When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts--indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts and represents something utterly new and different--we call that phenomenon emergence. When the chemicals diffusing in the primordial waters came together to form the first living cell, that was emergence. When the activities of the neurons in the brain result in mind, that too is emergence. In The Emergence of Everything, one of the leading scientists involved in the study of (...) complexity, Harold J. Morowitz, takes us on a sweeping tour of the universe, a tour with 28 stops, each one highlighting a particularly important moment of emergence. For instance, Morowitz illuminates the emergence of the stars, the birth of the elements and of the periodic table, and the appearance of solar systems and planets. We look at the emergence of living cells, animals, vertebrates, reptiles, and mammals, leading to the great apes and the appearance of humanity. He also examines tool making, the evolution of language, the invention of agriculture and technology, and the birth of cities. And as he offers these insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, and life itself, Morowitz also seeks out the nature of God in the emergent universe, the God posited by Spinoza, Bruno, and Einstein, a God Morowitz argues we can know through a study of the laws of nature. Written by one of our wisest scientists, The Emergence of Everything offers a fascinating new way to look at the universe and the natural world, and it makes an important contribution to the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

All organised bodies are composed of parts, similar to those composing inorganic nature, and which have even themselves existed in an inorganic state; but the phenomena of life, which result from the juxtaposition of those parts in a certain manner, bear no analogy to any of the effects which would be produced by the action of the component substances considered as mere physical agents. To whatever degree we might imagine our knowledge of the properties of the several ingredients of a (...) living body to be extended and perfected, it is certain that no mere summing up of the separate actions of those elements will ever amount to the action of the living body itself. (shrink)

The basic question cognitivists and most analytic philosophers of mind ask is how consciousness arises in matter. This article outlines basic reasons for thinking the question spurious. It does so by examining 1) definitions of life, 2) unjustified and unjustifiable uses of diacritical markings to distinguish real cognition from metaphoric cognition, 3) evidence showing that corporeal consciousness is a biological imperative, 4) corporeal matters of fact deriving from the evolution of proprioception. Three implications of the examination are briefly noted: 1) (...) the need to re-think the common assumption that unconsciousness historically preceded consciousness; 2) the need to delve as deeply and seriously into natural history as into brains and their computational analogues; 3) the need for a critical stance toward arm-chair judgments about consciousness and a correlative turn toward corporeal matters of fact. (shrink)

In the characterization of the ArCl2 'van der Waals complex', a recognizable pattern of well-defined peaks is observed in the microwave absorption spectrum. In the control of chaos in a chemical oscillatory reaction the power spectrum progressively becomes simpler, at length yielding a single peak. Since both of these cases generate coherences that are centers of agency, they should be considered to produce new chemical entities. Applicability of this ontological approach to coherences of wider societal interest is suggested.

This article shows how the proper question to answer concerning consciousness is not ‘how consciousness arises in matter’, but how consciousness is part and parcel of the evolution of animate forms. The article traces out just such an evolution by consideration of real life forms including bacteria and invertebrates. It vindicates the evolutionary thesis that external proprioceptive organs, as evidenced in their own right, were modified and internalized over time into kinesthetic organs, sustaining, in effect, a directly movement sensitive corporeal (...) consciousness across virtually all forms of evolutionary life. The paper specifies significant consequences of the thesis having to do with the unconscious, with present-day focal studies of the brain that neglect a correlative natural history, and with the need to attend to corporeal matters of fact. (shrink)