Emergence

Another dig­i­tal col­lage, part of a page done for a ‘zine I put together for Expozine 2011. You can see the rest of the PDF here.

The quote on this page reads:

The col­lec­tive psy­che points toward and guides us through the tran­si­tion period we now face. New images are aris­ing, refram­ing the future. Images have heal­ing prop­er­ties. They speak to us in our sleep­ing and wak­ing dreams, forg­ing shared sto­ries rel­e­vant to every­one in the process as well as the Cos­mos itself.

We can­not sep­a­rate our psycho-physical symp­toms from the col­lec­tive envi­ron­ment. There is a miss­ing dimen­sion in our world­view and mind­scapes. We sense it, even though the mar­ket and media have attempted to drain all depth from our expe­ri­ence. Emer­gent events are not merely responses to eco­nomic and cli­matic con­di­tions or social engi­neer­ing, but erup­tions of the col­lec­tive unconscious.

– Iona Miller

Basi­cally, this pas­sage sums up what I feel is hap­pen­ing as we hur­tle along the river of time — not as indi­vid­u­als, but as beings that are inex­tri­ca­bly con­nected on the most sub­tle lev­els of exis­tence, and where the true func­tion of art lays: to sug­gest new visions, new worlds of possibility.

So what exactly is “emer­gence”? It describes a con­cept from sys­tems the­ory that within com­plex sys­tems, the sum is more than its parts; the integrity of this entirety arises from the intri­cate mul­ti­plic­ity of seem­ingly sim­ple inter-relationships between its parts, which are not always eas­ily quantifiable.

Wikipedia quotes Jef­frey Gold­stein in the School of Busi­ness at Adel­phi Uni­ver­sity as say­ing that emer­gence can be seen as “the aris­ing of novel and coher­ent struc­tures, pat­terns and prop­er­ties dur­ing the process of self-organization in com­plex sys­tems.” Biol­o­gist Peter Corn­ing details emer­gence further:

The com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tics are: (1) rad­i­cal nov­elty (fea­tures not pre­vi­ously observed in sys­tems); (2) coher­ence or cor­re­la­tion (mean­ing inte­grated wholes that main­tain them­selves over some period of time); (3) A global or macro “level” (i.e. there is some prop­erty of “whole­ness”); (4) it is the prod­uct of a dynam­i­cal process (it evolves); and (5) it is “osten­sive” (it can be perceived).

So what does it mean? It means that we’re all in this boat together — and that things are not what they appear to be.

 

 

 

 

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