ABSTRACT:
This paper addresses the transition that occurs in an Emergence, via the much more basic process of an avalanche of destruction. For without this surprisingly necessary event, the possibility of the creation of the wholly New would not be possible, for any stable and persisting situation actually acts against anything new actually becoming established.
To get the conditions necessary for a new version of Order with new content, the prevailing system must be dismantled. I hesitate to say destroyed because what has been removed is NOT everything that existed before at all. Individual processes will continue, but NOT in the same associations, yet in addition to the overall associations, any system maintenance and inhibitors of opposition will also be removed as powerful agents of the then status quo.
Thus the remarkable positive feedback of the dismantling avalanche, in removing the old stability, also delivers the conditions for an “adaptive radiation type” of positive feedback of creation, and the final establishment of a new persisting Level of stability.
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SYNOPSIS:
1.The crucial missing ideas on Emergence are those, which explain the trajectory from one Level to the next. Clearly, they cannot be simple incremental steps from one to the other, because somewhere along the way the wholly new must emerge. We must be dealing with a kind of Revolution: NOT a mere re-organisation, but a creative transformation.
2.The alternative to such a conception can only be reductionist re-organisation, which when understood would be easily reproducible. It is no surprise, therefore, that those who purport to be investigating such transitions with such methods, expect to be able to emulate the whole process using computer simulations.
3.So, what is it that occurs within an Emergence Event? If it is not to be like the rest of Science, it must not only involve creation, but be initiated by an all-enveloping destruction of the old self-maintaining stability, to allow the New to emerge. We must deal with both the wholesale destruction of the prior Level, and the creation of the New.
4.Clearly, Levels are interludes of self-maintaining stability, wherein things qualitatively stay much the same, and the coming cataclysm will be evident as that stability is successively undermined.
5.The actual trajectory during an Emergence Event is not yet clear, but certainly the Old Level must be totally dismantled, and somehow a completely New Level must be both established and then persist.
6.The usual positive feedbacks of destruction (avalanches) must, at some crucial point, be replaced by positive feedback processes of creation, and this must involve co-operating processes, which begin to form self-perpetuating systems, and then build further.
7.The task is clear! It must be to describe the various processes, within an Emergence, which dismantle the Old (not difficult), and construct the entirely New (most difficult). We know that such has happened many, many times. Was not the Origin of Life an Emergence?
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