Dear Learned Reader:

I invite you to an unusual experiment:

- blank out the science from your mind - the one which you 'unconditionally' learned during your school-days, the mental pre-destinations that follow from those studies and "open up" to a new, unbiased view of the world. Postpone speculation for later, after having read the considerations herein.

Take a good look at the world around - and inside - yourself. You are observing "things": constructs, functions, ideas, all of them "as they are", as they appear in your conscious view, without trying to understand as usual: by attaching connotations towards connotations, explanations based on explanations of explanations, deductions of deductions - which all pop up, all the way to the "axioms", at the bottom line of our mental capabilities in - the ongoing series of the reductionist edifice of a (scientific) worldview.

It is hard, but worthwhile, if we want to try to eliminate the barriers by the present views: all the paradoxical concepts, the ambiguous wording, even Einstein's limitation of common sense: as being subordinate to new findings in physics. We will detect the "skewed" way of science, which concentrates on the ingredients to find an explanation of the total, neglecting the buildup side, the 'given' and observed characteristics of the ensemble. Granted: science did not have the epistemic means to include this side, the 'tectology' of the world - so far. Now, however, the current scientific trends opened a crack through which the earlier 'unpredictable' may be studied - if we persevere. Probably we will need to devise a new logic, maybe review our mathematics - which is based on equations of proportional quantities, while buildup changes do not follow proportionality of the quantities involved. Maybe we will need a modified causality, - which may change the quality/ies as well in the processes, unheard of in our existing views in mathematical logic and conventional causality. Not that we want to persue something new, we lived with these same items ever, just disregarded them and deemed such changes as the 'givens' of nature, with the registration "how things are".

Let us take a look at our logical/scientific way of learning about the world.

WHATEVER we observe, material, function, ideation, phenomena present and past, consists of "ingredients", which we find in material constructs by physical dissection or chemical anaysis, in function by measurements and calculation, in ideation by psychological or theoretical analysis. Observed features are reduced to components, to ingredient matter, to component processes, to underlying idea/mental fundaments, all the way to the 'quark' (in any sense, using the physical term as a general noumenon). Or to the axiom, the "further not reducible given". This is the lowest level, where our present capabilities stop: such level was way up higher (i.e. less detailed) in earlier stages of the epistemic evolution. We constantly increase our observing skills, learn more and more (about less and less, as sarcasm has it). Reductionist science penetrates deeper and deeper into our observational inventory by our epistemic evolution.

Now take a look at "anything" we observed and have reduced to its ingredients. The characteristics of the 'observed' are lost when looking into their ingredients, be it matter, function, or ideation. Those ingredients do not add up by our scientific ways, by combining them together, into the originally observed item. The characteristics of the ensemble are different from the sum of the ingredients (in Aristotle's word: 'more'). In a trivial example: the characteristic of a group, a unit, is not a composition of the characteristics of the bunch of components it can be dissected or analyzed into. The 'change' from ingredients to ensemble is (mostly) out of quantitative proportionality and qualitative consequentiality as we use these concepts today, the assemblage forms in a "nonlinear" way. This can be said about EVERYTHING we observe in the world. Something 'new' and 'different' has emerged into the 'group' and we cannot follow "how". We can speculate in hindsight, in some cases we can force explanations, but as a general rule, without pre-conceiving the (emerging) group-characteristics, from the components we are not capable to derive the "emergent" of such assemblage. In current terms: such ensemble is called a complexity. There is more and more effort invested in theories about "such complexities" and the nonlinear way they behave (the new chaos).

Please consider two remarks:

1./ as we just saw, "the complexities" include our total world with all the observable features in it, it is not a select group. It is nature herself. We are living in a world of complexities, no matter which aspect of it we consider. Within the variety of nature it may mislead to select a certain field and work on its specially observed features without realizing that it is part of an interconnected whole, where every part is adapted to the rest of it. However, it may be useful to work on segments - because of the limitation of our capabilities - but we should always keep in mind that it IS a segment.

2./ Physical chaology expropriated the term "chaos" for certain processes in space-time dynamics, with mathematical/physical nonlinearity - as observed. This is why I refrain from using "chaos" (anyway: it is an undefined concept, meaning: nature's way, currently beyond our causal/quantitative logic, it is really a composite-term of maybe many different items not yet discovered in our ongoing scientific endeavors) - but more importantly: we should extend the meaning of "nonlinear" from the mathematical chapter of 'equations of other than straight lines' into a more comprehensive content. As we touched it above, the "nonlinear" in this new worldview includes the quantitative aspect of "not-proportional" and the qualitative aspect of the "inconsequential" ocurrences. Eo ipso: proportional quantitative content and consequent qualitative changes are deemable "linear", a statement which will bear further use and consequences in this train of thoughts.

Let us continue with the thought of

"c o m p l e x i t i e s , i. e.: -a n y- -t a r g e t- -o f - -o b s e r v a t i o n"

in this world. The assemblages of 'components'. What does that say about the components - when we just observe THEM? they are just as complexities as the original target was: analyzable into THEIR components with THEIR special group-characteristic, which identifies THEIR observable qualia. And so on, all the way to the above noumenon: a hypothetical quark (and beyond).

What happens if we consider our 'original' observational target (complexity) as a 'component'? we will find its peers (identical or different), with which it assembles into complexities of a "higher" level in the hierarchy of complexities. In this aspect I would not say: 'higher complexity' since the hierarchy is unlimited up and down, only our observational capabilities are limited, which does not limit nature at all, no matter where we stop and how we proportionate. We may use the word 'higher' or 'lower' in the sense: who is participating in who's ensemble, in the "nested" hierarchy. We cannot help using our anthropocentric views.

The 'other' direction, the buildup is the domain of the tectology, the assemblage into the complexities, i.e. the composed units from their components - plus the emergence of the group-qualia. As was said, neither does quantitative logic, nor qualitative causality predict such emergent group qualia, by using the (known) characteristics of the component-complexities (and the known functional knowledge of the 'assembling') into the emergent, the group characteristic of the assembled unit. Explanations may be drawn upon the prior knowledge of those group-qualia as reflected back on the components. Call it: hindsight-prediction, or rather: postdiction. These qualia disappear when components are dissected from the 'total', nonlinearly, more so than a fuzzy gradual disappearance by a gradual extraction of components. The emergence (or its disappearance) is not an add-on process: it comes with the unit, the total, called "self organization", a name which will change if we learn more about its nature. In the meantime we observe an increase in complexity by the still undiscovered rules of nature's buildup side, the tectology, the complementary view to reductionist - analytical science. We can observe it in the evolution, of both animate and inanimate features.

C o n c l u s i o n

Let us return to my initial plea to the reader to blank out for this reading the textbook knowledge of the "science", based on the (insufficient) information of the past centuries using reductionist - mathematical logic. The reason: it is a challenge to establish the new understanding of the world, the complement to the reductionist-analytical side of physical sciences and their philosophy (which was extremely efficient in building our incredible technology) into developing the tectological domain, the understanding of the buildup-side in nature. We need new ideas, new ways of thinking, "old habits are hard to break".

• A. For the mathematically minded: start thinking of a new type "mathematics" of the unproportional quantities and their non-equilibria.
• B. For the philosophically minded: start thinking about a world order with a 'new' causality, in which quality can change from cause to effect.
• C. For the multidisciplinary thinkers with a free mind: try to synthesize the postulates A. and B. into a tectology, nature's rules of the buildup-side of nested hierarchies of complexities, the occurrences, which we like to call now "chaotic emergence".

Madison NJ 5/14/99

Comments please e-mail to: jamikes@prodigy.net