A boundary creates an inside.
But an inside is not yet a world.
For that, something else has to happen.
The relations within the boundary must begin to acquire a certain independence from what lies outside. Not independence in the sense of isolation, but the capacity to maintain a pattern of organisation while continually exchanging with the surrounding world.
A cell does this.
It takes in matter and energy, transforms them, and expels what it does not retain. Its contents are continually changing, yet the organisation persists.
The cell is therefore not simply in its environment.
It maintains a world within the environment.
This does not mean that the cell has a miniature representation of the universe inside itself. Its world is not an internal picture.
It is an organisation of differences and possibilities.
Inside the cell, some chemical reactions can occur that would not occur in the same way outside it. Concentrations can be maintained. Gradients can be established. Molecules can encounter one another under conditions created by the organisation itself.
The boundary has therefore done more than separate.
It has created a local order of relations.
And this local order changes what external differences can mean.
A molecule outside the cell may be chemically identical to a molecule inside it. Yet its consequences can be completely different.
Inside, it may participate in a metabolic pathway.
Outside, it may do nothing relevant to the system.
The difference is not in the molecule alone.
It lies in the relation between the molecule and the organisation that encounters it.
This is a crucial step toward significance.
The world now contains something like context.
A difference has different consequences depending upon where and within what organisation it occurs.
Context is therefore not something added later by a mind.
It can be built into the organisation of matter itself.
A membrane establishes one context.
A metabolic network establishes another.
A multicellular organism establishes another.
At each level, relations are organised so that events acquire consequences within a larger pattern.
This also means that an organism can contain smaller worlds within itself.
A cell contains metabolic networks.
A multicellular organism contains cells.
A forest contains organisms.
A social system contains organisms and their interactions.
Each level creates a relatively coherent field of relations without becoming completely detached from the levels around it.
The world is therefore not simply a flat collection of things.
It is nested.
Worlds can exist within worlds because relations can be organised at different scales.
And when a new level of organisation appears, new differences can become significant.
A molecule can become significant to a cell.
A cell can become significant to an organism.
An organism can become significant to a colony.
A colony can become significant to an ecosystem.
The physical difference may be the same; what changes is the organisation in which that difference participates.
This gives us another way of understanding emergence.
A higher level does not necessarily require new fundamental ingredients.
It can arise when existing ingredients enter into a new organisation of relations.
The novelty lies in what differences can now make a difference.
That phrase is beginning to acquire considerable weight.
A world inside a world is not merely a smaller world.
It is a new regime of consequence.
And once such regimes become nested, the same event can matter differently at different levels.
A change in temperature can alter a molecule.
That molecular change can alter a cell.
The cellular change can alter an organism.
The organism can alter its population.
The population can alter its ecosystem.
There is no single level at which significance resides.
Significance is generated through relations among levels of organisation.
This may also explain why individuality is never quite as simple as it appears.
The cell is an individual relative to its surroundings.
But it may be part of a larger individual.
The organism is an individual relative to its environment.
But it may participate in a social organisation that has properties of its own.
A world can therefore be inside another world without ceasing to be a world.
And perhaps that is one of the deepest features of organised existence.
The emergence of a boundary does not produce a closed object.
It produces a new centre of relations.
Inside that centre, differences acquire consequences of their own.
Outside it, those same differences may have quite different consequences.
The universe has begun to contain not merely things, but contexts in which things can matter differently.
And that brings us to the next step.
For once a system has a world of its own—a structured field in which some differences have consequences—we can finally ask the question that has been waiting in the background:
When does a difference begin to matter to the world that contains it?
No comments:
Post a Comment