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12:10

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

This applies to social emergences just as much as physical emergences. Biology brings something new to chemistry as such, which in turn brings something new to physics as such. In the same way that the Internet brings something new to the mass media from precisely a mass medial perspective, which in turn adds something to written language as such. How could the potentialities of physics or written language be apparent to us today without their subsequent and amplifying historical actualisations? This becomes even clearer when one brings into the argument the fact that there are no laws that make these emergences necessary in advance in our contingent universe. As Hegel very correctly points out, the actualisations only appear as necessary afterwards for us constant rewriters of history. The reason for this is that the emergences – in contrast to, for example, the phase transitions in physics – are not preprogrammed within the phenomena that are located in the hierarchy’s lower tier. The emergences are completely contingent phenomena. They thus arise ex nihilo at a certain, arbitrary moment, without, as is the case with the phase transitions, having been built into the lower tiers from the start.