In this second volume of The Sparks of Randomness, The Atheism of Scripture, Henri Atlan pursues his investigation of human life, which he grounds in a distinctive intermingling of the biological and cognitive sciences and traditions of Jewish thought. The Atheism of Scripture offers up a paradox: its audacious thesis is that the Word or revealed scripture can be better understood without God. It must be decrypted or analyzed atheistically, that is, not as divine revelation, but in and of itself.
The Sparks of Randomness, Volume 1: Spermatic Knowledge (Cultural Memory in the Present) Amazon
What does it mean to be the being observer?
[General Complexity] draws its epistemological implications from the point of view of the subject who knows: complexity would compose a “new paradigm” (Morin, 1977) or “new alliance” (Prigogine and Stengers, 1979), which is potentially transdisciplinar. Therefore it gives a theoretical account of the properties of self-organization and autonomy of the physical, biological, and social systems from the perspective of the process of their observation. Complexity would express the extent of ignorance of an observer who is unaware of the information of the observed system itself (Atlan, 1979) and the process of “construction” (von Foerster, 1981) of an external object that is unattainable by the cognitive system of a subject. It is characterized more by their own “operational closure” and “internal consistency” (Varela, 1979) than by the faithful representation of the external reality. This approach, going back to the historic Macy Conferences (1946-1953) on Cybernetics (Dupuy, 2000), was widely developed in the 70s since the transition from a “first-order cybernetics” or cybernetics of observed systems (Wiener, 1948) to a “second-order cybernetics” or “cybernetics of observing systems” (von Foerster, 1981). A. Malaina, 2015
