noogenesis
the essence of emrgnc
"We are not only set adrift and carried away in the current of life by the material surface of our being; but like a subtle fluid, space-time first drowns our bodies and then penetrates to our soul; it fills it and impregnates it ; it blends itself with the soul's potentialities to such an extent that soon the soul no longer knows how to distinguish space-time from its own thoughts.
To those who can use their eyes nothing, not even the summit of our being, can escape this flux any longer because it is only definable in accretions of consciousness. The very act by which the fine edge of our minds penetrates the absolute is a phenomenon, as it were, of emergence.
In short, first recognized only at a single point, then perforce extended to the whole inorganic and organic volume of matter, evolution is now, whether we like it or not, gaining the psychic zones of the world and transferring to the spiritual constructions of life not only the cosmic stuff but also the cosmic 'primacy' hitherto reserved by science to the tangled whirlwind of the ancient 'ether'.
How indeed could we incorporate thought into the organic flux of space-time without being forced to grant it the first place in the processus? How could we imagine a cosmogenesis reaching right up to mind without being thereby confronted with a noogenesis?
We are not only concerned with thought as participating in evolution as an anomaly or as an epiphenomenon; but evolution as so reducible to and identifiable with a progress towards thought that the movement of our souls expresses and measures the very stages of progress of evolution itself. Man discovers that he is nothing else than evolution become conscious of itself.
It seems to me that our modern minds (because and inasmuch as they are modern) will never find rest until they settle down to this view. On this summit and this summit alone are repose and illumination waiting for us."
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - "The Phenomenon of Man" - 1955