Can you comment on the claim that in complex and open systems, self-organization gives rise to life, consciousness, and mind, and leads to the irreversible collapse of old structures and the emergence of new ones?
This is a profound issue. Please consider (kind of the opposite) direction: Self-organization is inherent to consciousness, mind, and life (the inherent 'infinite self-referral dynamics' of nature). Manifestation into phenomenal 'emergence' of finite nature expresses the principle of 'self-organization' from infinity to finite, whole to parts, ultimate unity to diversity. Then from the viewpoint of diversity, complexity increases -- at each stage involving creative, maintenance, and destruction of old to new structures. This is the natural principle of emergence from 1 to 3 to the vast diversity of phenomenal nature, and then re-unification from diversity to 1. One helpful explanation is the recent (full-text, open-access) paper on ResearchGate.net: The Scientific Method: Its Successes, Limitations, and How to Progress Deeper. Thanks for considering it. Bob (RW Boyer)
I think this is a profoundly important question—philosophical and scientific at the same time. Let me illustrate with a personal example. Just two weeks ago, I went live with an experiment where I connected a friend’s brain to a computer software I developed. The results were truly extraordinary.
Unlike invasive technologies such as Neuralink, my experiment required no chips or brain surgeries; it relied purely on quantum quantities—the foundational informational units emitted by the brain. The first thing my friend ever communicated, after years of complete silence, was: “I am here.”
Those three words carried an immense weight. She had been unable to speak for many years and suffered social ostracization because of her condition. Now, using this software, she can communicate with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
What this experiment demonstrates is that quantum quantities naturally collapse into larger structures, and these larger structures, in turn, collapse into smaller ones—a continuous, dynamic process. Reality, therefore, is undeniably complex, but it is never truly “open.” The concept of openness, as often used, is a self-contradictory statement, a cognitive bias rooted in our intellectual ignorance of how systems truly function.
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