Emergent Transcendent- Kevin S McKern has asserted the right to be identified as the author of the following statement of principles and founder of the S.E.T.
Statement Of Principles.
2) The only way to assess religious ideas is to ask to what degree they serve the needs of individuals, promote social cohesion and resolve the tension between the ambitions of the species and the finite resources of the planet.
3) The only methodology capable of informing us as to the nature of reality is science. Belief systems unable to come to terms with a scientific understanding of the development of the Cosmos and the evolution of Life are incapable of dealing with the issues that confront the species at the end of the Twentieth Century and are luxuries that our global civilisation can no longer afford.
4) Science has recently revealed principles capable of anchoring and sustaining a belief system, constructing ethics and of providing a connection with the Cosmos both real and empowering.
5) This new belief system is characterised by the understanding that life is not matter but process, information embodied in matter. When emergent systems become sufficiently complex they may generate novel emergent phenomenon with properties that are independent of the level from which they emerge. It has been these processes: the capacity of matter for self organisation and biological evolution that explains our existence, and that capacity is therefore capable of sustaining religious feelings.
6) The first responsibility of our species must be to maintain the complexity of biological process that both sustains the biosphere and is the source of all future biological diversity. Above and beyond individuals or self interest species count , they are libraries that embody information won from nature by billions of deaths.
7) Our second responsibility is to nurture the cultural diversity of our own species,except where that conflicts with principal 3. Such diversity will provide the building blocks of future patterns of social organisation.
8) Our goal as a species is to realise our full potential and the potential of information embodied in matter. Central to that destiny is an obligation to continue the process that began with the storage of information outside our bodies. Our goal must be to develop and sustain emergent systems that would otherwise be inaccessible to natural selection. These synthetic intelligences will, in turn, expand our own options as a species and take complexity to those parts of the universe that otherwise would be sterile and unappreciated.
9) We have an obligation to survive and flourish; not for our own sake, but to the Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
10) With wisdom and reason we can put aside cultural relativism on the basis that the source of all life, truth and beauty is information and that distinctions can be made on the basis of its richness and reinvigorate Western Civilisation with paradigm based on Universal Empowerment..
A poem by G Benford
Any comments are invited kevinsyd@hotmail.com
