Outcome of the session (P. Deane; July 29th, 2008)

John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)

Well, for this Forum John Schooneveldt lead us on one very stunning trip, covering 4 billion years, into some seriously big ideas and re-conceptualisations (and which I can not do justice too in a few paragraphs, but here below is a shot at a slice of it). Also, for those of you who would like a closer look, here is John Schooneveldt’s PowerPoint presentation (please do not quote from this work/Powerpoint thanks, as it remains a project under development).

Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining the evolution of our physical selves, including our brains, our minds seem to change in rather more mysterious ways.

In this Forum I argue against this dualism by going back to Darwin’s original work and earlier Greek ideas of causation to explore the possibility that contextually generated selection pressures not only offer an elegant explanation of biological evolution but the evolution and development of mind, culture, language etc as well.

So starting with John’s title ‘From the Music of the Spheres to the Clatter of the Dice and Back Again’, I’d like to try and depict one idea from John’s talk. Essentially, on the way to re-explaining and recovering core ideas propagated by Darwin (and Aristotle), John gave us a new set of insights into the evolution of culture and the nature of social change. Firstly, John took us on a tour of the Western intellectual tradition (starting with the Greeks) via the principle ‘know thyself’ (as once inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece) and the Greeks understanding of ‘harmony and beauty as a property of nature which was alive’ (ie., panpsychism – all entities/objects possess an inner experience of the world around them) and ‘ever-changing (evolving)’. Mathematical patterns abound, from music to the movement of the planets and which gives us (in John’s title) ‘…the Music of the Spheres’. Somewhere in this history, from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, things changed and beauty became a property of the mind, individual entities/organisms became machines, and nature became a system in service to abstract utilitarian values. Further, into the depths of our mad loss of understanding wholes, we supply our food by killing all that is not useful (agriculture), isolate our children from the rich context of the world inside abstract structures of the material and of mind (eg., disciplinary knowledge) and conform deviate individuals/cultures through a wide variety of fundamentalisms. In this we have reduced, isolated and broken the world into pieces on the way to appropriating, dominating and controlling, so ‘what is left is an empty, meaningless world of clattering dice’ (this being the second component in John’s title).

So, in regards the third component of John’s title, ‘…and Back Again’, where now? John’s talk is part about social change and the way that our poor understanding of what the universe could be cripples our ability to act in a more appropriate manner as to the bio-physical limits and possibilities we are faced with. John has set out to reconceptualise our ideas of what we and the universe are via utilising a Darwinian framing to account for ‘…the evolution of mind, culture and belief’. This is done without making the same errors the Neo-Darwinists and Socio-Biologists made by forcing culture into an overly constrained understanding of Darwinian Theory.

John does this all by (doing a lot of stuff I can’t possibly cram in here but) noting that a Darwinian approach is based on radical individualism, where living organisms are agents interacting with each other and with each having an internalised experience of reality that changes over time. Supra-organisms (eg., ecosystems/institutions) are not causative agents and there is no such thing as transcendence (from which, in one form, we constructed the idea of ecosystems/institutions). Instead, change/evolution is a process of 4 billion years of organisms internalising experience in developing (to the now). This is fundamentally a biological process involving interaction between a living cell/organism and the environment which evokes expressions of particular genes and in sum involves change that is exponential in nature (positive feedback) tensioned by other cells/organisms (negative feedback). Individual adaptations of organisms are echoed by contextual enhancements in the environment that can cumulatively assist in survival and reproduction. These interaction patterns functionally emerge from diversity and complexity in extremely subtle ways, ie., internalised and in the end encoded experience expressed as a potential, and as interactive with the environment, then emerges (as) behaviour. Core expressions of emerged behaviour are encapsulated as motility (eg., ability to make choices, such as find better food), imitation (eg., making choices via what others have chosen, such as herding) and anticipation (eg., predicting the behaviour of others, such as camouflage/pretence). Humans have learnt through increasingly sophisticated expressions of motility, imitation and anticipation to change the environment to suit us in the last 10,000 years, and so we have taken more control over contextual enhancements, thereby minimising individual adaptations (ie., ceased adapting). This has two consequences; (1) human progress is illusionary, as we misinterpret the control over contextual enhancements as what it is to be fully human; and, (2) the consequences of controlling contextual enhancements alone leaves us in an increasingly tight spiral of acting (to control) and reacting (to contain the feedback from our maladaptive understanding). This comes at the steadily increasing expense of the planetary bio-sphere, thereby slowly but steadily weakening our ability to make further contextual enhancements. So, ‘…Back Again’, means propagating, treasuring and drawing on diversity in knowledge creation and action, re-enchanting wonder in all things and as direct experience, plus using the tools of logic, mathematics and semantic metalanguages without loosing sight that they are just tools and that the work of finding other ways to put together new futures is preeminent. It would also be smart to re-read and understand Darwin and Aristotle. John’s recapitulation is a major life work and we look forward to seeing how he continues to develop it into the future!