Life Cycle in the Natural Sciences and Traditional Cultures as a Complex System Self-Organization

Book excerpt: Throughout history, humanity has grappled with how to face the inevitability of death. Today, this struggle takes many forms, from efforts to extend life through medical and technological advances to the fascination with apocalyptic imagery in popular culture. To move beyond these ideas and explore new possibilities, we must seek precise knowledge across fields such as cosmology, biology, and evolution, examining the origins of life and death, which trace back billions of years to the earliest organisms and chemical compounds on Earth. For humans, these life stages prompt profound questions about the origins and meaning of life, why we age and die, and what, if anything, lies beyond death. These mysteries have driven human curiosity since our earliest days as a species, and we are better prepared than ever to explore these questions. Life Cycle in the Natural Sciences and Traditional Cultures as a Complex System Self-Organization explores the modeling and system analysis of the human life cycle, from the emergence and evolution of life to death and post-mortem phenomena, all within the framework of the theory of self-organization of complex systems. By treating life cycle events as wave and soliton processes, the research bridges anthropology, systems theory, geology, biochemistry, and evolution, among other fields. Covering topics such as death, senility, and transpersonal experience, this book is an excellent resource for academicians, researchers, educators, graduate and postgraduate students, philosophers of science, and more.