Back to index

13:2

(In »Participatory culture, religious rituals and psychedelic practices«)

From once having been an obscure philosophical idea, emergence with time has become a central concept within the sciences. The idea is that a specific system can change so dramatically in conjunction with a small shift in its degree of complexity – at a tipping point – that the system as a whole is transformed from one kind of phenomenon into something completely different, where the new emergent phenomenon appears with entirely new properties and qualities that entail that it must be classified as something entirely new in relation to the original system. According to relationalist physics, an emergence moreover means that nature as a whole goes through a change. The emergence has such a decisive ontological significance that a return from the new to the old paradigm is impossible after the emergence. Between different emergent phenomena with, in principle, the same component parts, there is a hierarchy. Every emergent transition forms a new level in the hierarchy. But because every suddenly arisen emergence has its own just as suddenly arisen laws and rules – this is quite possible as long as the newly created laws and rules do not threaten the existence of the actual hierarchy – it also changes nature as a whole for all time in a relationalist universe.