Third Story

Description

Francis Heylighen:

"The Third Story is what I would call the contemporary scientific worldview. Not every scientist thinks in these terms as yet, but it draws on developments associated with thinkers such as Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers and Erich Jantsch. The universe is understood not as a fixed clockwork but as self-organizing: it spontaneously evolves from relatively simple elements toward increasingly complex forms of organization.

In broad outline, we begin with the Big Bang and the emergence of space and time, then particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, minds and societies. There is a history of increasing organization. Teilhard de Chardin described this trend with his “law of complexity-consciousness”: as evolution generates greater complexity, it also tends to generate greater consciousness or intelligence. I would not call this a deterministic law, but I do think it captures an important evolutionary tendency."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)

Characteristics

Francis Heylighen:

"We can now run through Apostel’s worldview components again. Ontologically, I describe the world in terms of relational agency: networks of agents interacting with one another. At different levels, those agents can be physical particles, living cells, organisms, persons or organizations.

The explanatory component is self-organization: to understand origins, we try to reconstruct how more complex networks arose from simpler ones. Futurology consists in extrapolating this process and considering plausible higher levels of complexity and consciousness, without assuming that any specific outcome is predetermined.

Axiology is grounded in notions such as fitness, synergy and intelligence: the configurations that persist and develop are those that fit their conditions and enter productive relations. Praxeology then suggests broad strategies such as reflecting, learning, solving problems and cooperating. Epistemology is intrinsically critical: nothing should be accepted merely on authority. Claims remain open to questioning, testing and improvement. The integration is provided by the image of a network of co-evolving agents.

Evolution, fitness and synergy

An important point is that evolution in this worldview is neither deterministic nor purely random. There is no fixed endpoint or pre-existing blueprint, and we cannot predict exactly what will happen. But not all outcomes are equally likely. Evolution has an inherent directionality in the sense that some arrangements are much more likely to persist than others.

The basic mechanism is Darwinian: blind variation followed by natural selection. “Blind” means that variations do not know in advance where they need to go. Selection then retains some variants more effectively than others. Over time this produces increasing fitness.

Fitness is often misunderstood as sheer power, dominance or ability to compete—the caricature of “nature red in tooth and claw”. But to be fit literally means to fit in. A system survives and grows when it is adapted to its environment: it can exploit useful resources, avoid dangers and maintain itself under the right conditions. And since much of an organism’s environment consists of other evolving systems, fitting in typically means establishing good relationships with others.

A good relationship minimizes destructive conflict and maximizes synergy. Synergy means that two or more systems do better together than they would separately. In game-theoretic terms it is a positive-sum or win-win interaction.

Examples occur at many levels. A free neutron is unstable, but a neutron bound together with a proton in an atomic nucleus is stabilized. Sodium and chlorine atoms are highly reactive, whereas the sodium chloride molecule forming table salt is stable. In biology, coral polyps and their symbiotic algae support one another. In human society, cooperation allows people to achieve outcomes that none could produce alone. Evolution repeatedly discovers such mutually supportive couplings.

From synergy to complexity and consciousness

The broader implication is that growing complexity can emerge when parts develop synergistic relations and form a higher-order system. That new system can in turn enter into synergistic relations with other systems. This generates a hierarchy of levels of complexity: particles, atoms, molecules, cells, multicellular organisms, societies, and so on. Complexification combines differentiation—the parts becoming more diverse or specialized—with integration—the specialized parts become more strongly coordinated into a whole.

The second major tendency is the growth of cognition or consciousness. From the level of even a very simple living cell, survival requires sensitivity to local conditions. An organism must receive information about its surroundings, accurately interpret that information, and select an appropriate action. The better it can make sense of its environment, the better its chances of survival. Evolution therefore tends to favor increasing capacities for cognition, awareness or intelligence.

A useful visualization, developed by the biologist Michael Levin, is the “cone of consciousness”. A system is aware of some range of conditions in space and time. It may have access to events close by or farther away, remember more or less of the past, and anticipate more or less of the future. A tick has a very narrow cone; a dog has a broader one; a human has a broader one still. In this sense, increasing consciousness means widening the spatial and temporal horizon within which a system can make sense and act.

...

Coupling between systems can extend this horizon further. By exchanging signals, components become informed about conditions they could not sense directly. In a brain, internal neurons can become responsive to stimuli received by distant sensory organs. In society, individuals can learn about events observed by others. Modern information and communication technologies have enormously enlarged this distributed or collective awareness.

At the largest present scale, this brings us to Teilhard’s concept of the noosphere: the realm of shared thought, information and consciousness generated by humanity as a whole, now strongly mediated by the Internet. Much of contemporary evolution is taking place at this level. Some of it is positive, some less so. The challenge is to help this emerging noosphere evolve in a direction that increases coherence, intelligence and synergy rather than fragmentation and conflict."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)

Discussion

Francis Heylighen:

"Why a ‘Third Story’?

If an integrated worldview is to spread beyond specialists, it should not exist only as an abstract theoretical framework. It should also be expressible as a relatively simple and intuitive narrative—a story. Human Energy was founded, in its own words, “to share a new scientific story as a source of meaning for future generations in a globalizing world”. This is the motivation for the term “Third Story”.

The label “Third” distinguishes it from two older worldview narratives. The First Story is the traditional religious worldview. In most religions, the world and humanity are described as having been created by one or more deities for some purpose. The story is conveyed through myths or scriptures, and it specifies values and rules of conduct. It can therefore provide understanding, meaning and moral orientation.

Its limitation is that many literal assumptions of traditional creation stories no longer fit modern scientific knowledge. The biblical narrative of creation in a seven days, for example, conflicts with cosmology and evolutionary biology, which see the universe emerging over billions of years. Traditional religious stories may also impose norms that modern societies no longer accept, such as the superiority of particular groups, such as men or true believers. Most importantly from an epistemological viewpoint, revealed knowledge is not supposed to be questioned. It therefore does not allow for any correction or systematic improvement.

The Second Story is the traditional scientific, or mechanistic, worldview. It sees the world as consisting of material objects moving through space and time according to fixed physical laws. It is often called Newtonian, although Newton himself held a more complex philosophy than the later mechanistic interpretation attributed to him. The central metaphor is the clockwork universe: if the state of the mechanism and the laws are known, the trajectories are fixed.

This worldview was enormously successful at producing precise explanations and predictions, but it has difficulty providing meaning or values. If the universe is just a deterministic mechanism, then humans appear like small wheels within the clockwork, being inexorably pushed along by external causes. Introducing randomness, as in quantum mechanics, does not solve the problem: randomness by itself supplies no direction or purpose. Steven Weinberg captured the problem in his famous quote that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.” Antonovsky’s ideal, by contrast, requires comprehensibility and meaningfulness at the same time."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)

Leo Apostel's Integrating Worldview

Leo Apostel, from the conclusion:

"Let me conclude by bringing the argument back to Apostel. The Techno-Social Dilemma describes a contemporary crisis of anxiety, depression, despair and loss of meaning. A way to respond is to strengthen people’s sense of coherence. That requires an integrated worldview.

Comprehensibility requires a model of what is happening, an explanation of where it comes from, some anticipation of possible futures, and methods for distinguishing reliable from unreliable knowledge. Manageability requires an understanding of what we can do. Meaningfulness requires values: a sense of what is worth doing and what we should strive for.

The Third Story that I have sketched can be compressed into a simple sequence. At the bottom there is variation and selection. Variation means that the future is not fixed; there is no predetermined plan specifying exactly what will happen. Selection means that evolution is not arbitrary either: some solutions work better than others. Through repeated variation and selection, systems self-organize, discover synergies and form higher levels of organization. This produces a long-term growth of complexity and of the capacity to make sense of the world—in other words, of consciousness or intelligence.

If we want to survive and flourish, we should work with rather than against these tendencies: become better adapted, build more synergistic forms of organization, learn more effectively, and expand our awareness of the conditions in which we act.

This goes beyond Apostel, but it also builds directly on the program he formulated. At the end of their book on worldviews, he and his co-authors listed a range of theories that might contribute to a new synthesis: systems theory, cybernetics, self-organization, cosmogenesis, the origin of life, psychology, psychiatry and related fields. Many of these elements now fit naturally into the story I have outlined. Thus, we at CLEA have made substantial progress toward the integration Apostel envisaged.

One of my aims for the coming years is to articulate this story more fully—in books, papers and videos, including through the collaboration with Human Energy. This brings us back to Apostel’s idea of deep dissemination. The goal is not only to construct a worldview that is convincing to philosophers or scientists. It should also be intelligible and useful to people—especially younger people—who feel overwhelmed, anxious or without direction. The hope is to offer a scientifically credible but also hopeful story: one that restores coherence and helps people find meaning in life."

(https://francisheylighen.substack.com/p/integrating-worldviews-a-tool-for?)

More information

Bibliography

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Antonovsky, A. (1998). The sense of coherence: An historical and future perspective. In Stress, coping, and health in families: Sense of coherence and resiliency (pp. 3–20). Sage Publications, Inc.

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Heylighen, F. (2023). Relational agency: A new ontology for co-evolving systems. In P. Corning, S. A. Kauffman, D. Noble, J. A. Shapiro, R. I. Vane-Wright, & A. Pross (Eds.), Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems (pp. 79–104). MIT Press.

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