The list is growing fast. The common thread is there and wonderfully, each author or set of authors adds a new facet to the growing multifaceted model of the complex real world. Reductionist science is being augmented by the missing models we need and it takes its place as one among them. This will not be a review of the book:Darwin's Unfinished Business The Self-Organizing Intelligence of Nature because I want to focus on certain aspects that fit into what we have been talking about here very well. The concept of Nature's Intelligence is one which we can look at critically at a later date. For now I want to tell you what Powell says to help us with the case we have been making. In particular, his section entitled "Appreciating the Environment" is worth a look. Read on below and we will look more closely.
The forward to this book is by Dorion Sagan, one of the people I chose to include in the conversation I staged in the paper I diaried about a few diaries back. Among other thing, Dorion says this
Persistant species may have wild youths, but eventually they must find a more stable place in Nature. Simon G. Powell's book may be a wake up call showing us our true place in a Nature abundant in intelligence and sentience, if not consciousness.
It is interesting that as our arrogance gets further and further beyond our own control we begin to have more and more of these voices coming together to warn us. Before jumping ahead to the section "Appreciating the Environment" I want to inject a bit of personal history for perspective. I have taught about complex systems for over thirty years and long ago I found the term "environment" as part of the world view problem we have created for ourselves. There is no "environment" there is a planet on which we live and everything on it makes up one big system. I have always like the "Gaia" outlook for that reason. So here's what Powell says:
One has only to consider human culture's fervent exploitation of the planet and its resources over the past few hundred years and the environmental cost of such remorseless activity to realize that our species lacks insight into the sensibly interwoven nature of all life. The fragmentation of science into departmentalized divisions with little or no overlap also reflects this tendency to disconnect from the whole.
There it is again. how can we go on ignoring what is so obvious! Clearly these boxes of "knowledge" need to be dumped and the contents allowed to self-organize back into the coherent whole that is the real world we destroyed in our attempts to do "science", etc.
Do you see the totality of this mind set yet? It is in every part of our minds. We have brains that have been trained to think this way since birth. Everything has a label. everything has its box. We need this to be able to speak about and think about immediate concerns. however it goes too far when the entire educational system, the entire philosophical system, the entire political system, etc have adopted it as the norm and have forgotten that it was put into practice as a convenience not to be a model for the real world. And it is destructive if it is allowed to make us loose the connections. If it reduces us to robots in a mechanistic world. This was not Descartes intent. It was not a conspiracy. But it has happened and the consequences are immense! So we need to work hard. Our brains our wired. I'll say it again: Hello, my name is Don Mikulecky and I am a recovering reductionist.