Life Made Me Up

Michael McMaster
Aug 23, 2017 · 5 min read

Life made me up. I didn’t make me up, life did that. Life made us all up. Life also made up language and social organization. After that, we made up the specifics. We are still doing that. I fervently hope we improve at it.

In the spirit of life made me up, here is my “Ode to Life”.

I can only write this like someone who got on a plane by accident and arrived at a totally surprising place — and continued the journey from there. All the while, the life that was me was just along for the ride.

I call it “a privileged life” because I didn’t really create it, I was just lucky — or blessed. I was born into it. This isn’t to say my parents were wealthy or my family relations were wonderful, or that I didn’t expend any effort of my own. The only extraordinary things I can say about my beginnings is I fought against the domination of my father long before I could have rebelled on purpose. This too was just a lucky accident — for me, not so much for him. The other is that my mother loved me completely in an appreciative (and developmental) way.

However, the way my life has played out so far has been a fortunate privilege. I blame nobody but myself for all that has not gone well and for any harm that I have done. I credit many people, including the father that I fought with until his death, for pretty much all that has gone well and for the contributions that I’ve made.

My overwhelming feeling is gratitude that life took me for this ride. May it continue to produce more good and do little harm.

Namaste

Chapter 1: In the beginning, there was life. Not the beginning of everything. Not the beginning of science. But for us, there was life.

Our beginning was the beginning of meaning. Science can go farther back after life has become sufficiently evolved. Time can go farther back, but only after life started the clock. Time had no meaning and no existence before life developed sufficiently to give it meaning.

With life, the possibility of meaning came into existence. With life, choice came into existence. With choice, life’s emergence gained an accelerator.

With the emergence of complex adaptive systems (CAS), life gained its next major accelerator.

The most recent accelerator of life’s emergence was intelligence, the combination of language and social phenomena. From which emerged intelligent complex adaptive systems (iCAS).

The products, the emergents, of iCAS — so far, at least — have not produced the next level. They will produce the benefits, and the dangers, of iCAS as a stage of development. The “laws” of iCAS are significantly extended over other CASs. Before iCAS, the “laws of emergence” are programmed in.

Every event of emergence brings with it the possibility of increased good. Every event of emergence brings with it the possibility of destruction.

Some can increase the overall good. But, every destruction increases the possibility of greater destruction. Every accretion increases the possibility of a better future. This is the struggle of good and evil.

Chapter 2: Integrity begins, probably, before language. Without language, however, it is crude and has only blunt force as a “teaching tool”. We can feel or sense integrity without language. Be it remains mainly personal.

With language, integrity becomes social. We share it in stories. We make meaning of it. “Walking the talk” expresses the combination required for integrity.

Eventually, we build society with it. Integrity is sacred. It is what connects us socially. It is what we build society from. It is what allows us to deal with others through distance and time.

With life, emergent evolution began.

Before life there may have been emergence, but without evolution. There was simply non-linear and linear change. Before the emergence of intelligence there was only change.

Emergent evolution was possible only after intelligence emerged. And then we could look back past the emergence of intelligence and see emergence in all living things — including ecologies which provide the conditions for emergence. Only then could emergent evolution have meaning.

Since then, we’ve seen emergent evolution back to the emergence of life. Will it go farther back? We shall see.

Chapter 3: Consider integrity separate from human beings with values and moral judgement. It just exists.

The integrity of a bridge or a building refers to the fit and fitness of all the parts to produce a desired result. It refers to the specific connections between all those parts. All of the “fitnesses” produce the quality of the end product. This fitness includes the qualities of all material and the specific quality (i.e. fitness) of the materials and the workmanship. It includes the quality of design.

We might even use the term to refer to the integrity of a mountain. Insufficient quality and we better think twice about living at the foot of the mountain.

Integrity, in this sense, was there, just there before humans came along. Except for that one little bit about producing a desired end product.

At some point, as intelligence emerged, integrity in the above sense could be seen from the smallest, earliest part to the greatest most recent state of the universe.

Integrity refers to being integrated or to an assessment of fitness. There have been and continue to be countless instances of emergence which result in countless emergents. In point of fact, every emergence is a co-emergent. Hence the integrity of the universe. It is all connected.

The condition for the survival of each emergent is that it increases complexity and integrates into the largest of ecologies that it occurs in. Such integration requires that each emergent provide a benefit, a contribution to the ecology. Each instance of emergence adds a new level of complexity. Fortunately, or minds and beings were co-emergent as well as so we are able to function not matter what occurs — although some times it doesn’t seem like it. The greatest threat to the power of positive emergence is the existence of entities that are beyond human scale. The most dangerous of these are large government organizations that pretend to be democratic in arenas too large, of too big a scale, to be amenable to those processes.

I believe that the greatest intelligence that exists on the planet today is found in those enterprises, those organizations, which are focussed on producing goods and services that contribute to society. In the same way that a team is more intelligent than any individual in that team, “for-purpose” organizations are more intelligent by far than any individual.

My life is devoted to the exploration and development of such entities. Many are based on “power laws” rather than the laws of iCAS and these reduce the intelligence of the planet. Many are based on laws of human scale and are increasing the intelligence of the planet.

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Michael McMaster

Written by

Design4OrganizationIntelligence, complexity, CPA,transformation@Monsanto,BP,Unilever,https://WWW.transformativeorg.com michael@disruptiveconsulting.ca

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