As the eye sees, McLuhan believed, so the man is. The reflexive nature of this philosophical theorem leads immediately to the conception of human as an informational system, sending messages both forward and back, positive and negative feedback working in concert with biological imperative to produce a coherent, autopoetic unity. The damnable thing about self-organizing systems is that they remain fundamentally opaque, the bet noire of analysis. Synthetic thinking has, in the modern era, become identified more with the arts than the sciences. Hence, Great Advances in human knowledge often seem more like impact events, striking the structures of epistemology, rattling the ivory towers rising above its flanks.
Physics proceeds funeral by funeral - or so it is said.
When I was a wee lad, I dutifully sat in my earliest science classes and listened to the teacher lecture about life, about the characteristics that defined the living organism. That recognition, easily among the most significant of this century, lead, over the next twenty-five years, to an catastrophic broadening of the definition of life. The Apollo missions answered a question first seriously posed by Giordano Bruno as he meditated on the heliocentric vision of Copernicus, and made the Earth seem all that more precious. The visualization of the Earth, as seen from the capsule of the Apollo 8 mission, became the principle visual archetype for the twentieth century. All of this, of course, happened when I was a wee lad, and all of it confirmed the self-evident truth that life existed on Earth alone, another Ptolemaic myth disguising naked religiosity as scientific truth, ripe to be overthrown by another Copernicus.