05 - WORK IN PROGRESS

One fair description of Progress could be: the state of increasing complexity of systems; be it biological, technological, social, legal, economical, or other kind.

It sounds fair in the sense that information in those systems gets accumulated, instead of starting anew every time. This allows for increasing levels of complexity, unattainable if it didn't exist a past, memories, or other supports of information. It can also be interpreted in a Darwinian perspective in relation to species. The possibility of producing an eye depends on some other and less complex biological structure originally sensitive to light.

But of course this remains problematic, since evolution doesn’t seem to operate out of ”increasing complexity”, but rather out of “increasing usefulness”, or adaptative effectiveness.

Meaning that even if there were light sensitive structures in a species living in dark caves, it is unlikely that the structure would become an eye. And also, if a species that has developed an eye moves into a dark cave, for some environmental pressure or competition with other species, it will likely “loose” it’s eyes. There is no abstract goal to produce an eye (but it seems irresistible to do it).

This becomes problematic in relation to Progress, because it means that Progress, in a

biological sense, doesn’t seem to follow a determined goal, as if there was an ideal, let’s say, human being, to be achieved. Rather it seems to have been a result of context, proceeding step by step, but on a winding road. Under construction, as it were, but without a goal. Work in progress as a process and not the works of progress as the result.

This puts the concept of Progress under a different light, in the sense that sees it as a product of change in a random direction, rather than a producer of change operating in a determined direction. Progress becomes the unexpected result rather than the deterministic operator; adjective, instead of noun; independent rather than dependent; subversive rather than teleological.

Progress seems to be produced out of amalgamation, rather than out of a plan.

We don't necessarily like Progress better this way.