The Radical New Reality of Systems Science
Our Next
World View
Heading 6
New Factual Spirituality
Beholding a 'Self-Animating World'
Nature and Society are Self-Animating thus "Spiritual" in Their Essence
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Emergent ordering in complex systems appears 'technicallly magical' from a causally deterministic perspective
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The emergent self-directing, self-asserting agency of some systems makes these 'self-animating entities'
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This self-animating impulse in both human and natural systems constitutes a status of 'spiritual agency'
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Thus, there now exists a scientific basis for a factually spiritual perspective on 'how things happen'
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This evidence-based concept of spirituality frames both society and Nature as 'mysteriously self-creative'
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​And, viewing ordering as deterministic versus emergent, re-frames concepts of 'the profane and the sacred'
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The 'spirits' of mythic imagination can now be understood as metaphors for network agency's animating impulse
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Diverse spirits, gods, and goddesses effectively characterize the archetypal manifestations of that system agency
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Further, the 'monstrosities' of myth can be engaged as symbols for 'rogue' or unconstrained system agency
The Science of Spiritual Animation and Its Mytho-logical Imagination
The 'Technically Magical' Emergence of Self-Organization and Self-Asserting Systems
As fantastical as it can seem, systems science identifies traits of complex adaptive system dynamics that result in unpredictably emergent effects, or properties, that include system self-organization and self-direction. By reductive scientific methods of quantification and calculation, this field of science confirms the factual occurrence of events that are do not derive entirely from predictably deterministic causation. That makes such phenomena 'technically magical' from the perspective of deterministic physics. More confounding yet, these emergent phenomena do not appear to violate the laws of physics per se, but rather manifest from the 'material world' and its mechanistic dynamics. Confronting this evidence is so disturbing to the worldview of modern science that few even in the field of complex systems science dare to discuss it in terms of 'system agency,' much less 'magic' or 'spiritual animation.'
Perceiving Self-Animating Systems as Scientific or Naturalistic Spirituality
The extensive evidence for the emergence of self-organizing, self-directing systems provides the basis for speaking of complex system networks as generating agency that effectively animates those systems by enabling them to operate purposefully for their own persistence. Whether we like it or not, logic now compels us to acknowledge there exists an unexpected, factual basis for what archaic human cultures generally understood as 'spiritual agency' in Nature. Now, systems science now enables us to know something about 'spiritual animation' in Nature scientifically -- or factually -- without having to believe literally in spirits, gods, or demons. However, this requires us to think not only in terms of factually predictable sequences of events but also factually unpredictable, simultaneous network interactions that 'mysteriously' generate self-organization.
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Scientific thinking can now be done in terms of predictable events
AND in terms of unpredictably self-determining networks
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The Ecological Orientation of Archaic Animistic Cultures
Why did Human Cultures Generate a 'Spiritual Imagination?'
​If we apply an evolutionary perspective to the question 'why did human cultures generate a spiritual imagination,' we must assume this way of thinking in some way proved adaptive for human survival. From the perspective of the mechanistic modernist worldview, based in material physics, there is no conceivable benefit to notions that 'the world is animated by spirits, gods, and goddesses.' But, from the perspective of complex adaptive systems science, such notions suddenly appear rather differently. If, as systems science indicates, self-organizing, self-directing, self-asserting systems emerge in ways that are partly 'technical magical' (in deterministic causal terms) and these systems, from animals to ecologies and super organism societies, can act purposefully to sustain their 'selves,' then a spiritual imagination that represents the world as self-animating begins to make logical sense -- as a mode of perceiving 'how the world actually works. Such a worldview is generally termed "animistic."
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​Ecological 'Embeddedness' and Human Sensitivity to Self-Asserting Complex System Agency
Archaic hunter-gatherer societies were intimately embedded in their local ecologies. While the interdependent relationships among the systems of species, from which emerge ecosystems, is unimaginably complex, humans living intimately within those ecosystems can sense how plants and animals enable each others' survival through mutualistic benefits. However, even rudimentary hunter-gatherer technologies can give humans the capacity to over-exploit their environments in ways that compromise human survival. It appears likely that humans created a 'spiritual imagination' as a form of cultural adaptation which promotes the sustainability of human societies. This mode of regarding the non-human world as arising from awareness and intelligence similar to that of humans, known as "animism," promotes the view that humans are intimately 'related to' other life forms and even landscapes. That 'relatedness' facilitates a sense of empathic kinship between humans and their ecosystem environments.
Archaic Cultures as Super Organism Social Systems Biased toward Preserving Ecological Interdependencies
Societies based upon such notions of human relatedness to the non-human form feedback networks that constrain the potential of their self-assertion to disrupt their ecosystems by 'giving' the social system the purpose of sustaining the other systems of the biosphere upon which humans depend for their own well being. But, as the behavior of a social super organism emerges from the capacity of its human agents, those agents must behave in response to 'feeling empathy for', thus emotionally 'identifying with,' the non-human. If individual humans are acting 'for the purpose' of sustaining their ecosystems, then the social super organism is more likely to do so.
Personal Experience of "Numinosity" Enabled by Mythical and Ritualized Symbolism
That 'bottom up' purposefulness is promoted in turn by the social system conditioning , individual humans to 'identify with' non-humans systems through mythical tales of non-human spirits that 'animate' the world around them and symbolic ritual enactments that promote 'tangible experience' of those non-human 'agents.' Individuals are conditioned to have 'mystical experience' of self-animating non-human systems.
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The Archaic Spiritual Worldview and Fundamental Cultural Values​
​Because the animistic worldview of ecologically embedded societies orients individuals towards experiencing the systems around them as numinous, the super organism of such societies become networked to express their purposeful self-assertion 'for the purpose of' not disrupting the ecological interdependencies upon which they depend. Thus the feedback in the super organism expresses its self-asserting agency 'in service to' this purpose as an 'underlying value.'
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Mythological Imagination as Archetypal Characterization of how Self-Asserting System Agency Manifests
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With this surprising new scientific characterization of 'spiritual agency,' it becomes possible to reinterpret the meanings of the mythic imagination. From the perspective of network science, the spirits, monsters, and divine actors of myth can be understood as personified metaphors which 'stand for' the different 'characters' of network behaviors. Such symbolization of network agency has long provided humans with a way to perceive and appreciate how it animates and orders both natural and humans systems. We are creatures in a creaturely world. The feedback networks that are the basis of our human intelligence also pervade Nature, though in simpler yet still self-organizing, thus self-animating forms. To know reality we must have ways to perceive these self-asserting systems as 'agents'. To do that in an emotionally compelling way, we must employ our archaic mythic imagination.
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The network agency that animates the self-organization of the biosphere is 'see through'
the mythic imagination of the goat-footed god Pan--the 'spirit' that orders Nature
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Myth's monsters model the network character of networks which act in non-reciprocal ways
to exploit other systems in ways that only disable them​
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'Scientific Mythology' -- Correlating Systems Science and Myth's Archetypal Symbolism​
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​Science and Sacredness
Given the new scientific description of a self-animating thus spiritual impulse in Nature we can now regard the world as 'sacred' in the archaic sense. That is, because it is ordered by self-animating agency it has a sacred aspect that is beyond our human control and indeed is the source of our human agency itself. In that view, it is the reciprocally interdependent relationships of many network agencies, or 'spirits,' that enable the biosphere to self-organize itself in what constitutes a collective con-spiracy, giving the whole a 'unitary sacredness.' In contrast, human systems tend to behave 'monstrously' by acting non-reciprocally, competing with and exploiting natural ones without responding to feedback from them. The failure of or modern systems to act reciprocally with natural systems can be seen as a cultural failure to perceive this 'sacred interdependency' that governs relationships between Nature's system networks.
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Significant Changes in Our Social Super Organism Systems can only Emerge from Individual Experience of Numinosity
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Constraining the 'Rogue Behavior' of Modern Super Organism Social Systems through Science-Based 'Mystical Experience'
​Sacredness and Right Brain Hemisphere Understanding
Spiritual experiences have been associated with cognitive activity more influenced by the holistic perspectives of our right brain hemisphere. In regard to systems science concepts of network agency as emerging unpredictably from interdependencies of feedback flows in systems, it appears appropriate that our intuitive sense of such phenomena would derive from that right hemisphere modality, rather than our more reductive, sequentially focused left hemisphere mode of understanding. Any 'felt sense of the sacred,' as understood through system's science evidence for emergent system agency, would necessarily involve some 'experience' of a 'mysteriously' emergent, purposeful, yet somehow not literally material 'intentional force' that influences phenomena in the 'material world.' However, to effectively imagine such 'spiritual agents,' which somehow 'animate nature,' would also necessarily involve 'symbolic representations' that are not readily comprehensible to our left hemisphere perspectives. Thus our left hemisphere dominated modern worldview, with its emphasis upon deterministic causality and a strictly materialistic reality, cannot comprehend those symbols nor validate any status of 'spiritual sacredness.' Yet, to fully embrace complex systems science is to confront the 'return of the sacred' by way of scientific knowledge.