Thursday, February 12, 2015

Evolutionary Love : A Creation Story

Prefatory Note:

The following streaming-consciousness outpouring on Evolutionary Love is only a rough scaffolding to hold some voluminous ideas. Yet I'm posting it in the interest of finding whom these thoughts might attract. I invite your resonances, insights, collaborating thoughts.
The title? I think Evolutionary Love works. I am tempted to add "and its cash value” to provoke curiousity, but I don’t get far enough in my line of thinking here to work my way back to my ultimate goal of explaining that! 

Evolutionary Love

   "My use of all my gains includes
     Continual further gain." -- Harvey Jackins


I expect some to feel surprise on hearing the claim that “money,” rightly instituted, will one day  liberate self-regenerating, reciprocally-energizing love for people and natural places all around the world. Rightly realized, money increases freely — without debt and without usury or interest, and as a true sign of real, underlying value — when human beings achieve congruence with one another and with the earth and cosmos, thereby increasing the human capacity to collaborate with others and with the biological and physical beings of the gifted creation, thereby walking together purposively in to adorn the world with beauty. The only backing that money ever really has is the collaborative capacity of the community to satisfy its shared dreams and desire, including the desire that all individiduals enjoy the liberty of their own self-development in a supportive human and natural context. I view this principle and ideal of congruence as defining the ever-attracting bountiful, inexhaustible horizon of our liberation.

The generation of freedom, value and love or Eros begins at the Beginning.

Even at the moment of the Big Bang, just prior to the time explored by subquantum and quantum physics, prior, that is, to the miraculous emergence of subquantum strings and then subatomic particles composed of those strings, the original Chaos was without law or form, and the first Great Dancings then began, when the diverse subquanta and their quanta children of various qualities and frequencies began to stabilize their interplay into regular dancing patterns, settling into recurring, recognizable rhythms and beats, which were one with their unnamed identities. These dances began because the strings and particles were attracted to one another. They were mysteriously attracted from out of the mysterious preferences that showed up in the grand initial utterly timeless and unpredictably random and shapeless spontaneity of Chaos. This Great Attraction, Eros, was therefore from the Beginning the generator of Law, and destined to be refined into ever more subtle patterns through the Great Chain of Being.

These mysterious First Preferences were the first inklings of what much later, at higher meta-levels of being and in human times, would be experienced and named as the Erotic principle: the principle by which dancing partners — on whatever level of ontology, physical, chemical, biological, mammalian, human or spiritual, down and up the chain — find each other and come together into mutually pleasing grooves that the attracted partners then keep grooving on, and which they willingly sustain and conserve into the future, a form of proto-commitment to action.

These “stabilizations,” Dances, or grooves were the first laws or principles — indeed from the much later emergent human perspective they were proto-institutions -- and they resolved, after some time, into regularities. But this resolution into regularities that could later be relied upon by the other higher orders of being that would later emerge, just as a man relies upon the earth, did not signify the complete disappearance of Chaos and Randomness. They did not signify the banishment of the Original Spontaneous Unpredictable Energy, neither in its terror nor in its creative potential. 

Instead, while through the dancing the particles there gradually resolved within the compass of the All the  relatively stable world of Newtonian mechanics, Chaos and Randomness gave up none of their explosive potential — instead, they remain at the two horizons, dangerously accessible to the finest titrations.

(N.B.: These explosive forces were at one point in later history to be tapped by human beings, a team of physicists, who in the 20th century unleashed nuclear forces into the living earthly environment, an environment which had been constructed on the foundation of the containment of these forces; that this earthly containment did not signify the elimination or complete abeyance of these great encompassing and underlying forces of Chaos, but only – i’m inspired to say – their relegation beyond the most distant horizons of immensity and smallness, is indicated by the fact that these physicists themselves, the nuclear scientists,  spoke of the remote possibility that any nuclear explosion might unleash an uncontrollable chain reaction into the earthly environment).

But back to our story. In time, the subatomic and atomic dancers locked into their seemingly-eternal dances, creating the Newtonian universe on the foundation of the quantum universe. Their dance became sure, strong and linear — at least speaking from the practical human perspective -- and led to a point of stabilization that gave realm to a very, very, very slow dimension of time, calculated in eons. So slow is this physical dimension of Being and Time, so stable and steady its grooving, that Newton and his successors deemed these dances “the Eternal Laws of Nature.” For all human intents and purposes, the universe and its laws are eternal, of another order of time altogether than we can comprehend.

Now, in turned out that this logical and operational domain of Newtonian physics, a domain of great material and mechanical activity, would constitute the operational floor, at a later time, of a new dimension: the biological universe, or better, the domain of biological ecosystems, as we shall soon discuss.

For now, we are speaking of the Uni-Verse, the Grand Systemic singular (uni-) and cycling-upon-itself (-versing) of the seemingly infinite, centerless and random Newtonian space, deathless and without biological life. The human phenomenal cosmos, as distinct from this eternal universe (or at least eternal from any practical human standpoint), is yet a long way from appearing on the scene. The Universe is as distinct from the Cosmos, our Home, as eternity is from mortality.

The constituting principle of this domain of the physical universe — of the dancing that we named above —  is the ongoing sustained consensual coordination of insentient matter in such a way as to reproduce the conditions of its ongoing self-reproduction. In a word, the ongoing dancing of mutually attracting particles.

This underlying dynamic, a wordless (infant) drama, is what determines the soundness of all that humans, in the  iterative adaptations of their theories of mechanical physics, attempt to name and represent as Newtonian Law, as the representable truths of science. Yet it is not science that gives the Law to the Universe; instead, it is the Universe that holds sway over all human models and representations. (The tacit, unspeakable dynamics of the physical universe under-stand human representation, and not the other way around.)

At a later time, as we anticipated above, a new major epoch in the history of the world’s ontology was built on this physical foundation, this basis, this floor — which only became a floor when their emerged new actors to walk upon it.

We are speaking of the epoch that begins with the astounding emergence of biological life, an event that was nothing short of miraculous, especially from within the perspective of the physical universe, because it is nowhere com-prehensible, but unfathomable and ungraspable, in physical terms. In other words, upon the foundational logic (or -ology) of Newtonian physics, biology eventually emerged, a new order of logic, a new dimension of dynamic relations among a new order of entities, which entities and relational dynamics could not be reduced to or understood according to the principles of physics. [Note: I say “biological” life because I am holding to a distinction that permits the physical universe also to be understood as “living,” as may be clear from my languagings.]

Every new higher-order or meta-level domain emerges upon the opaque floor of the domain before it, a floor upon which the entities within the new domain blindly rely as they interact within their own theater.
Atoms are totalities formed upon the floor of their subatomic components, and these subatomic components, on their own level, themselves interact on the floor supported by the sub-quantum string-level components. From the dance of atoms, molecules are born. These new totalities, dancing together with their kind, discover new, relatively-stable dancing grooves.  The subatomic level, the atomic level, and, now, the chemical interactions at the molecular level forming a new lively, interactive domain*: The theater of molecular dynamics. In Chemistry, the  dancers find an entirely new attractive chemistry, so to speak. That is, Eros expands into a new sphere. Important to understand: the domain of the newly emergent totalities above the floor of their subcomponents, does not intersect with the domain of the subcomponents. As Wittgenstein once noted, it is impossible through observations of the brain and/or nervous system and/or other biological subsystems for us to ever perceive the fundamentally higher order of being in which thoughts and perceptions arise. At best, what can be found are resonant correlations. [*N.B.: The development from atomic to molecular interaction is perhaps better described as a maturation within the same domain.]

Let us recount the story of the miraculous emergence of life. Within the new theater built upon the stage floor of atomic physics, a drama was set into motion among nonbiological entities, the molecules. These  molecules began to interact and play with one another in their own physical and chemical dances and rituals of attraction, and repulsion, finding the most pleasing grooves and those most enchanting and stabilizing recurring rhythms that win strong commitments. The molecules are the new totalities, or higher-level entities, whose interactions as totalities (in dance and play) constitute the new domain or theater and, with it, a unique and unprecedented kind of dancing. A new level or subworld, really, of new song, movement and story-making comes into its own, creating, in the self-created theater, the dancing through the dancing.

At this higher level of dancing a new domain of Free Play emerges. New dance steps and grooves, of an entirely different order and quality, first become possible. The new tricks are all the rage. In amazing contrast, for instance, to the slower eonic (long-time) rhythms of the relatively-stabilized quantum and atomic dancings, the new dances of these molecules are much more Free, more Playful and Faster, relative to the dances now hidden in the subdomain, beneath the floor — a new range of diversity of Rhythms has emerged on the new layer of being: upon the slow, slow rhythms of silent immobile rock are heard new fast-stepping molecular ecologies, new instruments with utterly new qualities; the range of rhythms, timbres and colors grows; new plots and dramas unique to the lives of molecules begin to unfold with great drama.  Each successive order of Being emerges as a space of new liberation founded upon the dance-floor of the prior ontological epoch. The world becomes more musical all the time.

All the while, it is important to understand that, even with the emergence of new theaters, each prior ontological epoch continues its dancing, its grooving, as before, and continues active below each floor.

The new molecular dancers of which we are speaking emerge as totalities, as entities in their own right witin their own unique domain, only within the field that opens up through their relation to the other molecular entities that interact with them on the same molecular  level. Each molecular totality is thus by definition necessarily blind and insentient  to the subdomain within which its  components, the atoms and subatomic particles, interact. This is coherent with the metaphor of the floor as foundational basis: the floor limits, and is coincident with, the horizon of the theater of the actors in question. (It’s not just the floor, but both the near and far horizons, in fact, of the entire new theater of play.) But the actors play upon the material floor without being able to enter within its, to them, dark and closed domain, and they play within the compass of a horizon whose limits, likewise they can never reach. [Aside: This is analogous to the human experience of “phenomena,” the “surfaces” that appear to uninstrumentally-aided sense experience; when Kant spoke of the impossibility of knowing the underlying noumena, he was speaking of this same principle of the limit-horizon, at least with regard to the underlying foundational preconditions of experience; at this moment it is not apparent to me whether Kant considered the role of the outer horizonal preconditions of human experience. More about this to come below. ]

Just so, underneath or within the floor upon which the new molecular dancing happens, as it were, the components of the molecules (the “interior” of the molecules) continue to do their dancing as atoms and subatomic particles (and below that, perhaps, “strings,” the primordial violin strings of the Universe). 

Here it is also critical to understand that each prior ontological epoch, while continuing with its dancing and grooving — thereby supporting the higher-orde entities dancing on the floor above them, in a non-intersecting, higher domain — also itself, and despite its titanic stability relative to the upper floors — remains open to the possibility of improvisation in its dancing. Each understanding floor retains some opening, even,  to influence from the new dancing above, for as the container transforms -- even thought the domains of container-agents (totalities) and contained agents (subcomponents) remain non-intersecting — so does the environment of what is contained; that is, as the totalities refashion their dynamic with one another, they simultaneously refashion the upper context or wider horizon which partly defines the operational subdomain of the subcomponents.  Maturana describes the same logic when he points out that, for example, when human beings conserve the newly emergent human relations of love in consensual coordinations of consensual coordinations that produce the conditions for the self-regeneration of the conditions of love, or, to simplify, when human beings conserve, or institutionalize in their practice, a particular dynamic, they create the possibility for everything around them to change in relation to that conserved dynamic or practice as a center and guide. (In the human domain, this is the outer horizon of ideals and our shared commitment to them.)

In other words, the newly discovered preferences of the dancers, if the dancers groove to them in the right key, become as spiritual guides to the underfloor entities, even though these guides are intangible and unreachable by them due to their being beyond the horizon, and these guides can lead or entice the lower entities into new rhythms, and towards those new possibilities of delicate adaptation, new orders of micro-harmonization, that are congruent (mutually harmonized) with the new rhythms of the dancers above.  Hence, to give an example, a community that stabilizes its commitments to reciprocal love and develops institutions and rituals that stabilize and proliferate the genuine experience of love, building its collaborative capacity, creates an environment which favors evolutionary adaptations in the biology and in the physical landscape that are congruent with those institutions, practices and commitments.

To approach this from another perspective: In sum, each level remains actively nested within the higher orders, and each order continues to have its unique kind of influence on all of the others. The congruence of the orders with one another, the congruence of their music, is likely what has been referred to in times past as “the music of the spheres”; this music finds one expression, on the principle of the isomorphism of each of the nested systems with one another, in the Indian system of the ascending Chakras, which track the evolutionary growth of the spine, from the sacrum, or residual tail, into the abode of the gut and parasympathetic nervous system, up through heart and the sympathetic nervous system, and upwards again to the voice, to the speaking, conceptualizing and spiritual bodies or levels associated with the throat, forehead and crown/aura or outer horizon. [N.B.: I have not studied the Chakras, so my application of  this analogy may be somewhat loose and imprecise]

We are still preparing to discuss the emergence of living beings within the theater of Newtonian physical space. Here, I borrow from Humberto Maturana his explanation of the constitutional principle of biological organisms. Maturana states that the living organism, on a molecular level, is constituted as a self-reproducing coordination of molecules that together keep reproducing the conditions of their own ongoing self-regeneration. [N.B.: [N.B.: I should check Maturana's exact wording, which I am here reproducing inexactly and inelegantly.]

Note: Initially, I suspected that this Maturanan principle describing the constitution and operation of biological entities on the molecular level did not apply to the underlying non-biological, physical entities (under the floor). However, I now seem to see that Maturana’s thesis describes is a more universal principle that applies at all levels through the principle of isomporphy of nested systems. [Note: However, this raises the question of what distinguishes living organisms from lower-order entities;  in living organisms an autonomous automotive and emotive principle first appears; but I will address this elsewhere.]

Each ontological domain finds its stabilizing, organizing principle in the emergence of consensual coordinations (dancing grooves that reciprocally satisfy the inherent preferences of the autonomous subcomponents) that generate the ongoing conditions of their continued consensual coordination: this means reality can become reliable at each level in preparation to support the next. After enough dancing, the domain enters into a period of ongoing stabilization, permitting the emergence of higher level entitites on ints floor.  So this principle of consensual coordination can apply not only to the biological level, where we are more used to speaking of “preferences,” but also to molecular, atomic and subatomic levels. “Inertia,” for example, can be described as the preference of a stationary object to stay at rest. An planetary orbit describes the “preference” of the planet to sustain its cyclical orbital trajectory. Etc. When we open to our hearts desires, our preferences will lead us where we want to go: “I learn by going where I have to go.” - Theodore Roethke.

To repeat: Consensual coordinations that produce their own ongoing self reproduction. [Note: This could be deemed a principle of “Agreement." When C.S. Peirce claimed that the purpose of Reason was to achieve Agreement, and in particular when he expanded this idea to his notion of Evolutionary Love, he more or less arrived to a very similar place to that which I am elucidating now.]

So to get back to the dancing of molecules — within the grand theater of molecular dynamics — from which, eventually, life emerges: a living organism emerges when a circle or collective of molecules joins together in such a way as to generate their own self-reproduction as a unity. This achievement (or musical discovery or unexpected type of agreement) gives birth to the conditions of emergence of an ongoing, autonomous self-motivating complex being with its own unique motive preferences, i.e. tastes and emotions, that guide it in its interactions withing the new environment, a "container" that emerges simultaneously with the emergence of the organism. The new organism exists in a new domain along with the other organisms that, as totalities or actors on the new stage floor (the earth), coinhabit the domain, giving rise to a new world or (if the term world is to be reserved for languaging organisms) or ecosystem. 

By following its preferences within the limitations and peculiarities of its unique environment (preferences for the newly sensible and meaningful qualities, for example, of hotter, drier, colder or wetter, darker or lighter, etc., depending on the locality within which the organism finds itself) every organism is launched into an evolutionary lineage, itself developing in complex interactions with the developing evolutionary lineages of the other organisms within its growing ecological system. The organism subsequently develops in conjunction with its environment, and the environment and the organism favor (or prefer) adaptations that most reciprocally support the ecosystem. As all organisms happily conserve (sustain in ongoing repetition) those mutually-agreeable congruences (dances) that, in their play, they discover between themselves and their physical and creatural environment (the theater or ecosystem), a layered building up occurs, in which the evolutionary path of speciation tracks together with evolutionary changes in the ecosystem. Organisms and ecosystem co-constitute one another.

Now to jump way back, for a moment, to the thesis with which I began, that the invention of True Money (not the counterfeit that we currently call money, which now conserves a relational dynamic of deceit, theft, exploitation and domination/submission in our socio-bio-cultural ecosystem), True money (interest and debt free) will in the future represent (as it has briefly at times in the past) the discovery of a new order and potential for the development of cosmically-beneficial congruences — capable of reaching to and uniting ever-wider geographical regions and populations while simultaneuosly nourishing individuals and their local environments everywhere, linking local and global planetary health for the first time. True money, through the aforesaid principle of structural isomorphy, extends and participates in the same logic of value- generation and evolution that we are seeing in the evolutionary world architecture that we have been discussing.

Language is the human capacity for human beings to consensually coordinate their consensual coordinations— this capacity is acted out within the theater of languaging on the immediate floor of the long-developed and stabilized consensual coordinations of our not-yet-speaking animal ancestors, that is, made possible by and built upon  the preferences of our animal ancestors (underbeings) to be social with one another and to live in communities in which they developed and made instincural certain practices of gentleness, kindness and love that ensured not only their survival, but more importantly, the pleasure of their being in community, by which actions they brought Eros into yet another and higher domain of accomplishment and institutionalization. On the floor of our emotional-relational instinctual-biologically encoded patterns of interaction, to which we remain nearly blind because we live in language and because these biological interactions go on at the very limit of our conceptual-linguistic experience, human beings emerge as languaging beings. As we know, emotions, when they enter the world of languaging where we as higher-order entities acknowledge them (even though they often determine what we are doing while they are unacknoweldged), become feelings; as we know, emotions when they are named become feelings, and then they become available to our coordinations with one another through reflection on what we are doing and through dialogue. In this way dialogue opens the domain of what C.S. Peirce called Evolutionary Love.

Some Possible Subtitle(s) for this Post: 
  • A Creation Story
  • A Scientistic-Spiritualistic Creation Story
  • Integrally evolving consensual coordinations at all the levels of our intelligence. 
  • Building on the congruences: From the deep singings of subquantum violins, to the overarching Hosannahs of the gilded heavenly sphere. 

NOTE:

Alas, my friends who've made it this far: I’m running out of steam and haven’t made it back up to my starting place: the level of money and beyond.

Here are some early notes which may or may not contain substance not included above:

Then, of organisms with each other and with the environment: ecosystems, species differentiation - dynamically discovering new consensual (mutually pleasing) coordinations (recurring, "institutionalized", conserved practices) OF the totalities  (higher level entities, at this level organisms structurally coupled with their environments) constituted by recursively consensually coordinating molecules. Each level generates its own domain and the diversity of its agency entities towards fulfillment of its sphere: subquantum diversity, atomic diversity, molecular diversity, biodiversity, cultural diversity, etc. The extension of diversity within each theater simultaneously develops and deepens connecting intimacy through increasing sensitivity and differentiation at both the level of the ground/floor and the sky/horizon, sensually and spiritually. Individuation and community grow each other. Oneness and difference move towards convergence.

Humans seeking to coordinate (integrally) all the many levels into mutual congruence (coordination). The heart is said to be the organ of integration of upper with lower levels.

Forgot to add image of the womb/matrix. The theater of humanness, the matrix of humanness, is the context of love.
Also, the masculine principle brings the mother-child cycle forward from circular to forward-moving spiral (?)
blog comments powered by Disqus