Emergence and Levels

Abstract

The worldview that informed the vanguard of the Western scientific community between ca. 1600 and ca. 1850 conceived of the universe as the maximal self-winding mechanism: recall Chapter 2. By the end of that period a number of discoveries and inventions contributed to the decline of this, the earliest scientific world view: the marvels of field physics, chemical synthesis, embryology, and biological and social evolution. These and more showed that matter, far from being the passive substance imagined by the traditional metaphysicians, was capable of spontaneous self-organization – the transmutations and metamorphoses dreamed up by the ancient alchemists and naturalists. Some of these processes turned out to be real, and they were not admired with “natural piety,” in the manner of the holists: they were now analyzed into their elementary components. In some cases, it was attempted to replicate them in the laboratory, and even to better nature – for instance, by manufacturing artificial materials such as paper and plastics, as well as transuranians, GMOs, and, of course, by organizing utterly unnatural social systems such as schools, churches, businesses, armies, and governments.