Saturday, November 21, 2009

(1) Consciousness & Complexity

Chapter Five. Consciousness & Complexity

Though I was initially disappointed when I found out that
Teilhard engaged in religious speculation after he had a
special experience, I still was very much attached to his
earlier sense of Cosmogenesis. After awhile I once again
approached his idea about what he coined as the
"Cosmic Law of Complexity Consciousness."

Teilhard explains it thus: "if the universe regarded siderealy,
is in process of spatial expansion (from the infinitesimal to
the immense), in the same way and still more clearly it
presents itself to us, physico-chemically, as in process of
organic involution upon itself (from the extremely simple to
the extremely complex...and, moreover, this particular
involution of complexity is experimentally bound up with a
correlative increase in interiorization, that is to say in the
psyche or consciousness."

Whew! Teilhard's prose is heavy! Just for my own sake I
had to break down his Cosmic Law into more understandable
language. As I dipped more into Teilhard, studying what he
believed about Consciousness evolving, becoming more
complex, I stumbled across more specifically his ideas about
what he called the "Biosphere" and the "Noosphere." They
are the steps towards Complexity.