Immortality
Out of context: Reply #45
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- neue75_bold0
the universe evolves along one scale or Prigoginic level until it reaches its "event horizon" within that level. Then the system moves toward a catastrophe or statistical bifurcation familiar to chaoticians, often accreted around a single node or "catalyst" (which readers of the Gleick brand of chaos will recognize as a "strange attractor"). At crisis, the system prepares itself to take "the Prigoginic leap" into a new order of being, one discontinuous—and in some senses incommunicado—with the previous one. Every level of complexity floats freely from the last...
So though the four levels of Prigoginic Complexity are after all not so strange as a picture of evolution, the process by which they arise is decidedly "chaotic."
The raw, unstable, elemental, chaotic stuff that preceded space-time is the first level of Prioginic Complexity.
Out of a crisis in this pre-universe came space and time as we know them, as well as things, accretions of matter and energy, the planets, galaxies, elements, etc.: "Space-time, the Second Level of Complexity, expressed its noumenon in the whine of stars, the rumble of planets, the transcendent crackle and gush of the uncoiling sun"
Under certain conditions of far-from-equilibrium, wildly fluctuating elemental systems bring forth arrangements of matter, energy, and information that regenerate spontaneously, reproduce, transmit information from one generation to the next, process: elementary fungi, lichens...life, the Third Level.
The Third Level shudders to give birth to intelligent beings, the Fourth Level.
The Fourth Level yearns to force-evolve itself into the crisis that will bring on its ascendency to the Fifth Level, the Posthuman. Sterling's hero in "Cicada Queen" can trace the shape of the posthuman in the hyper-evolved nature of the "Lobsters," humans who have almost completely gone over to the other side and shucked their humanity like a caul, combining some Shaper technologies with those of the Mechanists to encase themselves in complete cyberneticized shells after undergoing biological transformations...