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13:3

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

The syntheist biologist and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman investigates the metaphysical significance of emergences in his book Reinventing The Sacred. Kauffman points out that there is nothing built into physics from the start that says that it should emerge and give rise to chemistry, in the same manner that there is nothing built into chemistry from the beginning that says that it should emerge and give rise to biology. Neither chemistry’s nor biology’s future births are in any mysterious way preprogrammed within the Big Bang at the genesis of the Universe. Rather, emergences tend to occur quite suddenly, and quite independently of all previously applying laws of nature. They thereby add an increased complexity to the Universe, rather than just develop something built in beforehand, as the totalist determinists from Plato via Newton to Einstein interpret the function of emergences.