The Radical New Reality of Systems Science

The Science of Spiritual Animation and Its Mytho-logical Imagination

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​Systems Science and the 'World Animating' Effects of Network Agency

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The 'Technically Magical' Emergence of Self-Organization and Purposefully Self-Asserting Systems

As fantastical as it can seem, systems science identifies traits of complex adaptive system dynamics that result in unpredictably emergent effects, or properties. These are termed emergent because they arise synergistically from interdependent interactions in feedback networks in ways that cannot be predicted or explained from preceding conditions. Such emergent effects include system self-organization and self-direction for the future purpose of sustaining the system. According to many physicists, there is no basis for such future-oriented, or "teleological," action in the deterministic 'laws of physics.' Nonetheless, using the reductive scientific methods of quantification and calculation, this field of science confirms the actual occurrence of events that do not derive entirely from predictably deterministic causation, nor are they simply random, and demonstrate purposeful selection. That makes such phenomena 'technically magical' from the perspective of deterministic physics. That is, they are not 'technically caused' entirely by preceding conditions.

 

More confounding yet, these emergent phenomena do not appear to violate the laws of physics per se, but rather manifest from the 'material world' and its mechanistic dynamics. Confronting this evidence is so disturbing to the worldview of modern science that few even in the field of complex systems science dare to discuss it in terms of  'system agency,' much less 'magic' or 'spiritual animation.' Nonetheless, there are some who dare to do so. Theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher, Stuart Kauffman, has termed this science the "reinvention of the sacred."

 

Perceiving Self-Animating Systems as Scientific or Naturalistic Spirituality

The extensive evidence for the emergence of self-organizing, self-directing systems provides the basis for speaking of complex system networks as generating agency, or a system's capacity to act selectively for a future purpose. This network-generated agency effectively 'animates' systems by enabling them to operate, or 'behave,' in ways that adaptively promote their own persistence. This scientific view of system networks not only applies to the 'animals' of biological plants and creatures (animals), but also to systems that emerge from interactions of biological creatures (or 'agents'), such as bee hives, ant colonies, and human social systems. Notably, the latter, sometimes termed "super organisms," are shown to 'act like living creatures' even though these do not have specific 'bodies' or 'brains.' All the above are effectively 'agentic' systems, though some manifest more overt intentional agency than others. Nature, at least in the context of the biosphere, is intrinsically 'agential' in how it creates complex ordering. Such 'agency' is not 'super natural.' There really is 'fundamental mystery' in 'how things actually happen.'

 

Whether we like it or not, quantitative evidence now compels us to logically acknowledge there exists an unexpected, factual basis for what archaic human cultures generally understood as 'spiritual agency' -- as a 'natural force' which 'purposefully animates' phenomena. Systems science now enables us to know something about 'spiritual animation' in Nature scientifically -- or factually -- without having to believe literally in spirits, gods, or demons. However, this requires us to think not only in terms of factually predictable sequences of events but also factually unpredictable, simultaneous network interactions that 'mysteriously' generate system self-organization and purposeful agency. That requires thinking in terms of complex dynamical networks, with their emergent properties. We might term this 'metaphysical science.'

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Scientific thinking can now be done in terms of predictable events

AND in terms of unpredictably self-determining networks

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In we 'follow through' on the logical implications of the new factual evidence for purposeful complex adaptive systems agency, we must engage notions of naturalistic self-animation in complex adaptive systems. Most disturbing to many 'hard core' physical reductionists, this notion constitutes the actuality of "free will," or selective agency that is not predetermined by physical causation. Indeed, we must  'come to terms' with evidence that the materialistic and deterministic realm of physics somehow provides the basis for a kind of 'dynamical magic' in complex system feedback networks. As synergistic interdependencies that result in the emergence of system properties neither predictable from, nor explainable as, preceding conditions. Then, further, that this 'technical magic' of emergent properties can become system self-regulation and purposeful system self-direction, or self-assertion. And, that the 'autonomous agents' of such systems can interact in ways that give rise to meta or "super organism" systems, which behave like purposeful living creatures, 'acting' for their own purposes of self-assertion, yet have no central nervous systems or 'brains.'

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​Sufficient interactivity in deterministic ordering enables feedback driven emergent self-regulating self-organization:

 

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Interdependencies in self-organizing networks become the 'dynamical animating force' of complex adaptive systems agency -- constituting individual agents from whose interactions emerge collective "super organism" systems:

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Why Interpret Systems Science as 'Spiritual Animation?

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Thus far, modern science has been regarded as fundamentally 'non-spiritual' or "atheistic." Science is understood to be the quantitative analysis of physical matter and energy -- of a 'material world.' Spirit is generally understood as a notion of some non-physical phenomena that 'acts upon the material world' but is not 'of it.' By definition, it seems, science cannot be spiritual. However, the recent science of complex adaptive systems confronts us with a conundrum. If this science has, in effect, proscribed phenomena that have measurable effects on the material world, yet cannot be fully reduced to processes of deterministic physical causation, what do we do with this evidence? Many choose to 'dismiss' it as "epiphenomena" that are merely 'by products' of physical causation but do not have any influence on the processes of causation. Yet, the science appears to show that emergent ordering and subsequent agentic actions in system networks do indeed have influences on how physical causation comes to be ordered. The agency of system networks manifested by biological life forms have dramatically altered the entire planet in numerous ways over the last two billion years. Our human existence, our mental capacities to 'do science' derive from such 'epiphenomena.'

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Perhaps more importantly, this science makes it factually evident that we cannot know 'how the world actually works' if we assume that all events 'must be' the direct and exclusive consequences of deterministic causation. To be scientifically realistic, we must 'take into account' the role of emergent self-organization and its agentic effects. Arguably, our obsessive preoccupation with deterministic causation plays a large role in how modern civilization has suicidally disrupted the life-sustaining systems of the planet. Clearly, we are manifesting a delusional culture and catastrophically non-adaptive social systems. We are clearly 'missing something' of fundamental importance in our cultural worldview. But how could a science-based concept of 'naturalistic spirituality' make any difference, even if we could somehow rationally correlate it with our deterministic science?

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The answer to that question can be explored by reconsidering what role a 'spiritual imagination' played in pre-scientific archaic cultures. Perhaps we moderns have not comprehended how such a seemingly fanciful worldview could play a fundamental role in sustainably adaptive societies because we have not, until now, had a science-based perspective from which to evaluate those 'imaginations.'

​If we apply the insights of systems science to this question, it can provide a factual basis for understanding what pre-modern human cultures referred to with notions of magic, spirits, gods, and goddesses. It can radically alter understanding of how and why human ever did generate notions of 'spiritual animation' and an 'animistic worldview' -- as a symbolic epistemology for perceiving what reductive science now also reveals. And further, how essential such an 'imaginal' aspect of culture is to maintaining ecologically sustainable societies.
 

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The 'Cultural Evolution' of an 'Agentic Worldview' in Archaic Animistic Spirituality

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Why did Human Cultures Generate a 'Spiritual Imagination?'

​If we apply an evolutionary perspective to the question 'why did human cultures generate a spiritual imagination,' and thus an animistc worldview, we must assume this way of thinking in some way proved adaptive for human survival. From the perspective of the mechanistic modernist worldview, based in material physics, there is no conceivable benefit to notions that 'the world is animated by spirits, gods, and goddesses.' It simply appears as delusional and is often characterized as 'bad science.' But, from the perspective of complex adaptive systems science, such notions suddenly appear rather differently.  If, as systems science indicates, self-organizing, self-directing, purposefully self-asserting systems emerge in ways that are partly 'technical magical' (in deterministic causal terms) and, these systems, from animals to ecologies and super organism societies, can act purposefully to sustain their 'selves,' then a spiritual imagination that represents the world as self-animating begins to make logical sense. It can be understood as a mode of perceiving 'how the world actually works.' Such a worldview is generally termed "animistic."

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​Animal Survival and Perception of 'Agency at Work in The World'

Agentic capacity enables animals to behave adaptively, which means selectively and unpredictably. Animal survival among other animals and species requires awareness of both 'one's own' agentic capacity, as in 'what can I chose to do?' as well as, 'how can I do it?' Additionally, they require capacities for detecting and interpreting the potentials of agentic capacity in other creatures, as in 'what is alive out there,' and 'how can it act?' They have to detect 'what is self-animating' from what is not, and 'how might it behave?' Predators must differentiate the selective agentic behaviors of prey animals so they can 'out maneuver' or 'out smart' their prey.  Prey animals must similarly interpret the agentic capacities of predators. We can consider this as perceiving 'agency at work in the world.' In more complex animals, this awareness and interpretation involves some sensing of 'what others are thinking,' and 'why did they do that?' Research on dogs indicate they have some "theory of mind" in this regard. Human animals appear the most complex and elaborated in manifesting such awareness.

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Human levels of intelligence and technologically enhanced manipulation of their environments amplify this detection and interpretation of  agentic capacities in self and others. Abstract human reasoning facilitates thinking in terms of 'how' and 'why,' or 'what for?' From a systems science perspective, humans are not so much 'more purposeful' than other species but more adept at emergently manifesting adaptive 'purposefulness.' They are more enabled to generate 'agentic potentials' that other creatures.

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​Ecological 'Embeddedness' and Human Sensitivity to Self-Asserting Complex System Agency

Archaic hunter-gatherer societies were intimately embedded in their local ecologies. The interdependent relationships among the systems of species, from which emerge ecosystems, are unimaginably complex. But humans living intimately within those ecosystems are constant, active participants in those relationships. Their immediate, all-encompassing 'world' is their natural environment. They can and must sense how plants and animals 'do what they do,' and how species enable each others' survival through mutualistic benefits -- in order to act adaptively among them. Such human individuals, and their collective social systems, depended directly upon their immediate ecosystems for survival -- just like other species.

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Like other animals, human survival requires capacity to detect and interpret agency in others, both of their own as well as other species. As fundamentally social creatures, humans demonstrate the capacity for intense empathic sensitivity and affinity for each other. Individual human agents necessarily form potent emotional bonds with other human agents. While this appears to be the case with at least some other animal species, humans elaborate it in complex language and symbolic ritualizations. Perhaps human survival depended upon using this capacity for empathic affinity not only to enhance social cohesion and cooperation, but in the ways they concpetualized and understood agency in non-human species. 'Spiritual imagination' in human culture's has been characterized as "anthropomorphism," or the attribution of human traits to non-human entities. Here, we might say that the intelligence of humans as complex adaptive systems tends to 'see' its modes of purposeful self-assertion in non-human systems, as in, 'if we do it this way then they must also.' Non-human systems would then be encountered and understood in terms of human 'psychology.'

 

That such thinking and behavior became a pervasive aspect of human cultural worldviews suggests it had some adaptive benefit for their continued survival. That it was a form of "cultural evolution" rather than strictly genetic-based adaptation.  Somehow, the complex adaptive systems of human cooperation emergently generated overt 'cultures of spiritual imagination' -- and these must have proved somehow 'practically useful' because they appear universal until modern times.  

 

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Human Manipulative Capacity and Its Impacts Upon Ecosystems

However, unlike other species, human abstract thinking and technological ingenuity make them extraordinarily adept manipulators of their environments. It is evident that even rudimentary hunter-gatherer technologies can give humans the capacity to over-exploit their environments, resulting in threats to their own survival. In comparison to other species, technologically leveraged human self-asserting agency appears less constrained by the co-evolved ecosystem relationships which relative relative advantages among other animals. Thus, there appears a potential motive for humans to generate cultural attitudes that restrain their capacity to disrupt local ecosystems.  From a system science perspective, that would mean perceiving, respecting, and preserving the self-asserting agency of species composing an ecosystem network. However, archaic humans did not have this science to 'think with.' What they did have were intuition, empathic feeling, and symbolic imagination.

 

The Imagination of Human Relatedness to Other Species and the 'Cultural Evolution' of an Animistic Worldview

If this view that survival for archaic humans required ways of regulating the impacts of their own self-assertion on their local ecosystems is accurate, then it seems they would have to do so through adaptive 'cultural evolution.' They would require a shared cultural worldview to guide their collective self-assertion in ways that would promote their continued survival. From that assumption, we can propose that humans created a 'spiritual imagination' as a form of cultural adaptation which promotes the sustainability of human societies. Examples of such a cultural worldview are still extant even in modern times, among surviving indigenous and hunter-gatherer societies.

 

These societies are often overtly based on cultural attitudes and values that regard the non-human world as arising from awareness and intelligence similar to that of humans. Each species is understood as having its own particular 'spirit' and associated knowledge or wisdom that 'animates' its behavior and promotes its survival. These can then be viewed as interacting with each other, in their characteristic ways, to generate an interconnected, interdependent 'world.' Such attitudes are categorized as "animistic." Animism promotes the view that humans are intimately 'related to' other life forms and even landscapes. That sense of 'relatedness' might be something of a 'reflexive feeling' in humans living an ecologically embedded lifestyle. But, its overt conceptual and symbolic cultural elaboration suggests that it required special emphasis to make it an effective constraint on human self-assertion.  Empathic kinship between humans and their ecosystem environments evidently needed to become an aspect of 'cultural morality' to configure adaptive feedback between individuals, cultural values or priorities, and social system networks. Thus, the cultural 'invention' of an animistic worldview, and its elaboration through mythological concepts and symbols, can be considered as a form of adaptive cultural evolution that influenced the configuration of human social systems. That is, it assisted humans in adapting more sustainably to the ecosystems upon which their existence depends by reinforcing a kind of 'ethical regard' for the non-human.

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Archaic Societies as Social Systems Culturally Biased toward Preserving Ecological Interdependencies

The idea is, that societies based upon animistic notions of human relatedness to the non-human as 'similarly sentient' can form feedback networks in social systems which constrain the potential of their self-assertion to disrupt their ecosystems. An animistic worldview can configure a social system around the purpose of valuing and sustaining the other systems of the biosphere, and their self-sustaining interdependencies, upon which humans depend for their own well being. If a social system emerges from cultural attitudes which promote the capacity of its human agents to feel empathic affinity for non-human species, even landscapes, its individual agents will be more 'socially conditioned' to behave in response to 'feeling empathy for', thus emotionally 'identifying with,' the non-human. In this manner a recursive feedback loop is configured between cultural attitudes and social system operations.

 

An Animistic Worldview and Long-Term Human Survival

So, perhaps animism emerged as a from of adaptive cultural evolution, which functioned to enhance the species' long-term survival. That would then indicate how humans, as a form of system network agency, require self-imposed constraints upon their self-assertion in order to operate sustainably within their ecological contexts. Judging from the archeological evidence for the existence of animistic human cultures, it appears that the extreme elaboration of system agency enabled by human intelligence and technological empowerment has required some such imposition of culturally organized self-constraint for at least 30,000 years.

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​Human representations suggesting identification with non-human species became widespread

in the Upper Paleolithic and continued among animistic cultures into modernity:

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​The theme of humans becoming animals or animals human appears to date back at least 35,000 years

and has been a primary element in the mythologies of both indigenous and civilized societies:

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The time and effort ecologically embedded indigenous cultures put into elaborating, enacting, and preserving their animistic mythologies is itself worthy of note. It suggests no only that this mode of thinking about and representing the world must have been functional to their survival, but that it also was a source of profound meaning, both for individuals and the collective. This interpretation is evident in the accounts contemporary indigenous peoples provide of how their animism effects them. Such people seem to feel their own human existence is greatly expanded by a sense of affinity and kinship with the non-human spiritual agents animating the world they inhabit. Clearly early humans were profoundly pragmatic about how to survive as hunters and gatherers. They adapted their life styles and technology to each ecosystem they inhabited with sufficient skill to sustain survival for millennia. Yet they all appear to have found the creation of an animistic worldview, to 'behold a self-animating world,' a necessity. Mechanistic pragmatism was, evidently, not sufficient in and of itself.

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Spiritual Imagination in Civilized Societies

If this linkage between an animistic worldview and early human survival is valid, then it is useful in tracking what happens to spiritual imaginations in latter civilized societies -- which were not so intimately embedded in their local ecosystems as hunter-gatherers. With larger scale agriculture and urbanization, humans begin to distance self and social systems from non-human species, beginning to divide the world into the 'tame' on they manage and depend upon from the 'wild nature,' which can readily be perceived as a threat to their ability to survive through controlling their 'tame domain.' As civilized humans become the 'lords of their domesticating realm' their mythologies begin to imagine more "theistic," conceiving abstract anthropomorphic gods and goddesses who 'rule over' nature. These are generally described as "polytheistic" mythologies. Here, the spiritual worldview is still one teaming with various animating agencies but some are more generalized and not fundamentally 'of' the living systems of the biosphere. It is in these contexts that hierarchically organized, institutional religious social systems become prominent. Eventually, there emerges a more reductive spiritual imagination, referred to as "monotheism," in which there is a singular, seemingly all powerful deity, who creates and controls all of existence, to which humans owe unwavering obedience.

 

In short, there is a trajectory here from a spiritual imagination of a diversely self-animating world to one that is 'made and managed' by a singular, human-like, yet disembodied agency -- one which exists 'outside' nature. Then, in modern times, that monotheistic spiritual imagination is displaced and even invalidated by a culture of scientific materialism with 'all explaining' deterministic "Laws of Physics." From a systems science perspective, that historical trajectory can be seen as toward a more abstract sense of network agency, then a kind of unified one, and finally a culture and society that completely invalidate its existence, replacing it with a kind of de facto belief in deterministic causality as 'the creator and sustainer of life.' And it is that cultural worldview that has wrought such devastation upon the self-ordering, self-sustaining network agencies of the biosphere.

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