Back to index

13:6

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

On the other hand, it is a mistake to imagine that in some mysterious way these emergences are givens, that they follow some kind of metalaw of nature – which in that case must exist even before the genesis of the Universe, which of course is an impossibility in an internal self-creating universe without a creating god that is both external and preceding. The Universe has namely not created itself in the past, it is creating itself all the time. In this, Kauffman breaks radically with reductionism, the fundamental axiom of the sciences since Newton’s heyday. According to reductionism, everything can be deduced downwards in the hierarchy; as if everything that arises higher up and on a later occasion always lies fully preprogrammed at one of the lower levels on a previous occasion. According to reductionism for example, biology is really only an advanced form of chemistry, while chemistry is really only an advanced form of physics, and nothing more than this.