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The universe evolves like a life form - C C - May 14, 2026
https://iai.tv/articles/the-universe-evolves-like-a-life-form-auid-3571?_auid=2020
INTRO: We tend to think of reality as made up of things, governed by fixed laws that determine how they change over time. But biochemist Timothy Jackson argues that this is back to front: fundamental reality is a lawless flux, a chaos of unpredictable change, and what needs explaining is not chaos but the stability and order that emerge from it. The “laws” of physics are not eternal truths but descriptions of patterns that have persisted long enough to look permanent. Darwin’s central insight, Jackson suggests, was to show how such order might emerge, via natural selection—a principle which can explain, but never predict, the patterns that make up the world... (MORE - details)
RE: The universe evolves like a life form - Magical Realist - May 14, 2026
Quote:The evolutionary thinker rejects this assumption via recourse to the empirical domain of biology, in which intelligibility apparently emerges from unintelligibility all the time. That this emergence of the definite from the indefinite is “real” and not merely a matter of “appearances,” turns out to be the unexpectedly (and unintentionally) generic kernel of Darwin’s thought. Numerous thinkers, from logician-metaphysicians like Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead, to epistemologists like Karl Popper (who considered Darwin’s intervention the invention of “situational logic”), have explored the consequences of this insight in metaphysics, epistemology, and elsewhere. Old habits die hard, however; the ancient invariants that constrain our thought, even when their obvious historical contingency is acknowledged, continue to make the idea of an evolutionary metaphysics derived from a generalization of biological principles a tough pill to swallow.
Whitehead is a good place to start with this paradigm shift from the mechanical to the organic. He was way before his time, anticipating many of the implications of quantum physics and cognitive science long before they were a thing. One quote I cherish though cannot find anywhere in Whitehead's writings is: "Life is a property of empty space." There is so much profundity crammed into that simple proposition that it's like dynamite to our inert matter-obsessed traditions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSyu-IOXBL4
Synchronistically I just came across this Substack post:
"An Old Solution to a New Enigma
The hard problem of consciousness can be stated with deceptive simplicity: how did the survival pressures of several hundred thousand years on the African savannah give rise to a being capable of mathematics and mercy, of symphonies and sacrifice, of metaphysics itself? How did a nervous system shaped beneath drought, predation, hunger and mating become a creature haunted by eternity?
It is a question upon which modern thought still breaks like surf against black rock. Much has been measured; little has been explained. Yet in the 1920s, long before contemporary neuroscience transformed consciousness into a cartography of neural firings, Alfred North Whitehead recognized the rudiments of the enigma and attempted something far more ambitious than a neurological inventory. He attempted a metaphysics adequate to Darwin, to Einstein, to becoming itself.
Recognizing that much of the older metaphysical architecture had cracked beneath the discoveries of Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein, Whitehead undertook not the repair of the old cathedral, but the pouring of a new foundation beneath the earth itself. Substance gives way to process; stasis yields to becoming. The universe ceases to resemble a warehouse of inert objects and begins instead to resemble a river whose whirlpools briefly mistake themselves for stones.
For Whitehead, the modern sciences are not false but partial. Physics, chemistry, biology… these become disciplined abstractions drawn from a reality fuller than their instruments can disclose. The mistake of modernity was not science itself, but the temptation to confuse the map with the terrain, the skeleton with the living body. Reality, in his rendering, is composed not of dead particles colliding in vacancy, but of events, prehensions, inheritances of feeling: each actual occasion receiving the world, transforming it, transmitting it onward. Even matter begins to lose its granite immobility. The cosmos breathes.
And so Process and Reality unfolds not merely as a philosophical treatise, but as an attempt at cosmogenesis. Whitehead begins with the intellectual machinery required to think process at all; from there he descends into the extensive continuum, into feeling, into symbolic reference, into the strange traffic between permanence and flux from which the sciences abstract their laws. Finally, beyond the mechanistic heavens of modernity, there emerges his reimagined God: not the unmoved mover of classical metaphysics, nor merely the watchmaker exiled after creation, but a lure toward order and novelty within becoming itself — a deity who does not annihilate process, but suffers and persuades within it.
There are moments when the entire edifice appears almost unbearable in its difficulty, as though one were attempting to read geology during an earthquake. Yet Whitehead’s central contention remains deeply persuasive: metaphysics cannot be escaped because every account of reality already contains one implicitly. Even the scientist who claims to reject metaphysics smuggles it in through the laboratory door. We shape our metaphysics; afterward, our metaphysics shape what we are able to see. And, if there is a pan-universal mathematics and a pan-universal system of logic, why can there not be a metaphysical science?
At times, reading Whitehead may even awaken a longing for the older consolations of India: the dream that multiplicity itself is illusion, that all flux and fragmentation are merely the shimmering surface of a deeper unity. Simpler, perhaps, that vision would be. Simpler than this universe of incessant perishing and renewal, where permanence survives only as pattern, where identity is less marble than flame.
And yet, whatever one ultimately concludes regarding Whitehead’s system, Process and Reality stands as one of the great acts of philosophical defiance in modern thought. After Immanuel Kant, metaphysics was often treated as a corpse awaiting burial. Whitehead answered by making the grave itself begin to move.
As Étienne Gilson once observed, metaphysics always buries its undertakers. Whitehead, however, did something rarer: he taught the corpse to breathe again."---- https://substack.com/@arancanes/note/c-255959719