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Below is an initial editor's comment on Paul's essay, "From Complexity to Emergence and Beyond," the first of seven published by Bryn Mawr's Emergence Working Group in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of the journal, Soundings.

"The author has described the evolution of a bipartite brain with capacities for both emergence and rules-and- properties thinking .. and asserted that we needn't choose between these perspectives. ... He next claims that we should evaluate both approaches to inquiry according to their usefulness and generativity. This claim, then, sets up the following section, where the author argues that in the interests of innovation and productivity we need to become non-foundationalists and give up our notions of truth, reality, and objectivity. A quantum leap to be sure! ... Indeed, it is a very high stakes argument of breath-taking complexity in which nothing less than truth itself is in question... it is not clear how far the author is actually willing to go in banishing the notion of an objective world. He seems to waver between a world "half created and half discovered" like the one experienced by Wordsworth in "Tintern Abbey" and a more radical vision of experience in which "the construction of the brain" creates all of the "properties and rules" found in those "things out there."

Jan Trembley