Human Energy Podcast
The Third Story: self-organizing evolution as a source of meaning - Francis Heylighen - N2 Conference
The Third Story: self-organizing evolution as a source of meaning
Presented by Francis Heylighen as part of Human Energy's 2023 N2 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley
The Human Energy project intends to address the "Techno-Social Dilemma", which we define as the sense of anxiety, depression and despair in the present Information Age. That dilemma can be understood as a loss of people's "sense of coherence": they no longer experience the world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. Making sense of the world requires an integrated worldview, based on scientific insights, but also providing values and courses of action. What we call the "Third Story" provides such a sense-making scheme in the form of a narrative of evolution.
This narrative explains the development of the universe from elementary particles to human society and beyond. Teilhard formulated the underlying dynamics by noting that both complexity and consciousness increase during evolution. We clarify this statement by analyzing the mechanisms of self-organizing evolution. The principle is that interacting systems mutually adapt until they settle in a synergetic whole. This whole forms a higher-order system, which in turn interacts with other such systems, eventually settling in an even larger whole. Human individuals and organizations are presently interacting globally via the Internet, markets, and logistics, or more generally the Noosphere.
Contemporary problems can be understood as remaining frictions to be resolved within this emerging global superorganism. This may be achieved by enhancing collective consciousness: learning to find and explore synergies, and to avoid frictions.
Watch this presentation on our YouTube channel.
Learn more at https://humanenergy.io
The Third Story: self-organizing evolution as a source of meaning
Presented by Francis Heylighen as part of Human Energy's 2023 N2 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley
The Human Energy project intends to address the "Techno-Social Dilemma", which we define as the sense of anxiety, depression and despair in the present Information Age. That dilemma can be understood as a loss of people's "sense of coherence": they no longer experience the world as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. Making sense of the world requires an integrated worldview, based on scientific insights, but also providing values and courses of action. What we call the "Third Story" provides such a sense-making scheme in the form of a narrative of evolution.
This narrative explains the development of the universe from elementary particles to human society and beyond. Teilhard formulated the underlying dynamics by noting that both complexity and consciousness increase during evolution. We clarify this statement by analyzing the mechanisms of self-organizing evolution. The principle is that interacting systems mutually adapt until they settle in a synergetic whole. This whole forms a higher-order system, which in turn interacts with other such systems, eventually settling in an even larger whole. Human individuals and organizations are presently interacting globally via the Internet, markets, and logistics, or more generally the Noosphere.
Contemporary problems can be understood as remaining frictions to be resolved within this emerging global superorganism. This may be achieved by enhancing collective consciousness: learning to find and explore synergies, and to avoid frictions.
Watch this presentation on our YouTube channel.
Learn more at https://humanenergy.io