A Processed-based Evolution: "Process Evolution"

Process Evolution is "How everything

relates to everything else"

- re slater

Having recently reviewed and written about process philosophy over the past several months I would like to apply its concept to all previous articles on evolution I have written on this website. It is a necessary ingredient to any understanding of evolution whether from a religious or non-religious viewpoint. Its principle aptly describes what science has been studying.

When googling "process evolution" I mainly found articles applying the term to business systems but very little, if any, coupling the idea of process philosophy / process theology to Darwinian evolution. However, it would be right to apply the one with the other when thinking how the "circle of life" intricately relates from its whole to its parts and back again.

I think Alfred North Whitehead might describe process evolution as that preceding congeal of actual entities or actual occasions affecting and intermixing with one another as to led to endless outcomes of novelty where each actuality concresces towards another affected and evolving actuality leading to generative, valuative events of becoming.

In terms of Process Theology, God is the unique and initiating Actuality or Occasion who births all succeeding novel actualities and occasions. These events are unique and unrepeatable as well as connective to all previous and succeeding events. It answers the question why quantum particles are strangely connected to each other when separated at great distances. It also speaks to why all of the cosmos, the universe, nature, and life are so intimately bound together with one another.

Whitehead described this idea as the "process of organism" which is commonly known today as process thought or process philosophy. He was looking to circumscribed all previous philosophical discussions within a holistic circle of "beingness" or "eventness" so that when done he had completed what we think of today as "the circle of life".

Process Philosophy is holistic metaphysic which saw all parts of creation as related to the whole of creation, and the whole as related back to its parts. Thus, previous philosophers were simply describing reflective "parts" to the "whole" of the metaphysical world surrounding their observations much like describing the proverbial elephant in the room but not necessarily the elephant (sic, the metaphysic) itself.

Besides Whitehead, Baidou, and Deluze write in similar fashion of "Being and Event" but in Whitehead he uplifts the discussion towards the fuller idea of "Becoming" wherein a divine process is initiated from God's Being or Essence leading to valuative (better described as generative) becoming. When this fails, both inorganically or organically, it is because of the freedom of agency God has gifted creation.

Thus, what we may describe as sin or evil, suffering or harm, is in another sense a result of agency granted creation from a good and loving God. One might describe it as a "fearsome gift" as portrayed in the Adam-Eve-Serpent legend of the Bible wherein all things changed with its taking. In all respects freewill is thus birthed from God's Essence as a good and perfect and loving quality to take into life with each succeeding derivation.

However, when given agency, any unloving, or ungood, disruption is a result of the creative freewill. That is, freewill is a gift granted by uncontrolling divine action allowing a fully free and open future without determination. It was birthed from God's love, not by fiat nor command. That is, as God is free in His agency so too He endowed His creation with that same agency which bore from His divine image. Freewill is, because God is. It did not require a special command to do so; it resulted naturally from God's Being or Essence into creation's being or essence. Thus, God's agency grants all recipients - from quantum forces to living hearts - with endless generative possibilities for goodness and love, positive creativity and constructive novelty.

On the inorganic level we might describe disruptive agency as chaotic randomness if, and when, it creates negative disruptive events within the human purview of life (such as destructive flooding or winds) or nature's reaction to events in its life (such as pollution). But as a process theologian I must insist on the principle of chaotic randomness for a freewill creation to function lest it loses its ability to retain its creative novelty.

Let me explain. Originally the primal earth was filled with methane gas wherein organic life thrived. Later, the gas of oxygen began to replace methane gas. Oxygen was lethal to methane-base organisms. As oxygen expanded to replace methane so old life forms died out. In their place new forms of life resulted which thrived on oxygen - even as methane became lethal to those oxygen-based organisms. The life forms had effectively switched with one another as their environments changed.

This is the beauty of evolution. Life will find a way to survive against all odds. Yet underneath it must lie that generative (and regenerating) principle of chaotic randomness (we know these as Darwinian mutations) without which the life cycles of persistent change would be permanently disrupted thus ending any cycles of life. As such, I find the evolutionary perspective to be quite helpful in representing the sublime feature of process philosophy as relentlessly explorative against all chaotic events leading towards ungenerative becoming.

That chaotic randomness is a necessary ingredient to the circle of life must also be the case lest Whiteheadian process becomes a deniable conjecture. This type of agency must therefore include the event of death. Without cycles of life-and-death there can be no perishable, succeeding actualities. This is the very basis of process thought as perishing entities and occasions prehend future passing forms of actuality in the intermix of relational continuities and discontinuities of actualized communities.

Essentially, Darwinian evolution has captured the essence of the necessary (mutating) life-and-death cycles of creation as a redeemable quality of seeming disruptions birthing-and-rebirthing time-and-again life's struggle for beingness, novelty, and becoming. Its concept is part-and-parcel of process philosophy's overall observation of the world and any future worlds to come.

On the organic level of sentient beings, the clearer idea of sin and evil can more easily be conveyed by the actions we take with one another. We are created to love and bring goodness, novelty and wellbeing into this life. When not, when acting un-Godlike, we fail in our generative or, valuative, purpose of living.

The remaining sections of this post will show how other theologians, scientists, physicists, and engineers are thinking about process evolution related to their fields of interest. Overall, the idea that all things are related to all things is but a beginning point in describing a generative teleology or purposeful result of the evolutionary process of the circle of life.

R.E. Slater

May 7, 2020

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Evolution and Process Thought

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14746700500141671?journalCode=rtas20

by Ian G Barbour

Pages 161-178 | Published online: 18 Feb 2007

Five topics arising from evolutionary biology open new possibilities for fruitful dialogue between scientists and proponents of the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. These topics (with the main authors whose views are discussed) are:

(1) Contingency and Teleology, Stephen Jay Gould, Simon Conway Morris;

(2) The Baldwin Effect and Interiority, Bruce Weber and David DePew, Daniel Dennett, Terrence Deacon, Susan Oyama;

(3) Complexity and Design, Michael Behe, David Griffin;

(4) Hierarchical Levels and Downward Causation, Theo Meyering, Charles Hartshorne; and,

(5) Self-organization and Emergence, Terrence Deacon, Philip Clayton.

In the final section, I look at the relation of science and metaphysics and ask whether the subjectivity postulated by process philosophy is accessible to scientific investigation.

Keywords: Complexity, Design, Emergence, Evolution, Process philosophy, Self-organization, Teleology

Notes

Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942); Gaylord G. Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949).

S. J. Gould and N. Eldredge, “Punctuated Equilibria,” Paleobiology 3 (1977): 115 – 151; S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptionist Programme,” Proc. of Royal Society of London B 205 (1979): 581 – 598; S. J. Gould, “Darwinism and the Expansion of Evolutionary Theory,” Science 216 (1982): 380 – 387.

G. Ledyard Stebbins and Francisco J. Ayala, “Is a New Evolutionary Synthesis Necessary?” Science 213 (1981): 167 – 171 and “The Evolution of Darwinism,” Scientific American 253 (July 1885): 72 – 89.

Thomas J. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

See Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models and Metaphors (London: SCM Press, 1974); Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989).

Simon Conway Morris, The Crucible of Creation: The Burgess Shale and the Rise of Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998). See also the exchange between Gould and Conway Morris in Natural History 107 (1998): 48 – 55.

Simon Conway Morris, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Conway Morris, Life's Solution, 124.

Conway Morris, Life's Solution, 328.

Simon Conway Morris, “The Paradoxes of Evolution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe?” in God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, ed. Neil A. Manson (London: Routledge, 2003), 334.

Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), 293 – 297.

Bruce Weber and David Depew, Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

J. M. Baldwin, “A New Factor in Evolution,” American Naturalist 30 (1986): 441 – 451, and Development and Evolution (New York: Macmillan, 1902). See also Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chap. 10.

C. H. Waddington, Organisers and Genes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940) and The Strategy of the Genes (New York: Macmillan, 1957).

Daniel Dennett, “The Baldwin Effect: A Crane, Not a Skyhook,” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 77 (his emphasis).

Terrence W. Deacon, “Multilevel Selection in a Complex Adaptive System: The Problem of Language Origin,” and “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence: Untangling the Interdependence of Evolution and Self-organization,” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and Brain (New York: Norton, 1997).

Gerald W. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

Susan Oyama, “On Having a Hammer,” in Weber and Depew, op.cit.

David Ray Griffin, “Some Whiteheadian Comments,” in Mind and Nature: Essays on the Interface of Science and Philosophy, ed. John Cobb, Jr and David Ray Griffin (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1977).

David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2000), 299.

Ibid, 299.

Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (New York: Free Press, 1998).

Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism, 287, footnote 23.

Collections of essays for and against Intelligent Design are given in ed., Neil A. Manson, God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) and ed., Roland T. Pennock, Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological and Scientific Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). A bibliography of recent articles can be found on website of the National Center for Science Education at www.ncseweb.org

Kenneth Miller, “Answering the Biological Argument from Design” in Neil A. Manson, ed., op. cit.

Griffin, op. cit., 289 (quoting William Thorpe).

Symposium on “Life and the Art of Networks,” Science 30 (26 Sept. 2003): 1863 – 1874.

See Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software (New York: Scribner, 2001).

Ian G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966), 327 – 337 and Religion and Science: Historical and Contemporary Issues, 230 – 235. See also, Francisco J. Ayala, “Introduction” in The Problem of Reduction, ed. F. Ayala and T. Dobzhansky (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1974).

On top-down causation, see Arthur Peacocke, Theology for a Scientific Age, enlarged ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), chap. 3.

Theo Meyering, “Downward Causation,” in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, ed. J. Wentzel Vrede van Huysteen (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2003), 229.

Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1953), chap. 1 and The Logic of Perfection (LaSalle, Ill: Open Court, 1962), chap. 7.

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984).

Stuart Kaufman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Terrence W. Deacon, “The Hierarchic Logic of Emergence” in Weber and Depew, op. cit.

Bruce H. Weber and Terrence W. Deacon, “Thermodynamic Cycles, Developmental Systems, and Emergence,” Cybernetics and Human Knowing 7:1 (2000): 21 – 43.

Philip Clayton, “Neuroscience, the Person, and God: An Emergentist Account” in Neuroscience and the Person: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action, eds. Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, Theo C. Meyering and Michael Arbib (Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory and Berkeley, CA: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1999).

Philip Clayton, “The Emergence of Spirit,” CTNS Bulletin 20:4 (Fall 2000): 3 – 20.

Ibid., 15.

Clayton, “Neuroscience, the Person, and God,” in Russell et al, op. cit., 211.

Philip Clayton, “Barbour's Panentheistic Metaphysics,” in Fifty Years in Science and Religion: Ian Barbour and His Legacy, ed. Robert John Russell (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004).

Ian G. Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 37.

Ian G. Barbour, “God's Power: A Process View,” in The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis, ed. John Polkinghorne (London: SPCK, 2001).

Clayton, “Barbour's Panentheistic Metaphysics,” in Russell, 113 – 115.

Ian G. Barbour, Myths, Models, and Paradigms (London: SCM Press, 1974).

Clayton, “The Emergence of the Spirit”, 6.

Barbour, Religion and Science, p. 290; Nature, Human Nature, and God, 37, 99.

Barbour, Nature, Human Nature, and God, 99.

Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), 211.

John F. Haught, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 178, 179.

David Ray Griffin, “On Ian Barbour's Issues in Science and Religion,” Zygon 23 (1988): 57 – 81.

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https://evogeneao.s3.amazonaws.com/images/tree_of_life/tree-of-life_2000.png

This awesome graphic of all lifeforms

will make you feel tiny

https://www.businessinsider.com/this-evolution-graphic-will-make-you-feel-tiny-2015-5

by Jennifer Welsh

May 27, 2015

"LIFE ON EARTH IS ONE BIG EXTENDED FAMILY!" is the greatest lesson from evolution, Leonard Eisenberg shouts at the top of his website https://www.evogeneao.com/en, which he says stands for Evolutionary Genealogy.

Eisenberg created the graphic below to counter the creationist themes he's seen spring into science classes recently. A Penn State University poll in 2011 found 59% of teachers are wary of discussing evolution in the classroom and fear sparking controversy by teaching it. Even more worrying, another 13% dismiss it all together and instead teach intelligent design or creationism in class.

"I run into this even when teaching about Earth history, how life and the planet have changed through time," Eisenberg told Business Insider in an email.

"By emphasizing the 'family' aspect of evolution, in a fun way with attractive art, EvoGeneao makes evolution less scary, more 'family' friendly, and easier for students to understand and teachers to teach."

So what does the family tree of all living things on Earth look like in one graphic? Check it out (Or for a larger version click here):

The age of the Earth radiates out in both directions from the center of the half-circle. As the world gets older, you can see more and more species populate it. The majority of the species on this graphic are still living — except for a few, like the dinosaurs, which are mentioned specifically to point out the five mass extinctions that have changed Earth's history. The graphic didn't include the millions of organisms that have died out over the Earth's history.

"This Great Tree of Life diagram is based primarily on the evolutionary relationships so wonderfully related in Dr. Richard Dawkins' 'The Ancestor's Tale,'" Eisenburg writes on the site. It is meant "to illustrate a great lesson of evolution; that we are related not only to every living thing, but also to every thing that has ever lived."

The lines show different big events — like major extinctions — that have changed Earth's evolutionary history. You can also see the huge explosion of new species at the Cambrian Explosion, 542 million years ago, as the large swath of pink organisms called protosomes.

And we are just a tiny slice of that evolution. Mammals, like humans, are the darkest brown. Here you can see humans as one tiny sliver of life at the end of the evolutionary rainbow:

evo mammals. All of humanity. One little line | Leonard Eisemberg, Evogeneao.com

And even though humans take up a tiny amount of space on the tree, our presence should be even smaller, Eisenberg says. Bacteria, as you can see, take up a huge swath of life on Earth — as they have from the very beginning, through five mass extinctions:

evo bacteria | Leonard Eisemberg, Evogeneao.com

As Eisenberg writes on the site:

This Tree of Life is drawn from the human, mammalian point of view. That is why humankind, instead of some other organism, occupies a branch tip at the end of the tree, and why our vertebrate cousins (animals with a backbone) occupy a large part of the tree. This falsely suggests that humans are the ultimate goal of evolution. In fact, if that asteroid or comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago and helped wipe out the dinosaurs, had instead missed the Earth, there might not be a dominant, tool-using, space-faring species on earth. Or if one evolved, it might be a dinosaur, not a mammal.

There are a few other simplifications in the poster, as noted on the site.

As a retired oil industry geologist, Eisenberg says this project developed out of volunteering with his children's schools, pursuing multiple evolution and Earth history based projects to educate the children.

"I needed a diagram to explain evolution for an interpretive sign. I couldn't find any I liked, (mainly because they were not tied to a geologic time scale) so created my own, hand drawn in Photoshop, using available texts and websites," which wasn't an easy feat, Eisenberg said. It "took about six months and many hundreds of hours to find ages of common ancestors."

Eisenberg is currently working on an animated, interactive version of the tree of life for the website.

See the entire graphic over at EvoGeneao. You can also buy the graphic as a giant laminated poster.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

CIRCLES OF LIFE

Process Evolution:

"How everything relates to everything else"

- re slater

https://itol.embl.de/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/all-2-3-million-species-are-mapped-into-a-single-circle-of-life/

https://www.biostars.org/p/820/ - ALSO -https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Tree_of_life_SVG.svg

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

First comprehensive tree of life shows how related you are to millions of species - https://phys.org/news/2015-09-tree-life-million-species.html

OPENTREEOFLIFE.ORG

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/09/first-comprehensive-tree-life-shows-how-related-you-are-millions-species

by Elizabeth Pennisi

Sep. 21, 2015

Want to know how related you are to a wombat? Or an amoeba? Now you can, thanks to the newly released Open Tree of Life, which knits together more than 500 family trees of various groups of organisms to create a supertree with 2.3 million species.

Researchers have already begun to put these new data to work toward a better understanding of life on Earth. “Everything we study in biology can be pinned somewhere on the tree of life,” says James Rosindell, a computational biologist at Imperial College, London, who was not involved with the database. “It’s highly significant that scientists have finally produced a complete tree.” 

Over the past 3 years, about 35 people from 11 U.S. labs have spent about 100,000 hours scouring the scientific literature for family trees. They had to resolve naming issues—sometimes a species would have multiple names, and at one point a spiny anteater shared the same moniker with a moray eel, confusing the computers. “There is no single database of accepted names, so the group had to come up with one,” says co-author Douglas Soltis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Florida, Gainesville.

He and his colleagues expected that knitting together these different family trees—which often disagreed—would be the hard part. But what stumped them the most was the dearth of digitized data. Of 7500 trees published between 2000 and 2012, only one in six were computerized. Ultimately, the team used about 500 smaller trees to build one large one, says Karen Cranston, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who helped coordinate the effort. With this relatively small sample size, the draft tree, released online this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “does not summarize what we know,” Cranston says.

But the tree’s website includes links to the original studies examined that offer alternate views, she adds. Furthermore, the site is built to accept feedback and incorporate new data that will eventually be used to update the tree. “We hope the tree looks much different a year from now,” Cranston adds.

Meanwhile, Rosindell and Yan Wong, an evolutionary biologist at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, have adapted a computer tool they’ve been developing to help people “see” the tree. Called OneZoom, the project works like Google Maps in that a user can drill down the tree’s trunks, branches, and tips to see ever finer details. In this video, OneZoom starts out with an overview of the tree, then zooms in on successively more detailed branches that lead first to animals, then to placental bearing mammals, and finally to humans. For this tree, Wong used not only the Open Tree data, but also data from other studies he identified as important.

“It’s one cool visualization,” says Open Tree of Life coordinator and evolutionary biologist Stephen Smith from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He hopes there will be many more adaptations of the data. If you could combine it with other data, for example, “you can make your own tree of life.”

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Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has

found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution

of life. | Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine

This Physicist Has A Groundbreaking Idea

About Why Life Exists

https://www.businessinsider.com/groundbreaking-idea-of-lifes-origin-2014-12

by Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine

December 8, 2014

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck.

But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat.

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

Cells from the moss Plagiomnium affine with visible

chloroplasts, organelles that conduct photosynthesis by

capturing sunlight. | Kristian Peters

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

His idea, detailed in a paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken “a very brave and very important step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England’s work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality of the ideas.”

Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard University, are not convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,” Shakhnovich said.

England’s theoretical results are generally considered valid. It is his interpretation — that his formula represents the driving force behind a class of phenomena in nature that includes life — that remains unproven. But already, there are ideas about how to test that interpretation in the lab.

“He’s trying something radically different,” said Mara Prentiss, a professor of physics at Harvard who is contemplating such an experiment after learning about England’s work. “As an organizing lens, I think he has a fabulous idea. Right or wrong, it’s going to be very much worth the investigation.”

A computer simulation by Jeremy England and colleagues shows

a system of particles confined inside a viscous fluid in which the

turquoise particles are driven by an oscillating force. Over time

(from top to bottom), the force triggers the formation of more

bonds among the particles. | Courtesy of Jeremy England

At the heart of England’s idea is the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of increasing entropy or the “arrow of time.” Hot things cool down, gas diffuses through air, eggs scramble but never spontaneously unscramble; in short, energy tends to disperse or spread out as time progresses. Entropy is a measure of this tendency, quantifying how dispersed the energy is among the particles in a system, and how diffuse those particles are throughout space. It increases as a simple matter of probability: There are more ways for energy to be spread out than for it to be concentrated.

Thus, as particles in a system move around and interact, they will, through sheer chance, tend to adopt configurations in which the energy is spread out. Eventually, the system arrives at a state of maximum entropy called “thermodynamic equilibrium,” in which energy is uniformly distributed. A cup of coffee and the room it sits in become the same temperature, for example.

As long as the cup and the room are left alone, this process is irreversible. The coffee never spontaneously heats up again because the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against so much of the room’s energy randomly concentrating in its atoms.

Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings.

In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do. A plant, for example, absorbs extremely energetic sunlight, uses it to build sugars, and ejects infrared light, a much less concentrated form of energy. The overall entropy of the universe increases during photosynthesis as the sunlight dissipates, even as the plant prevents itself from decaying by maintaining an orderly internal structure.

Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. In Schrödinger’s day, they could solve the equations of thermodynamics only for closed systems in equilibrium. In the 1960s, the Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine made progress on predicting the behavior of open systems weakly driven by external energy sources (for which he won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry). But the behavior of systems that are far from equilibrium, which are connected to the outside environment and strongly driven by external sources of energy, could not be predicted.

This situation changed in the late 1990s, due primarily to the work of Chris Jarzynski, now at the University of Maryland, and Gavin Crooks, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Jarzynski and Crooks showed that the entropy produced by a thermodynamic process, such as the cooling of a cup of coffee, corresponds to a simple ratio: the probability that the atoms will undergo that process divided by their probability of undergoing the reverse process (that is, spontaneously interacting in such a way that the coffee warms up). As entropy production increases, so does this ratio: A system’s behavior becomes more and more “irreversible.” The simple yet rigorous formula could in principle be applied to any thermodynamic process, no matter how fast or far from equilibrium. “Our understanding of far-from-equilibrium statistical mechanics greatly improved,” Grosberg said. England, who is trained in both biochemistry and physics, started his own lab at MIT two years ago and decided to apply the new knowledge of statistical physics to biology.

Using Jarzynski and Crooks’ formulation, he derived a generalization of the second law of thermodynamics that holds for systems of particles with certain characteristics: The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things. England then determined how such systems tend to evolve over time as they increase their irreversibility. “We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there,” he said. The finding makes intuitive sense: Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment.

“This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments,” England explained.

Self-Replicating Sphere Clusters: According to new research at Harvard,

coating the surfaces of microspheres can cause them to spontaneously

assemble into a chosen structure, such as a polytetrahedron (red), which

then triggers nearby spheres into forming an identical structure. | Courtesy

of Michael Brenner/Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time. As England put it, “A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself.”

In a September paper in the Journal of Chemical Physics, he reported the theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating.

He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising.

The chemistry of the primordial soup, random mutations, geography, catastrophic events and countless other factors have contributed to the fine details of Earth’s diverse flora and fauna. But according to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter.

This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well. “It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization,” England said. “Many examples could just be right under our nose, but because we haven’t been looking for them we haven’t noticed them.”

Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid. And in a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters. “This connects very much to what Jeremy is saying,” Brenner said.

Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well. “Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process,” he said. Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases.

“He is making me think that the distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp,” said Carl Franck, a biological physicist at Cornell University, in an email. “I’m particularly impressed by this notion when one considers systems as small as chemical circuits involving a few biomolecules.”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible

for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many

other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-

replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of

dissipation-driven adaptation. | Wilson Bentley

England’s bold idea will likely face close scrutiny in the coming years.

He is currently running computer simulations to test his theory that systems of particles adapt their structures to become better at dissipating energy. The next step will be to run experiments on living systems.

Prentiss, who runs an experimental biophysics lab at Harvard, says England’s theory could be tested by comparing cells with different mutations and looking for a correlation between the amount of energy the cells dissipate and their replication rates.

“One has to be careful because any mutation might do many things,” she said. “But if one kept doing many of these experiments on different systems and if [dissipation and replication success] are indeed correlated, that would suggest this is the correct organizing principle.”

Brenner said he hopes to connect England’s theory to his own microsphere constructions and determine whether the theory correctly predicts which self-replication and self-assembly processes can occur — “a fundamental question in science,” he said.

Having an overarching principle of life and evolution would give researchers a broader perspective on the emergence of structure and function in living things, many of the researchers said. “Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics,” said Ard Louis, a biophysicist at Oxford University, in an email. These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes Louis has recently studied.

If England’s approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization.

They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve,” Louis said.

“People often get stuck in thinking about individual problems,” Prentiss said. Whether or not England’s ideas turn out to be exactly right, she said, “thinking more broadly is where many scientific breakthroughs are made.”

Emily Singer contributed reporting.

Towards a Process Philosophy of Ecological Neuroscience

Neuron Activity inside the brain

Towards an Ecological Neuroscience:

Aspects of the Nature of Things

According to Process Philosophy

http://home.earthlink.net/~icedneuron/ProcessPhilosophy.htm

by S. David Stoney

Ph.D.Dept of Physiology

December 17, 2001

"There are deep similarities between Whitehead's idea of the process by which nature unfolds and the ideas of quantum theory. Whitehead says that the world is made of actual 'occasions', each of which arises from potentialities created by prior actual occasions. These actual occasions are 'happenings' modeled on experiential events, each of which comes into being and then perishes, only to be replaced by a successor. It is these experience-like 'happenings' that are the basic realities of nature, according to Whitehead, not the persisting physical particles that Newtonian physics took [to] be the basic entities.

Similarly, Heisenberg says that what is really happening in a quantum process is the emergence of an 'actual' from potentialities created by prior actualities. In the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory the actual things to which the theory refer[s] are increments in 'our knowledge'. These increments are experiential events. The particles of classical physics lose their fundamental status: they dissolve into diffuse clouds of possibilities. At each stage of the unfolding of nature the complete cloud of possibilities acts like the potentiality for the occurrence of a next increment in knowledge..." Henry P. Stapp, author of Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, in an invited paper at the Silver Anniversary International Whitehead Conference, Claremont, CA, August 4-9, 1998. See http://www-physics.lbl.gov/~stapp/wh2.txt

I. Introduction.

The problem, of course, with the materialistic approach is that it doesn't validate that which is the only thing we are really sure of, our own experience. This is dangerous for ourselves as persons of value and for science. Whitehead's bold step was to presume the reality of experience and process all the way up, from the most "elementary" of particles to the mind of God, so to speak. The biologist, Conrad H. Waddington, described Whitehead's idea as follows:

"Whitehead was bold enough to take on, face to face, the most difficult of intellectual problems - the fact that each one of us has a conscious experience, whereas in science we try to account for the behavior or things by means of concepts or entities - atoms, waves, fundamental particles, and so on - whose definition does not contain any reference to consciousness. Whitehead argued that this is not good enough: you have either got to have consciousness, or at least something of that general kind, everywhere, or nowhere; and since it is obviously in us, and cannot be nowhere, it must therefore be everywhere, presumably mostly in very rudimentary form." Conrad A. Waddington, cited in John A. Jungerman, World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pgs. 86 & 87, 2000.

David Ray Griffin had this to say about the universality of experience:

"Panexperientialism [another name for process philosophy] is based upon the... assumption that we can, and should, think about the units comprising the physical world by analogy with our own experience, which we know from within. The supposition, in other words, is that the apparent difference in kind between our experience, or our "mind," and [other] entities... is an illusion, resulting from the fact that we know them in two different ways: we know our minds from within, by identity, whereas in sensory perception... we know [other entities] from without. Once we realize this, there is no reason to assume them really to be different in kind." David Ray Griffin, Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pg. 2000.

So, process thought views experiential events, understood as actual occasions, not substances, as fundamental. Although brief, actual occasions bring forth, over and over again, the objective world and our awareness of it. The following description, which relies heavily on the mercifully short introductory chapter in Jungerman's (see above) book, will present, in a somewhat didactic form, a brief description of the basic features of the process approach. This chapter from Jungerman's book is on reserve at the MCG library. The other books and copies on reserve at the MCG Library have more thorough descriptions.

II. Some important process ideas.

(See Figure below from Jungerman, pg. 11, see )

• Actual occasions, understood as experiential events, are primary, not substances ("mere matter").

• Each event feels the feelings of - is connected to (i.e., prehends) - earlier events as well as the dominant occasion of experience of the universe. Actual occasions are "drops of experience."

• Although strongly influenced by the past, events have aims (goals), namely to maximize creativity and intensity of feeling, that arise due to their participation with more dominant occasions of experience.

• Thus, events have some capacity, however slight, to select among alternatives. This allows for novelty.

• Immediately upon grasping or incorporating the feelings of past events and potential goals, the actual occasion "perishes" into objectivity, becoming data (potentiality) for the next actual occasion, which immediately succeeds it.

• This process makes concrete a novel, present unity with duration, in which the prehensions and the subjective goals are integrated. Whitehead calls this process of self-determination a "concrescence."

• An event that has completed it's concrescence has achieved satisfaction and becomes "objectively immortal" as a datum to be prehended by future experiential events.

• Thus existence is a series of coming into beings (concrescences), each occasion of which brings the world with it as data (See and reference 8, especially Kevin O'Regan's notion of "the world as an outside memory," in the Introduction).

• Subjects and objects are different in time, not in kind.

• Compound individuals (societies of prehensions with dominant occasions of experience; such as living creatures) must be distinguished from mere aggregates (societies of actual occasions without dominant members; such as rocks).

• Any creature is a highy integrated, dynamic pattern of interdependent events. Its parts contribute to, and are modified by, the unified activity of the whole, i.e., by the dominant occasion of experience.

• The dominant occasion of experience integrates the lower level actual occasions into a unity of purpose. For human beings, the dominant occasion of experience constitutes the mind (or psyche, or soul) and the integration of the experience of all subordinate actual occasions provides for conscious awareness from an embodied perspective.

• Existence is becoming: The many become one and are increased by one

• Most experience is nonconscious (nonsensory) experience. All actual occasions share in having nonconscious experience; conscious experience arises in only a few compound individuals.

• The universe appears interconnected by a web of prehensions and probably has its own dominant occasion of experience.

• For any actual occasion, the future is open, i.e., unpredictable because of the alternatives (potentialities) available to it. This is the basis for the appearance of novelty.

• Conscious awareness is not an unbroken stream of experience, but rather is a series of experiential events, each of which has spatial as well as temporal extension.

• Memory and perception are alike in that they each are an intuition of previous actualities

Jungerman describes this figure as follows:

"The event begins with a prehension, a grasping of previous events, including the prior events of the enduring society to which it belongs, by the physical pole. The physical pole is the part of the event that interacts with the external world. This information passes into the mental pole. The mental pole is internal to the the event. It synthesizes the data coming to the physical pole with the goals of this becoming event. This process is termed a concrescence. When the synthesis is accomplished, all the data are simplified in a satisfaction... The mental pole's creative simplification by selection among alternatives may lead to increased intensity of experience and to novelty. It may lead to a new whole (synthesis) through emergence with other events. On the other hand, a single electron's experience may be viewed as being so dominated by its physical pole that upon concrescence its characteristics are repeated over and over. It becomes an enduring individual that retains the same character over a long period of time. After its satisfaction, an event is said to be objectively immortal, as it becomes a datum to be prehended by future events. Note that the event takes place in a finite time, which flows from the past to the future..." (pg. 11 & 12)

Nicholas Rescher, in Process Metaphysics (see), notes that this approach is a point of view that accepts that processes and activities are more important than things and substances. He listed the following differences:

III. Prehensions

The importance of this concept cannot be overstated. Each actual occasion prehends - i.e., grasps or incorporates - data from the past, as well as subjective aim from dominant occasions of experience. Thus, an actual occasion is an action.

In addition to such positive prehensions, negative prehensions, which can exclude the sharing of feelings can also occur. Jungerman describes prehension as follows:

"Prehension describes the connection between past and present events, no matter how elementary. The present event, which is partially self-determining, makes a creative selection among data from all past events and from alternative future possibilities, goals, or aims. Such aims are only potentialities until the selection actualizes them... At some level we are aware of the mysterious 'otherness' of our fellows creatures and take them into ourselves, informing our own actuality - not just in appreciation, but rather in recognizing that the 'other' is [sic] in some sense constitutes ourselves. We are all inextricably linked in the matrix of creation " (pg. 7 & 8)

At a more concrete level of description, consider Charles Hartshorne's words (which describe, I believe, the doorway to understanding of placebo effects):

"Cells can influence our human experiences because they have feelings that we can feel. To deal with the influences of human experiences on cells, one turns this around. We have feelings that cells can feel." (pg. 12)

IV. Dominant occasions of experience

No doubt there is a dominant occasion of experience for the event known as a hydrogen atom, just as there are dominant occasions of experience for the events known as you and I. The prehension of the proton by its electron (and vice versa) no doubt gave rise to an experience that is, from our perspective, indescribable, except to say that there presumably is more enjoyment associated with that concrescence than, for example, with the concrescence of the quarks and gluons that make up the proton. The idea that societies of actual occasions, especially those associated with compound individuals, are capable of more enjoyment and more complex experiences than simple assemblies of events is fundamental to process thought. Failure to take note of this feature is one of the most common, erroneous reasons for dismissing panexperientialism: "Oh, those folks are crazy, they believe that electrons (or rocks) are conscious."

Process thought explicitly recognizes that creation of order, increasing complexity, and emergence of novelty are historical facts. Such an outcome is, according to process thought, the natural outcome of a society of occasions of experience maximizing its satisfaction or enjoyment. Jungerman quotes Waddington in this regard:

"Whitehead insisted that an event is not merely an assemblage of numerous relations between many different things thrown together in a disorderly heap. On the contrary the various 'feelings' of one for another are organized into something with a specific and individual character... Organization occurs when the relations are of such a kind that they tend to stabilize the general pattern against influences which might disturb it. That is to say, organization confers on the entity an enduring individuality which a mere assemblage lacks." (pg. 118)

In this regard, I believe that it is noteworthy that Whitehead's metaphysics leads naturally to an introduction of the divine. I simplistically [can now] view the divine "as a field of pure positive affect that pervades the entire universe and which participates with the dominant occasion of experience of that universe." The accord between modern science and process theology means that the estrangement between religion and science may dissipate in a reconstructive postmodern era. Given the threat to societal stability posed by abrupt global climate change, it is comforting that we may be able to use all the tools at our disposal to meet that enormous challenge to human progress.

V. Why bother?

Isn't the present primarily physicalist approach close enough for government work? Well, yes, provided that the goal is to maintain the status quo and continue the current modern trajectory toward a deconstructive postmodern ("posthuman") future where we can all take great delight in being naught but souless "bags of genes and chemicals" bumping about in a blighted environment. If perchance that does not seem desirable, then perhaps it is time to admit that 100% allegiance to the present approach may be suicidal. Isn't neuralism, especially in conjunction with a "revolt of the elite" - for whom the accumulation of more and more 'stuff,' without relation to actual need, has become the highest good - quite nihilistic toward human value, not to mention survival of the world as a viable ecosystem?

I suggest taking a bold step. Integrate information about abrupt global climate change into our base of conscious knowledge so that it can act as a "cognitive capstone," deflecting the trajectory of embodied human consciousness away from its highly alienated, 'posthuman' target and towards a more humane, postcritical mindscape. According to this scheme, the competitive, tribal mentalities that have dominated the first part of this interglacial phase must give ground to more cooperative, postcritical, participatory mentalities not dominated by unconscious fear. A postcritical worldview will consciously recognize abrupt global climate change and the critical need to break free of the conditioned thinking of the past where 'our knowledge' of abrupt global climate change has been almost entirely in the form of unconscious fear. The figure below illustrates some alternative trajectories for embodied human consciousness.

As alluded to above, the data about cyclic climate change - at least for the last three million years or so of earth's geologic history - where long, cold, arid glacial phases have been interrupted by short, warm, wet interglacial phases, is startling and very worrisome. The last three million years was, by the way, the period when the hominid line diverged from its primate forebears, leading, according to the fossil record, to the appearance of modern Homo sapiens with brains such as ours in size, around 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. This data is, at least in broad outline, firm and widely accepted.

"Cyclic climate pattern of alternating cold, dry glacial periods and warm, wet interglacial periods. This pattern has prevailed during the current ice age, which has lasted for three million years. Transitions between glacial and interglacial phases may occur within as short a period of time as a decade. Marked variations in sea level occurred near the end of the last two interglacial periods. Upward slope of interglacial phase temperatures reflect the progressive decrease in earth's albedo as the polar ice caps shrink. Insert shows rapid fluctuations in temperature that occurred during the last glacial phase."

So, our best guesses are that the three million year old climate cycle continues and the currently warming interglacial phase will come to an end, perhaps abruptly, perhaps soon. What we don't know is exactly when and how the next glacial phase will begin. However, to wait until we do know "for sure" will almost certainly be too late. Even though we have developed practically all the tools (except perhaps the political will and spiritual fortitude) we need to deal with this problem during the first part of this interglacial phase, we should not underestimate the resistance that will arise to changing the ways we do business.

If we have 100 years to get used to the fact that those of us who live in northern latitudes are merely 'renters,' well, then we could probably do a little. If we have 500 years we could do a great deal. To put it into stark terms, consider that contemporary thought forms appear to be able to do relatively little towards stemming population growth. This makes it probable that interglacial phase population growth will approximate the curve shown in part A of the figure below: population increases as long as food supply allows.

The problem for the postcritical mind: Learning to learn to live in an ecologically sustainable way during interglacial phases.

Now, in the event of a rapid cooling (or worse, a "1-2 punch" of rapid warming and sea level rise followed by rapid cooling) the population downsizing will almost certainly be extremely catastrophic. Is that how this phase of civilization is going to end? Let's at least try opening ourselves to a new infusion of creativity and novelty for the last part of this interglacial period.

Surely we should work towards having a population that will be closer to a level sustainable through the transition to the next glacial phase. Surely we should work for the maintenance of civilization, freedom, and the individualized modes of consciousness that civilization supports. Who knows what can be accomplished in our society if we Homo sapiens sapiens are willing to work together, if we are willing to strive to be an example for the rest of the world.

If not, if we bow our heads and slink into the posthuman future of denial, alienation, and despair, then the question must arise as to whether or not human beings are truly conscious. What use is freedom without consciousness?

VI. References and Notes

1. The disutility of conceiving of human beings in strictly physicalist terms was addressed with vigor by philosopher/scientist Michael Polanyi:

"The ideal of strictly objective knowledge, paradigmatically formulated by Laplace, continues to sustain a universal tendency to enhance the observational accuracy and systematic precision of science, at the expense of its bearing on its subject matter...[Science may be characterized as harboring] a misguided intellectual passion - a passion for achieving absolutely impersonal knowledge which, being unable to recognize any persons, presents us with a picture of the universe in which we ourselves are absent. In such a universe there is no one capable of creating and upholding scientific values; hence there is no science."

The story of the Laplacean fallacy suggests a criterion of consistency. It shows that our conceptions of man and human society must be such as to account for man's faculty in forming these conceptions and to authorize the cultivation of this faculty within society. Only by accrediting the exercise of our intellectual passions in the act of observing man, can we form conceptions of man and society which both endorse this accrediting and uphold the freedom of culture in society. Such self-accrediting, or self-confirmatory, progression will prove an effective guide to all knowledge of living beings." (Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 1958. Emphasis added)

2. John A. Jungerman, World in Process: Creativity and Interconnection in the New Physics, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pgs. 86 & 87, 2000.

3. Henri Bergson, in Introduction to Metaphysics (NY: G. P. Putnam's Sons, pg. 12, 1912), expressed it this way:

"...to live is to grow old. But it may just as well be compared to a continual rolling up, like that of a thread on a ball, for our past follows us, it swells incessantly with the present that it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory."

4. Nicholas Rescher, Process Metaphysics: An Introduction to Process Philosophy, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, pg. 35, 1996.

Jay McDaniel - Process Pluralism as an Antidote to Hate

Photo: Susannah Stubbs, Artist in Residence, Open Horizons

​Process Pluralism as an antidote to

the Ideology of Hate

Article Link

In appreciation of, and response to, David Brooks'

"The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It"

excerpts from David Brooks' Opinion essay in NY Times, August 5, 2019

1. Mass murderers are inspired by a shared ideology

"Many of today’s mass murderers write manifestoes. They are not killing only because they’ve been psychologically damaged by trauma. They’re not killing only because they are pathetically lonely and deeply pessimistic about their own lives. They are inspired to kill by a shared ideology, an ideology that they hope to spread through a wave of terror." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

​2. Their ideology is antipluralism: a yearning for "clear borders, settled truths, and stable identities" and a reaction against the "diversity, fluidity, and interdependent nature of modern life."

"Trumpian nationalists, authoritarian populists and Islamic jihadists are different versions of antipluralism.These movements are reactions against the diversity, fluidity and interdependent nature of modern life. Antipluralists yearn for a return to clear borders, settled truths and stable identities. They kill for a fantasy, a world that shines in their imaginations but never existed in real life." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

3. Mass murderers share this ideology with ethnic nationalists, authoritarian populists, and Islamic jihadists, although the latter may not resort to violence. 

The antipluralist ideology need not include incitements to violence, but it lends itself to violence against "others" who threaten "clear borders, settled truths, and stable identities." (Jay McDaniel)

4. The alternative to antipluralism is pluralism. It is a belief that each person is a "symphony of identities" and that no one is reducible to a single label. In the language of Whitehead, each person is an ongoing process of of assimilating many influences into one moment, in the context of which a person becomes "new" moment-by-moment.

"The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front...We pluralists do not believe that human beings can be reduced to a single racial label. Each person is a symphony of identities. Our lives are rich because each of us contains multitudes." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

5. Pluralists believe that "mixing" and "amalgamating" is good and that a "pure culture is a dead culture."

"Pluralists believe that culture mixing has always been and should be the human condition. All cultures define and renew themselves through encounter. A pure culture is a dead culture while an amalgam culture is a creative culture. The very civilization the white separatists seek to preserve was itself a product of earlier immigration waves." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

6. Pluralists believe that life is an adventure in diversity and dialogue.

​"Finally, pluralism is the adventure of life. Pluralism is not just having diverse people coexist in one place. It’s going out and getting into each other’s lives. It’s a constant dialogue that has no end because there is no single answer to how we should live....Life in a pluralistic society is an ever-moving spiral. There are the enemies of pluralism ripping it apart and the weavers of community binding it together. There is no resting spot. It’s change, fluidity and movement all the way down." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

7. Pluralists believe that the idea of a pure, static world is an illusion and that life is about movement, interdependence, and life.

"The terrorists dream of a pure, static world. But the only thing that’s static is death, which is why they are so pathologically drawn to death. Pluralism is about movement, interdependence and life. The struggle ahead is about competing values as much as it is about controlling guns and healing damaged psyches. Pluralism thrives when we name what the terrorists hate about us, and live it out." (David Brooks, NY Times, August 5, 2019)

​​8. Process Pluralists add a cosmology to what Brooks says, partly rooted in insights from physics. They believe that what David Brooks says of the world is likewise true of the universe. 

They believe that the universe as a whole is vast network of inter-dependent creative inter-becoming, and that antipluralists are fighting against the very grain of a creative, dynamic process of inter-becoming. (Jay McDaniel)

​9. Process Pluralists believe that the universe of inter-becoming is enfolded within a self-conscious Life (God) and that process pluralism can have a faith dimension.

​For process pluralists -- sometimes called open and relational theoloians -- God is not a tyrant in the sky but rather a sky-like Mind who embraces the whole of the universe. God feels the feelings of all living beings with tender care and inwardly beckons human beings to live with compassion, creativity, and wisdom concerning the interconnectedness of things and the needs of fellow creatures. God, too, is in process. This means that antipluralists are hiding from the will, and the yearnings, of the Soul of the universe. (Jay McDaniel)

10. Process Pluralists add that people need community and the natural world to live happily and wisely.

The social ideal of process pluralism is to help build communities are compassionate, creative, participatory, multicultural, multifaith, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. Process pluralists speak of these as the building blocks of ecological civilizations: the best and only hope of humankind. (Jay McDaniel)

The best way to fight the ideology of hatred, and the violence which is sometimes give rise, is not to moralize incessantly or to argue, but to help build these communities, working with the antipluralists whenever and wherever possible, understanding their need to secure identities, helping them find community. Such communities need strong and enforceable laws, but generous spirits. (Jay McDaniel)

Photo: Susannah Stubbs, Artist in Residence, Open Horizons

* * * * * * * * * * *

THE IDEOLOGY OF HATE AND

HOW TO FIGHT IT: DAVID BROOKS

​In his Opinion Column of August 5, 2019, David Brooks makes a strong case that the current cultural battle in the world is between antipluralists and pluralists, and that the antipluralists feed the ideology of hate. His column is called "The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It." Brooks sees this antipluralist ideology -- this ideology of hate -- in Trumpian nationalism, authoritarian populism and Islamic jihadism. He presents pluralism as the needed alternative and suggests that there will be competition between these two approaches to life for many years to come. 

Brooks' pluralism sounds very much like open and relational or “process” philosophy, albeit without mentioning additonal themes such as “community” and “ecology” and “spirituality” and "God." In what follows I speak of Brooks' pluralism as Process Pluralism, because his views so resemble process philosophy... and a word about the unmentioned themes at the end.

- Jay McDaniel

* * * * * * * * * * *

Mourners on Monday at a makeshift memorial for victims of the
shooting in El Paso. | Credit: John Locher/Associated Press

The Ideology of Hate and How to Fight It

The battle for the soul of our culture.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/opinion/el-paso-dayton-shooting.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

Aug. 5, 2019

Many of today’s mass murderers write manifestoes. They are not killing only because they’ve been psychologically damaged by trauma. They’re not killing only because they are pathetically lonely and deeply pessimistic about their own lives. They are inspired to kill by a shared ideology, an ideology that they hope to spread through a wave of terror.

The clearest expression of that ideology was written by the man charged with a killing spree in Christchurch, New Zealand. His manifesto has been cited by other terrorists; the suspect in this weekend’s El Paso mass shooting cited it in his own manifesto.

It’s not entirely what you’d expect. At one point its author writes about his travels around the world: “Everywhere I travelled, barring a few small exceptions, I was treated wonderfully, often as a guest and even as a friend. The varied cultures of the world greeted me with warmth and compassion, and I very much enjoyed nearly every moment I spent with them.”

The ideology he goes on to champion is highly racial, but it’s not classic xenophobia or white supremacy. Its first feature is essentialism. The most important thing you can know about a person is his or her race. A white sees the world as a white and a Latino sees it as a Latino. Identity is racial.

The second feature is separatism. Races are healthy when they are pure and undiluted. The world is healthy when people of different races live apart. The world is diseased when races mix. “I am against race mixing because it destroys genetic diversity and creates identity problems,” the El Paso suspect wrote.

The third feature is racial Darwinism. Races are locked in a Darwinian struggle in which they try to out-reproduce their rivals. Currently, the black and brown races are stronger than the white race and are on the verge of obliterating it through invasion.

If we allow them into our country, brown immigrants will overwhelm whites just as Europeans overwhelmed the Native Americans centuries ago. As the El Paso suspect put it, “The natives didn’t take the invasion of Europeans seriously, and now what’s left is just a shadow of what was.” Immigration is white replacement. Immigration is white genocide.

This is not an ideology that rises out of white

self-confidence but rather white insecurity

Mourners at another memorial, this time in Christchurch,
New Zealand,  in March. | Credit: Adam Dean for The New York Times

This ideology is an extreme form of a broader movement — antipluralism — that now comes in many shapes. Trumpian nationalists, authoritarian populists and Islamic jihadists are different versions of antipluralism.

These movements are reactions against the diversity, fluidity and interdependent nature of modern life. Antipluralists yearn for a return to clear borders, settled truths and stable identities. They kill for a fantasy, a world that shines in their imaginations but never existed in real life.

The struggle between pluralism and antipluralism is one of the great death struggles of our time, and it is being fought on every front.

We pluralists do not believe that human beings can be reduced to a single racial label. Each person is a symphony of identities. Our lives are rich because each of us contains multitudes.

Pluralists believe in integration, not separation. We treasure precisely the integration that sends the antipluralists into panic fits. A half century ago, few marriages crossed a color line. Now, 17 percent of American marriages are interracial.

Pluralists are always expanding the definition of “us,” not constricting it. Eighty years ago, Protestants, Catholics and Jews did not get along, so a new category was created, Judeo-Christian, which brought formerly feuding people into a new “us.” Thirty years ago, rivalries were developing between blacks and Hispanics, and so the category “people of color” was used to create a wider “us.”

Pluralists believe that culture mixing has always been and should be the human condition. All cultures define and renew themselves through encounter. A pure culture is a dead culture while an amalgam culture is a creative culture. The very civilization the white separatists seek to preserve was itself a product of earlier immigration waves.

Finally, pluralism is the adventure of life. Pluralism is not just having diverse people coexist in one place. It’s going out and getting into each other’s lives. It’s a constant dialogue that has no end because there is no single answer to how we should live.

Life in a pluralistic society is an ever-moving spiral. There are the enemies of pluralism ripping it apart and the weavers of community binding it together. There is no resting spot. It’s change, fluidity and movement all the way down.

The terrorists dream of a pure, static world. But the only thing that’s static is death, which is why they are so pathologically drawn to death. Pluralism is about movement, interdependence and life. The struggle ahead is about competing values as much as it is about controlling guns and healing damaged psyches. Pluralism thrives when we name what the terrorists hate about us, and live it out.