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Our Next

            World View

What is Our Modern Worldview?
​The Emergence of Our Preoccupation with Predictable Causality and Mechanism
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  • ​Human adaptive survival derives from exceptional capacities for physical and mental manipulation of phenomena
  • Human agency can profoundly amplify these capacities through conceptual abstraction
  • A feedback loop can form between elaborations of technical manipulation and human worldview assumptions
  • Significant shifts in worldview basics appear in transitions from archaic hunter-gatherer to civilized societies
  • Hunter/gatherer societies necessarily adapted by living sustainably 'within' self-regulating ecosystems
  • Agricultural-based, urbanized societies adapt by becoming more dependent on predictable control of environments
  • These often generate hierarchical social systems of manipulative command and control that become self-reinforcing
  • This impulse can become fixated upon extending its influence and dominance to a maximal extent, as in 'empires'
  • The more we can manipulate phenomena, the more we can elaborate the power to control things and people
  • Thus, techniques or technologies of control can become a high priority driving behavior in civilized worldviews
  • ​The emergence of scientific insight into physical properties of cause and effect greatly leveraged such purposefulness
  • Thereby promoting mechanistic assumptions about 'how things happen,' thus how to think and behave
  • Through scientific knowledge and industrialized technologies, modern societies have become obsessed with control​​​
  • Though this seems 'normal' to us, it is historically unique, relentlessly self-reinforcing, and psychologically 'manic'​

Modernity Involves A Fundamental Shift in Worldview Assumptions about 'How Things Happen'

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Modern Worldview Assumptions are only Evident in Relation to Premodern Ones

​As moderns, our thinking is reflexively immersed in our cultural assumptions about reality -- about 'how things happen.' That makes it difficult to even specify what those assumptions are. So, to get some perspective on them, it is useful to consider how the basis for our worldview differs from historically preceding cultures.

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The Emergent and Agentic Basis of 'How Things Happen' in Archaic Worldview Assumptions

​Though the cultures of archaic hunter/gather societies differ in many respects, their assumptions about 'how things happen,' thus 'how the world actually works,' share a fundamental focus upon unpredictably emergent, agency-driven ordering. Obviously, these cultures had an adequate understanding of deterministic cause and effect in the physical world. They survived in practical ways for millennia. But their worldviews presumed an additional and more primary source for 'how things happen.' That aspect of 'how the world works' involved the purposeful influence of 'spiritual agents,' whose volitional actions animated the physical world. For them, the ordering of events and things necessarily manifested from agency. Hunter/gatherer cultures did, and some still do, position their efforts toward adaptive survival 'within' the ecosystems they inhabit -- which they consider to be organized by various 'spirits' animating plants, animals, and landscapes. Thus, their worldview basics assume that 'things happen' in an unpredictably emergent manner associated with the purposeful activities of 'agentic' or 'agent-like systems' in nature -- the systems of creatures, species, ecologies. Such societies often regarded these non-human agents as their "relations," even "equals," upon which their survival depended, but which they could not control.  These cultural worldviews pursued sustained survival through adaptive behaviors having the purpose of 'cooperating with' those agentic systems. The world so represented had a relatively 'horizontal' framework of interacting relationships among its systems, within which human societies were a 'participant.'

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​Archaic worldviews assumed human survival to derive from an interplay with 'spirits' or agentic systems:

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The Shift in Civilized Worldviews from 'Participation in The Wild' to 'Control of The Tame'

Larger scale, agriculture-based, urbanized societies that emerged after around 6,000 years ago manifest a distinctive shift in how they promote survival through their adaptive behaviors. For these societies, their adaptive behaviors had the purpose of controlling the reproduction of plants and animals in a domesticated context, thru 'dominating,' rather than by direct participation in local ecologies. Here, cultural worldviews began to pose a division between that 'tame' domain of more direct human manipulative control, and a 'wild' domain of nature. In effect, civilized survival through domestication required adaptive behaviors that 'acted in opposition to'  the 'wildness' of natural ecosystems, positioning human survival as occurring 'in competition with' natural systems which could threaten the 'tame domain.' Within that domain, nature had to be controlled. This control-based approach fostered technological innovations in farming, engineering, building, and metal working, and warfare that enhanced its effectiveness. Here, humans gained historically exceptional capacity for exploitation of nature and imperial dominance of other humans. This elaboration of technical manipulation was not just mechanical, it was also social. New, hierarchical and bureaucratic institutional techniques for manipulating human societies also emerged to manage all the needed manipulative control.

 

Civilized worldviews posed survival as dominion over a domesticated realm and obedience to centralized social hierarchies:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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At the same time, early civilized worldviews retained a fundamental assumption that the world was 'ordered' by 'spiritual agency.' But these versions often represented spiritual agency in the more abstract form of human-like gods and goddesses. These divinities sometimes personified human capacities for control-oriented behavior, either by 'commanding nature' or being the source of human skills that foster manipulative control and technology. ​The world so presented here, has a more hierarchical structure of agentic relationships, with some gods being more dominant over others, mirroring how civilized societies tended toward ranked classes of superior to inferior status. These civilized worldviews still assumed the world to be agentic, but there appears more hierarchy among those agents, as well as distinction between the more versus less human or civilized.

 

In early Mesopotamian culture, a 'city founding' god, Marduk, slays a goddess

of chaotic, 'wild nature,' Tiamat, to re-order the world in favor of civilization:

 

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The Change in Brain Hemisphere Related Cognitive Emphasis in Civilized Worldviews

The shift from hunter/gatherer assumptions about surviving by participating within the agentic systems of nature, to the civilized frame of survival through domestication's control regimes, indicates a change of emphasis on cognitive processing.  Modern neuroscience shows that our left and right brain hemispheres impart contrasting views to our thinking. The right hemisphere is said to direct attention toward holistic relationships, in effect 'seeing' the world as interconnected. In contrast, the left hemisphere is said to focus more on parts and sequences, presenting phenomena in a more divided, sequential manner. This left hemisphere emphasis is particularly useful for mechanistic analysis and control-oriented thinking. So, it appears that hunter/gatherer worldviews can be regarded as more right-hemisphere biased, while civilized ones start to shift emphasis more toward the left-hemisphere modality. From that perspective, we gain insight into how our cognitive functions and worldview assumptions can become entangled in a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

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​Our two brain hemispheres perceive differently and worldview assumptions can favor one over the other:

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The Primacy of Causality and Mechanism for 'How Things Happen' in Modernist Worldview Assumptions

​With the scientific and industrial "revolutions" of the 17th to 19th Centuries, and the intellectual one of the European Enlightenment, human capacities for manipulative control of physical materials, natural environments, and even human societies, were enormously amplified. Mechanistic technology expanded human powers to manipulate physical phenomena, while scientific knowledge appeared to confirm factually that the entire world 'happens' only as, or through, predictably deterministic physical causation.  Thus, worldview assumptions increasingly became based upon a causally mechanistic model for 'how the world works.' Consequently, notions of unpredictably emergent, agency-driven phenomena, particularly as 'spiritual agents,' came to be regarded as less important. Any notion of phenomena that were not causally determined by measurable physical forces became characterized as 'unrealistic magical thinking.' In effect, these advancements in techniques and knowledge for reliably controlling phenomena continually reinforced the civilized impulse to assert its 'dominion over nature.' All of which suggests an even more extreme cultural bias toward left brain hemisphere cognitive emphasis.

 

​Sequentially deterministic causal 'action and reaction' became the only realistic 'way things happen':

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The archaic notion of a world ordered by interacting 'spirits' (or 'agentic systems') was displaced by assumptions that everything 'happens' as sequentially causal, deterministically mechanical events -- even human intelligence and psychology. Thus, if all of nature is 'mere mechanism,' it is potentially subject to deterministically predictable manipulative control. Where civilization might once have been understood as a relatively discreet 'tame domain' of human control (as farm, manufacturing, commerce, society, and city), which existed 'apart from,' yet still dependent upon, the unpredictably agent-driven systems of nature, it now could be regarded as capable of dominating all phenomena, all of 'how things happen.'

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The Mechanistic, Maniacally Control-Obsessed, Priorities and Behavior of Modernist Societies

Through scientific and technological innovations, civilization's already existing preoccupation with survival through control and domination were 'super charged.'   The civilized domain of domesticating control, or 'the tame,' took complete precedence over the 'wild domain' of natural systems. Nature, the planet, the biosphere, became inanimate material resources for civilization's reflexive self-assertion.  In essence, if 'control is good,' more control is 'better.'  The reflexive purposes of civilized survival through enhancing hierarchical control, or domination, which promotes mechanistically manipulative adaptive behavior, became maniacally self-reinforcing.  Technological elaboration of manipulative control became 'an end in itself.'             

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The more control we get, the more we want, and the more desperate we become to 'hold onto it':

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​We not only 'think mechanistically,' we have even come to assume

that our brains are machines -- there is no more 'spirit at work in the world':

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The Disparity between Our Humanistic Cultural Values and the Operational Priorities of Our Socio-Economic Systems

Superficially, it appears that contemporary modern societies derive from worldviews based upon prioritizing empathetic social behaviors, equality, justice, personal freedom, and honesty. Such values are overtly cited as the justification for public institutions and governments, even corporations and entire nation states. However, a systems science based analysis of how these collective systems actually function, how feedback flows direct them, and what the effects of their operations actually are, indicates they are not guided by those humanistic values. Rather, these systems appear reflexively directed by an impulse toward the competitive expansion of manipulative influence and dominance. It is as if the values and priorities which we overtly assume direct our systems are, in fact, not the primary purposes which the systems are configured to serve. We tend to assume that we directly, even mechanistically, control our systems. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Indeed, it can be demonstrated that our systems are operating in ways that are seriously threatening our survival, rather than promoting it. If that is the case, then there is something 'driving our systems' of which we are ignorant. And that suggests our modern worldview is inadequately realistic for promoting our survival.

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The New Science of Emergent and Agentic Ordering that Challenges Modernist Mechanism 'In Its Own Terms'

​Initially, modernity's mechanistic version of 'how things happen' appeared so completely validated by both science and its seemingly limitless power, that it became the fundamental basis for 'how things happen' thus 'how the world works.' Though some phenomena remained difficult to completely describe and explain in mechanistic terms, such as human consciousness, it was easy to assume all would eventually be understood in terms of deterministic causality. Any scientifically factual basis for premodern notions of acausally emergent and agentic ordering was assumed to be impossible. 

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So, though quantitatively reductive scientific analysis of phenomena did not create civilization's obsession with manipulative control, it did appear to confirm the validity of mechanistic assumptions.​ However, there is no presumption in scientific method that it can necessarily describe and explain all phenomena in mechanistic terms. That attitude is a cultural assumption projected upon science. What scientific method can do is analyze phenomena, in its reductive manner, to discover what that method can reveal about 'what is' and 'how things happen.' As scientific research continued to elaborate its reductive analysis of phenomena through the 20th Century, it began to produce evidence that contradicted an exclusively mechanistic, predictably causal worldview. This research effectively demonstrated that some interactive systems can self-organize, then self-direct, in agentic ways that purposefully promote their continued existence through adaptive behaviors. These properties of spontaneous self-ordering and purposeful self-assertion in "complex adaptive systems" can be quantitatively measured as changes in the systems. But, how that actually happens cannot not be entirely analyzed and explained in terms of predictably deterministic causality -- or, as mechanistic processes. Self-organization and agentic system behaviors are partly inexplicable emergent properties of feedback networks within the systems. Further, systems science has detailed how both the biosphere and human societies are, in fact, such self-creating, self-directing complex adaptive systems -- systems whose behavior is fundamentally agentic.

 

None of this is supposed to be possible from the perspective of modernity's mechanistic worldview assumptions. Yet, it is factual evidenced derived from rigorous scientific analysis. Our modern worldview assumptions about 'how things happen,' thus 'how the world works,' have been contradicted 'in their own terms' -- by the same reductive scientific method used to validate the universal explanatory power of deterministic causality. Agency, or 'spirit,' is, once again, factually functional in 'how things happen.'

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​Next Page of Introductory Sequence:

New 'Way Things Happen'​

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