamic, creative universe instead of a preset moribund mechanism, which was also Prigogine’s project. In the years since, as noted herein, Bob has deeply thought about ways to express an organically viable nature, which are surveyed in this volume.

A summary of his triad theme is served by a contrast of each option. In the first Newtonian scheme, and second quantum and neoDarwinian offshoots, systems remain closed, atomistic, time-reversible, with deterministic physical laws. But in an third ‘ecological metaphysic,’ living systems are open, animate, with historic trajectories, contingently emergent. In an endeavor to set aside the old fixed, machine model, Ulanowicz goes on to cite an ‘aleatoric’ randomness, a ‘raw chance.’ In such regard, the book is endorsed by biologist and philosopher Stuart Kauffman in an extended “Foreword: The Open Universe,” because it accords with his own sense of a ‘partial lawlessness.’ These attempts to engage into a more life-oriented cosmos fo tend to get caught up in abstractions, and may lose sight of a greater, self-existing genesis, the very idea, they valiantly try to evoke.

A full list of Robert Ulanowicz’s publications can be accessed on his homepage: http://www.cbl.umces.edu/~ulan/. An essay review by John Haught: “Robert Ulanowicz and the Possibility of a Theology of Evolution” which alludes to a “narrative cosmological principle” appeared in Axiomathes, 22/2, 2010. The whole issue is devoted to “Framing a Third Window on Life.” See further the author’s papers in Zygon “Process Ecology: Stepping Stones to Biosemiosis” (45/3, 2010) and “A World of Contingencies” (48/1, 2013).

Ulanowicz, Robert. The Tripartite Nature of Causalities in Ecosystem Dynamics. Current Opinion in System Dynamics. 13/129, 2019. The University of Florida theoretical ecologist and philosopher (search) continues to incisively parse a third openly creative way forward between a dichotomy of lawful order and/or randomness. A central drive can then be seen at formative work via multiple autocatalytic agencies. In a 2018 issue (5/417) of the Oxford journal, National Science Review, is a collaboration of RU with Chinese theorists entitled The Common Developmental Road: Tensions between Centripetal and Centrifugal Dynamics. Ever again through the centuries, a natural verification of such a middle path to marry these archetypes roles achieves their resolve.

Recent opinions on ecosystem dynamics point away from the conventional notion that changes in ecosystems result only from the action of mechanisms interacting with blind chance. More recently, ecological outcomes have come to appear rather as the work of semiautonomous agencies that arise from extended mutualisms that build on themselves by endogenous selection from complex contingencies. Most contingencies, however, still serve in agonistic fashion to degrade system operation. This dualistic agonism between order-building agencies and entropic degradation unfortunately obscures the supporting but insufficient role of underlying universal physical laws. A new and more complete picture of causation in ecosystems appears to be tripartite, with physical constraints (laws) serving as constraining mediators between semiautonomous agencies and interfering contingencies. One is first inclined to represent the three–way relationship in linear fashion with agencies and entropy at the ends and lawful constraints in the middle. (Abstract)

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