SHAPE Journal

ABSTRACT:

The culmination of a prior series of attempts to illustrate what could be happening within an Emergence, finally produced the diagram included here. It is certainly a very surprising conclusion, for it is not the obvious and evident summation of small increments, but, on the contrary, involves major overturns, and indeed, for a time, violent oscillations between competing opposites. It could, therefore, never be arrived at by the usual pluralist methods that dominate our reasoning and even our scientific methodologies. For the substance our of which these suggestions have emerged is the alternation between long periods of Stability, and via their imperceptible undermining dissolution and cataclysmic collapse give birth to an interlude of creation within an Emergence. You could never arrive at such dynamics and contradictory trajectories without a wholly new perspective – that of Holism.

This paper shows both diagrammatically and descriptively, what it is suggested happens in the transition from one Level of Reality to another. It starts within a stable and persisting Level with classical reductionist (pluralist) sequences of cause and effect, simultaneously undermined to some extent by the dissolutionary process summed into the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And this equilibrium is ultimately breeched by the accumulation of dissolutory demands to push the situation beyond its, minimum threshold level, which invariably precipitates an avalanche of dissolution down to a minimal level: a nadir of dissolution.

At this seemingly chaotic termination, a surprising thing happens. The removal of all the maintaining constraints of the prior order not only removes the Order itself but also all those processes, which prevented any alternative order emerging. In such an absence of prevention, all sorts of previously impossible moves-to-order occur and proliferate. But, as it might be anticipated, these inevitably resurrect the processes of the Second Law, and indeed alternate phases of growth and dissolution follow. But these are not of equal strength. The forces of Order include many ancillary processes of self-maintenance, and each upward swing of the pendulum gates higher, until an upper threshold is achieved, and a new and persisting stable Level appears.