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But your development is so vast that it seems more like Mike Pearson's 'language as evidence ' theme.
In Chinese medicine there are two things, A & B, which in some sense are opposites. They can merge, and they do, otherwise nothing interesting happens. When they merge the resulting effect can be A or B or C or gradations between A, C, and B.
If the A effect is equal and opposite to the B effect, then the pure balanced C results. This is the desired state of health of any individual or system or nation.
Now if A is 1/2 B to 1/4 B what emerges is D, which is on the B side of C, but not as strong an effect as pure B. Likewise if B is 1/2 to 1/4 A, then a weak A effect emerges.
However, and this is interesting, if A is 1/7th B, or there abouts, (1/7 is optimum), then the combination of B and A/7 is a much stronger B effect. The combination is much stronger than B alone. A little salt in your beer has that effect.
In fact, according to Chinese medicine, if you have a state of pure B, over a period of time it will produce a little A just to enhance the B effect.
Now Alan's theory also reminds me of Hegel's dialectic, which Marx then used to justify communism. In the dialectic theory, whenever there is a very strong A, the corruption of its power will produce an opposite B, just like Chinese medicine. Then in time, B will grow in strength until it becomes more or less equal to A and the two merge to produce C: A being the thesis, B being the anti-thesis and C being the synthesis. If C is strong, it will produce an opposite D, which then grows and eventually merges with C, to produce E. In Hegel's theory this process goes on forever.
With Marx when A, the aristocracy combines with B, the workers, then C is produced, a dictatorship. But Marx believed that C would just be temporary and that B would soon come into power. Here he went against Hegel theory which predicts that C, the dictatorship, will produce D, some opposition wanting to be free. But what actually happened is that whenever D came along, C just crushed horrifically, thereby making C all the stronger, according to Chinese medicine.
What happened in the end is that C was not fit to survive as well as other systems did. The same diatectic process at work in other places in the world produced, for example, C, a governing body, and D, a free capitalistic market, which in a balanced combination produced E, an economic country that was much stronger than C the dictatorship. What is missing in Hegel is provided by Darwin. Survival of the strongest of many systems.
But from the above story we can see that survival of the fittest is frought with perils. It can lead to dictatorship as well as democracy. It can be terminal if there is not a sufficient number of competing systems so that the Darwin effect can work. That is why God provided such diversity in nature. And that is why human affairs requires system diversity so that in the end the strongest system wins. But winning is bad for it eliminates diversity. It would appear that divesity must be maintained. Otherwise C could take over the world.
Complexity seems to maintain diversity. That can be seen in the microscopic world of physics. It took the combination of A, B & C to make a proton D or a neutron E. D had a strong effect but E was neutral. So that combination immediately produced an effect opposite to D, the electron F, which could either merge with D to produce E, or could just spin around D to produce G, the first atom of Hydrogen. Hydrogen was very big in the universe. And it was also very simple, like the dictatorship. There was no diversity.
So against all reasoning, God allowed more than one D to combine, even though they were the same effect. He finally built a tremendous diversity of numbers of Ds and even Es at one point, with equal numbers of Fs spinning about that point. God produced about 100 such systems, some being very useful, yea even the staple of life- but almost all such systems had some usefullness. In fact, I cannot think of a system that is useless.
All this generated a very complex world. Let's keep it that way. |
