The Riddle of a Human Being: A Human Singularity of Co-evolutionary Processes. In: Cosmos and History. 2008. Vol.4, N 1-2. P.244-259. (original) (raw)

Abstract: The theory of self-organization of complex systems studies laws of sustainable coevolutionary development of structures having different speeds of development as well as laws of assembling of a complex evolutionary whole from parts when some elements of “memory” (the biological memory, i.e. DNA, the memory of culture, i.e. the cultural and historical traditions, etc.) must be included. The theory reveals general rules of nonlinear synthesis of complex evolutionary structures. The most important and paradoxical consequences of the holistic view, including an approach to solving the riddle of human personality, are as follows: 1) the explanation why and under what conditions a part (a human) can be more complex than a whole (society); 2) in order to reconstruct society it is necessary to change an individual but not by cutting off the supposed undesirable past, since a human being as a microcosm is the synthesis of all previous stages of evolution, and as a result of repression of, it would seem, the wild past one can extinguish a “divine spark” in his soul; 3) in the physical sense, singularity denotes a moment of instability, phase transition; one can talk about the human singularity of co-evolutionary processes, since in such a moment of instability individual actions of a human can play a key role in determining a channel of further development as well as in appearance of a new pattern of collective behavior in society; 4) as the models of nonlinear dynamics, elaborated at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, show, there is a possibility of a direct influence of the future and even a touch of an infinitely remote future in certain evolutionary regimes and under rigorously definite conditions, more over, it turns out that such a possibility exists only for a human (admittedly, through a specific state of being inherent to him—the sleep without dreams) but not for the human society. Keywords: co-evolution, human being, nonlinearity, self-organization, tempo-worlds