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Emergence
The conviction that existence is indeterministic and the future thereby is open, which enables various conditions to suddenly change so radically as to cause laws and rules for both states themselves and their surroundings, including so-called laws of nature, to fundamentally change. Often cited examples are that chemistry as a phenomenon is emergent in relation to physics and biology as a phenomenon is emergent in relation to chemistry. Note that emergences in principle only take place once in history and for example cannot be replicated in experiments, since they do not obey any laws of nature whatsoever preceding their genesis. Note also that emergences such as the Darwinian evolution cannot possibly arise in a determinist universe.
According to the Austrian monk David Steindl-Rast, religious practice starts with doctrine, which is followed by ethics and finally consummated in ritual – all with the purpose of creating a social emergence, to unite people around an entity that they experience as greater than themselves individually, and greater than the sum of the group of individuals. This is definitely something worth bearing in mind: the original point of religion was to create affinity and loyalty within a dynamic collective. In this context, God is no more than the arbitrarily chosen name for the sense of belonging that people seek. Nowhere is this usage of God as a productive object of projection clearer than in the person who has failed in life in his or her own mind and is bravely struggling for self-restitution. When Bill Wilson founds Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States in the 1930s for example, it was with the unshakeable conviction that religion – in whichever form it appears, as long as it preaches a sense of belonging that is greater and mightier than the small, cramped prison, which is how the addict experiences his/her own subjectivity – is the best possible springboard out of alcohol addiction. Religion is that within us which is greater than ourselves and for precisely this reason it is closer to our hearts than our fragile little egos.
Primitivism is the first paradigm; it is based on the revolutionising emergence of spoken language and is characterised by nomadism, hunting, fishing and gathering. Primitivist metaphysics is based on reverence for one’s ancestors and respect for the tribe’s oldest members, since these are the collective’s most reliable and resource-rich knowledge bank, and thus also the key to survival, the engine of primitivist metaphysics. The narrative of nomadism revolves around the concept of history as circular with the regular return of the seasons as its dominant symbol. Existence is not linear, has no direction, time instead runs in recurring cycles; there is no development, everything is instead repeated ad infinitum. To be a human being is to be a member of a tribe, and within the limits of the tribe’s structures, to take responsibility for ensuring that this perpetual repetition is maintained. Strangers constitute competitors for the tribe’s resources, wherefore one either flees from them or beats them to death when one happens upon them. The human being who does not belong to the tribe is therefore not a human being at all, but an animal that can basically be treated as nonchalantly or brutally as one pleases.
Feudalism is the second paradigm, which starts from the emergence of written language and is characterised by permanent settlements, land ownership, agriculture and the domestication of livestock. Society’s focus lies on the domestication of animals and plants and a low-intensity class struggle between the aristocrats and the peasants. Written language was invented and started to develop as early as more than 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, after which it arose in three other places (Egypt, the Indus Valley and China) roughly simultaneously and independently of each another. But it exploded in use over the entire Eurasian landmass during the period that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age (Achsenzeit in German) between 800 and 200 B.C. The Chinese, Indian, Iranian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek cultures flourished during the Axial Age, since for the first time it became possible to build empires (an order from the administrative centre of the empire could be expected to arrive un-garbled and be implemented as intended out in the provinces), and it was at this time the world was also blessed with the first formalised world religions – for example Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and Judaism – and the first documented philosophy. It might be added that additional advanced civilisations in for example Italy, Ethiopia and Peru developed soon thereafter.
Entheos means the God from within in Greek. And our inside is fundamentally split, for we are dividuals and not individuals and thus tangible evidence ourselves of the irreducible multiplicity of existence. Therefore Entheos is the difference as a divinity, and since difference piled on difference becomes a duration of differences, we are also speaking here of the god of time. Entheos is quite simply the historical differentiation as divinity, simply because the lapse of time is and must be a constant repetition of ever so small differences and not an eternal repetition of the same. Aside from being the divinity of difference and duration, Entheos is also the divinity of contingency, oscillation, plurality, transcendence, ecstasy, melancholy, transformation and emergence. Entheos is the borderland between Atheos and Pantheos, that which sets the dialectics between Atheos and Pantheos in motion, the medium through which Atheos and Pantheos communicate with each other. Entheos is the very relation between Atheos and Pantheos set in motion, but also the constant, high-octane oscillation within both Atheos and Pantheos. Entheos is the syntheist agent’s god and the common name for, and oscillation between, Taoism’s yin and yang.
Deleuze advocates a Nietzschean affirmation of the eternal return of the same in constantly returning loops of a kind, without substance of their own, with only minute changes for every revolution, which opens the way for the sudden genesis of emergent novelties, for example in the process-philosophical, artistic search for the genuine expression, or in the process-religious, spiritual search for the genuine impression. Therefore, artistic expression and spiritual experience strive towards the syntheist emergence made sacred, through which they can communicate an actual meaning, impart an existential substance, to the syntheist agent’s existence. The conclusion of this train of thought is that the credible spirituality of our time – which is important when syntheism is compared to competing religious and metaphysical alternatives – can only arise within the confines of the immanent process religion. It is not possible to take other religious and metaphysical alternatives seriously as spiritual projects in the Internet age; they cannot be anything other than guilt-driven nostalgia (like holding on to the religion of one’s parents in spite of it having become irrelevant) or nonsensical superstition (such as New Age and other commercial, exoticised posturing masquerading as spirituality).
We are forced to abandon the old Cartesian internarcissism in order to construct a universocentric interdependism instead. And based on a universocentric interdependism, society or the social must be a primary emergence, that is, we apply the One in a Spinozist sense to the social under the name Syntheos, in the same way that we already apply the One to the universal under the name Pantheos. What is essential here is that the social as a whole thereby precedes the Kantian relation between the subject and the object instead of the other way around, just as the Universe on the whole precedes all kinds of atomist constructions within physics. In addition, interdependism must be relationalist and not relativist; the mutual dependence of the agents applies at all levels in the hierarchy, and thus also within the phenomena themselves.
But while Dawkins has a markedly reductionist attitude towards memetics – all human expressions can be broken down into their smallest components, individual memes – Blackmore is the first proponent of a relationalist memetics. She points out that a cluster of memes often undergoes an emergence and together these memes form in fact a memeplex, a phenomenon that de facto constitutes something more than just its smallest constituent parts (the various memes). Thereby Blackmore succeeds in doing something which Dawkins and Dennett failed to do: namely, to explain how a society, a culture, a civilisation – the outermost forms of memeplexes – arise, survive and even propagate, based on a strictly memetic explanatory model. Thus, as a memeplex of its own, memetics must be regarded as a memetic replication of semiotics, a discipline in the borderland between philosophy and science whose roots go back to John Locke’s vision of a science of signs which he formulates in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as early as the end of the 17th century.
Islam originally means precisely submission and every faithful Muslim submits to a strictly circumscribed way of life filled with more or less arduous duties in the form of daily prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, etc. The believer thus becomes a small but significant cog in an infinitely much greater machinery. In key respects, religion is precisely this: a liberation from the petty perspective of one’s own ego and the limited possibilities for asserting oneself in the world, which leads to a merging into a collective organism with everything that this means in terms of the feelings of expansion and ecstasy associated with coordinated behaviour, that is, participation in a socio-cultural emergence process. Singing, dancing, speaking in tongues: through various types of liturgical rites, religion binds the collective together emotionally and creates at least one convincing illusion of access to the transcendental. Personal antipathies and conflicts are lessened or disappear in the rhythmically synchronised intoxication of the community.
Thereafter we only have to reverse the addition to get subtraction, the temporarily negative addition – neither more nor less. In the next step, we build further with multiplication and division as shortcuts to increasingly complex additions and subtractions. And so on, and so forth. But we never leave eternalism within mathematics, which of course ultimately is applied eternalism par excellence. Mobilist existence outside mathematical construction does not take any notice of this however; it is not the least bit more mathematical than it is eternalist. All such things are merely illusory conceptions that are nourished by our inadequate albeit functional aids for navigating the turmoil of existence. It is important to note here that mathematics does not distinguish itself from physics as some kind of latter-day emergence – no such suddenly arisen mystical degree of complexity is needed – rather, this separation actually occurs right at the same moment that mathematics starts to come into use at all. The structured fantasy sets off in one direction, the chaotic reality in another. We live in a radically relationalist universe – not in a mathematical one. We must not follow the autistic Plato and mistake mathematics’ tempting simplifications and fancy symmetries for endlessly complex reality per se. Mathematics is merely our eternalised way of trying to understand a mobilist environment that constantly evades our descriptions of it, and at the end of the day this must also apply to mathematical formulas per se, which become tangible within Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics. According to the British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, one of Whitehead’s most prominent disciples, Cantor succeeds in creating a science of infinity. Syntheism can only agree and if nothing else say thank you for the inspiring metaphors.
In relationalist physics emergences play a central role. Emergences appear when a more simple system for some reason or other attains a higher degree of complexity to such a great extent that it changes shape and transforms into a completely new phenomenon with completely new properties. An example might be that biology is regarded as an emergent phenomenon in relation to chemistry, in the same way that chemistry in turn is an emergent phenomenon in relation to physics. And if emergences play a central role within the sciences, there is no fundamental reason to exclude the possibility that the metaphysical equivalent to these emergences could play as important a role in social theories. There is thus good reason to regard the metaphysical event as the social equivalent to the physical emergence.
However, relationalist metaphysics takes this Nietzschean and Foucauldian critical thinking about truth production one step further. Quite simply, according to relationalism, relativism does not go far enough in its criticism of an antiquated and useless idea of truth. A new metatruth is required for the Internet age. It is correct that the prevailing power structure strives to produce the truth that confirms and solidifies its position. But regardless of this, a new truth may have a higher informational content and a stronger empirical demonstrability than an old one, that is, aside from its greater relevance and usability for a new power structure. According to this view, it may thus climb higher in a hierarchy of produced truth and de facto be closer to an imagined, but in fact in terms of its formulation, inaccessible reality well-founded in physically indisputable facts, by constituting an emergence in relation to the old version of truth.
Through this new, information-technology writing of history, we receive not just a more relevant and more power-generating world view for the burgeoning netocracy – thus far a relativist historian would agree – but we also receive, through the Internet’s status as an historical emergence, also a de facto truer, and from an intersubjective perspective more realistic, view of history as such. The emergence quite simply helps us to see a greater depth in the past that has previously evaded us, as Hegel would express the matter. And the emergence changes the historical playing field once and for all, not just directly in contemporary time and in the future, but even indirectly, projected onto the past. For this reason an emergence is not just a completely new phenomenon that appears in conjunction with a higher degree of complexity in the underlying structure. An emergence is also a truer phenomenon than the preceding phenomena further down in the hierarchy to the extent that the emergence per se enables a deeper understanding of the hierarchy as a whole.
Badiou maintains that every universal singularly is open vis-à-vis the future and remains constantly unfinished. It is not concerned with our mortality or general fragility. He sums up universality as the faithful construction of an infinite, generic multiplicity where the multiplicity must be primary since the One is merely a verbal illusion (that is, the One is the eternalised fictive par excellence, if we use a syntheological vocabulary). Multiplicity is merely a linguistic singular; any singular outside the irreducible plurality does not exist. Every universality is exceptional, has its origin in a single emergence, is assembled step by step, is the consequence of an existential decision, generates an ethical subject and is based on a becoming in an active truth and not on any specific knowledge. Badiou argues that philosophy obviously comprises the art of analysing, but above all is the art of articulating universalities. The truth event arises, according to him, ex nihilio. To begin with, this event is invisible rather than obviously identifiable where and when it occurs. It is not possible to predict or trace based on the circumstances around the situation where it occurs. Instead the truth event gets its status from the faithful subsequently, and its general acceptance is determined by the strength and perseverance of the faithful, their loyalty. It is quite simply the faithful who must make the event true; it can only get its status as a singularity by means of an aesthetic retrospectivity.
For Zizek, revolutionism is even necessary on an ontological level. Just like his role model Lenin, Zizek claims that revisionism – the step-by-step transition to the Communist society – is impossible, since every step in the revisionist process salvages too much of what is reprehensible in the pre-revolutionary society, things that only the revolution can wipe out. Therefore the revolution is both desirable and necessary, and therefore, according to Zizek, it is the only authentic event. A radically immanent interpretation of the concept of revolution would however reply that both the bloody demonstrations on the streets and the realisations of a far-off personified justice – to the extent that they take place at all – actually are only marginal expressions among many others of the real, underlying revolution. This revolution is instead always a long drawn-out process, precisely a step-by-step but at the same time non-linear revision which starts with a revolutionary change of the material conditions (for example the Internet’s emergence as the manifestation of Syntheos), followed by a revolutionary change in social practices (syntheism’s high-tech participatory culture), which in turn is followed by a revolutionary change in intersubjective metaphysics (syntheism’s subtraction, monastisation and psychedelic practices), which only thereafter can lead to the longed-for social event (the syntheist utopia, the syntheological pyramid’s completion), where the power structure hopefully can be adjusted, more or less dramatically, in order to liberate the new paradigm’s creative potential.
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.
Kauffman argues that the apparent presence of emergences means that the principle of self-organisation must be added to Darwinian natural selection in order for the sciences to hang together and provide a comprehensive picture of nature’s various processes. Emergences and their self-organisation quite simply add something fundamental to the sciences that natural selection lacks, namely an idea of how the pre-adaptive material, which is later the basis of the success story of the evolutionary process, actually arises. The point is that the emergence per se is not a product of Darwinian natural selection; rather it is something as remarkable as a suddenly arisen and self-organising phenomenon, spontaneously emanating from a disorganised chaos, which later turns out to be a piece in the jigsaw puzzle with a perfect fit when circumstances in the otherwise Darwinian process change.
The emergence’s potentiality is based on a single simple principle: however many actualities might exist in physics, the potentialities that precede these actualities are always still far more numerous. It is sufficient to go to every human being’s genesis in order to establish that this is the case: for every dividual that is born, nature wastes millions and millions of sperm and also a large number of eggs, which are never made use of at all. And now we are just talking about the eggs and sperm that in spite of everything are actualised as precisely eggs and sperm – the virtual eggs and sperm are in turn many times more numerous. Out of this infinite multiplicity, the emergences stand out as the great winners, as the possibilities that an ultra-creative universe sooner or later must produce anyway, and they are impressive in their pre-adaptive ability to self-organise durable and stable complexities. It is not strange that people have allowed themselves to be carried away by nature’s ability to generate emergences throughout history.
Kauffman points out that above all the Universe is characterised by an enormous, constant creativity – it is quite simply capable, in a pantheist spirit, of constantly giving rise to completely new phenomena with completely new laws and rules, right down to their metaphysical foundations. Therefore Kauffman draws the conclusion that the presence of emergences calls upon us to create a new religion – or to use his own parlance: he encourages us to allow a new religion to emerge from our consciousness – once the insight of the central roles of the emergence and self-organisation in relationist physics become widely accepted with full force in informationalist metaphysics. Decades of extensive complexity-theory studies have made Kauffman a convinced and almost militant syntheist. His book’s title Reinventing The Sacred says it all.
With his theory of the sum of all histories, the physicist Richard Feynman proves that a particle can follow all sorts of potential paths from A to B. The vacuum’s energy exhibits the least amount of energy in space, but is never at the zero level. A vacuum is always something and never nothing; it is filled with incessant fluctuations, there is never any passive condition of non-being anywhere. On top of this, Planck’s constant is a kind of emergence engine of physics: below the Planck length there is pure chaos, above the Planck length organised cosmologies arise. Therefore the Planck length is the least relevant component in all physical measuring, it is the level where the organisation of existence first appears as a discrete emergence on top of which the ensuing higher emergences such as chemistry, biology and human consciousness have been able to arise entirely spontaneously.
If emergences within hierarchies are central for the sciences, there is no reason why our studies of mental and social phenomena should be facilitated by defining emergences within mental and social hierarchies as well. It is sufficient to note that a new level in a mental or social phenomenon is no longer reducible to its constituent parts, and we have thus identified an emergence. In this way Christianity is emergent in relation to Judaism, socialism is emergent in relation to liberalism, syntheism is emergent in relation to atheism, to name just three clear and close-at-hand examples. While interactivity is emergent in relation to the mass media, the mass media are in turn emergent in relation to written language, just as written language is emergent in relation to spoken language. Etcetera.
The syntheist community differs radically from the socialist idea of the collective that oppresses the dividual and forces her into submission. Here there is no talk of false consciousness. Rather, it is about the following: the less self-interest the dividual brings to the religious ceremony, the more powerful the spiritual experience. The spiritual work focuses on training the participants in a process that moves from the dissolution of the ego to a climb up the syntheological pyramid. Through this direct participation, the dividual becomes an active agent in and for the syntheist community, where the congregation is somewhat larger and more important than the separate dividual: the network of relations that gives the dividual context, meaning and existential weight in relation to herself. It is a matter of letting go of the ego fixation and allowing oneself to dissolve into the hierarchically higher collective emergence, where the community stands out as something greater than the sum of its constituent parts, as the most powerful agent. This is the infinite now, the immanent transcendence, the point where the connection to time and space disappears, where the dividual dissolves into something larger than herself, where Syntheos appears and completes the syntheological pyramid. The symbol for the infinite now is of course the lone photon, the light in eternity.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58