Re: World Systems, the Eonic Effect, and "Attractors"

John Landon Writes:

If you look at the cover of World History and the Eonic Effect, you will see a nice fractal (look at the Amazon blowup), it's the Mandelbrot in Sea Horse Valley.  The question of complex systems was intensively studied prior to constructing the eonic model (ca. 1995), without any hard conclusions one way or the other.  The eonic model uses a conceptual map approach to describe 'what a system does'. And what it does certainly impinges on issues of complex systems, but not anything we have yet heard of.   The reason is that complex systems are all extensions, at best, of simple dynamics of point particles or masses. What the eonic model shows is the relationship of open ended free activity to its own large scale patterning, which is paradoxical.

What is it that we are describing? We see a distribution, for example, of creative individuals appearing in clusters and these clusters, most amazingly, show structure over many millennia. Anyone who can model that deserves five Nobel prizes.   The core issue then is the transformation of 'creativity' in individuals over a long range of historical evolution.

Current dynamics and evolutionary theory isn't even in the right ball park. Nonetheless the whole thing has a 'causal formalism' that puts it in the family of dynamics. We can stylize that dynamics from its resemblance to a computer algorithm, by isolating some of its elements:  1. the computer clock and its cycles  2. the relation of the system and individual, as in a computer program and the user with input.  The problem is that such systems are not self-contained. They are not fixed at their boundary conditions. Their net information content at the end of each cycle has increased, where did that come from?   The question of attractors is very 'attractive'.  I have often thought, but never made specific due to its lack of rigor, that the only thing that can explain so many different individuals operating in concert though separated was some unknown higher generalization of an 'attractor'. How to proceed with that is not clear. In general, the basic idea of an algorithm, i.e. a series of cycles in each part of the system's manifestation is one starting point.  Those who promote genetic algorithms often seem unaware of the way they contradict ordinary dynamics. But the eonic effect (and this is not an explanation) technically mimics that kind of programmatic structure.

Luke Rondinaro Responds:

This is very interesting … A bunch of good points here.  Let me add a few other ideas to the mix.  First of all, even if the book cover didn’t have the fractal, the material itself in the book would still have clearly conveyed the notion of a complex systems dynamic.  The terminology – but even more the pattern itself of what we see in the longer term of world history – is most certainly saturated with the quality of complexity/chaos.  I expect that even had you not done this research into complex systems studies and undertaken your own study/discussion/model from a very different theoretical vantage point, this aforementioned animus in the Eonic Effect still would have shone through in the text.  In any event, I agree with you:  there’s clearly a complex systems’ dynamic at work here in the Eonic pattern of world history; we’re just not sure what it is exactly (because it seems very different from the kind of patterning we’ve come to expect, even with respect to CDS). 

What it isn’t:  The Eonic Effect is probably not an environmental condition of physical entities systemically related in larger wholes.  Why it’s not has to do with the fact that it seems to defy the physical parameters we see in the normal run of our material existence and even our scientific understanding.  This material we’re looking at, the process, the conditions goes way beyond Newtonian mechanics (and yet even beyond its direct descendents in the modern sciences).  [From what I’ve noticed with long cycles for instance, and this may be only my own skewed vision of such] we can (for example) see a dynamic related more to physical conditions of material entities and their environmental contexts within human history as people socioeconomically interact with each other (via trade & communications exchanges of world-systems; we see something far stranger with your Eonic Effect – something far more akin, it seems to me, to the notion of “quantum chaos” as Eduard Prugovecki mentioned it back a few months ago on this list (http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/wsn/2002/msg00871.html )..

At the same time.  I don’t think it’s “memetic resonance.”  This [the Eonic Effect] is something that goes way beyond the patterning of memes and replicative structures of ideas/communicative instrumentalities in the human world.  Although we see it at work in the more recent 5,000 years of world history, the high likelihood is that it reaches much farther back, not only into the dawn of our species, but further to the Big Bang and the dawn of our universe.  If that’s the case, then, for the Eonic Effect to be memial,  memes themselves would have to be something different than just intellectual engines of communicative exchange in the human order; they would need to, in fact, transcend even the operations of organic life.  They’d have to proceed from physical entities themselves, gaining their replicative properties from some sort of material-energetic process on either the molecular or atomic/subatomic level.  And, as far as I know, physical systems in their normal operations (as we know & experience them) don’t behave that way or manifest such tendencies; they may in fact exhibit properties of chaos and complexity, but I haven’t (from anything I’ve seen) ever come across them giving rise to memetic relational structures [as is the case regarding human life and the intellectual/communicative exchange that is a part of such].  For just these reasons, memes cannot be the source principle for the Eonic Effect.

Memes may themselves, however, be a function of that same Eonic Effect in history [at least insofar as they form an interzone between an overall teleogic process in human affairs and its interactive relations with the human psyche on a social & historical basis (ala psychohistory)].

The clock metaphor is apt; yet with history and the Eonic pattern, this clock is no mere taker of the time.  It would also act like a system regulator.  This core dynamic we see in the Eonic Model works not only to establish the temporal parameters of the matrix of time (by which systems act, act upon and through); it also would function – by way of its “time” component – as a means through which a system (+ its subsets, and elements) is directed along a natural course (its ‘life cycle’ if you will) from its beginnings to its termination/ transformation into a new system.  Thus the “time” component would not operate just as a static substrate for entities merely to act in, but as an active factor by which systems might evolve and move through directed change.  If “time” behaves this way – and I seem to recall reading somewhere that it distinctly might acc. to the empirical research & projection models of modern physics – then this would go a long way toward explaining many of the dynamics we notice in world history, evolution, and the pattern of the Eonic Effect.

The notion of attractors is, indeed, quite fascinating.  And, as you’ve seen in Paul Ziolo’s paper, it’s very fitting for use in discussions of historical change (“Chreodics”, “Thom-Pomian Historical Chreod”, etc.)  The problem is:  this set of concepts is best suited (soley)(it seems to me) for more specified levels and scopes of historical study [and at best it still must work metaphorically and analogically w/ even the concrete particulars of human experience over time] .  Anything larger on the level of “Big History” or the “Eonic Effect” may extend temporally and substantively, in terms of the scope of a historical investigation, beyond its reach.  But we clearly see in macro-historic change, the outlines of a larger concept of attractors and CDS.  So what then? … It’s very possible we have our fingers on a new, higher level of dynamic behavior in nature; a group of dynamic principles that go a step above what the research has uncovered for us up to this point.  If you’re willing, I’d like to hear some more about your notion of a “higher generalization of an attractor” (even if all you can do with it is to draw out the vague outlines of such an idea). 

Looking forward to your insights.  Best!

Luke Rondinaro

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