08.16.07
The eonic effect and Gaia
Continuation of previous post on the eonic effect, punctuated equilibrium, and gaia, posted to chaosmos@yahoogroups.com
I forgot to indicate the connection to Gaia. The eonic effect is highly suggestive of an exotic variant of a complex system, but the exact solution in that regard is not easy to come by. And there is no inherent reason why the kantian framework should prevent that. But first I should note that the eonic effect resolves to an abstract formalism of an ‘evolution of freedom’, this required to reconcile the issue of dynamics with the issue of individuals. Take a simple example, an ocean liner and the passengers on that ship. We have two questions, the dynamics of the ship and its trajectory and the relative motions/experiences of the passengers. Remarkably the eonic effect shows a way to reconcile these two aspects. This might lead you to the discussions paired discussions of ’system (or eonic) determination’ and ‘relative free action’ in the text, i.e. the ship dynamics aspect and the individual aspect. A system constrained by dynamics cannot resolve the issue of freedom. But a system that generates freedom can, although it still puts some constraint on freedom temporarily, eject its individuals to a higher state of potential that can realize a higher freedom at the end of the punctuated dynamic series. And that’s what world history and the eonic effect show. Remarkably.
Btw, you will see the amusing (and I must say it, still primitive, version of this in Hegel’s idea of historical freedom). Not to confuse the two.
Now I see no reason why someone can’t take this and explicate it with a variant of complexity thinking, subject to the restriction that it must not erase the freedom aspect. Freedom is remarkably similar, as the opposite, to causality. So a symmetric treatment of these is theoretically possible, but that requires a new kind of science. Again, echoes of Hegel. I think chaos theories have had their wings clipped by reductionism, and need to be ‘let loose’, rigorously, to apply to these strange realities. In the same way that Newtonian thinking required drastic revision to become QM. Introducing an observer who interacts with the system produces a drastic non-linearity, which, remarkably, the eonic pattern itself takes in stride with an elegant drumbeat series.
The relation to Gaia is direct. The eonic effect shows the emergence out of nowhere of a global system able to operate via localized regions toward a global result in a series of drumbeat interactions with populations, and operating on a kind of minimum principle.
If all this is confusing look at the Axial Age: as a function of time, five separated regions of Eurasia show spontaneous ‘punctuation’, as accelerated cultural evolution over a few centuries. There is no local explanation for this. It is a global phenomenon.The eonic effect can seem confusing because it operates on two levels, the macro dynamics and the micro level of populations and individuals. The latter gives expression to the former, indeed, may notice, through primitive lenses, the effect occurring. A good example is the Old Testament (or a core subset), a religious account among other things of an Axial Age phenomenon. We can’t take that literally since it is the micro version of the macro event. Thus we must reconstruct in secular terms the overall nature of the data given. That is, we see that the Old Testament senses the macro aspect of the experience of passing through an Axial transition, a stage of the eonic effect, and mythologizes that, in the process producing a seed version of future religions. A lot to say there.
To us, the spectacular vista shown must have another explanation. The point being that the interpretation of the data of the eonic effect (of which the Axial Age is a subset) is not so easy, although it is right in front of us, and easy to demonstrate with nothing more than careful periodization stretched over five thousand years.
One problem is the incomplete nature of the data. I can find a fourth earlier stage of this by backtracking 2400 years from -3000, north of Sumer, but the data is still too thin, and the result blurred. Further this was before the invention of writing, which means we can hardly resolve our lens at all to the particulars of any earlier transition.I say that because the eonic effect shows us that without decent records at the level of centuries or less, we can never detect the real processes of evolutionary dynamics in a macro sense. That should remind us why Darwinists never get it straight; We don’t have a single data set for earlier man that tells us what happened at the centuries level. All Darwinists have is a myth of natural selection. And that is all it is, a myth.
We do have a tidbit of possible evidence in the claims for ‘The Great Explosion’, a rapid ten thousand year (perhaps) transition crossing a human threshold. If true, that is highly suggestive of earlier ‘eonic effects’, but so far we can draw no conclusions and must discipline ourselves in light of the clear persistence of ‘evolution, macro style’ into historical times to acknowledge our ignorance, so far, of how the evolution of early homo sapiens actually occurred.
And it makes a big difference because the Darwinian suggestion that natural selection explains everything gets injected into present thinking to influence action with an incorrect myth of earlier evolution, the disastrous Social Darwinism which is the toxic by product of Darwin’s botched theory.