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

B. Anthropocene Sapiensphere: A Major Emergent Transitional Phase

Updike, John. The Accelerating Expansion of the Universe. Harper’s Magazine. October, 2004. A short story that unsuccessfully tries to come to terms with an oppressive gloom and despair implied by the reigning model of an indifferent, expiring cosmos that is flying apart. As this site hopes to convey, this sentence may be rescinded by a radically positive genesis being realized by a worldwide cerebral humankind.

The accelerating expansion of the universe imposed an ignominious, cruelly diluted finitude on the enclosing vastness. The eternal hypothetical structures – God, Paradise, the moral law within – now had utterly no base to stand on. (71)

Vidal, Clement. The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer, 2014. The author is a post-doctoral researcher at the Free University of Brussels, this is his PhD thesis supervised by Francis Heylighen. The work is a good example of a mid 2010s endeavor as integral past, present, and future cosmic scenarios become possible. By virtue of our worldwise witness, our home Earth can aspire to become a cognitive center. Such a vista begs a volume to match and the young scholar is up to the task. Part I Overview of Worldviews lays out the project by way of historic religious, philosophical and scientific precursors. Part II The Beginning of the Universe and Part III Our Future in the Universe chart a spatial and temporal cosmos to culture evolutionary development. Fine-tuning evidence is considered, along with physical, mathematical, computational, or biological universe options, as well as an artificial cosmogenesis. Vidal then wonders whether universal selection processes might be at work. These nascent conjectures imply an overall vector whence bioplanetary life and mind can contribute to a long, creative future of “universe making.” In closing, the author muses about an array of spiritual, individual, evolutionary, and cosmological values.

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.

Volk, Tyler. Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. It is worth notice for our natural philosophy resource that this “grand synthesis” by the New York University systems environmentalist (search) appears at the same time as Geoffrey West’s opus Scale: the Universal Laws of Life. Both works attest to and validate a sequential, nested, repetition in kind from universe to human. Volk sights a “combogenesis” with a dozen main phases over physical, biological, and societal stages whence simpler units symbiotically join into new viable wholes. A generative aspect, akin to West’s complex adaptive system, is added by way of an “alphakit” model that serves in a creative genetic or linguistic way. As it proceeds, nature’s emergence might be seen (to me) as a dual interplay of genotype and phenotype. The author of Gaia’s Body (2003) then looks toward an ecologically stable biosphere and maybe noosphere if peoples and nations might similarly rise to a peaceable Earth community.

As these volumes and others describe a sequential, recurrent scenario from basic matter to our witness with an integral veracity not possible earlier, they begin to fulfill the perennial quest to identify and qualify this vista. To his credit, contrary to dismissals, Volk affirms human beings as the intended, anthropocentric goal and purpose of the entire emergence. By these achievements, the prescience of James G. Miller, Pierre Teilhard, Kenneth Boulding, Ludwig Bertalanffy, many more versions, on back to a mythic, correlative essence of microcosm = macrocosm wisdom may at last come to fruition. A step further, we latecomer Earthlings might even be the participatory agency by which a self-organizing (genesis) cosmos achieves its own sapient observation and selection. I have met both Volk and West, their impressive contributions merit a broad audience and application.

Our world is nested, both physically and socially, and at each level we find innovations that are necessary for the next. Consider: atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form single-celled organisms; when people come together, they build societies. Physics has gone far in mapping the basic mechanics of the simplest things and the dynamics of the overall nesting, as have biology and the social sciences for their fields. But what can we say about this beautifully complex whole? In Quarks to Culture, Tyler Volk answers these questions, revealing how a universal natural rhythm―building from smaller things into larger, more complex things―resulted in a grand sequence of twelve fundamental levels across the realms of physics, biology, and culture. He introduces the key concept of “combogenesis,” the building-up from combination and integration to produce new things with innovative relations. He explores common themes in how physics and chemistry led to biological evolution, and biological evolution to cultural evolution. The resulting inclusive natural philosophy brings clarity to our place in the world, offering a roadmap for those who seek to understand big history and wrestle with questions of how we came to be.

Volk, Tyler. Rhymes and Reasons. Science & Spirit. September-October, 2004. An earth systems scientist and author at New York University takes issue with the current effort in physics to find a quantum “theory of everything.” Instead the proper approach ought to appreciate the presence of dynamic patterns and networks throughout an emergent, creative cosmos. Such a perception can then fulfill Galileo’s project of reading the grand book of nature through mathematics, as it finally becomes legible through computation and its graphic display.

Is the self-similar? Are we a nested series of levels, all the way down to the firings of the brain’s neurons? (49)

Wagner, Andreas. Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us about Creativity. New York: Basic Books, 2019. The University of Zurich evolutionary biologist (search) follows up his Arrival of the Fittest (2015) by an emphasis on how life’s genetic advance might best be seen to take place on an active landscape of hills, valleys and mountains, as first cited by Sewall Wright in 1932. An appreciation of its deep potential to foster novel, viable improvements for better survivability and existence just now becomes evident. The presence of self-organizing energies from Ilya Prigogine and other forces are also seen at work. Later chapters then offer how these 21st century insights can aid the education and inspiration of children and onto innovative global cultures.

In these explorations I have discovered astonishing similarities between natural and human creativity. First, it is about things Charles Darwin could not know – that natural selection can face obstacles that it alone cannot overcome. And it explains the mechanisms of evolution that can overcome them. Second, it illustrates the similarities between human creativity and a modern, segmented view of Darwinian evolution. These similarities are not only numerous but also deep, as psychological, historical, and biological research will later testify. (4)

Evolution can manipulate such recipes easily because any one regulator recognizes not just one but hundreds of different DNA words. Together, all those DNA words – each a special kind of genotype – form a landscape of gene regulation. (50) The DNA text copied in a duplication may comprise a few letters, thousands of letters, or large parts of a chromosome with millions of letters. (74)

In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection--instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's forty-some iterations of Guernica, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing. By understanding these principles, we can also better realize our own creative potential to find new solutions to adversity. (Publisher)

In evolutionary biology, fitness landscapes or adaptive landscapes are used to visualize the relationship between genotypes and reproductive success. It is assumed that every genotype has a well-defined replication rate (often referred to as fitness). This fitness is the "height" of the landscape. Genotypes which are similar are said to be "close" to each other, while those that are very different are "far" from each other. The set of all possible genotypes, their degree of similarity, and their related fitness values is then called a fitness landscape. (Wikipedia)

Wagner, Andreas. Possible Creatures. aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/natures-library-of-platonic-forms. A March 2015 contribution by the University of Zurich biologist to this salon site which has become a choice forum for frontier thinkers. The posting provides a good summary of the author’s 2014 breakthrough work Arrival of the Fittest. An explanation of how species occur in the first place, not possible in Darwin’s day, is again traced to “nature’s library of Platonic forms.” In this textual view, the universe is seen as a vast alphabetic repository of books which informs and guides animal appearances and their evolutionary post-selection. From Greek origins to Jorge Borges, such an independent, natural genetic resource can at last be affirmed.

So nature’s libraries and their sprawling networks go a long way towards explaining life’s capacity to evolve. But where do they come from? You cannot see them in the glass lizard or its anatomy. They are nowhere near life’s visible surface, nor are they underneath this surface, in the structure of its tissues and cells. They are not even in the submicroscopic structure of its DNA. They exist in a world of concepts, the kind of abstract concepts that mathematicians explore. Does that make them any less real?

Walker, Alice. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Light in a Time of Darkness.. New York: New Press, 2006. The renowned author and crusader for social justice, in a series of luminous essays including commencement remarks to the California Institute of Integral Studies, exhorts people folks to a “global antiwar rage” in this time of insane militarism. A worldwide enlightenment could just as readily be at hand if we can appreciate our common planetary selfhood.

Weiss, Kenneth and Anne Buchanan. Is Life Law-Like? Genetics. 188/761, 2011. We post three Weiss-Buchanan articles at once, please search. For they are picking up on and trying to express, along with a global chorus such as Sara Walker, Stuart Newman, Irene Chen, Martin Nowak, (search) a nascent sense and articulation of this epochal revolution. As this site seeks to document, physical matter is progressively becoming rejuvenated by way of an intrinsic nonlinear spontaneity. Many evolutionary theorists admit that random molecular contingency and post-selection is simply inadequate to explain regnant life and we observers. While much “probabilistic” variety does go on, a prior organizational agency is strongly implied and necessary to fully explain. As chance is leavened with generative code, a grand 21st century genesis evolutionary synthesis comes closer.

Genes are generally assumed to be primary biological causes of biological phenotypes and their evolution. In just over a century, a research agenda that has built on Mendel’s experiments and on Darwin’s theory of natural selection as a law of nature has had unprecedented scientific success in isolating and characterizing many aspects of genetic causation. We revel in these successes, and yet the story is not quite so simple. The complex cooperative nature of genetic architecture and its evolution include teasingly tractable components, but much remains elusive. The proliferation of data generated in our “omics” age raises the question of whether we even have (or need) a unified theory or “law” of life, or even clear standards of inference by which to answer the question. If not, this not only has implications for the widely promulgated belief that we will soon be able to predict phenotypes like disease risk from genes, but also speaks to the limitations in the underlying science itself. Much of life seems to be characterized by ad hoc, ephemeral, contextual probabilism without proper underlying distributions. To the extent that this is true, causal effects are not asymptotically predictable, and new ways of understanding life may be required. (Abstract)

This raises a disturbing question. If life is a phenomenon that obediently follows the physical laws of chemistry, yet there is not a law of life, and if life is a set of statistical principles, but its dynamics need not be statistically significant, then how is life to be understood? Or, put a more practical way, if life is usually causally complex and contextual and does not follow a law, then against what baseline, or what criteria should we anchor our evidence, conclusions, or generalizations? (768) Many other authors, current and past, have attempted to incorporate more ecologically interactive or cooperative systems and/or phenotype- rather than genotype- based views of life. There is also an active “complexity” school of thought that tries to relate reductionism to emergent self-organizing higher-order traits. (769)

We are still being aided (and baited) by continuing technological development, but this has enabled us to see that, in important ways, life might not be law-like in the Enlightenment sense, or even that we may not know when or if we have found such laws. Such realization does not challenge empiricism, but questions current empirical approaches to causation and inference, especially in regard to understanding of the phenomenon of emergence. And that leads to a radical thought: Could it be that, as a result of what technology is revealing, the sun is setting on three centuries of Enlightenment-based science — with genetics leading the way to some new kind of empiricism? (769)

Wendt, Alexander. Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. The German American professor of International Security and Political Science at Ohio State University is a leading scholar in these fields, with his 1999 Social Theory of International Politics winning a “book of the decade” award. This present work joins these disparate title domains so as to achieve a breakthrough synthesis not be possible earlier. As this site reports, a 2010s cosmic revolution is much underway from a moribund mechanism to an integral biological genesis. From his academic gravitas, backed by an extensive bibliography and a review of past vitalist views, a novel “quantum vitalism” can now be realized. By these lights, this natural milieu is innately panpsychic, fecund, self-organizing, and now graced by our active participation. By these lights, this natural milieu can be realized as innately panpsychic, fecund, self-organizing, and presently graced by active human participation.

By this vista, which the book informs and conveys, a new appreciation of the micro quantum and macro classical phases can accrue. The fundamental quantum realm can be appreciated as quite organic in kind, which may be why it has been so at odds with the macro-machine of things and persons as objects rather than subjects. The new sciences of dynamic, self-organizing complex network systems are another contributor to this view. Among many companion works cited, New Materialisms edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010) glimpses this resolve. Sapient, societal people are thus no longer alien accidents but spontaneously arising from and continuous with a fertile material ground, an extraordinary synthesis.

An integral hologram model whence every part reflects the whole image is then evoked from cosmos to civilizations. Wendt’s impetus is a salutary resolve of sectarian, continental, and international affairs from their current clash and crash. His chapter, Flatland: Quantum Mind and the International Hologram in New Systems Theories of World Politics (2010), is an earlier version to this effect. A companion effort would be Ran Kuttner’s The Wave/Particle Tension in Negotiation (2011, search) by way of a quantum Taoist poise of entity and community, concerns and conciliation. No longer a peripheral view, in 2015 a premier scholar can endorse a radically animate human universe which is at last evident for the asking and seeing.

My proposal for a quantum vitalism has important elements in common with New Materialism. It too aims to re-think matter into a less “material” and more active force. In ith panpsychist basis it also sees and essential continuity between living and dead matter. And in its claim that all organisms are subjects it shares a non-anthropocentric, post-humanist view of reality, which would deny to human beings a privileged ontological position from which to justify abusing nature. (146)

Finally, my proposal implies a sharp distinction between life and non-life, both substantively and normatively. While in my panpsychist view matter at the quantum level is latent with life, it only becomes life when organized into quantum coherent wholes. When there is no quantum coherence, as in thermostats or computer, matter is dead, and as such does not have agency or other intentional properties. – causal powers, yes but not agency. (147) Making a quantum panpsychist turn enables us to abandon materialism once and for all in favor of a broader, vitalist physicalism that can accommodate that which is most distinctive about life, namely its subjective aspect. (147)

I began Part III by describing what human beings are if we imagine them under a strict classical physic constraint, which is to say without reference to consciousness and therefore intentional properties. The resulting image is one of a machine or zombie – material, well-defined, subject only to local causation, deterministic, and, in effect, dead. I argued that a very different picture emerges if we imagine ourselves under a quantum constraint with a panpsychist ontology. Quantum Man is physical but not wholly material, conscious, in superposed rather than well-defined states, subject to and also a source of non-local causation, free purposeful, and very much alive. In short, she is a subject rather than an object, and less an agent than an agency, someone always in a state of Becoming. (207).

Toward a Quantum Vitalist Sociology: The dominant model of man in naturalistic social science today is materialist, ontologically deterministic, and mechanistic. Yet, while it is recognized that people have minds the fact that our minds are conscious plays little role in mainstream scholarship, where we are modeled as either machines or zombies, and thus, in effect, as dead. (267) In this book I have laid the ground for a different, albeit still naturalist, sociology. Building on quantum consciousness theory, in Parts II and III, I argued that human beings are conscious, free, and purposive in a teleological sense – in short, very much alive. I suggested this amounts to a genuinely vitalist ontology – not the ersatz vitalism of New Materialism, but a phenomenological vitalism in which subjectivity is constituted by a physical but non-material and unobservable life force: quantum coherence. (267)

West, Geoffrey. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. New York: Penguin, 2017. Geoffrey West, a theoretical physicist, has been a pioneer advocate of the complex systems movement since the 1980s. With senior posts at Los Alamos Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute SFI, he assembled a research team to study dual evolutionary domains. For biological and ecosystems, from the 1990s James Brown and Brain Enquist were main members, while in the 2000s and 2010s, Luis Bettencourt, Deborah Strumsky, Jose Lobo (search each) and others illumed human societies. At a conference in 2002, I chatted with the author and asked if he was contemplating a book. Indeed he was, for something seems to be going on, but its time was not ready. Some 15 years later, this 475 page volume was worth the wait, for it is a robust fulfillment of this 30 year revolution whence the same form and flux is found to repeat in exemplary kind across 50 orders of magnitude from a microbe to a metropolis.

Although a technical treatise (see our Chapter IV for a long glossary), its achievement via worldwide resources merits wide attention. In regard, it concludes with a Vision of a Grand Unified Theory of Sustainability if these natural lineaments can be socially and environmentally carried forth into practice. For example, anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s (search) nested groupings from five to over a hundred are seen to manifest a fractal self-similarity. I visited SFI in 1987, which was just starting up but with the incentive that such a universality, a term West uses, was there to be found. In the 1960s general systems theory was of this mind, just as the perennial quest to distill common correlations from heaven to human has been. In regard, Philip Ball’s writes a good review in Nature for May 11, 2017 (545/154). By a nascent sense of a creative organic universe in the air, one could imagine a cosmic genetic code in steady, recurrent effect. See also Tyler Volk’s new Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be (search 2017) for a concurrent perspective.

The examples shown in Figures 1-4 are just a tiny sampling of an enormous number of such scaling relationships that quantitatively describe bow almost any measurable characteristic of animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and companies scales with size. You will be seeing many more of them throughout this book. The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all these very different highly complex phenomena and that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic “laws.” (5)

Viewed through this lens, cities, companies, plants, animals, our bodies, and even tumors manifest a remarkable similarity in the ways that they are organized and function. Each represents a fascinating variation on a general universal theme that is manifested in surprisingly systematic mathematical regularities and similarities in their organization, structure, and dynamics. These will be shown to be consequences of a broad, big-picture conceptual framework for understanding such disparate systems in an integrated unifying way, with which many of the big issues can be addressed, analyzed and understood. (15)

This remarkably systematic repetitive behavior is called scale invariance or self-similarity and is a property inherent to power laws. It is closely related to the concept of a fractal. To varying degrees, fractality, scale invariance, and slef-similarity are ubiquitous across nature galaxies and clouds to ours cells, your brain, the Internet, companies, and cities. (92)

West, Geoffrey. The Importance of Quantitative Systemic Thinking in Medicine. Lancet. 379/1551, 2012. In a special issue on Physics and Medicine, the systems physicist and past president of the Santa Fe Institute succinctly reviews both complexity science, and its potentials for better wellbeing health care from infancy to aging. But as the quotes convey, one might realize that more than another method or approach is being described. Geoffrey West has been a leading theorist, advocate, and natural philosopher from his 1984 physics volume (Precedents) to a 2011 TED talk (Universal Principles) of a creative nonlinear nature. As this article conveys, several surmises can be gleaned. Complex adaptive systems whereof many discrete entities engage in dynamic, rule-guided interaction has become the common phrase and agency. An invariant, iterative scale of nested fractal networks now stretches from biomolecules to a metropolis as the same phenomena recurs from microcosm to macrocosm. A stratified, recurrent reality thus results, both spatially and temporally, from universe to human. By these lights, an independent, mathematical source seems to be at generative effect everywhere. By this nascent vista is a cosmic Copernican revolution in our midst from Ptolemaic mechanisms to a procreative genesis whence this ubiquitous pattern and process, quickening and awakening in its development, is the guise of a parents to children genetic code?

The study and practice of medicine could benefit greatly from an enhanced engagement with the new perspectives provided by the emerging specialties of complexity science and systems biology. To develop a more complete understanding of health, disease and dysfunction and the many issues in medical research and education a more integrated systemic, holistic approach is likely to be needed as with any complex adaptive system. (1552)

However, computer-modeled simulations have had the greatest effect on the early development of complexity science. These showed how highly complex and diverse behaviors of systems as a whole, including the emergence of multiscale structure and organization, can develop from very simple rules that govern interactions in the constituents (eg, cells) of the systems. Investigations have given credence to the idea that the extraordinary complexity of real complex adaptive systems, such as proteins, cells, organs, social systems, and economies, including the health-care system, is the result of simple rules at the constituent level. (1552)

So, what about scaling in biology and medicine more generally? First, the range of scalability of life: organisms span more than 21 orders of magnitude in mass from the smallest microorganisms to the largest mammals and plants and use energy at rates that span more than 18 orders of magnitude. Over this immense range of sizes, life is made up of basically the same chemical constituents, reactions, and principles to create a diversity of forms, functions, and dynamic behaviors. (1553)

Since each organism, organ, cell type, and gene has evolved through natural selection in a unique, historically contingent environmental niche that is subject to random forces, these systematic relations are highly counterintuitive. Furthermore, the number four plays a special, fundamental part as manifested in the ubiquitous quarter-power exponents. This strongly suggests that natural selection has been constrained by other general physical principles which originate from the mathematical, physical, and geometrical properties of the networks that sustain life at all scales. (1556)

The framework for understanding the origin of scaling laws is based on the finding that all life is ultimately constrained by rates at which energy, metabolites, and information can be supplied through the many hierarchical branching network systems that sustain life at all scales. Examples include circulatory, respiratory, renal, neural, genetic, metabolic, and mitochondrial networks, all of which play crucial parts in medicine and health. The generic mathematical, dynamic, and organizational properties of these networks are the underlying mechanism for the origin of the observed scaling laws. (1556)

Another indication of the importance of systems thinking is provided by the ubiquity of fractal-like structures in biology. In addition to spatial manifestation, fractals also occur in time series of many phenomena, such as electrocardiograms showing fluctuations in the heartbeats or functions MRI studies of neuronal activities (both of which are similar to the time series of stock-market fluctuations). (1558)

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