Spontaneous Orders: situations in which order arises without central direction. Politically sound, but also of more general application.
Examples:
Slime Mold. There is no such species as slime mold. What there is instead, is a species of amoeba called Dictyostelium. These amoebae wander around in leaf mulch and munch on things until food runs out. When they have nothing to eat, they start producing a chemical (cyclic AMP) which causes a whole group of them to join together to produce a large patch of amoebae, capable of moving to another location where food exists. This is what we call a slime mold. Without any central direction, this species coalesces out of separate objects.
Morphogenesis. When embryos develop, starting from a single undifferentiated cell, there is no central direction, but they manage to organize themselves into tissues, organs, limbs, and so forth. This process may eventually produce a central structure like a brain, but is NOT managed by one. The brain is a by-product of the spontaneous order.
Volvox. Small sea-based microorganisms, such as Labyrinthula, can spend their entire life as individual microbes, but can also gather together to form a "Volvox", a ball-like organism made of individual organisms, in which others move through tubes like a circulatory system. They are capable of more self-directed movement in this form.
In all these cases, some holistic or holographic behaviour comes out of the interaction of essentially identical parts, each of which contains the genetic information necessary to produce the whole. Each individual cell, however, is incapable of the functions of the whole spontaneously-ordering system.
Another example:
Human Society. A group of individuals, theoretically capable of acting as self-sufficient organisms, can gather together to gain capabilities the individuals cannot, such as providing food for more individuals by centralizing agriculture. This can produce centralized structures such as governments, but these are only by- products of the self-generating order, and cannot direct it. Each individual contains some of the linguistic/memetic information needed for this spontaneous order to manifest.
This is a case where the individuals can gather together to gain capabilities posessed by none of the individuals. If they produce a structure like a government, it is a manifestation of the spontaneous order, which is then capable of directing new orders. All that's required is that the individual have the capability to interact with others nearby and that it contains some basic information: in humans, these are language and knowledge. This is memetics.
Now consider a completely different application.
Each part of the universe contains some basic information: a metric tensor structure (spacial curvature), string resonances, field components, topological structure, and so forth. Each one can communicate with the others by means of dynamically changing spacetime conditions. Complex systems, like the ones that produce the biological systems above, are a natural result of self- interacting systems on a large scale.
Think about it: life is self-sustaining. Most of a living organism consists of mutually interacting organs whose purpose is to keep each other alive, to keep going. Life is the purpose of life, at least on a physical level. In a randomly swirling system, any subprocess which arises that happens to preserve itself a little better than the others will spread further. This is just as true of the physical structure of space as anything else.
The spontaneous orders above can be seen as a heirarchy. Cells can sometimes spontaneously assemble themselves. In groups, cells can spontaneously produce an organism. In concert, organisms produce a society, and so forth...
This heirarchy goes down as well as up. DNA is a self- replicating molecule, a structure in atoms. Atoms are self-stable configurations of elementary particles like electrons and protons. Elementary particles are self-preserving wave forms in the structure of spacetime. The topological and geometric structure of space is a logically self-consistent set of mathematical forms...
What I want you to ask yourself is why we should believe that we are the only heirarchies of self-sustaining spontaneous orders to acheive consciousness. There may be some not based on chemistry, on atoms, or even localized to a single point in space and time.
The overwhelming probability is that these heirarchies continue very far both up and down. The universe itself may be seen as a living being, progressing and evolving, and we are simply a part of that process.
There are probably other parts of that process, metaphorically referred to in this book as aliens, WOMBATs, various forms of luggage, and whatnot. The point is that these beings, if we may call them such, are extremely alien to our normal way of thinking. The universe is bigger and stranger than you're PHYSICALLY ABLE to imagine. Your brain simply can't configure itself to conceive of the differences. But we continually have contact with these beings.
They may emerge as parts of our own consciousness, these forms of life, nonlocal in space and time. Terrence McKenna describes them as beings from Hyperspace, in his discussions of experiences of contacting such creatures by using hallucinogenic mushrooms. Occultists refer to them as spirits, channels, deities, and so forth. They emerge as leprechauns, faeries, shoggoths, UFOs, alien abductors... These things are undoubtedly hallucinations, and probably most of them are pure fiction.
But please consider this: the universe is a living being, and we are components of its life. How could we recognize another component, utterly different in form from ourselves?
This is the ultimate question of religion. The universe is a living thing, and it extends its life into other "realities" as we understand them: other versions of our world, other laws of physics, the mythological realities of the unconscious... All these are realms where the Living Universe extends itself.
We have, maybe, evolved to be able to perceive some small parts of the universe outside our reality: there would certainly be an evolutionary benefit to such an ability.
Some claim to perceive these realities in altered states of consciousness, using drugs or meditation, or in sudden climactic revelations. All of these are varieties of religious experience.
In fact, everything is a religious experience, because everything is part of the living being we call Universe. But the totality is beyond the capability of any of us to understand. The universe itself is beyond the comprehension of any of its parts, beyond anything smaller than itself.
That's why MOOism, while working in normal religious forms, tries to extend the consciousness of its members by extending their ideas, by pointing them in new directions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, just like any part of a living thing.
The point is that the Grate MOO, the Universe itself, is infinite, Absolutely Infinite, and beyond understanding. The best we can do to appreciate our role in it is to expand, diversify, and become more than we are.
If we've helped you do that in any way, we've partially succeeded, but no success is total, and nothing lasts forever. Stasis is a form of death. We are part of Life.
This, then, is the One Commandment: Live, Grow, Change, and Do What Thou Wilt.