Emergence
A Sermon for Prairie Crossing Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Rev. Clare Butterfield
Reading:
From Harold Morowitz, The Emergence of Everything; How the World Became
Complex
In the domain of emergence, the assumption is made that both actual systems as well as models operate by selection from the immense space and variability of the world of the possible, and in carrying out this selection, new and unanticipated properties emerge. This type of outcome is similar in some ways to the biologists' view of evolution, in which novelty occurs by mutation, translocation, selection, and differential survival. New structures, new species, and new ecosystems thus emerge. The evolving taxa and systems are not predictable in any exact sense. Thus emergence has a certain familiar feel to biologists….
Emergence does not mean randomness; it is an orderly unfolding of the world, but an unfolding rich in novelty. We know the challenge, if not the solution….
With the emergence of humans and the human mind, there has been a radical change in the universe, locally at least, resulting in having someone to think about it. Everything changed with the emergence of the human mind and human culture; even God changed as transcendence emerged.
Sermon:
Good morning. How good to be here again.
Last time I was here I let you know that I'm in the midst of my project for a
Doctor of Ministry degree and that this sermon, and the next one will be part of
that project. For that reason I've dropped some evaluation/feedback forms about
the place and if you have the time to fill one in and leave it or stay to chat a
bit after the service, please keep it. If you got one and you can't do that
please pass it to someone who can.
I'm trying to figure out whether these ideas are useful to you, or merely endlessly fascinating to me.
Last time we talked about the idea of natural theology - of trying to learn anything about the nature of the divine based on what is before us and observable and by the application of reason. It seems like a no-brainer to UU's generally that this is an ok thing to do - what other sources are there, after all. But there are some very good minds that caution us against trying to know too much about God except by the means that god chooses to disclose Godself (generally, scripture). That is really a caution against hubris in what we think we know, and it is wise to heed it.
But we concluded that for our purposes, modern, liberal, human, experience and reason are pretty significant tools so we'd go ahead and use them and see where they got us. Once you conclude that it's ok to go ahead with analogies about the sacred from what's here before us on Earth, then you face the obligation of describing what's here correctly. And that is where some correction to the assumptions about nature that occurred within the history of Christianity is needed.
The ideas about nature and creation that are enshrined within Christian history and doctrine derive from Platonic roots. They have implicit within them a model of the universe which is static and hierarchical, outside of which stands the unmoved mover who caused it all to be.
This model of nature as separate from spirit, and as fallen with the fall of humankind, is the science of its day.
So one very important question is what does the science of our day tell us?
And that brings us to the idea of emergence.
Now I know I've talked about emergence before. Ever since I stumbled across it in this journey toward enlightenment that I've been on for the last few years, I've hardly been able to think about anything else.
I'm not a scientist but I love biology. I think living things are not only infused with the divine, but exceedingly cool in their own right. And I don't say that just because I happen to be one of them.
Emergence just makes that true in spades.
What emergence refers to is the capacity of complex systems to produce new characteristics that arise from the interaction of the parts. These characteristics are neither reducible to the sum of the parts nor are they predictable from them. They represent breakthrough capacities that can only arise because of the full complexity of the systems in which they sit.
One example of this is water. You put oxygen, a gas, and hydrogen, a gas, together, and you get this liquid with wave action. Some wag, I don't recall who, said there is a third thing in water, the thing that makes it water, but we don't know what that thing is.
That thing, my friends, is emergence.
Consciousness is another example of emergence. It comes from the brain, we know that, but it doesn't live in any individual neuron in the brain. Language seems to be another emergent characteristic, clearly related to consciousness. It may come from one part of the brain, but when that part gets damaged the brain can frequently rewire itself to produce language from some substitute part. So there isn't a cell function that produces language - it comes from the brain as a whole, as does consciousness. Consciousness emerges from the interaction of the parts, it is not reducible to them and it is not predictable from them. But once it emerges it is a real thing - it has causal influence - "top-down" influence, as it's called in emergence circles.
It is important to remember that while what emerges is genuinely novel, it is not necessary to view it as a different substance from what preceded it. However while what emerges is not a new substance it does have causal effect - it is a "thing" - it exists. It is also important to remember that emergent characteristics are truly unpredictable, at least at the limits of current scientific understanding. A reductionist view denies this possibility - it wants everything that occurs within a system to be predictable, controllable, and reducible to the sum of the parts.
If we think about it, we can see that the reductionist view of nature underlies much of what is said about nature in our religious traditions. It colors how we see the natural world, which in turn colors how we see the relationship between the natural world and the realm of the sacred. Reductionism tends to divide things - this is not that. Emergence tends to indicate that such divisions are not really possible.
Unanticipated capacities of complex systems are being discovered all the time. "Self-organizing behavior emerges unpredictably in systems at different levels. We make it intelligible by recognizing how it is consistent with lower-level properties and by finding appropriate mathematical descriptors. But in doing this we don't reduce a whole to the properties of its parts and their interactions…Emergent properties provide the recognition that nature can be creative while denying the occurrence of miracles or inconsistencies."
While much of the exploration of emergence centers on consciousness (a phenomenon not reducible to individual parts of the brain, but emergent from the function of the entire organ together), there are examples from biology far below the conscious level. There is, for example, the case of the slime mold Dictyostelium discoideum.
For decades biologists have studied this and related species, whose life cycles have two quite distinct phases: (1) single cells that move about as amoebas, growing and multiplying as they engulf and digest bacteria in rotting vegetation, but paying not the slightest attention to one another; and (2) multicellular organisms consisting of a stalk and a cap of spores. The transition from one phase to the other is initiated by starvation.
The amoeba, in other words, generally exist as single celled, non-sexually reproducing organisms. But when they run out of food they start to self-organize by means of an enzyme-based "distress call" into a single multi-celled stalk with a cap of spores on top. When moisture returns the cap germinates, releasing amoebas that return to their single-celled lifestyle.
I'm sure I've talked about that example here before, but is it not cool? And more than simply being cool, it talks about the innate capacity of life to preserve itself through reorganization. It says that competition isn't the only method by which life is organized on Earth - cooperation also plays a role in our preservation.
And it says that very simple things possess rather complex capacities when pushed to the wall.
All of that is really very, very hopeful.
It's gift.
And it ought to be provoking not only a feeling of amazement and gratitude, but a responsible looking around to see where that gratitude might most profitably be directed.
A sense of gratitude toward the emerging complexity of life in the universe might be a better form of religion to go forward into the 21st Century with than a reliance on rules, doctrines and punishments that are based in the idea of a fixed universe in which nature, by its very mobility, is engaged in one long continuous fall. All changes from perfect origin are necessarily for the worse. This downward assumption underlies everything Biblical about nature until the time of Darwin.
But the beauty of evolution is that it tells us that in many cases things change for the better. Emergence is a clear-cut case of change being positive - a move toward greater complexity and interactivity. This is a fundamental world assumption that is in contradiction to the assumptions that are implicit in the teachings of our religious traditions about nature.
Harold Morowitz presents the concept of emergence in his intriguing summary of 28 emergences throughout the history of life on Earth.
Let's start by noting that Morowitz thinks that epistemology - how we know things - is important. He recognizes, starting out philosophically, as he also ends up, that the world exists without requiring people but that "the kind of knowledge we have of that world is not independent of us, and we will never have God's knowledge of the thing in itself." Morowitz is neither an idealist (one who believes in the primacy of the idea) nor a materialist (one who believes that everything can be reduced to the activity of matter). He says, rather, that "the clear distinction between mind and nature simply does not exist."
For us this might imply that there is no clear distinction between body and spirit. Which might imply further that God's activity is within creation and not outside of it - within matter and within the rules that govern matter, and not outside them. That implication could turn out to be very important. We'll look more thoroughly at it next month.
Morowitz is a scientist but he feels very free to speculate about the theological implications of his science. The scientists who study emergence seem to find it filled with religious implications - and the theologians who study it seem to get sucked in to the beauties of the science.
I find that interesting. That it happens implies to me that we're on the right track somehow. My biases suggest that when going deeper into one thing leads you deeper into something else at the same time, and harmoniously, then you're on the right path. Or at least you're having an experience that feels very good in the brain.
What feels so good about it, I suspect, is its undivided nature. Depth without division might be a good working definition of the thing the religious seeker seeks.
Depth without division.
So if we can go deeply into the biological realm that surrounds and infuses and upholds us without dividing those thoughts and observations from the intuition that we have of the link between our own souls and the holiness that is greater than all, we've achieved some level of depth without division. We've found something, religiously.
Another point that Mr. Morowitz makes in his book on the 28 emergences also strikes me as religiously important. Matter, he says, at more than one point, is informatic. That is - the point of anything material is to transmit information. When he talks about the Pauli exclusion principal, a principal in physics that says that two electrons cannot occupy the same state at the same time, he refers to exclusion as having "a curious and somewhat noetic character." In other words, they're electrons. How does one know what state the other one is in?
They're communicating somehow. At that level of matter, stuff is communicating with other stuff. Single-celled critters send information across the cell by proximity, by chemistry, but then we get to the types of cell that transmit by electric impulse. Add an axon to a neuron and you've got the ability for information to be transmitted more quickly from, say, the head of a creature between five and six feet long, and its feet.
Matter is informatic. All this emergence seems to be headed toward the transmission of information from one part of the universe to another, from one point in time to another. Makes you think, doesn't it?
When we go diving into the biota that lurks under the leaf cover and in the air and all around us, what else do we find? Besides the self-organizing slime-mold, we find ants that build burial chambers in their colonies, and build them as far away from the food supply as they can. We find bees that choose a queen from among what are to us an array of indistinguishable larvae, and then keep that queen alive through the winter by forming a ball around her and having the workers take turns moving from the inside, where it's warm, to the outside, where it's not warm at all, while the queen stays at an even temperature. We find, in other words, levels of complexity that simply shouldn't be there if the world were encased in the static heavens and creation represented a continual fall down from the creating grace of God. In fact, if matter is informatic, then what is there can be considered part of the self-offering love of God - part of God's communication within the universe to anything capable of receiving the information God imparts.
The ancient view of creation is that it happened once for all time, and that things have been kind of disappointing since they began - that they've been falling and falling from their point of high origination. But emergence, along with basic notions of evolution suggests just the opposite. Rising, rising, rising.
This is why these ideas are threatening to those whose religions are still bound up in those old ideas of science and those old ideas of God's authority as creator. If we can pull ourselves free from those biases, however, and look at what's really here, we get an entirely different view of nature - which might (as we'll say more about next month) lead us to an entirely different view of God.
Separating body from spirit and nature from the divine allowed the assumption to be made, eventually, that when the human fell because of bodily desires, nature fell with us. But look at what's really happening out there. Amoeba are organizing themselves into single multi-celled organisms and then re-organizing themselves back to single-celled creatures when it rains again. Brains that look very much like primate brains, somehow combine with a different set of vocal chords to produce language, and that language then begins to create its own reality and to reorganize those who produce it. Suddenly there are not only words of warning but the books of the Bible, Shakespeare, social science - the world begins to look back on itself with great self-consciousness and in that self-consciousness it writes poetry about its own condition. This relentless drive to communicate - for a light particle to turn in time with its neighbor, for electrons to have a noetic sense of the state that those around them are in, for the impulse to move not by chemical transmission from one cell to the one next to it, but by electricity. And then for information to pass by sound - through the air - from one conscious creature to another. And then by speech among humans. These thoughts we have, these words, these descriptions of the holy, are not apart from the cells that give rise to them. God is still speaking from every corner of the universe. Emergence is a sign that it's not too late - that all the capacity of the universe is not used up.
A great assertion of all faiths in all times is that God is with us, and with us for our good. Emergence is a new way of understanding how this might be - God is here in the capacity of things to be greater than they are, and in the lure that draws them together.
There is not body apart from spirit or spirit apart from body. There is body in spirit. There is God emerging all around us, all the time, in the world.
Amen.