Metaphysical Humanism and the Laws of Being, part XXII—The Law of Emergence

The abbey Church of St, Jouin de Marnes

detail of a capital

Photograph by the author

The Law of Emergence

…those 'aggregates of microcosmoses' that also became concentrated on the planets, this time thanks to the second-order cosmic law called 'mutual attraction of the similar,' were named 'tetartocosmoses.' 

—Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, G. I. Gurdjieff, From Chapter 39, The Holy Planet Purgatory.

The Law of Emergence regulates and governs the progressive appearance of higher levels of complexity, or order, from lower level, disordered, simple, states, through aggregation. 

It says:

Chaotic states inevitably produce intermittent aggregating elements of order; and those aggregating elements of order will, as they reach progressively elevated levels of critical mass, produce more complex elements of order that display physical orders, intellectual insights, and emotional behaviors orders of a magnitude well beyond the individual abilities of their constituent elements. 

Gurdjieff’s probable term for this second-order law, which doesn't quite do it justice, was “mutual attraction of the similar.” Readers take note: it's this very high-level, second order law that, exerting its influence  on a much lower level (the level of planets), produces what we call living organisms.

The physical sciences are accustomed to illustrating classic examples of emergent behavior with colonial insects such as termites, ants, and bees, whose collective, relatively simple behaviors produce highly structured social systems that accomplish tasks far beyond the capabilities of individual insects making up the colony. 

These creatures are indeed fascinating; I'm a beekeeper and can attest both to the deceptively simple behavior of single bees and the astonishing feats of hive building, resource collection and distribution that an entire hive so routinely achieves. Yet in assigning emergent behavior to strictly narrow ranges of interpretation—mostly limited to the social behavior of animals—we fail to see the forest for the trees, because all of reality consistently displays emergent properties which are overlooked, simply because they’re so ubiquitous we easily and thoughtlessly take them for granted.

The existence of matter as we know it is an emergent property of quantum states. There’s no reason we know of, really, for quanta to see their superimposed energy states collapse and differentiate into wave or particle operations; yet they do, and the resultant collectives of quanta we call atoms are already emergent properties: they behave in ordered ways that individual quanta don't and can't, in and of themselves and by their nature, predict. 

Molecules are, furthermore, entirely emergent entities that display properties which become increasingly impossible to predict when extrapolating from the behavior of individual atoms. That is to say, one can extrapolate individual behaviors, such as the bonding of nucleotides in DNA; to describe one operation of this kind is relatively simple. But the aggregated nucleotides—although there are only four of them!—engage in collective behaviors that display positively impossible levels of complexity, and they furthermore do so in an ordered and purposeful manner.

This phrase, ordered and purposeful manner, is essential to understanding the Law of Emergence, because of this corollary:

Acquired behaviors displayed by the aggregated elements in an emergent system will tend to become more ordered and purposeful over time.

We see this principle at work around us constantly; it’s evident not just at the microscopic level, where atoms, molecules and quanta rule their own world, or universe, but also at the macroscopic level where solar systems and galaxies are produced. Matter and energy have a natural tendency to order themselves which inherently contradicts the forces of entropy.

This brings us, of course, to life, which in the material world (the coarse world of matter) is the most significant entity produced by the Law of Emergence. Life, from its inception, displays a new emergent property called agency, which operates as a law unto itself. Yet for now let’s just simply think of life as an emergent property of the universe.

Like all other emergent properties, the ability of quanta to ultimately produce life is inherent—it pre-exists as not just a potential, but also inevitable, consequence of the nature of quanta and their collective behaviors. 

Give the fact that life has already demonstrably arisen even one time, as it has, and given the consistency of physical laws and chemistry throughout the cosmos, we can be certain that life, in the course of billions of years and trillions upon trillions upon trillions of planets, has arisen over and over again—in each case dependent on the same molecular interactions that we know today.   

Life is, in other words, as inherent as the other emergent properties in the universe. Following upon life, the ability of organisms (in our own case, human beings) to think as well as feel illustrates inherent universal emergent properties.



Take note: Starting on February 22nd (mark your calendar!) some essays specifically about Gurdjieff's laws—which certainly differ in some ways from my laws of Metaphysical Humanism— will be published. In draft as I write this, they offer a perspective on Gurdjieff's laws as inner, not outer, laws, and discusses some potential meanings consequential to that perspective.

Metaphysical Humanism is in the publishing edit and will be made available in its entirety in the next few months.

As a service to the Gurdjieff community, and in the hope that it will stimulate further discussion and investigations of the laws of Being, I intend to publish this book for free, or as close to free as possible (the paperback edition will inevitably have some publishing costs.)

Donations are, as always, gratefully accepted and will be turned towards funding Gurdjieff-work related publishing projects. 


May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.