Introduction, part 5. Go back to previous part
Integrating science – integrating society
The nature of the Anthropocene crisis has necessitated not only the integration of natural and social science, but also that of theoretical and applied science. After an atmospheric chemist and a marine microbiologist presented the ‘Anthropocene hypothesis’ in year 2000, the issue landed at the table of the geological research community. Suddenly the fossils, at their habitually tranquil work benches, seemed dancing in a new light. Such turning of tables within the scientific communities corresponds to massive development features of everyday life. Nothing will ever be the same within scientific research. Nor within any other walks of life.
The most important aspect of scientific integration concerns unified science massively entering everyday life, and the new socio-natural state of the earth system. This is the most complex task. But it is also the perspective, in which the necessary change becomes doable and concrete. Unified science will join in the front of burgeoning social mutiny. Scientists will have to answer the rallying call ‘Listen to science!’ by retorting ‘Walk with social mutiny!’. The means of cooperation are the ‘weapons,’ necessary to wrest from the hands of the forces of mass destruction. Not to wage war, however, but to save the life system of the planet for the future, as means of mass construction.
End of ‘two cultures’
The outlived rift between ‘two cultures,’ in bourgeois society’s scientific approximation, is on the verge of collapsing. The study of humanity and of remaining nature, cannot continue as two separate domains, without any determined mutual relation, and without any common understanding. Such dualism, established during Enlightenment, had corresponded to capitalism’s bifurcation of society into economics and politics. Such social dualism, of culminating exploitation metabolism, is no longer possible.
On the one hand, natural science had been engaged, in developing technology for economic purposes. The present radical change, in this mutually economic relation, cannot any longer be disciplined through linear metabolism. Science and exploitation are breaking their segregate social contract. By increasingly representing destructive forces, the economic-political principals of scientific-technological management are losing their authority. They are in a state of unprincipled degeneration. They are piling up walls against scientifically sound discoveries. Necessary and possible rapid scaling up of sustainable development techniques and methods into massive currents, are turned down flat. President Trump and others of the same ilk have lent their wry faces to this decay. The fact that schoolchildren can tell them all off, says more than enough about their loss of authority.
On the other hand, the humanities and social sciences had been treating human relations in a wide and confusing variety of disciplines, from arts to economics. A common standard of scientific rigour, comparable to the one in natural sciences, had been wanting. And no such standard could be achieved as a segregate practice. It never will. Human self-reflexion, alienated from its natural historic context, cannot be achieved, and will not be realized.
Common scientific discipline will only be found in scientific integration, as human cooperation returns to integrated applied and theoretical science. Hence, to where labour had set it free at the dawn of civilization. This reintegration, however, will take place at an incomparably higher level of human association. Precisely thus will human cooperation reintegrate, within the natural evolution from which it once emanated. Our speciation’s original alienation from the animal kingdom gets rehabilitated. Spiral closes.
In this natural historic feedback process, even the false pretension of natural science as an objectively detached and external discipline, will be dissolved into scientific integration. That its theoretical research should have been a non-intervening approximation from the outside, proves to be an illusion. Likewise, the assumption that its applied science should have been unbiased manipulation. These delusions have, as a matter of fact, been just as unscientific as the religious and ideological arbitrariness of the humanities.
The very regularities, discovered and described with mathematical precision by humans, had been implemented within the work of labour. That does not mean that those regularities had been achieved through labour, neither human nor divine. They were the products of natural history. Neither does it mean that the mathematics, or semantic conceptualizations, utilised in mental human labour, for guiding physical human labour, can be understood as universal products of natural history. They had been products of human natural history – human artefacts. By emancipation from the logics of linear metabolism, such fundamentals might finally become common sense and scientific consensus.
Just as dramatically liberating might scientific integration work to organized human self-reflexion. If serving any immediate and precise social purpose at all, the humanities, as segregate part of dualist epistemology, had assisted politics, class society’s given form of coordinated management. Such exclusive social corruption of research has now become a paralysing dead-end. It is no longer possible. It is no longer necessary. It is no longer desirable.
This dualism of science, which had celebrated such a revolutionary success ever since Enlightenment, can no longer serve as organizing principle of further approximation and advancement. It would spell disaster, since inability to meet the challenge of the Anthropocene crisis would be the end of science. And ability to succeed, in humanity’s third phase transition, is completely dependent on successful scientific integration.
A new way of associating
In everyday life as well, dualism has become obsolete. The cleavage of society, in economy and politics, as two separate spheres, layers or disciplines, does no longer correspond to the way we need to associate and self-organize. This social dualism is not capable of solving the Anthropocene crisis.
The old normal cannot continue. A life where the great majority of people constitute society’s resource, while exerting no influence over resource use and possessing no way of changing course, is no longer sustainable. This labouring majority is dependent on minding its proper business privately, while a tiny minority is controlling the aggregate resources of society, in segregate and short-sighted self-interest. The majority can only change course, in the interest of society, of the planet, and of life, by freely associating. This is tantamount to breaking up from its incapacitated social status. Majoritarian self-organization means social mutiny.
The new normal must complete, combine, and concretise already massively accumulating development features into concrete principles of human daily interaction, uniting a social order of equal grown-ups. A system is acutely needed, embodying incentives to save and promote life at The Blue Planet for enhanced life of future human generations. Its breakthrough would immediately saturate the parched need of human cooperation, simply because of the immense scale and intensity of the task. Integration of human production and consumption, and the re-integration of this overall process within the circular metabolism of planetary nature, is incompatible with the exploitation principle.
The constitutional principles of class society – state and property – do no longer hold any possibility of furthering human cooperation. Generalized associationism needs to de-segregate and de-propriate human cooperation, in order to complete the third phase transition.
Exactly this shift should also be concretely and immediately expressed as a globally active currency. Flow-organization of integrated human labour and ecologically natural energy needs an exact and stable measurement, even more than the capitalist market ever did. Emergence of a concrete currency, reproducing equalizing and globally sustainable resource balances of advanced circular metabolism, would represent the only possible ‘soft landing’ of coming financial crashes. Avoiding further evermore catastrophic collapses, in abstract capital’s self-liquidation process, can only be accomplished by combining, scaling up, and instituting self-organized independence of such a non-fungible measure of sustainably balancing sovereign human interaction. The technical means are all already present, for developing such powerful means of mass construction. This has been demonstrated by the destructively corrupt hybrid-form of ‘crypto currency.’
The obstructive means of struggle, that once had provided the labour movement with force, have today lost their meaning. Construction – not obstruction – has become an absolute minimum in the third phase transition. For example, a general strike must immediately transcend into taking over direct resource control, to gain anything at all. When doing so, however, it might become the transformative pivot.
It is in such a context that introducing and gaining momentum of a Humus currency gets rational. Within integrated associations, an axis of self-organized productive and scientific labour would form their organizing principle, leading optimal conversion to advanced circular metabolism. By such integration of manual and intellectual labour at all levels of association, embodying integration of united science into everyday life, a natural metabolic standard of socially recognized labour would be constituted, a base level towards which other types of labour might be commensurately measured. In short, science and the working class need to clinch hands. This combined force needs to criminalize abstract capital and break the global wave of reactionary populism in one and the same act.
Labour servicing human consumption, or human cooperation servicing human relations in various other respects, like social care, education, theoretical research, eco system services, et cetera, would be free to seek employment in, affiliation to, or association with, such a networked base level of human association.
Such a social leap, corresponding to completing a phase transition to globally advanced circular metabolism, could of course not take place within the old normal. For this disintegrating order is no longer normal at all, but has become disastrously abnormal. A shrinking social minority is controlling society’s and nature’s resources. It depletes them in narrow, short-sighted, and thoughtless self-interest. It forms a separate and autonomous civil society around its abstract capital, which is no longer involved in human development. The general public is left to comply to the destructivity of this civil society, or to drop out of. This is no longer sustainable. Neither is this minority’s disciplining of human resources, through wage labour, nor its association to this effectually powerless majority, through a fictitious political equality of state membership – citizenship. Citizenship, in turn, forms obstructively exclusive entities towards other populations. Self-organized association, to save the future of society and planetary life, cannot let itself be hindered by these obstacles. All these things had been special time bound entanglements of socially indirect relations. They can no longer be perpetuated. The nation states and abstract capital are on the verge of collapse.
In fact, this social order has been self-liquidating since a century. It has produced a result where totally impersonal and absolutely abstract capital runs the business of society. Security traders at their computer frames are acting most slavishly of all humans in case they are still humans at all. For the unsustainable ‘new normal’ in this self-liquidating depletion economy is trading robots. They are auto-regulating the world market in abstract capital – the monopolized right to proceeds. Thereby they are monopolizing the entire conditions of global cooperation. It is representing ‘AM’ – ‘Artificial Madness’ – in all its naked monstrosity. This alienating mechanics is taking a further leap through the global Corona crisis, echoing like a warning shot of what is yet to come: ‘Robot’s hungry!’ ‘More zeros!’ And the central banks are nothing but compulsive feeders.
The sustainable new normal is quite opposite to this destructiveness. The new way of associating already grows by leaps and bounds, in thousands of different ways. This introduction is not the place to develop this thesis further. Suffice it to mention a few negative determinations, outlining the course-altering spontaneously evolving. Self-organization tends to grow outside political parties and government sponsored institutions. Fields of research tend to break up national, institutional, and commercial boundaries, in order to advance. Cash as the general expression of property is vanishing, being replaced by balances virtually reflecting alleged resource contribution and consumption. Virtual currency tends to break loose from the global banking system. Exchange tends to spread peer-to-peer, apart from market institutions. Trust rating of strangers built on recorded performance tends to move outside credit rating, as peer-to-peer feedback from self-organized interaction. Efforts at sustainable innovation tend to perforate bureaucratic inertia. The intimacy of emotional life tends to move out of the private sphere to enter global transparency. Centralized media production is tending to be submersed by self-produced information. In the Corona crisis, science has tended to round political corruption, publicly communicating the method of successive approximation to real life in real-time. Human self-organization is obviously in a state of transcendence.
The fact that such divergences tend to end up in corrupted aberrations, so far, only testifies to these intuitively trickling development features of social mutiny still being too indistinct, irresolute, and mutually isolated. Social mutiny is yet only crawling. It is still lacking the balance, skill, constructive focus, and coordinated consciousness, needed to walk, and to resolutely head for its natural historic aim.
Integrating science will of course be a complex matter. It is necessary to aim at, but impossible to complete, until human self-organization altogether gets focused on solving the Anthropocene crisis. The processes towards this fusion of scientific and social association are intimately interconnected. Integrating applied science in everyday life, integrating labour and consumption of social life, integrating natural and social science into a completed earth system science, and in turn re-integrating humanity within nature, are all expressions of one and the same process – social mutiny against the disintegrating and socio-naturally unsustainable remnants of class society. A new life now begins.
Social conceptualization
Human society had made itself quasi-enclosed, through linear metabolism. Now, this natural historic status has proven unsustainable. It has come into acute conflict with the semi-closed earth system.
Society is the second most complex system that we know of. Its interaction within the semi-closed earth system is the most complex one. This interaction now needs to get synchronized. Entire humanity needs to re-adapt. The critical independent variables reside within humanity. How can these be represented scientifically?
Complex semi-closed evolving systems
Complex systems, like for example global climate, are studied by successively building, revising, amending, and fine-tuning models. These are evaluated in comparison to measured outfalls. They are corrected according to best understanding of what interference should be included in, modified within, or excluded from a respective model, to make it more exact and powerful in forecasting. At the level of complexity, where human-induced independent variables have been detected – most conspicuously greenhouse gases – which have been studied, measured and mathematized, together with data from dependent variables – above all atmospheric average temperature and chemical changes of oceans – power of prognostication is being achieved. By successively discovering, measuring, assessing, and combining positive feedbacks of the earth system, integrating them with detected negative feedbacks, the simulations of the models have gained in certainty and precision.
Since we are only dealing with models representing combined observations, not particular substrates in isolated experiments or measurements, running various models in parallel is not excluded, but rather recommended. Replicability of simple experiments constitute a crucial way of establishing individual scientific results, through achieving predictability. In the study of complex systems this corresponds to compound modelling approximating higher degrees of converging precision, to be able to make prognoses. In such prognoses, real-time feedback and fine-tuning will become increasingly crucial, as human interaction matures into claiming them for active current use.
Scientific consilience at the fundamental level of natural science – physics – has produced identic results and conclusions, not only by repetition, but also by distinct paths and through different methods. That has contributed to empirical robustness, verification, and predictability. In studying complex systems, however, consilience gets even more important, although for an opposite reason. It is more gradual and less spectacular than in physics, in addition aiming at a moving target. This means it may never realistically pursue full-scale verification and predictability. Then, scientific approximation, by globally conciliant convergence, becomes a permanently ongoing process. The earth system is complex and dynamic. So must humanity’s surveillance of, adaption to, and preservation of it become – collective intelligence in the earth system.
Can society be modelled?
Human society is too complex a system, displaying such unpredictable volatility, that it might not be readily mathematized, no matter how much data you would feed. Even less under conditions of class society and linear metabolism, where opposite social interests, opposite self-organization and opposite driving forces of self-preservation, have intersected society’s cooperative fabric and clashed in unpredictable ways. Moreover, the effects of linear metabolism have remained largely un-surveyed and un-measured, to the degree and at the scale of metabolic development. Especially as it comes to the entropic output end of the line – pollution. And certainly, social courses of events have become harder to anticipate, as class society is disintegrating in an unprecedented crisis process.
The question is: Might this complex system, in unparalleled turbulence, be modelled? The brief answer is no. Not unless you start thinking about the problem, in the perspective of self-organized scientific integration. Then you might approach the very opposite of bureaucratic ‘social engineering,’ which had produced such devastating results during the twentieth century. Scientific modelling of human society can only be achieved by generalized self-organization, through transparent real-time feedback within everyday life, of its status within the planetary life system.
Fundamental development features
Such a perspective should depart from detecting and interpreting massive development features of contemporary self-organization. First, two opposing features should be noticed. The accelerating process of class society’s disintegration is one of them. The increasingly rapid development of cooperative means is the other one. These two features are presently united. This unity, however, is critically instable. In a natural historic perspective, it is cooperative development that is the independent variable. Dissolution is perpetuated by this development. Even class society’s disintegration being human development, it must be so.
These critically associated opposites really distinguish the present age. They are fundamental development features. They express the currently critical condition in human socio-natural evolution. Therefore, modelling of society should start by focusing these opposing features. Otherwise a realistic overall picture would directly be lost. Contemporary social conceptualization should be based on that counterintuitive insight – disintegration by association. And it should aim at reintegration within humanity and within Earth’s life system, by right of association generalizing itself.
Disintegration corresponds to the crisis of the second order approximation, the right of association: The present level of human association is critically inadequate to the level of human evolution reached. During the twentieth century, associative resource control has been narrowing and alienating itself from the real life of human society. Monopolized right of association has ended in globally inflated markets of absolutely abstract capital, parasitizing upon real human cooperation. This state of things moves towards collapse, for social as well as natural reasons, at a global scale.
Association corresponds to the potentiality evolved out of the first level approximation, the cooperative species-specifics: Means of cooperation are becoming abundant. But control of them are still monopolized. These means involve human needs awoken. Monopolized control of these means signifies human needs not fulfilled. An unprecedented rift in human needs has resulted, corresponding to the globally critical rift in nature’s cycles. The combined force of these needs and these means press for a natural historic leap in human associability.
Twentieth century disintegration by association will be analysed at the decisive economic level in the first book, through the formula of capital abstraction producing industrial repulsion. Right of association is being ever more unsustainably monopolized by increasingly abstract capital formation. Abundant development, in virtual and material means of cooperation, tends to associate humanity in social mutiny against that destructive impact.
Demise of ‘social engineering’
Scientific modelling of society can never be a case of successively approaching greater exactness, in observing an externality. It is by nature integrative. It could only be achieved by decentralized intra-calibrating measurement and management within human metabolism. An externalist misconception, however, had been typical of twentieth century restorative bureaucracy, claiming aptitude for social engineering. That type of delusion might now be evaluated as a completed natural historic experience. It has been disqualified. Bureaucratic ‘social engineering’ had produced associated abstract capital, world wars, totalitarian labour states, the Holocaust and other genocides, weapon systems of mass destruction, and a failed ‘world order’ producing the Anthropocene crisis.
Human nature is not static. It is evolutionary. Therefore, society cannot be understood and formulated in unchanging laws either, like in theoretical physics. Of course, classical political economy, and even more its neoclassical bastard offspring, had been the prime outlets for the misleading trade description of ‘perfect market.’ That pretentious failure has now become a catastrophe waiting to happen. Hyperinflation of perfectly abstract asset valuation is terrorising humanity and the life system of the planet. Human nature needs to catch up, grasping the nature of that acute crisis.
Reading and analysing self-organization
Society is, by definition, self-organizing and historically evolving. Detecting, describing and projecting society’s amassing of development features, is the subject matter of social science. What are their social sources? What are their directions? How do they conflict? What potentialities, in relation to the overall picture, might they express? How might they change place and function in accordance with such potentialities?
Fundamental questions, of this sort, relate to human cooperation and association. None of this can be mathematized. It must be approximated by semantic conceptualization. Complexity of the system requires this. Also, the complexity of its individual variables needs semantic conceptualization. Individual variables might of course be tested by social statistics.
End of pragmatism
A social regularity, causing complex patterns to develop, conflict, and change nature, cannot be understood by simply observing and describing what appears. Abstracting observations of generally changing patterns from incidental impressions, conceptualizing these as well as their interrelations, is an essentially different and more dynamic kind of enquiry than natural scientific experimentalism. The sound conservative claim of natural science, of repeatability, verification, and predictivity, cannot be applied in analysing society. It would not gain any firmer foothold, than applying prejudice of the past to a reality in rapid change.
Non-systematic approximation to a system itself rapidly self-altering, as in the unique self-organizing quality of human society, may at most become intuitive pragmatism. At best it might produce sharp hindsight, which may possibly inspire new paths of cooperative mass manifestations in reaction. At worst it would simply become adapted rationalisations of outlived patterns of reaction, merging into and reinforcing these.
The Anthropocene crisis needs systematic treatment
Under conditions of the Anthropocene crisis, however, systematic scientific approximation will be urgently needed. Its starting point is not random. In a certain sense, this approximation is even less random, than the principles discovered and described by natural science as scientific laws, since the cosmological origin and framing of the latter are still hotly contested, and seem to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Approximation of the Anthropocene crisis narrows down to a tiny spot in universe. The domain of crisis solution’s independent variable is a given. Determination of its natural historic character is acute, but that should be a problem already solved. The basic scientific principle describing humanity, including its origin and its present state, evolving into the magnitude of a rapidly changing planetary socio-natural law, should no longer be contestable. It cannot be anything else than the first-, second- and third-order approximations to human nature. Humanity is a cooperative species. Its basic scientific principle is its self-organizing right of association. This principle it now confronting its global life crisis. The independent think tank right2unite is being founded on that insight.
Determining the short-term social variable, causing, driving, and aggravating the Anthropocene crisis, might be trickier. The first book of this work is an attempt at isolating that variable, which if successful might start opening for distinguishing and concretizing the natural historic variable of crisis solution.
Scientific approximation to society needs abstract conceptualization, just as much as physics does. But the laws of social development are expressions of social history and change accordingly. This does not imply that they are purely random constructions of the human mind, ready to be deconstructed and reconstructed according to academic fashion, as ‘post-modern’ liquidation of social science claims. On the contrary. Even greater scientific rigour is required, to epistemologically approach something which cannot be subjected to repeated experiments, formulated in equations, and established as unchanging laws.
Not only are the development laws of human society unsuitable for mathematical abstraction. Due to both their complexity and their changing nature, they should be formulated as historical tendencies, not as exact, static, and experimentally repeatable regularities (like for example in the more pretentious claims of game theory or econometrics).
In fact, such tendential and historical laws change with the social systems they perpetuate. For example, the law of labour value should be understood as time bound and characteristic of the capitalist period. The law of accumulation, exploitation of surplus value out of expanding industrial wage labour, had been a sign of the times. The law of tendentially falling profit rates had resulted from the growing force of these laws. It had expressed the distinctively transitionary character of the capitalist mode of exploitation. Today, within the present phase transition, these laws are disintegrating.
However, the more basic, natural historic, socio-naturally co-evolved, and species-specific law of human cooperativity is coming to the fore in its own right – human self-organization as expressed in an increasing right of association, and the critical natural historic deficiency condition of this associative right.
Core concepts of organizing principles
Massive development features, emerging historically within human cooperation, constitute social forces. Detecting, describing and conceptually determining the relations between such forces, is the subject matter of social science. Not even the study of human individual sociality – psychology – can be successfully pursued in isolation from its social context.
As already stated, scientific concepts in studying human social evolution cannot be mathematized. They need to be semantically formulated. The semantic concepts needed might form fruitful hypotheses by, primarily, fixing terms for massive development features observed, which can be understood as directly relating to the first, second and third order approximations to human nature. Such basic determination of concepts is in this work often referred to as ‘core concept’. An extant expression of the second and third orders – of right of association and its critical condition – forms the basic determination of a core concept during the Anthropocene crisis.
For simplification, we might cite some earlier, presently obsolete, examples. During the eighteenth century, citizenship of a nation state became a core concept of politics. Accumulation of capital, by hiring wage labour, became a core concept of economy. Twentieth century has displayed a crisis and dissolution process of these core concepts. Under present conditions, human association needs to transcend those limits. This assertion starts approximation to generalized associationism, by negative determination.
A core concept refers to an ‘organizing principle,’ of evolving human cooperation. It expresses a contemporary development form in right of association, that has become historically possible and necessary, or already achieved. Democracy was the organizing principle of citizenship. Accumulation, by industrialization of hired labour power, had been the organizing principle of capital.
Presently, the organizing principle of humanity has become global. This fact has not yet found its constructive realization, as an aggregate positive form of development. But the states of the global financial markets and of Earth’s life system proves it negatively and destructively.
Reactionary organizing discipline
Much of social development, however, does not express historical advancement. Especially not under the present conditions, combining crises in social and natural history. Social forces, expressing such reactions, might be termed ‘zeroth order approximation.’ Simply by being human, they need to adopt and self-organize in cooperative form, even in cases neither spreading cooperation, nor advancing human right of association historically mature, but rather obstructing them. Of course, massive development features expressing blind reactions, rather than possible historical solutions, should not be left out of the picture. In such analysis, zeroth order ‘organizing discipline’ should be basically reserved for referring to more short-term and randomly appearing massive patterns of reaction, impeding levels of association, the historical conditions of which are already developing. Let us briefly look at a few examples.
Imperial restoration of mid-nineteenth century France, in the political void produced by competing monarchist-restorative factions after the 1848 European revolutionary wave. Or 1975 monarchist restoration of post-fascist Spain, based in fear of Portuguese insurrectionist contagion, produced by fascism’s collapse in the neighbouring country. These historical instances might serve as randomly picked examples of reactionary organizing discipline of human cooperation.
Looking for more powerful manifestations, of course leads to the barbaric twentieth century dead ends, Communist labour states, or Fascism and world war. Supra-state organizing discipline of the Cold War, through the UN system, IMF, WTO, and other international clubs, has been breaking down. Contemporarily, the global wave of authoritarian and nationalist populisms, within disintegrating politics and obsolete nation states, presents itself as organizing discipline.
This untenable and disintegrating set of disciplines has been countering the currently global organizing principle of humanity, for more than a century. Globally generalized right of association is enrolling its forces, along all vital fronts. It is still not aware of its common principle.
Additional determinations of core concepts
As stated above, core concepts are primarily determined as central terms, directly expressing human nature at the contemporary level of human evolution. Therefore, they function as organizing principles of human self-organization, achieving the historically possible level of association. Let us now proceed, in developing conceptual apparatus, from this starting point.
Secondly, each core concept needs several additional determinations in order to gain precision. These are based in complimentary and more concrete observations of massive development patterns. In semantic conceptualization, additional determinations to the value of core concepts, serve a somewhat similar role as calculus does in studies reducible to mathematical formulation. There is no definite limit to how many determinations a core concept can get. Redundancy, however, is hardly anything to be strived for. Such procedure tends to produce disproportion, lack of focus, and non-dynamic understanding. As in all scientific approximation, optimal reduction is desirable.
Thirdly, as to the relations between concepts, those contradictions reflecting real social conflicts must be sorted out from contradictions in terms. Contradiction in terms contaminate determinations and hinder further approximation to real social forces. Contradiction in terms typically occur, as concepts from other disciplines, or terms from everyday language, are simply borrowed in an allegoric manner, arbitrarily tossing them in, without neither serious discretion nor clarifying re-definition and re-determinations. Such procedure results in randomness and confusion, rather than conceptual determination.
Another trap might be overdetermination. Structuralist modelling often forms static, overloaded, impregnable, arbitrary, and low-validity proposals for conceptual apparatuses.
If being a valid determination, referring to a real and contextually relevant social process, determining one core concept always places it in relation to another valid one. Such coincidence, where determinations of different core concepts relate, is conceptually formative itself. By thus associating concepts, successfully approximating real human association, a conceptual apparatus might be achieved.
The approximate validity of proposed concepts and conceptual apparatus might primarily be tested against the second order approximation to human nature – the right of association historically reached – as observed, described, and statistically measured in contemporary society. Ultimately, of course, the more exact validation of proposed concepts, lies in their approximate relevance to the conditions of the Anthropocene crisis.
Let us exemplify. Presently, we have a peculiar situation where absolutely abstract capital is globally associated, with securities becoming automatically inter-convertible through derivation and robotized trading. This does not express any organizing principle at all, but on the contrary an untenable, all-encompassing and self-liquidating organizing discipline. Nevertheless, this destructive discipline is developing abundant means of cooperation, only due to its zeroth order of simply being human, while threatening Earth’s biogeochemical life system, together with 65 million years of natural evolution and three million years of human evolution. This explosive combination, in turn, is triggering humanity’s need and possibility of completing the third phase transition to globally advanced circular metabolism – the presently organizing principle.
Fourthly, in the prospect of necessary scientific integration, validation of social concepts is particularly related to the ongoing phase transition from human linear metabolism to globally advanced circular metabolism. The possibilities inherent to the rate of cooperation achieved, are measured by redundantly developed means of cooperation. Alternately, from the perspective of human needs, the same thing might be assessed as level of association not yet achieved, but inherently possible by conversion of such means.
This cooperative redundancy, in turn, should be set in relation to and measured by the successive results described by earth system science. This provides the very basis for going ahead with scientific integration, by transforming society as successively approximating self-organized emergency plans, related to the critical variables of the earth system, and to those of global society. Social mutiny in defence of life at The Blue Planet constitutes an integrative scientific and social principle at one and the same time – the organizing principle of our time.
The role of mathematics and information processing
Human self-organization, taken by itself, cannot be mathematized. It is the density, scope, and quality of purpose in self-organization, that reflects to what degree the human means of cooperation developed have been realized as a further progress of the cooperative principle – right of association – or as a part of its obfuscation, obstruction and destruction.
The importance of mathematics, however, will of course become immense, in gathering and processing statistics for such analysis and synthetic conclusions. Meticulously measuring the expressions of dependent variables of the Anthropocene crisis, within nature and within society, stands at the core of scientific integration.
The great mathematical challenge will be concentrated to defining and measuring, in a commensurate way, the circular flow of energy, matter, and human labour at all social and geographical scales. A virtual Humus currency might concretise humanity’s sustainable re-integration into the global life system. At exactly the interface of integrated natural and social science, theoretical and applied science, science and everyday life, mathematics and information processing will occupy the core role in developing such a virtual currency of globally advanced circular metabolism.
Such a currency would measure collective intelligence in the planet’s life system. It would be based in monitoring and measuring the relative ecological and social status throughout the planet. It would balance self-organization’s auto-contracted resource allocation, according to natural and social need. Growth would be measured as increasing aggregate resources, getting equitably available to society, as positive feedback from success in re-integrating it into circular metabolism.
That would no longer signify economy – the theoretical discipline of linear metabolism – which never managed to reach a prognostic level. It would mean Anthropy – the general self-organizing principle of advanced human circular metabolism, within that of the earth system. A Humus currency would become the concrete principle, expressing and effectuating that general organizing principle.
Concrete principles
New trends in human self-organization have been provided with a socio-natural organizing principle by the Anthropocene crisis. The historically vital force of such trends might be tested, by measuring and evaluating them in relation to the requirements of this combined crisis. Are they already involved in completing the phase transition to globally advanced circular metabolism? Are they possibly conductive to do so? Or might they suitably be converted to do so? Such things should not be impossible to determine. Neither whether they are expressing the equal human right of the generalized associationism, needed to complete this phase transition.
Such progressive development features should be possible to distinguish from those trends in self-organization, which have come to express the opposite and destructive direction. Development features, that have obviously sprung out of the present disintegration of outlived class society, should be most easy to detect. But even which trends, traditions, and institutions, that perpetuate a form previously playing a progressive role in social history, but uncapable of doing so any longer, might be discovered in the litmus test of the Anthropocene crisis. Only to mention the most obvious, sensational, and counter-intuitive example: The self-organizing reach of democracy has become completely inadequate. Democracy’s substituted right of association will need to be realized in directly generalized and global right of association.
In natural science the term ‘principle’ signifies an achieved fundamental concept, an established formula for understanding and acting upon the world. Originating in antiquity, for example, Archimedes’ name was to be lent to the regular proportions of density to volume, in Archimedes’ principle. In modern times, Max Planck had gone to history for discovering the mathematically fixable constancy in the relation of a photon’s energy to its frequency. From the Enlightenment onwards, at least since Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which had been systematically investigating movement patterns of objects, and the magnitudes of and relations between ‘forces’ acting upon them, the term ‘principle’ stands for an empirically testable hypothesis on some fundamental regularity being successfully demonstrated, symbolically formulated, exhaustingly tested and established as incontestably true, by this scientifically sound method.
Natural science has generally left behind such methods as theology, teleology, natural, moral, or political philosophy, et cetera, as unsuitable for scientific enquiry. Relativism, in the post-modern sense of ‘alternative truths,’ corresponding to one’s own self-defined identity, or arbitrary ‘conceptual reconstruction’ of reality according to academic fashion and career opportunities, are certainly not desired. Successive approximation is. If the space-time of general relativity could be proved to represent reality even more precise, by including the dimension of time, as compared to the equations of Newton, which it did, then Einstein’s principles should be generally accepted. So they were.
In social science, the term ‘principle’ commonly refers to ephemeral and relatively random things, like political opinions and institutions, moral theses, personal beliefs, or judicial arrangements, reflecting contemporarily dominant social interests. However, in reintegrating humanity into the circular metabolism of living nature, which requires scientific integration, social sciences can no longer do without scientific principles.
The general principle of the cooperative species – social self-improvement of its inherited survival skill – lies in optimizing its own right of association. Having to proceed from such first- and second-order approximations, that are not possible to express with any singular or simple mathematical precision, does not imply that we are not dealing with scientific principles, only applying those with a different and more suitable kind of scientific reduction.
Humanity presently facing the global impact of its evolving associationism, provides basis for a further approximation to human nature, which by its very determination prepares for scientific integration. The global life system and human society converge towards one and the same organizing principle. It all boils down to the third order approximation to human nature – the scientific principle of our time. The anthropic principle, in this transferred, altered, and concretely verifiable sense, constitutes the scientific standard of the third phase transition.
The concrete principles proven conductive to, and therefore deductible from, this general principle, are those to be sought after among society’s massive development features. They are the ones to formulate as core and supplementary concepts – concrete principles. They are the ones to promote and self-organize as practical association.
‘Organizing principle’ in this text, refers to a general historical form, expressing the fundamental human associative principle at a given level in social evolution. ‘Concrete principles’ refer to massive development features associated with such organizing principle. If the anthropic principle is the organizing principle of our time, expressing the right of association at its present level, then globally majoritarian social mutiny is a concrete principle. Self-organized transparency as well. In the constructive extension, development of socio-natural co-working forces becomes a concrete principle. Such flow organization gets concrete, through globally decentralized auto-coordination by a virtual, de-propriated (non-property), de-verted (non-transactive), and de-sovereigned (non-state) Humus currency. Such a non-fungible currency becomes the concrete principle of equitable and sustainable human cooperation.
The second part’s first book will describe social mutiny’s critical development during the twentieth century conditions of phase transition. It will attempt to sort out the concrete principles its self-organization did tend to develop, from the organizing disciplines of political substitution that they were subjected to, aborting these concrete principles. The ensuing book will discuss the associative principle, and propose concrete principles expressing it within humanity under the conditions of highly advanced third phase transition. The concluding book will deal with the concrete – associative and natural rights – principles in the very transition to advanced circular metabolism – collective intelligence in Earth’s life system.
Some problems of integrating science
Integration of natural and social science, as well as of theoretical and applied science, is a means to an end. This end must be to integrate science in everyday life. The ivory tower of academia should be mature for listing as an historical monument, together with the gated communities of state security classification, commercial research labs, intellectual property, patents, company secrecy, and banking confidentiality. The third phase transition to globally advanced circular metabolism needs human cooperation, that is truly integrated by generally equitable self-organization. Scientific integration can only be realized as a necessary integral part of social mutiny against class society. Unsustainable habits, conventions, and traditions can only be actively broken by being replaced in self-organized association, combining massive development features already spontaneously starting to break them all over the place.
Scientific renaissance
The critical conditions of the present phase transition had tended to spread as increasing scientific scepticism. The surging scientific optimism, which had characterized research consensus from the Enlightenment to the end of the nineteenth century, had seemed to be broken with the twentieth century.
Kuhn’s theory of ‘paradigm shifts’ is an example of disintegrating ‘philosophy of science.’ Kuhn had been denying scientific approximation, by claiming that science runs in essentially nonoverlapping circles, with one incompatible ‘paradigm’ replacing another. Another example is Popper’s ‘critical rationalism,’ claiming the impossibility of scientific verification, and the unique primacy of falsification. Popper had jumbled up approximative conditions of natural and social sciences, respectively. He had attached complicity in nurturing totalitarianism to those opposing the dogma of exclusive ‘falsification.’ Disciplines of social science had then brought decay further, by post-modernist ‘constructivism.’ It had been picturing scientific approximation as competing ‘power relations,’ where one faction of the ‘scientific community’ should strive for getting the upper hand, through ‘deconstructing’ the ‘narratives’ of competitors, and gaining consensus behind the proper one. Stalinism, quashing the critical vein of neinteenth-century Marxism, harnessing its terminology for temporarily successful state terrorism, had thereby played a decisive part in provoking such scientific demoralisation. This slippery slope of scientific scepticism is now reaping what it has sown, in the form of outright science denial, absurd conspiracy theories, and unashamed advocacy of ‘alternative facts.’
Scientific approximation might not be a straight line. But in the long run it has proven an unquestionably successful one. Hypotheses might be falsified. They might be further strengthened ad hoc (thus far). Or they can be, for all practical purposes, verified. Scientific verification can of course not be regarded as something absolute. It is an ongoing practice of one single species at one individual planet. And history of science has repeatedly demonstrated that further approximation might need fundamental revision. However, approximation should be acknowledged as a material product of collectively accumulated human labour, expressing distinguished dots to completed sentences in an historically epistemological experience. This is especially true when reached through robustly converging conclusions from methodologically diverse enquiries – consilience.
The Anthropocene crisis constitutes an unprecedented opportunity for scientific consilience. It might develop into the massive breakthrough of integrated scientific approximation – life based collective intelligence. This scientific possibility, and its urgency, are starting to be felt by general intuition. They are developing into a new generation of common sense.
Parallel to the tendency of scepticism towards knowledge, which has reached rock bottom, and now meets a massively self-amplifying progressive counter-reaction – proclaiming ‘Listen to science!’ – a growing host of separate disciplines keep advancing rapidly, covering an ever-wider range of fields. And the scientifically organizing principle of earth system science provides a common point of reference, grounded in the discovery of the Anthropocene crisis. We are entering a scientific renaissance without precedent. There are, however, specific problems of scientific integration, particular to natural and social sciences, respectively.
Problems of natural science
The crucial methodological weakness in natural sciences’ way of approaching the problem of scientific integration is twofold. On the one hand, they tend to apply to complexity levels where they are not applicable, their own reductionist methods. Methods that had served themselves so well, in advancing theoretical science of physics, chemistry, and biology, as well as in revolutionizing technologically applied science, prove to be too primitive if applied to overly complex contexts. Transfer of their own methodology of reductionism, to the study of complex systems, unsuitable for that degree of reduction, has not proven fruitful.
Typically, such reductionism claims that everything can be described and completely conceptually determined by mathematics. Alternately, it might be argued that only objects that can be studied experimentally and in laboratory isolation, or at least be observed and measured externally, may lead to scientific conclusions. Such a view implies leaving the independent variable of the Anthropocene crisis to complete randomness, as a non-explorable topic. That is, the central research issue of our time is abandoned.
On the other hand, this uncertain situation has sometimes led natural scientists to admittedly transferring their own solid concepts – like for example ‘ecology’ or its ‘resilience’ – to the social domain without fundamentally re-determining them. This has resulted in conceptual corruption and confusion.
Alternatively, and for lack of better, they have tended to adopt uncompleted, corrupted, failed, or outmoded concepts and theories of disciplines treating human society, when cross-disciplinary requisites have presented themselves out of the very research questions. Most typically some variety of neoclassical economics or political science has gotten inserted into the quasi-synthetic models, attempting integration. The global market of abstract capital has often been invited wholesale, masquerading in nineteenth century worn-out conceptual outfits, to rule the house of scientific integration. Thereby, the loss of scientific integrity has made scientific integration impossible. Only a mishmash has resulted. The perfectly destructive impact of the global financial markets might be euphemistically presented as a wonder of ‘self-organization,’ as a culmination of natural historic evolution at this planet… or even in the universe (like with some simpletons of ‘complexity theory,’ impressed by the mathematical sophistication utilised, for optimizing abstraction of opportunity rent).
Problems of social sciences
Social sciences, the arts and humanities, have met their proper methodological impediments, which also could be described as twofold. Most basically, its degree of difficulty derives from the subject matters being so complex that reduction after the fashion of natural science’s success cannot be useful. Nevertheless, the risk that concepts might be corrupted, due to the bare complexity of its object, has often led social researchers to try applying natural science’s mathematical reduction standard to its own basis.
Since civilization had proven mathematics to be humanity’s most powerful, precise, simple and abstract method of reproducing reality by reduction, this had produced a compelling force. In natural science, the fascinating elegance of mathematics had produced wonders of knowledge, predictability and technological advance. In social sciences, mimicking natural science, when applied abundantly for explanatory purposes, rather than as supportive sets of statistics for illustrating probability, mathematical formulas have not proven successful even in forecasting.
Of course, economics is the foremost case in point. And it has hardly been likely to cause astonishment, that exactly this false expectation of scientific precision by mathematical reduction, should become so irresistible within precisely economy, the practical application of which had demonstrated precision in exchanging of scarce resources for thousands of years. Nevertheless, mathematical reduction would prove of limited value, even in forecasting how human cooperation would come to develop within this narrow field.
The complexity of human society, however, is finally becoming apprehensible, by its tangible collision with the natural world it is part of. This is critical. Social science can no longer run away from the fundamental postulate, where its actual point of contact with natural science is situated – human nature, as it can and should be understood through the natural historic origin of the species, its social development, and eventually its natural historic impact.
Secondly, social sciences in class society had constantly run the risk of getting proposed concepts corrupted, not only in the internal meaning of conceptualization failing because of false determinations, irrelevant arguments, invalid interpretations, corrupted data, causal misunderstanding, shaky reference to correlation, unfounded conclusions, et cetera. Even greater has been the risk of corruption in the externally social sense of spontaneously adapting to dominant social interests, thus one-sidedly dis-approximating social reality. This had been unavoidable. Nothing else could be expected, for as long as class society constituted the formal level of association, corresponding to the rate of cooperative development historically achieved. This had remained the normal state of things during human civilization. Consequently, the study of our own species is not properly adapted to the new situation, where class society cannot continue to exist.
The habitually sloppy comparisons of human cooperation to animals and their instinctual interaction amongst them do no longer hold. Nor does continuous reduction of humans and human consciousness to individual substrates. Research routinely influenced by state powers’ and exploiting classes’ habitual way of perceiving humans can no longer deliver. Specific cults or stigmatisations around some divisive social identity, typical of class society’s social fragmentation, have become reduced to waste of time in an urgent situation.
Sociology, economics, and political science
A short glance at the state of three branches of social science might illustrate. The over-arching discipline of sociology, to some extent reflects the general problems of social sciences. The core discipline of economics is a good measure of the theoretical crisis corresponding to the social one.
Sociology had arisen as a specific discipline in reaction to capitalism’s industrial revolution. Partly it had taken shape by criticizing its social effects, in the name of the ‘social question.’ Partially it had emerged by rationalising its dramatic ravages, for example by exploiting Darwin’s scientific breakthrough in evolutionary theory for implicit or explicit racism – like in Spencer’s ‘social Darwinism,’ advocating the ‘evolutionary’ right to ruthlessness of the socially most powerful, under the slogan ‘survival of the fittest.’
Handicapping reductionism was to persist. Reduction to biology, to ecology, to interpreting human nature through the lens of time-bound contemporary social relations, et cetera, has remained a problem.
Economic science had, for obvious reasons, emerged and been polished as the crown jewel of social science. Political economy had been the discipline of conquering and managing the state in society’s transition to the capitalist system. It had provided the emerging bourgeoisie – the political substitute of the capitalist class – with the courage and clear sight, that it had needed to head the breaking up of outlived privileges and hereditary obstacles to free enterprise.
During the twentieth century, the discipline of economics had converted into recipes for restoring capital formation beyond private accumulation, in the form of associated abstract capital, and for restoring wage labour beyond the boundaries of the industrial working class.
The new discipline of political science had converted in a similar manner. First into rationalisations of restoring the sovereignty of the nation state, in the contradictory form of belligerent blocs, covering a small human minority. Then into the disparate taxonomy of classifying formal state sovereignty, under the supra-state associating liquidation process of the nation states.
This bureaucratically corrupted political economy and political science, in the interest of abstract capital, had been oscillating from world and trade war to reactionary international social engineering.
Since globalization had broken the barriers restored, political economy and political science, together with the nation state and regularly contracted wage labour, had fallen prey to the global self-liquidation process of abstract capital, itself vaporizing. There is no more room for intelligibly converting them into coherent disciplines.
Consequently, the bankruptcy in the old way of understanding human society is most obvious within economics and political science. Understanding the end of economics as a separate linear discipline, and especially grasping – both in a mental and a real-life sense – the powerful means of cooperation created under abstract capital’s self-liquidation process, forms the springboard of formulating sustainable concrete principles of globally advanced circular metabolism.
Evaluating Marx and Engels
Evaluating Marx and Engels, as well as their sequel, will be a necessary integral part of this work. Suffice it here to make three brief statements.
In sociology, one contribution of the young Marx and Engels, 170 years ago, is still unsurpassed. Although partly contained in unfinished notes, and clothed in heavily time-bound philosophical terminology, their theory of human nature as cooperative might still be really validated. Their interpretation of class society, as transitory social evolution of this nature, proves to be correct. Its restricted level of association had been coupled to scarce material conditions, just like the prognosis had claimed. In fact, it is right now that it is even becoming verifiable. The present work is aimed at restating and updating such a basic understanding.
Two other contributions of these same authors should be mentioned. Karl Marx devoted most of his life-efforts to analysing capitalism, as a transcending culmination of class society. The transition forecasted, however, was to break through in forms that had not been prognosticated half a century earlier. Therefore, the theoretical approach of Das Kapital needs to be revised and updated, according to the unforeseen result. This text’s opening book of the first part, on abstract capital as the independent variable of the Anthropocene crisis, is intended as a contribution to conceptualizing such a revision.
The political theory of Marx and Engels, which had mainly been conditioned by contemporary revolutionary events, and mostly produced in the form of journalistic comments, was not to stand the test of twentieth century history. Although it had certainly been rife with unerring descriptions of contemporary politics, its proposed core concept, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ would prove to materialize as the opposite of that forecasted and intended. It turned out to be a contradiction in terms. And all efforts at amending, in theory and practice, this corrupted concept and its forecast failure, were only to make things incomparably worse, providing rationalization for the spread of the socially destructive forces producing the Anthropocene crisis. These things will take up parts within the second and third books of the first part, conceptualizing democracy and its place in social history, and twentieth century artificial restoration of bourgeois class society on historical overtime, respectively.
General consilience
Now, the conditions of the Anthropocene crisis might prove to be firmer ground for sociology. ‘New evolutionary sociology’ is starting to make some contributions, compatible with the understanding of the first phase transition referred to in this introduction. They are arguably substantiating the interpretation, that our progressing speciation among primates had transformed into human cooperative association through harvesting metabolism. The required scientific integration, at the critical interface of biology and sociology, seems to be burgeoning in reaction to prior failed attempts at scientific integration made by ‘socio-biology’ and ‘evolutionary psychology.’ These had still stumbled and fallen prey to biologist reductionism. A less speculative, more balanced and confirmative approach to human genesis and its implications is starting to result, utilising recent findings of cladistic analyses, comparative neuroanatomy, primate studies, and comparative habitat ecology.
But such findings, taken by themselves, lose their explanatory power, for the entire first two phases and their intermediate phase transition. Even less do they suffice for explaining the present phase transition. But the differential analysis of hominids transcending into hominins, revealing the special cooperative nature of this speciation, might of course have some bearing on Homo sapiens’ current return full spiral, to globally advanced circular metabolism. It might shed some light on the connection and difference between the original and the unilaterally maximized status of the species.
What remains from ‘socio-biology,’ that could prove suitable for recirculation, is the term ‘consilience,’ adopted by biologist Edward O Wilson in his second, and equally flawed, effort at re-launching the research programme of ‘socio-biology,’ a couple of decades further on. There might be no better designation, for conceptualizing the necessary integration process of theoretical and applied natural and social sciences into the praxis of everyday life, than general consilience.
An interesting effort at generalizing the emerging integrative synthesis is the book Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time by Gaia Vince, published in 2019. She has convincingly established human nature as progressively cooperative and human intelligence as increasingly collective (‘cultural bath’), consequently denouncing the myth of ‘artificial intelligence.’ As indicated by the book’s title, the renowned popularizer of the Anthropocene thesis has taken a grip on what is changing within humanity, although the concluding chapter is meagre, vague and impressionistic. By its lack of truly integrating this general understanding of human nature with the advent of the Anthropocene crisis, the book had questionably concluded a human transcendence into an altered species – ‘Homo omnis’ or ‘Homni’. The emerging reciprocity of humanity and the earth system, so brilliantly popularized separately by this author, was not to form the focus in this concluding anthropocentric thesis. Uncertainty therefore resulted. The third phase transition was thereby reduced to a concise footnote of the last chapter: “As we enter a period of global warming, with increasingly limited freshwater and mineral resources, our culture will need to transform from one that consumes water, fuels and materials to one that circulates resources within Homni’s global factory, ending the linear production-to-waste model we’ve used for the past millennia.” Nevertheless, Vince’s thoroughly referencing work forms an important contribution in displaying the present state of integrating science.
The meaning of life
The Anthropocene crisis has fundamentally reformulated the age-old question as to the meaning of life. It could never have been answered generally at the isolated individual level. It would therefore be both common-senseless and scientifically meaningless to insist searching general answers at that level. It does no longer even make sense restricting it to the individual human species, in front of threatening human-induced global mass extinction. Presently it is also inconsequential at the cosmological level, unless and until life on other planets might be both discovered, understood and contacted.
At the planetary level, however, the possibility emerges to both pose the question and answer it scientifically. The anthropic principle can be formulated in a conceptually verifiable and vitally concrete sense of the term: The meaning of human life has become the prospect of developing abundant human relations, in saving naturally evolving life, as we know it, for the future at The Blue Planet.
Our species, the only one capable of translating natural regularities, into information for proper interaction, has got a choice to make. Free will is only free in the meaning of choosing the right thing, in a situation where the options become so clear that it can be done, at exactly the very level of human association where the opportunity presents itself. The Anthropocene crisis presents us with a choice, that is so clear and so great, that united will needs to set free human cooperation in globally principled association. This corresponds to overall realization of human nature – in both the mental and the practically active sense of the word.
The meaning of life could or should not be posed as a predetermined matter. Such a teleological misconception might be illustrated metaphorically. Much like pre-adaptation could occur within natural evolution as random by-products (genetic drift), accompanying genetic changes immediately and actively selected for due to evolutionary advantage, only to occasionally gain a selective meaning at a later stage, humans had not been destined to take the critical position in natural history, presently produced by socio-natural co-evolution. But obviously it happened.
The result might prove a fundamental evolutionary shift – in that case probably the first global mass extinction caused by life itself, since proliferation of photosynthesis had led to mass extinction of simple anaerobic organisms, two and a half billion years ago (‘Oxygen Catastrophe’). Or, in a more conservative vein, it might prove a continuation of the 66 million years old Cenozoic era, through an Anthropocene epoch. It is definitely the first time at this planet, that a living species is presented with a real choice of such magnitude (cyanobacteria did not consider their oxy-poisonous impact, in the shallow oceans of the young Earth). If the former alternative should materialize, it would also mean the first time of missing out in this respect. Such occasions might be cosmologically rare, if not outright unique.
At exactly the moment of the Anthropocene crisis, aggregate life of one living species, humanity, is facing the option of consciously co-working, within itself and within the biogeochemical sun-fuelled work of the planetary life system, as a united self-organizing and life-promoting global force. This could be described as a temporary and locally unique, optional socio-natural force if you will.
It could also be perceived as humanity discovering and developing its true nature. The spiritual depth of this scientific meaning, of freely choosing relatively ‘eternal life,’ will make religious superstition bleak in comparison. Humans: Mature to fill this position, as manager of The Blue Planet! That has become the meaning of life!
Back to part 1, Metabolic phases of socio-natural co-evolution. Back to part 2, Cooperative species.
Back to part 3, Collective intelligence. Back to part 4, Ontological demarcations.