Comments on: No Law Entails The Evolution Of The Biosphere

By: iy9g86

iy9g86 — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:46:06 +0000

I’ve heard the promise of our market society is undeliverable to the vast majority. We continue exporting a debate that excludes dissent. Within the boundaries of language, culture, convention, we privileged constrain conversations along straight and narrow lines of thinking; there, between the poles we pin our perspective, excluding those who live out of bounds. It looks like a private club’s party for back slapping mutually admiring one trick ponies, whom exclude the multitudes living outside our society, living immediate homespun, local futures, living by “vernacular value” unregulated by us. Our rules of engagement with them, in effect thwart pathways for escaping the systemic assimilation into a life seen by increasing numbers as devalued, a relatively cheap commodity to employ. We have no exchange for one’s survival instinct, desire, fear, love, wonder, and creativity; there are no accounts for taste, intuition.
Who speaks to the effects of the continued net increasing number of outliers living within our social system? Such outliers constrained by our framework, organize and structure their growing numbers toward a critical point; following power laws, outliers are fighting many mini battles, fewer larger, and… always pressing into any and every space open to their future. What should we expect from such a growing force? The wall we build is substantial, but not enough. The cracks in the wall multiply. Those privileged today will be, in due course, assimilated by the outliers. Those who try to protect their state under cover of “expert” spin, behind the farce of a blind eye justice, promote an unprecedented global scale homicide, more an ecocide. And yet time and again dear Nemesis reminds me to have faith in her blind dissipation of potential, ubiquitous and unyielding, as one with the arrow of time. I have been humbled by her enough to at last tread lightly. We profess insight, yet we are blind to just proportions.

By: Stu Kauffman

Stu Kauffman — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:30:50 +0000

Thank you for your comments. My deepest hope is this: Early sociologist Max Weber said that with Newton we lost enchantment and entered Modernity. We know the good and evil of Modernity — constitutional government, a higher standard of living on the good side, the rapacious behavior of the big banks whose gluttonous greed for power is disrupting the carefully crafted balance of power in govenment and society that John Locke envisioned, and we are reduced to price tags, commoditized by an economic system that does not serve our deepest humanity. My deep hope is that “NO LAW” may help re-enchant us, beyond Newton, and with that re-enchantment, we can find our way Beyond Modernity, but do so as an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary process that disrupts our cultural and civilizational roots. Stuart Kauffman, MacArthur Fellow, FRSC, University of Vermont, Emeritus University of Pennsylvania

By: iy9g86

iy9g86 — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 14:23:40 +0000

And then I think why should I, how can I, feel such giddy contentment from a shower, a piece of music and a ripe avocado? And the answer is … “Who knows! Who cares, says I the Blind Bozo bubbling behind the wheel! Or is what I sense the true, experienced, navigator setting my course, driving me into our future.

By: happyseaurchin

happyseaurchin — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 23:55:25 +0000

thanks for this…
i follow this blog and it comes alive with posts like this

some interesting thoughts about kantian wholes
the notion of a cell achieving task closure
and laws establishing from below

thanks again
for this close look at the chemical-biological interface