[Essay]

Edge: BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED By Stuart A. Kauffman
Thanks, TheFallibleFiend, for this enrapturing tidbit I enjoyed over lunchbreak.

God and a Global Ethic

God is the most powerful symbol we have created. The Spaniards in the New World built their churches on the holy sites of those they vanquished. Notre Dame sits on a Druid holy site. Shall we use the God word? It is our choice. Mine is a tentative "yes". I want God to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours. What do we gain by using the God word? I suspect a great deal, for the word carries with it awe and reverence. If we can transfer that awe and reverence, not to the transcendental Abrahamic God of my Israelite tribe long ago, but to the stunning reality that confronts us, we will grant permission for a renewed spirituality, and awe, reverence and responsibility for all that lives, for the planet.

Does one know that such a transformation of human sensibilities will happen? Of course not. But the sense of justice matured in the Abrahamic tradition from 10 eyes for an eye, to an eye for an eye, to love thine enemy as thyself. Then can a heightened consciousness bring about a global ethic? I believe so. I believe, I hope correctly, that what I have sketched above is true, points to a new vision of our co-creating reality, that it invites precisely an enhancement of our sense of spirituality, reverence, wonder, and responsibility, and can form the basis of a trans-national mythic structure for an emerging global civilization.

...becoming a Type I civilization....

~Later

[Thunderbird]

One of my favorite scientist, Stuart Kauffman

In short, many, but not all physicists, are giving up on the adequacy of reductionism alone as a scientific principle to explain the properties of the world. In its stead a new scientific world view is just starting to come into view: Emergence.

[Thunderbird]

Great article, I have read a couple of his books, I remembered the insights, but I had forgotten about his great sense of humor.

Now a Darwinian preadaptation is a causal consequence of a part of an organism of no selective significance in the normal environment, but which might be of use in some odd environment, hence become the subject of natural selection. Here the organ was "preadapted" for this novel function in the biosphere. A fanciful example concerns the squirrel Gertrude who happened to have a single Mendelian dominant mutant that gave her flaps of skin from arms to legs on both sides. (Darwinian preadaptations need not rely on new mutations in general, but I use them for my friend Gertrude, who lived 65,394,003 years ago in Guatemala.) Gertrude was so ugly that the rest of the squirrels would not play or eat with her. She was in a magnolia tree eating lunch sadly and alone when Bertha, an early owl in a neighboring pine, spied Gertrude, thought "Lunch", dived towards Gertrude horrid claws extended…..Gertrude was terrified. Suddenly she jumped from the tree, arms and legs flung wide. "Ghaaaa!" cried Gertrude, then looked, incredulous, as she flew. And she escaped the befuddled Bertha. Well, Gertrude became a heroine in her clan, was married in a lovely civil ceremony to a handsome squirrel not a month later, and thanks to her dominant mutation, all their children had similar flaps of skin. And that is how flying squirrels came to exist in the biosphere. I like Gertrude a lot.

[Pyrotex]

...a new scientific world view is just starting to come into view: Emergence.

"Emergence" by Steven Johnson

I highly recommend this book.
Pyro the Peruser

[Thunderbird]

Originally Posted by Pyrotex

"Emergence" by Steven Johnson

I highly recommend this book.
Pyro the Peruser

Looks like a good read..... an Excerpt from the book.

*%*&&%$ damn link&***#@ working

[Tormod]

This one, perhaps:
Hypography Science Bookstore - Books - Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software