Gosh! I hope to connect people in all walks of life to this
extraordinarily lively, creative, full of surprises universe that we find
ourselves in and which, frankly, we do not ponder in its fullness often enough.
Life has demands. Life has distractions. And it requires stretching of the mind
to get into all the levels to at least the degree of detail that I think is
useful for expanding our minds and such exercise can lead to exhilaration.
I also would like to say in these concluding moments that
some of the families of patterns within the 12 fundamental levels can be useful
as templates for thinking about the organization of systems that anyone might
want to use.
For example, I noted earlier the part three of the book. In
that part, I discover, shall we say, or make a case for, three families of
adjacent levels that I am calling the dynamical realms: physical laws,
biological evolution, and cultural evolution. I will leave it to readers to get
into that part, and in particular to see how I justify using the word evolution
to refer to certain dynamics within cultural systems, from the upper Paleolithic
to the geopolitical state. But the implications of the logic indicate that a
next level would be some sort of merger of nations into a planetary scale.
I have an epilogue exploring what this might mean, which I
will not go into here. But let me say I believe that new perspectives on the
emerging planetary scale can be gained by studying these templates just
referred to. You can think of these templates as ways of combining that have
been proven successful more than once in the grand sequence. And therefore the
templates might be useful as generalizations for exploring possibilities for
the planetary scale. This is crucial to think about right now.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Lastly
Gosh! I hope to connect people in all walks of life to this extraordinarily lively, creative, full of surprises universe that we find ourselves in and which, frankly, we do not ponder in its fullness often enough. Life has demands. Life has distractions. And it requires stretching of the mind to get into all the levels to at least the degree of detail that I think is useful for expanding our minds and such exercise can lead to exhilaration.
I also would like to say in these concluding moments that some of the families of patterns within the 12 fundamental levels can be useful as templates for thinking about the organization of systems that anyone might want to use.
For example, I noted earlier the part three of the book. In that part, I discover, shall we say, or make a case for, three families of adjacent levels that I am calling the dynamical realms: physical laws, biological evolution, and cultural evolution. I will leave it to readers to get into that part, and in particular to see how I justify using the word evolution to refer to certain dynamics within cultural systems, from the upper Paleolithic to the geopolitical state. But the implications of the logic indicate that a next level would be some sort of merger of nations into a planetary scale.
I have an epilogue exploring what this might mean, which I will not go into here. But let me say I believe that new perspectives on the emerging planetary scale can be gained by studying these templates just referred to. You can think of these templates as ways of combining that have been proven successful more than once in the grand sequence. And therefore the templates might be useful as generalizations for exploring possibilities for the planetary scale. This is crucial to think about right now.