I.5. An unavoidable gamble?
Thus, I believe that because of the general crisis of meaning which we are experiencing, a learning mechanism consubstantial with the living world is engaged. Will it be powerful enough and fast enough to stem a scenario of even gradual general collapse, or at least limit its disastrous impact? This debate is crucial, because faced with a general rise in theories of global collapse, we see that several attitudes are emerging. The first, most extreme, is to prepare to survive individually or in small communities in a context of general chaos. These are the survivalists, with the most extreme among them going so far as to arm themselves heavily in order to resist potential “barbarian” invasions.
Another attitude consists of trying to amplify and accelerate, in a technoscientific effort without limits, based on a form of techno-worship, a radical technical response to the ecological and climatic challenges, problems arising moreover largely through the technosciences themselves. But in this scenario, the solution would make the problem worse. Some are geo-engineering projects such as the dispersion of diamond powder in the atmosphere; others involve the transformation of humans into post-humans adapted to radically degraded or modified living conditions (temperature, drought, polluted atmosphere, etc.), the implementation of palliative solutions to the rise in sea levels, gigantic dykes, and to the shortages of drinking water by means of the desalination of sea water, overpopulation by means of the “culture” of artificial proteins, etc. I have largely challenged this approach in La tentation d’Eugénie (Giorgini 2017).
Voices are also being raised, in part against optimistic environmentalists or at least those who still believe that a reversal of the trend is possible, as they are accused of slowing down the development of preventive solutions to limit the inevitable impacts.
Don’t be alarmed: it’s a catastrophe! Too late! By suggesting that we can still correct the trajectory of our industrial civilization, the alarmist approach is 40 years behind the game. From now on, only “catastrophism” and the search for the least evil still make sense1.
Yet to expect the imminent end of the humanized world as inevitable is to organize it somewhere in our consciences. Worse still, promoting the hypothesis as a lever for one’s own success as an author or pseudo-scientist here and now is a crime committed in the name of so-called clear thinking yet subject to incompleteness, to uncertainty, possible change of direction, possible positive chaos. So we must warn about such a hypothesis while also counting on the strength of the living world, and on the genius of Men so often tested in the past; in a word, believe in Man, love Man and life. “All the analyses and studies tell us that what we want to do is impossible. As a result, we only have one thing left to do: to do it.”2
I.6. A technoscience to be reinvented?
The point where to place the cursor in matters of investment and technoscientific research, between a return to practices of less technical intensity, resulting from a radically innovative technology because it will be more frugal, more resilient, or on the contrary, a radical acceleration consisting of doing even more of the same thing, increasing the intensity and technological dependence of our societies, is an essential question for the future. The first scenario implies a collective capacity to define that which we want to preserve, which cannot be reduced by technology, and to which we wish to confer value. “Impossible, as long as we confuse price and value in a market economy without ethical regulation other than individual behavior subjected to technological, economic and State domination,” says Paul Jorion (Giorgini 2018). The second scenario relies on an excessive confidence in technology to save the world, in other words, to solve more problems than it creates. “Impossible!” Ellul (2003) tells us. The recursive aspect of a life-saving technoscience pushed to the limits induces, in return, a standardization of human behaviors in the sense of conformity to the models mastered by technical development which then become essential, including to resolve its negative externalities. A general cut in telecommunication networks today would lead to millions of deaths, whereas it did not exist two centuries ago. But at the same time, they save lives that would not have been saved at that time (ambulance services and so on).
I.7. General argument of the work
First, we will describe the extent to which the place/link duality, that which contrasts the “localized” with the “non-localized”, the continuous with the discontinuous, the located with the diffuse and the fully connected, haunts the deepest human thought since thought began, from Greek philosophers to Cartesian dualism, from quantum physics to complex higher order social systems. We will approach this duality from different points of view starting from the wave/corpuscle duality of matter at its most intimate level. It is at this point interesting to recall that non-locality in quantum physics is the observation that two quanta of matter whose origin is linked remain connected instantaneously in their behavior throughout their life, whatever in theory the distance that separates them. They constitute a single object even if an infinite distance separates them.
Second, we will document a subject which is crucial in any attempt to debate the appropriate scientific and philosophical approach to meet the challenges to come. How can we envisage and conceive of the role of science and technology in fully solving the considerable, and seemingly simultaneous, unprecedented challenges which our global human society must face? This question underlies today all debates on the ethical, political and geopolitical level. To answer it, the key questions asked will be: “Is a new scientific monism or a radical neo-positivism of the infinite complexity of systems possible?” “And if so, will it lead, as often in the past, to new models for technological mastery of the energy, ecological and socio-economic challenges that confront us?” A positive answer to the first question (scientific monism) is a necessary condition for a positive answer to the second question, but not sufficient. New mathematical models may perhaps lead to a unified conception of everything, from Newtonian physics to consciousness through quantum physics, biology and the evolution of living things, neuroscience, psychology and the theory of consciousness, without leading to truly influential technological solutions and above all without irreversible risks to the evolution of the global system (however, the dream of grand unification of the theory of everything seems thwarted).
This reminds me of the sparkling and enthusiastic look of my physics teacher at college who had offered, in an optional course, to unfold the whole of field and particle physics from the four Maxwell equations. I had been there five evenings in a row, and what struck me was how jubilant he was, almost enjoying his complex constructions from a small core of basic equations. He had a feeling of power. The myth of the single equation is a fundamental of the desire for knowledge, the only God of the physicist. A myth that we need to dream while wanting it never to end in this world, because reaching it would mark the end of the so-called exact sciences.
I use the expression “unified scientific conception of the whole” here, and not “unified theory of the whole”, because the latter is a somewhat delicate expression. It only refers to the unification of quantum physics and relativity (and therefore of the fundamental forces). A priori, this would not lead, for example, to any progress for thermodynamics far from equilibrium (and a fortiori the living world, or consciousness). However, for reductionist materialists, the rest follows in principle. It can also be a horizon, but it is much more distant. There is nothing concrete able to achieve this today. A slightly different point of view is to say that we could approach everything in the same frame of thought, a common conceptual framework with the same tools.
This question deserves to be asked, because we know that the crisis is global and a series of global and irreversible technoscientific solutions, implemented without risk, would come from understanding and mastering the “System” as a whole: spatial, astrophysical, physical, biological, ecological, sociological, economic, etc., and above all, temporal, its evolution over time. Chaos theory has shown that a negligible uncertainty in the initial conditions of a deterministic evolution equation can grow exponentially over time and lead to a very great uncertainty at the end of a given time (butterfly effect). For example, we know that the chaotic aspect of the Earth’s trajectory is