Is it impossible to imagine a world where people don't know?
Think about it. It's quite odd - yet deeply mysterious - that the book of Genesis (BreiShiTh in Hebrew, meaning literally, '"beginnings")
stipulates a world created in 6 days, with a day of rest on the 7th.
What is work? The thermodynamic explanation of work is a process that releases energy. So, if I pop some coal into a furnace, the smoke/pressure
released can be captured for work i.e. to turn a wheel system to get a choo-choo train moving.
In living organisms, work is released when one process interacting with another process results in the transfer of energy. Metabolism is the name the
biological sciences give for the transformation of energy that occurs within an organisms body as it takes in external molecules and reconstructs
it's dynamic through-put. Indeed, it is now accepted that a physical organism is the 'accumulated' structure that has built along a particular
evolutionary line as a
means to process energy.
Of course, this is not all we are, but the fact that we are systems bound by the second law of thermodynamics i.e. requiring external energy to
maintain our metabolic processes i.e. our structure, does not mean we work like other systems. In fact, organisms - while obeying the second law -
simultaneously defy it by aggregating into large structures halfway between chaos and order, at a point called "far from equilibrium". To say that
the organism 'aggregates structure' means that energy becomes dynamically entangled into a structuring dynamic as the
most economical way to
dissipate energy. In other words, conditions on Earth are ripe for living - not too chaotic (like venus) or static (like mars): but just the
right atmospheric conditions obtain on the surface of the Earth to give rise to macrocosmic organisms.
Coherency Driving for Coherency
You could say that the Universe, on Earth, has been given the requisite conditions to reach what I consider to be an important boiling point: the
emergence of sociality. Sociality brought into the evolutionary narrative (or dynamic) a situation where materially emergent agents (organisms) begin
to relate to one another through the illusory
externality created by agential cuts i.e. a organisms emerged, it then could seem - via the
'portal of sensory detection', that the world was split into subject-object i.e. ineluctably dual. Clearly, however, this is not the case.
Centripetal forces within material processes are central to much of the life-dynamic - but with the emergence of social animals, the quality of warmth
started out as the "adjacent possible" condition to bridge one organism with another organism i.e. cuddling as a way to conserve energy loss.
Mammals - and the evolution of the myelinated nerve cell - forced a new metabolic condition that in turn compelled the ingenuity of the embodied
organic agency to discover a solution. Coming together with other such agents - huddling, evolved in a rat-like organism. But overtime,
central-neurons (in the brain) began to regulate these chiefly metabolic connections in a way that made seeking connection to be dynamically - and
affectively - desirable. The evolution of endorphin and dopamine systems brought the drive and and pleasure conditions of the experiencing agency onto
dynamical convergence with other creatures undergoing the same dynamical processes. Thus - an ontological "third" - the social group - developed
atop the individual behavior of the agentially separated organism - but the condition of absolute separability, of course, is an illusion: the social
is as ontologically real as an organizing vector for the unit as the units physical structure generates a state of separability.
But what is the unit - what is the social vector? It is the whole - secretly placed away within the potentiality of emergent forms.
It emerges
in between things, but do not imagine some physical "place" for this reality. It is, rather, a
quality which emerges, such
as the care that forges an organisms existential being with another organism with the same need. It is the play that manifests at metabolic surplus:
the play that celebrates the gift of life - living - moving, dynamically changing and discovering new configurations, innovations and different forms
of being.
It is awe. The awe which takes in the world as a massive, seemingly infinite realm of possibility - with bits of incredible order - life - integrated
into other lives, amidst a system of relations - the Earth - that we come to see as embodying an intelligence and will that amazes us.
Why do I subscribe ontological significance to fun, care, and awe? As emotional vectors, we can all agree that these affects
motivate our desires
as beings. Play - in being the oldest - is considered ontological 'primitive', inasmuch as it doesn't disclose knowledge of the
other.
Play is the apogee of narcissistic relation to the world, but of course, it is as much a Human need as it is a need for dogs. Advancing in being - or
coherency - does not entail dropping the existential quality of play, but in
contextualizing its utility in the life process, which means,
"knowing when its appropriate and not appropriate to play".
Care is deeper and central to the life narrative. It is there as the phenomena of love - and I do not claim that it is easy to demarcate love from
play (every parent who plays with their child feels both at once) or love from awe; only to say that there are 3 discriminable affective vectors which
emerge
in between the organism and the other.
Awe, however, bespeaks an
existential relation between the agentially enacted organism's subjectivity and the world perceptually received
through his sensory organs. Awe is the most enlivening and most coherent 'agency' within us - and indeed - I would argue awe performs a role within
our functioning that, overtime - if managed to be maintained in Human society through its transmission channels (institutions) - would generate an
organismic coherency that - I sense - may bring us to a state of coherency that existed in the far Human past.
Of course, the idea of the "far human past", and the effect of Human organismic coherency in relation to ontological reality, is not well described
in the above paragraph. The work of the biophysicist Mae Wan Ho, the philosopher Ervin Lazslo, and recent ideas by Stuart Kauffman, suggest that a)
what has happened in the past is not lost, but preserved in some abstract form; b) this relates to the quantum vacuum and quantum gravity and c) what
has existed maintains itself as a potentiality so long as a system exists somewhere to embody it.