Smashing four going to past arenas4/2/2023 ![]() Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new complexities. “First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you couldn’t survive.” Religion, science, politics and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. It would address the fact that “all human enterprises” seek to reduce the natural diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality. … he told me about a book he was working on, The Conquest of Abundance, about the human passion for reductionism. And complexity accounts for the universe’s abundance.Ībundance? Here is a remark that Feyerabend made to John Horgan, the science journalist: It is, paradoxically, the capacity for simple systems to undergo self-organization and thereby to become more complex, and still more ever complex. ![]() Complexity of this kind is more than complication. My basic thinking about the nature of the universe, about ontology and cosmology, is grounded in two ideas: 1) complexity, which I take from Ilya Prigogine, though he is by no means its only exponent, and 2) abundance, from the philosopher, Paul Feyerabend. The question I am asking: Is there something beyond culture, something just beginning to emerge? If so, what might it be?Ĭomplexity and Abundance in an Evolving Universe But most of the cultural activity is little more than 10,000 years old. That happened between two and three million years ago, the exact number hardly matters. We have changed the face of the earth, have touched the moon and the planets, and are reaching for the stars. The Third Arena is that of human culture. For all we know life may have emerged in other regions as well, perhaps even earlier, perhaps more recently. Of course we’re talking about our local region of the universe. About four billion years ago life emerged, the Second Arena. The First Arena is that of inanimate matter, which began when the universe did, fourteen billion years ago.
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