“Emergence, a domain where distinction between conception in matter and mind, and arts and sciences, are meaningless”

Abstract

Since the turn of the century, there has been a major shift in our worldviews from the classical deterministic views, which focused on isolated properties whose behavior was defined in terms of causal determinism, to views which see complex interacting processes manifested in dynamic and evolving systems. While classical theories were fixed and absolute, the new ones are probabilistic, conditioned by phenomenal circumstances, the observer's views, and uncertainty principles. These dynamic features are often referred to as emergence, where the diverse (or unpatterned, or even chaotic) properties rise to new levels of order in which one might observe patterns descriptive of some new systems. With these developments, the new task has become to find how such emerging properties can be represented. Scientists are rigorously seeking presentation methods, while artists, by the very nature of their work, respond less formally to the desires and milieux of their time and therefore to the presentation of new dimensions of man's aspirations, thus reflecting such properties as well [Minai, 1993]. This paper suggests that both these sets of characteristics, namely properties of nature and mind are ever changing properties ever emerging out of a sea of interconnection of cosmic unity. Every thing can only be defined based on certain circumstantial evidence surrounding it. The language known to us so far is order and diversity in pattern distribution of matter, energy, and information. To represent these emerging properties we adopt “autopoietic communication” as a model. We suppose this model is capable not only of describing the phenomenon of emergence, but also of bridging the gap between the two worlds of arts and sciences. It is a global model encompassing information and communication theory, semiotics, and autopoiesis. Autopoiesis, which describes not only biological and social systems, but also other evolving and self‐organizing systems. Adding the nonliving parameter to the concept of autopoietic systems may be conceived as changing the concept to a materialistic, reductionist (everything is physics) one. However, the opposite is also true. That is changing everything to some kind of spirituality. That is seeing the whole and its parts; humans, animals, plants and stones, in a melting pot, where diversity within unity, or identity and difference, rules.