Silent Illumination


Silently and serenely one forgets all words.
Clearly and vividly it appears before one.
When one realizes it, time is limitless.
When one experiences it, one's surroundings come to life.
Singularly illuminating is this bright awareness.
Full of wonder is this pure illumination.
The appearance of the moon, a river of stars,
Snow on pine trees, and clouds hovering on the mountain peaks.
In darkness they are glowing bright.
In obscurity they shine with resplendent light.
Like the feeling of a crane flying in empty space,
Like the still clear water of an autumn pool,
Limitless aeons dissolve into nothingness,
Undistinguishable from one another.
In this illumination all efforts are forgotten.
Where does this wonder exist?
A startled awakening shatters the dullness,
The path of silent illumination,
The origin of the infinitesimal.
To penetrate the infinitesimal,
A gold shuttle on a loom of jade.
Subject and object influence each other.
Light and darkness are mutually dependent.
There is no mind or world to rely on
Yet these two are mutually interacting.
Drink the medicine of correct views.
Beat the poison-smeared drum.
When these two are complementary
Killing and bringing to life are up to me.
One emerges from the door
The fruit has ripened on the branch.
Silence is the final teaching.
Illumination is the universal response.
The response is devoid of effort.
The teaching is not heard with the ears.
All manifestations throughout the universe
Emit light and speak the Dharma.
They testify to each other
And answer each other's questions.
Mutually testifying and answering,
Responding in perfect harmony.
If there is illumination without serenity
Then distinctions will be seen.
Mutually testifying and answering,
Responding in perfect harmony.
If within serenity illumination is lost,
All will become wasteful and secondary.
When the principle of silent illumination is complete
The lotus blossoms and the dreamer awakens.
The hundred rivers flow to the ocean,
The thousand peaks face the loftiest mountain.
Like the goose who always chooses milk above water,
Like a bee gathering pollen from a flower,
When silent illumination reaches the ultimate
I carry on the tradition of my sect.
The tradition of my sect is silent illumination.
It penetrates from the highest to the deepest.

~Hung-chih Cheng-chueh (1091-1157



I thought I'd start this thread with a meditation...it seemed apt...I'll add a few articles to get us thinking about the role of consciousness as we seek to explore our connection to a global and perhaps even a galactic brain.

Some of you may recall David Bohm, theorectical physicist, from our previous discussions....and his theory of The Implicate order......So I thought I'd start with a scientist who is more open to a holistic approach to the great questions we have as humans...





THE QUANTUM METAPHYSICS OF DAVID BOHM

Thomas J. Germine

"For the Eye altering alters all. "

~William Blake, The Mental Traveller


David Bohm’s posthumously- published paper on Soma-Significance represents an invaluable legacy, a veritable foundation plan of the immense metaphysical edifice which was taking shape in the author’s mind during the final days of his life. As is also evident in the unfinished collaborative work which Bohm was completing at the time of his death, his thinking was rapidly evolving in the direction of an entirely new paradigm of Mind and Matter pointing the way to the shores of a yet unexplored scientific/philosophical landscape. Perhaps it was somehow decreed that Bohm, like Moses, would be granted only a distant view of the land to which his vision had led him. If so, then it is left for us, as if by Bohm’s maqnanimous bequest, to complete his singular voyage of discovery on the vast, uncharted seas of what I will call Quantum Metaphysics.

The Duality of Mind and Matter

But the proposal in this paper is that the notion of soma- significance will make possible a kind of appearance that puts us into a much better contact with the basically unknown reality than does the duality of mind and matter, with its further division between actor, action, and that which is acted upon. - David Bohm, Psychoscience, 1, 27 (1994).

The metaphysical problem of Mind- Matter Dualism is inherent inthe classical physics of Isaac Newton and its philosophical counterpart, the empiricism of John Locke. Under this paradigm, which has dominated Western thinking for the past three centuries, reality is essentially viewed as external to and independent of the observer. Indeed, the observer is reduced to one relatively insignificant facet of a vast universe, only d miniscule corner of which is imperfectly comprehended by his/her thought processes. In the universe of Newton and Locke, then, consciousness is at best a merely subjective epiphenomenon of an objective reality i.e. Mind is dwarfed, if not annihilated, by Matter.

This Mind- Matter Dualism had derived its philosophical pedigree from Rene Descartes, for whom it was a natural corollary to his formulation of the constructs of Space and Time as pure mathematical abstractions. Viewed through the mesh of the Cartesian rectilinear grid, objective reality became not only external but also absolute, following an inexorable code of universal laws from which all outcomes could be positively determined. From this vantage point, human consciousness was shrunk down to the status of a crude tool.

Drawing upon Bohm’s image of the Mind- Matter relationship as analogous to opposing magnetic poles, one miqht well anticipate that the Newtonian- Cartesian endeavor to cut the magnet , so to speak, by assigning paramount reality to the material pole, would simply result in a reconstituted opposing mental pole. And in fact the extreme Mind- Matter polarization of scientific materialism did engender its opposite: the rise of an equally radical idealism, as espoused by Bishop Berkeley and the neo- Platonists, which denied that the material world had any reality outside of the human mind. For, if the materialists could point to Democritus for the view that matter consists of discrete, localized particles, the opposing school could invoke Plotinus:

Since matter is neither soul nor intellect,... but a certain indefiniteness, ,.. it cannot merit the appellation of being, but is deservedly called non- entity.... abiding without station, of itself invisible, and avoiding the desire of him who wishes to perceive its nature. Hence when no one perceives it, it is then in a manner present: but cannot be viewed by him who strives intently to behold it.

It is difficult to resist savoring the supreme izony here: the anti- materialist metaphysics of Plotinus uncannily anticipates the quantum mechanics of Newton’s intellectual heirs, with the foregoing quote being a virtual text- book recital of the theory of Schrödinger’s wave and Heisenberg’s uncertainty. But perhaps we should not be so surprised, since radical idealism is founded on Mind- Matter Duality every bit as much as is its polar opposite, radical materialism. Hence, the dualities of particle- wave and observer- observable can be seen to follow inexorably from the underlying split of consciousness away from the natural world regardless of which side of the rift one proceeds from.

For David Bohm, the polar dichotomy of Mind and Matter, whilebeing an arbitrary cut in the flow of an indivisible field of being, was nonetheless useful (in the same way as is the artificial idea of magnetic poles) as an aid in conceptualizing the ineffable workings of a deeper subtle level of reality. Thus, we may accurately say that Bohm bridged the Mind- Matter chasm by going beneath it, into the subtext of reality from which the manifest is woven . Underlying the familiar world of manifest reality or the explicate order in Bohm’s terminology he postulated the existence of a non- material realm of pure information the implicate order from which unfold all observable phenomena.

It is important to understand that Bohm conceived the implicate subtext underlying manifest events not merely as a useful paradigm for explaining quantum phenomena, but as a literal description of what is . This boldly ontological approach stands in stark contrast with the mainstream thinking of 2Oth Century physics, which has all but abandoned ontology in favor of a purely epistemological approach.

Defining a Quantum Reality

Implicit in the Newtownian- Cartesian mechanical model of the universe was the ultimate goal ofd deriving one equation which would describe all material phenomena. In the 2Oth Century, theoretical physicists achieved this goal, in the form of the Schrödinger Equation, but they found the reality which the equation describes is random, indefinite, inscrutable, and indivisible to be a far cry from what they had expected. Virtually overnight, the comforting world of discrete localized particles had evaporated into an omnipresent phantasmic haze of statistical probabilities, which an incredulous Einstein referred to as a Gespensterfeld Ghost- field .

Reacting somewhat like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, the mainstream quantum theorists, led by Neils Bohr, endeavored to confine their unseemly creation to the laboratory: accepting Shrödinger’s spectral waveform as a useful mathematical formulation for predicting experimental outcomes, but in the same breath denying that this probability wave actually reflects a quantum reality . Thus under the banner of Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation , the inability of modern physics to put the quantum genie back into an ontological bottle was resolved by throwing away the bottle. At the quantum level, at least, reality was deemed inherently unknowable .

Nonetheless, there remained a strong attachment among many of Bohr’s colleagues to a more traditional notion namely, that the scientific pursuit consists of developing a coherent model of what is , and not merely an incestuous set of rules for explaining the results of its own contrived experimental configurations. For those disinclined to follow Bohr into a metaphysical blind alley, the alternative inevitably involved revisiting the twin Cartesian pillars of scientific materialism: Mind- Matter Dualism and Objective (albeit not, after Einstein, Absolute) Space/Time.

The obvious alternative to the know- nothing approach of the Copenhagen Interpretation was to view the wave function defined by the Schödinger Equation as itself representing, mathematically, a Quantum Reality . But the characteristics of such a quantum realm indeterminance, non- locality, atemporality, universal interconnectedness are so fundamentally at odds with the attributes of the macroscopic world, that the ontological approach seemingly must engender yet another breach in the fabric of a unified reality this time in the selection of the appropriate dividing line between the quantum and classical domains. With his characteristic directness, Bohr had severed this Gordian knot by arbitrarily assuming, in the aggregate, a statistical convergence of quantum phenomena on purely classical behavior the so- called Correspondence Limit . Given this assumption, a macro- scale measuring apparatus may be viewed as purely classical, and the cut between the quantum and classical realms can be convenientiy located at the boundary between the experimental equipment and the subatomic particle.

Unfortunately, the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, as developed by John von Neumann in the early 1930’s, failed to support the supposed existence of a bright line dividing the well- defined attributes of the measuring instrument from the indeterminate potentialities inherent in the Schrödinger wave function. Instead, von Neumann’s mathematical rendering of the universe completely jettisoned the twin Cartesian pillars of classical physics replacing four- dimensional Space/Time with infinitely- dimensioned Hilbert Space , and emphatically rejecting the paradigm of a divided reality.. Hence, the von Neumann formulation demands that all physical processes be described in terms of an infinite array of potentialities, inherently incapable of actualizing without the intercession of a non- physical entity associated with the measurement process an entity which von Neumann was logically compelled to identify with consciousness. Thus, we have the sublime irony of a rigorous mathematical elaboration of a purely materialistic model of the universe yielding a radically idealistic paradigm: Consciousness creates Reality!

Does quantum ontology then inexorably drive us to a contra- Copernican revolution, once again assigning to humanity, or more precisely, to human consciousness, the central place in the universal scheme? And the problematic implications of the von Neumann formulation do not end there, because unless we deny the physical existence of the Universe prior to the biological evolution of human consciousness we are compelled to define Consciousness more broadly than in the context of the individual human mind. In fact, we are obliged to at least entertain the possibility that the Universe is in some sense Conscious a Consciousness which manifests itself in the undivided Whole, but which also permeates down into the increasinqly finer, subtler levels of reality. Under such a quantum animism , human consciousness may be seen to emerge from the all- pervading Universal Consciousness by a process similar to the collapse of a quantum waveform into the localized form of an observed particle.


Complementarity and Space/Time


"There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True. "

- William Blake



The fundamental unity and interdependence of what Blake styled Contrarieties is a concept which originated with Heraclitus and Pythagoras and became a central tenet in the alchemy of Paracelsus: That which is beneath is like that which is above; and that which is above is like that which is beneath.

Unlike the idealist- materialist poles of conventional philosophy, this esoteric tradition viewed spirit and matter, light and darkness, time and eternity, above and beneath as complementary principles, both alike rooted in a divine essence. Universal intelligence, the alchemists’ deus abscondituy, is hidden and operating in matter, no less than in the realm of consciousness or, as Blake expressed it poetically:

God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes.

In this visionary school of thought, the myth of Osiris, whose divine body was dismembered and scattered throughout the material world, was the archetype for the influx of Mind into Matter. Though hidden in Matter, the Light shineth in the Darkness , in the words of St. John’s gospel, conferring Form upon the otherwise watery material world.

Proceeding from the same fundamental Principle of Complementarity, David Bohm arrives at a remarkably similar paradigm of Mind and Matter with subatomic particles guided in their movements by active information encoded in a field of quantum potential which communicates with the entire universe. Characteristically, Bohm (1994) chooses his words carefully, explaining the special nuances which he attaches to the notion of information :

What is crucial here is that we are calling attention to the literal meaning of the word, i.e. to in- form, which is actively to put form into something or to imbue something with form.

It is easy to misconstrue this so- called pilot wave theory as a revival of the familiar certainties of classical physics, with a localized, tangible particle pushed around by a physical energy field. But in his final writings, Bohm takes great pains to explain that the quantum field exerts no force on the particle, and that both particle and field exist only in the implicate order which underlies manifest reality. Indeed, far from reverting to the pre- quantum Cartesian grid of Space/Time, Bohm’s theory for the first time proposes a non- Cartesian ontology of Space/Time which corresponds to von Neumann’s mathematical formulation of Hilbert Space:

The basic idea is to introduce a new concept of order, which we call the implicate or the enfolded order. This is to be contrasted with our current concepts of order which are based on the ideas of Descartes. The Cartesian qrid (extended to curvilinear coordinates), which describes what is essentially a local order, has been the one constant feature of physics in all the fundamental changes that have happened over the past few centuries. In the quantum domain, however, this order shows its inadequacy, because physical properties cannot be attributed unambiguously to well- derined structures and processes in space- time while remaining within Hilbert space....

What we are proposing here is that this disparity between physical concepts (e.q. particle, wave, position, momentum) and the implications of the mathematical equations arises because the physical concepts are inseparably involved with the Cartesian notion of order, and this violates the essential content of quantum mechanics. What we need is a notion of order for all our concepts, both physical and mathematical, which coheres with this content.

Just as the conventional photoqraph may be viewed as a paradigm of the Cartesian order, with its point- to- point correspondence between image and object, Bohm draws upon the hologram as the paradigm of his implicate order, in which the entire form of the object is enfolded within each point of the image. Thus, coordinates of Space/Time do not appear discretely in the implicate order, but are enfolded in a unbroken wholeness a sort of pre- space , each dimensionless part of which embraces all of Space/Time. The trajectory of a particle throuqh Space/Time can therefore be seen as a holomovement , i.e. the sequential unfoldment in Space/Time of a unitary eternal form in pre- space:

Whatever persists with a constant form is sustained as the unfoldment of a recurrent and stable pattern which is constantly being renewed by enfoldment and dissolved by unfoldment. When the renewal ceases the form vanishes.... The notion of a permanently existing entity with a given identity, whether a particle or anything else, is therefore at best an approximation ...

Although Bohm had only the opportunity to draw out some of theinitial implications of this revolutionary new paradigm, it ispossible to see in the holomovement a sort of cinematic , i.e. frame- by- frame, sequential rendering of an implicate subtext which exists outside of Space/Time or, expressed more figuratively,the progressive unfoldment of Eternity in Time and Infinity inSpace. Again, the poetic inspiration of William Blake proves amazingly prescient:


How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?


It may perhaps also be discerned that the sequential nature of the unfolding of the holomovement in Space/Time is a logical corollary of Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity of which Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is but a special case). Pursuant to Complementarity, certain groups of physical observables cannot be known at the same Space/Time juncture, because the mathematical operators which correspond to these conjugate attributes do not commute i.e. the order in which the operators are applied makes a difference. That being the case, the occultation of past events in Space/Time, which is the hallmark of the explicate or manifest order, may be seen as necessary to prevent the violation of Complementarity which would result from the pers istent observation of conjugate attributes .

But Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity also dictates that the knowledge of all complementary attributes is essential to render a complete picture of reality. Hence, since opposing potentialities cannot be manifested in the same Space/Time, the complete picture must be presented in installments , so to speak, with each frame disappearing from view before the manifestation of its complementary construct. Accordingly, manifest reality is not continuous, but instead composed of a cinematic proqression of avatars from the implicate subtext, each avatar being separated by what Bohm characterizes as a free flight- time related to the Planck time.

The apparent continuity of reality, therefore, must be ascribed to the same sort of persistence of vision which accounts for the illusion of cinematic continuity. This, then, suggests itself as a paradigm for the role of Consciousness, which, like the goddess Isis, voyages through the gormless waters of Space/Time, gathering up and reconstructing the dismembered body of Osiris the undivided Whole of the implicate order:

Such mental processes of indefinitely deep inwardness and subtlety can, can, however, incorporate the content of memory along with the rest of perception into wholes ...

Consciousness and the Implicate Order


Proceeding along the lines of Bohm’s rejection of Mind- Matter Duality, it is reasonable to hypothesize that, just as material phenomena are manifestations of an unfoldinq implicate order, so the phenomena of Consciousness may be seen as the unfoldment of a timeless, spaceless, apparently random subtext ( apparently , that is, because the text of this paqe, viewed as the cumulative occurence of individual letters, could also be interpreted as a random statistical process). Ultimately, at the most subtle levels, the implicate orders of the material and psychic universes are one, but it may be inferred that there are also intervening gradations of ever- more- subtle levels, in which common pools of information link waking consciousness with the unconscious , and the individual mind with a collective psyche.

The individual psyche erects the abstraction of selfhood only by severing itself from what Blake describes as the scattered portions of his immortal body , i.e. the seeds of Universal Consciousness sown ubiquitiously into even the minutest furrows of Matter. But the infinite potentialities of the scattered portions of Mind which the Self must define as external will now represent inactive information , in the same sense as do the unactualized quantum potentialities of the observed electron in Bohm’s theory. Thus, as suqqested earlier, individual conciousness may be abstracted from an underlying pool of consciousness, in the same way as the observed Quantum wave packet is collapsed from an overall wave function.


The consciousness of self in turn implies the unconsciousness of those portions of Mind which are not self , again because it is inherent in all observable phenomena that complementary attributes cannot be manifested at the same time. Conversely, the experience of the Unconscious, i.e. the Mind beyond the limits imposed by the limits of the Self, is the sleep or occultation of consciousness. Just as the form of a particle is sustained by continually converqing and diverginq waves unfolding from an implicate field of quantum potential, consciousness may be seen as an explicate form sustained by continually converqinq and diverging waves unfoldinq from an unconscious field of psychic potential.

Individual consciousness, then, like its counterpart, the individual particle of matter, has no continuous existence, but rather is a continual cinematic unfoldinq of the infinite content of the Unconscious or, as Bohm puts it, the action 0@ the infinite within the sphere of the finite . Thus, during waking hours, the implicate content of the Unconscious ostensibly random, non- local, atemporal, thingless and all- entanqled unfolds to sustain, by continual re- creation, the explicate form of Consciousness. Here, then, is a paradigm which accounts for that most- enigmatic characteristic of consciousness: that of being, from instant to instant, continually different, yet (absent pathology) replicating a constant form.

Applying Bohm’s holomovement consistentiy to Mind as well as Matter, therefore, compels us to consider the central role of what Freud called the dream- work in sustaininq healtny consciousness for the recurrent and stable pattern which unfolds during waking hours must be renewed during sleeping hours (or daytime reveries) by the enfoldment of waking experience into the seamless subtext of the Unconscious. The alternative to the dream’s enfoldment of waking experience follows inexorably from the nature of the holomovement: When the renewal ceases, the form vanishes.

Once again, ancient metaphysical traditions prove uncannily prescient of our emerqing formulations. In Hindu mytholoqy, the manifest world unfolds, like a lotus flower, from the universal dream of Vishnu:

Vishnu beinq the cosmic water itself, theinfinite ocean of that liquid life- substance out of which all the differentiated phenomena


and elements of the universe arise, and back into which they must again dissolve.


Like Bohm’s pilot wave , which quides and in- forms the path of the electron, the subtextual symbolic lanquaqe of dreams informs the conscious mind: Dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness.

Since consciousness is continually re- created out of the implicate order of the unconscious, the potential for the constantly- regenerated form to disperse or dissociate is always real and imminent. Based on the holomovement paradigm, we might expect such dissociation to result from either defective enfoldment of waking experience arising, e.g., from dream disorders, or defective unfoldment of the unconscious subtext in wakinq life. While the former tends to be a source of pathology in the individual psyche, the latter may also manifest itself as a disorder in the mass psyche of humanity.

An obvious example of such an psychic ungoldment disorder on the societal level is what Jung regers to as the loss of the primitive psyche , a syndrome which effectively cuts modern humanity off from the infinite enerqy of the deeper levels of the Unconscious. As David Bohm observed, within the strait- jacket of the conventional 2Oth Century persona, the individual sees the world a set of disjoint mechanical fraqments, one of which is oneself. Severed from its link to the infinite, the psyche shrinks to insignificance in its own perception. Drained of the energizing penumbra of the Unconscious, the material world takes on a cold, distant, alien and monotonous cast, devoid of affect or color.

This deadening of psychic energy or the blockaqe of its unfoldment reinforces itself in the complementary process of enfoldment: the lifeless mechanical meaning applied to conscious experience imprints its riqidity on the subtext of the psyche, so that its unfoldment in consciousness becomes incompatible withcreative perceptions.

Amazingly, the quantum mechanics of David Bohm led him to thesame insight which inspired the visionary poetry of William Blake: Mankind’s fallen state is a condition of amnesia, a forgetfulnessof our infinite source in the conscious depths of the implicate order. The reversal of this amnesia, the psyche’s reawakening to its eternal wellsprinqs, begins with a radically new mode of perception (Bohm, 1994):

We have seen that man is potentially infinite. Is man actually finite or infinite. As long as the siynificance of the finite is what dominates his consciousness, then he will actually be this finite significance. But when a human beinq truly sees the new meaninq that mankind need not be limited in this way, he will actually cease to be limited. He will begin to open to the inginite, and he will be able to act creatively in every phase of life, individual and collective.

We may perhaps discern the approach of a new Millenium, with its archetypal nexus to the cyclical movements of the implicateorder, in the first rays of a dawning new perception of Mind, a perception in which humanity rediscovers the active power of Consciousness to transform Reality.


http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/1995/TGERMINE.html

Bridging Science and Spirituality

Andrew Lohrey
University of Tasmania


Abstract:

This paper argues that the bridge between science and spirituality is found in the interconnected structure and function of meaning. Disclosing this connectedness involves an appraisal of subjective experience, the science of signs and Sri Ramana Maharshi's notion of Self-realisation.



It is possible to connect science with spirituality in meaningful ways that do no injustice to science or religion. Such a meeting is possible by following and building upon David Bohm and Basil Hiley's holistic thesis illustrated in The Undivided Universe (1995). This is the approach here: to show evidence of a holistic interconnection which automatically embraces science and spirituality within its boundless expanses. My method will be to renovate the underlying links, connections and relationships of meaning that bind science and spirituality into a perfect marriage.

The first and most obvious connection is found in a shared attitude towards truth. Unlike the postmodernist who views truth as relative, the spiritual seeker and the dedicated scientist are both concerned with universal truths that transcend cultural and physical relativities. For science these are called Laws of Nature. For the spiritual seeker these eternal truths are also known as the Laws of Nature.

Commitment to truth is well known in the scientific community but it is equally important for the spiritual seeker. "What is truth'? asks the thirteenth century German mystic, Meister Eckhart. "Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go". (Budhananda, 1992: 84) Is not Meister Eckhart's commitment to truth so appropriate for scientific investigation that any scientist would be pleased to emulate it? These are some basic connections that link science and spirituality in ways that perhaps do not build a marriage or a bridge, but do initially indicate the absence of a bottomless divide.

The present holistic approach can, however, be taken many steps further by asking some questions about the nature of science and of the scientific experience. What then is science? In a recent article Ian Stevenson proposed that science is more an attitude than a method.

The attitude is one of testing interpretations of observed phenomena against further observations until one interpretation emerges as the best. Unfortunately, judgments about the best interpretation vary greatly. (Stevenson, 1999: 257)

To see science more as an attitude than a method is to find some small expansion of the conventional objective methods of science. Such methods are listed by Stevenson as: controlled conditions, repeatablity, falsifiability, predicability, quantification, control groups and location. For Stevenson these are non-core features of science even through they are frequently important.

If Stevenson is right and science is an attitude rather than a method then the attributes of this subjective attitude should form the character of the scientific experience, the second question referred to above. The scientific experience is an experience normally seen to involve the so-called 'gap' between the physical world 'out there' and the world of thought 'in here'. If this gap does exists, as assumed by most science, then science and spirituality can never be strongly linked. If on the other hand, there is no gap then scientific experience will simply be a feature of subjectivity and a significant barrier preventing interconnection will be removed.

The Gap

Much of modern science appears to have blindly followed the father-figure of the mind-body problem, Rene Descartes who proposed a division between external observation and internal thought. This dualist model has given support to the desire for, and the belief in, what is objective and trustworthy in science and what is not. The notion of a gap between these two (the inner and the outer) lends credence to the dogmatic realism of a 'detached observer', and a knowable external physical world rooted in physical space. But what evidence is there for this so-called gap between inner and outer worlds?

Many philosophers, including several of Descartes' contemporaries found dualism difficult to accept. Writing almost a century after Descartes, Kant filled the gap by insisting that for sensible beings like us it was impossible to know, in any absolute, non-sensible way, 'things-in-themselves'. For evidence of an outer physical world we must begin with our sensibilities and faculties of representation. Kant suggested that there was an inseparable relation between inner and outer experience, that is, between self-consciousness and consciousness of the object.

These two do not comprise 'halves' of experience as a whole, which subsist independently of each other, but they are conjoined in the same ensemble of universally valid and necessary logical presuppositions, and inseparably related to each other through this ensemble. (Cassirer, 1985: 198)

For Kant the expression of both 'self' and 'object' is one and the same and is signified by his concept of transcendental apperception. Similar comments can be made about space and time for they exist only relative to our sensibilities. "The existence of space is dependent on the inner organisation of the subject's personality, which clothes the sense-qualities in spatial form". (Sebeok, 1976:194) For Kant, a knowable external physical world rooted in physical space was an illusion for both the world and space are dependent on an a priori framework that forms the 'constitution' of human sensibilities.

If we accept Kant's position there is no gap between the illusion of noumena (of objects in-themselves and absolute space and time) and the reality of the phenomena of transcendental apperception. Kant's basic position of the integration of inner and outer worlds in human sensibilities finds basic agreement with many of the developments of modern science, such as Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. In contrast, there is little in the history of science that supports Descartes' dualism, a theory which is widely regarded as raising more problems than it solves.

Even though there is little evidence of the dualistic gap between inner and outer reality, Cartesian dualism continues to have a strong and influential role in much scientific investigation. This is even the case in the study of consciousness. A quick survey of all the articles which have appeared in the Journal of Consciousness Studies since its inception in 1994 indicates that the overwhelming majority of them are written from a stance which separates consciousness from the physical world. This usual scientific approach to inquiry privileges the physical world and locates it as the legitimate field of study even when consciousness is the designated area. The lack of any solid evidence of a gap between inner and outer worlds has therefore not prevented recent studies into consciousness from building on such insecure foundations.

Meaning

Today we tend to talk in terms of subjective experience rather than human sensibilities or transcendental apperception. But whatever terms we use, all investigations will lead to the conclusion that this framework is integrated and not divided. In other words, the processes of observation and of concept formation are entirely integrated. Nowhere is there a division between what can be called an inner and an outer world. The lack of evidence for such a gap, yet the continual assumption in scientific investigation that such a gap exists, reflects the problem of bridging science and spirituality.

Both science and spirituality come within the framework of human sensibility - of subjective experience - and this means that science is produced by the same general subjective processes as spirituality. To make the cohesion of this framework more apparent we need to take a broad look at the medium which links both science and spirituality. This is the medium of meaning. Both science and spirituality create meaning, and meaning is the ever present medium of subjective experience. The critical question at this junction is therefore, what do I and most other writers mean by the term 'meaning'?

Meaning has presented a special problem for linguistics and the difficulty of defining it is said to be exceedingly complex. (Pike, 1967, 598 - 640). A broadly held view in linguistics is that meaning is generated by semiosis, that is, by the interaction of signs and also by the interaction of sign elements, such as signifier and signified (Saussure) or between a sign, its object and its interpretant (Peirce). In this view, meaning is solely derived from semiotic interaction (semiosis). This is the traditional linguistic view of meaning and for present purposes I will call it the derivative role of meaning.

A slight variation on the traditional linguistic view of meaning is found in the philosophy of John Searle where meaning "is a form of derived intentionality." (Searle, 1999: 141) For Searle, intentionality is fundamental, but this state does not equate with any fundamental role of meaning; rather, intentionality is restricted to a choice-process within the state of conscious awareness. Such a limiting view of meaning has not begun to take account of the nature of signs or semiotic activity.

The view that derivative meaning is all there is to meaning is challenged by the present author who proposed in The Meaning of Consciousness, (Lohrey, 1997) that meaning has both derivative and fundamental functions. These two operations are entirely integrated yet distinct. Perhaps the best way to describe them is in terms of:

a ) the meaning generated by forms; and
b ) the meaning of formlessness.

The meaning generated by forms is meaning that is derived from the interaction of forms, that is, in the conventional sense of semiosis, of deriving from the interaction of signs and sign elements. As everything in science can be a sign, the derivative meaning of forms includes the general purpose of all scientific investigation as well as most non-scientific activity. The derivate meaning of forms (semiosis) is therefore entirely general and applicable to all human behaviour.

The meaning of formlessness is not meaningless meaning. On the contrary, here there is a fullness of meaning which is also entirely general but it cannot be equated to the meaning of forms. Formless meaning underpins all forms and provides the background context out of which forms emerge and interact with each other to create semiosis. The meaning of formlessness thus precedes semiosis but it is also present in all aspects of semiosis. Another way of describing the relationship between semiosis and formless meaning is in terms of relations. Formless meaning is identical with those fundamental relations that generate and construct signs and sign elements. Such formless relations have the force of creation and will be discussed further under the heading 'relations'. From the present point of view, forms are only ever stable systems of relations that are secondary to the basic relations which have created them. The meaning produced by the interaction of forms (semiosis) is thus derived from formless meaning.

We can say that in its fundamental operation formless meaning can be described as 'the meaning of meaning'. This kind of meaning is commonly associated with silence and with the ineffable and with spiritual quests that seek to actualise the silence of this formlessness in its most universal and divine state. The major focus of all spiritual activity is on this kind of meaning.

In its derivate sense, meaning is created by the interaction of signs and can be spoken of as 'the meaning of something'. Scientific investigation is always about the meaning of something. This is the case in physics, chemistry, biology as well as the social sciences. While most practitioners in these fields may not see themselves as using and creating meaning-as-semiotics this is overwhelmingly what is happening. The kind of semiosis which is seen to occur between and within matter - particles, cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals, populations and the languages of these fields - is only the derivative signs of life. It is the meaning 'of something', created by the interaction of stable systems of relations, systems that are called, particles, cells, tissue and so on.

Gestalt

A possible model for meaning in both its fundamental and derivative forms is to liken it to dynamic gestalt configuration where there is an active background, field of relationships (formless meaning) out of which arise in the foreground a series of stable, explicit systems of relationships (forms) which interact with each other to produce derived meaning. These are the interactive and gestalt processes found in the production of language. The force and energy of these movements, both in the emergence of explicit forms and in the interactions of the forms, comes from a life force which is the nature of relations themselves. In other words, this agency is the agency of meaning.

One common location for such an agency of meaning is the context of subjective experience. The context of subjective experience represents a field of meaning from which emerge sign elements and as the explicit objects constructed by observation. These are the percepts and concepts of thought. Thus in all subjective experience we have an energetic background field of meaning (which is non-conscious) out of which emerges the explicit content of conscious awareness in its various forms. This background field of formless, non-consciousness creates meaning in two ways. Firstly, it infuses meaning into the explicit forms of conscious awareness in the manner in which every context provides meaning to constituent forms. Secondly, it provides the background field- the medium - in which these explicit forms can and do interact and thus create derivative meaning.

The gestalt model of meaning leads inevitably to the view that the actual forms of conscious awareness create conscious awareness. This means that conscious awareness is not like a puppet or shadow theatre. It is not some kind of dividing screen on which the shadows of explicit forms are relayed and displayed. Rather the content of conscious awareness represents actual explicit forms which have arisen out of the energetic, non-conscious, background field of meaning. In other words, the state of conscious awareness is only constituted by and through the emergence of explicit forms which have been born from a background field of formless, non-conscious meaning.

Life

In science the agency of life is usually seen as the property of interacting biological forms. The interaction of biological forms has been called a semiotic activity by Jesper Hoffmeyer. In Signs of Meaning in the Universe Hoffmeyer takes a close look mainly at biology and finds evidence of semiosis everywhere, from "pheromones to birdsongs and from antibodies to Japanese ceremonies of welcome . . . the essence of the entire life process - life as semiosis" (Hoffmeyer, 1993:61) A logical consequences of Hoffmeyer's thesis of life as semiosis is that meaning and life are created throughout nature, but only in derivative and secondary capacities.

Hoffmeyer's book is unusual not only because he calls attention to the bridge between semiotics and biology but also because he finds evidence of meaning-making at every level of life. His conclusion is that the sign, not the molecule, is the crucial, underlying factor in the study of life. Thus Hoffmeyer locates agency, which is the agency of life, as semiosis; as the interaction of signs and the interaction within signs. In other words, life is produced by the interaction of forms. Described thus there seems to be something missing from this proposition for how can forms interacting constitute a causal agency. Surely these are secondary processes?

The present proposition that meaning has a fundamental role as well as a derivative function in semiosis challenges Hoffmeyer's thesis not on the basis of the agency of life, but on the location of that agency as semiosis. It is not the interaction of signs (semiosis) which is the location of life but the more fundamental level of formless meaning which is the source and location of life. The semiosis which Hoffmeyer refers to is only the derivate signs of life and this occurs between and within biological forms such as, cells, tissue, organs, plants, animals and populations.

These are the signs of life which can be traced backwards to the source of the life they possess, that is, to the life force which issues forth from the background of relations, a background which appears to have the same attributes as Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphic fields'. Sheldrake's thesis of a morphic field is of a field of information that creates physical forms (through morphogenesis) and transfers information between successive generations of biological forms to create their evolution. (Sheldrake, 1990)

From the present perspective, a morphic field does not contain information but formless meaning. Information is a technological term signifying semiotic activity and thus it relates to the interaction of forms. On the other hand morphic fields are always background fields that are essentially formless. As such they constitute the locations of formless meaning. A morphic field is therefore a formless field of energy structured by fundamental relations which constitute the agencies of life. In this creation role, morphic fields create, through morphogenetic processes of transformation, the explicit, physical forms of physics, chemistry and biology. Once physical and biological forms have been created (exist) their communal interaction produces derivative meaning, which Hoffmeyer refers to as the signs of life, or semiosis.

If life in the universe is to be found in the fundamentally relations of morphic fields, and in a derivate sense as the signs of life (through the interactions of forms within these fields), then the obvious conclusion to draw from all this is that the universe is alive at every level and in every substance and in every time and in every space. This conclusion comes from the logic that relations are omnipresent in the universe and this leads on to the inevitable conclusion that the agency of life, which is the force of formless meaning, is omnipresent in the universe. In other words, the visible universe exists within an infinite morphic field (a holomovement in David Bohm's terms) and so has meaning and consciousness at every point in space/time.

Consciousness

'Life' is a term with strong biological connotations while 'consciousness' is a term that has both psychological and spiritual uses. Life and consciousness come together however, in the present use of the meaning of meaning. It is proposed here that meaning, in its fundamental and formless role has energy, force and agency. The nature of this energy and agency is consciousness. I have proposed (Lohrey, 1997) that consciousness is identical to meaning and therefore occupies the same location as meaning. We can say then that every type of meaning represents a type of consciousness and every quality of consciousness is also one of meaning.

For example, implicit meaning constructs and is the content of formlessness and non-consciousness, while explicit meaning both arises from implicit meaning and represents the forms and the content of conscious awareness. (The category 'non-conscious' relates to implicit meaning and involves the subjective states of preconsciousness, subconsciousness and the repressed. In addition, this field of non-conscious, implicit meaning extends into the un-repressed unconscious which is a feature of the universal field of consciousness which can be called cosmic consciousness).

The symmetry of meaning and consciousness implies that consciousness is the vital force that occupies the subjective field in which signs interact, scientific undertakings emerge and spirituality develops. In this view, signs, science and spirituality are features of consciousness and can be studied in terms of their relational architecture rather than exclusively and formally in their own separate terms. This means that consciousness is best analysed as meaning which in turn is best studied in terms of relations.

The symmetry of meaning and consciousness also provides support for the proposition that meaning is not a shadow generated by the interaction of signs (as traditionally assumed). Meaning itself has movement, force, energy, agency - consciousness. This is the same dynamic power which the Indian mystical philosophy of Vedanta calls sakti. These are also the features we call life and thus being. Meaning therefore constitutes being-ness. A change of meaning will always represent a change of being-ness but it is also a change of consciousness.

What is interesting about this morphic field of consciousness (being-ness) is that it is infinitely expansive, which is to say that nothing exists outside meaning. In other words, nothing exists outside of consciousness. If this is true then the context of subjective experience, in which science occurs, is situated within the movement, force and agency of the ultimate reality of being-ness, that is, within the formless, morphic field of the meaning of meaning. From a spiritual position the ultimate reality is usually assumed to be God or cosmic consciousness. Enlightened souls such as Sri Ramana Maharshi often use the term 'the Self' to refer to this ultimate reality.

Is it possible to talk about spiritual matters like the Self in terms of the meaning of meaning? I suggest it's entirely appropriate, for the language of meaning and the relations which structure it provide a new way of understanding the processes of spirituality, being-ness, of the Self and the way science relates to our lives. Such a language provides the method of filling the gap between science and spirituality - with meaning. It should be noted here, however, that the concepts of 'self' and 'selfhood' are also psychological concepts used in Western literature. I often find a good deal of confusion in Western approaches to the self as a psychological entity. This confusion seems to stem from the lack of clear distinction between the ego (generally seen as a psychological system) and the Self (a spiritual state). (For a recent example of this kind of approach see The Self Is a Semiotic Process by John Pickering, 1999).

The Indian spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi tells us, "Reality is only one and that is the Self. All the rest are mere phenomena in it, of it and by it. The seer, the objects and the sight, all are the Self only. Can any one see or hear, leaving the Self aside?" (Venkataraman, 1978: 487) In this reading the reality of the Self encompasses the subjective experience of the individual observer within an all-ness and one-ness of an infinite field of meaning we can call Self or cosmic consciousness. This doubling of the meaning of self and Self is reflective of the recursive symmetry we find between the fundamental role of meaning (as implicit meaning) and its' derivate sense in semiosis (the interaction of systems of relations).

While these sentences may be grasped intellectually this will be a very different result from the spiritual purpose of realising the Self. The difficulty of coming to a realisation of the totality of the Self is the difficulty of developing a holographic relationship with this one-ness. By this I mean a spiritual relationship in which the individual self is realised to be not separate from the cosmic, universal Self. This is a holographic relationship in that its construction leads to the non-dualist recognition and spiritual realisation of one-ness; that the self within is the Self within all beings.

Famous for his methods of self inquiry, Ramana Maharshi had this to say about this spiritual relationship:

The only permanent thing is Reality; and that is the Self. You say 'I am', 'I am going', 'I am speaking', 'I am working', etc. Hyphenate 'I am' in all of them. Thus I - AM. That is the abiding and fundamental Reality. This truth was taught by God to Moses: 'I AM that I AM'. 'Be still and know that I - AM God'. So 'I - AM ' is God. (Venkataraman, 1978: 487)

What Ramana Maharishi is saying, in terms of derivative meaning, is that Self-realisation is captured in the meaning of 'I - AM'. (God-realisation and Self-realisation are taken by Ramana Maharishi as being synonymous). Here the predicate term is left off and so the meaning does not signify the usual subject/object relationship common in the normal interaction of signs we see in sentence structure. Rather, what is signified here is a prior and more fundamental state of meaning. This state is the formless state of agency, and this expression is how we can signify the agency of our subjectivity. Here the subject 'I - AM' relates to itself. The subject in this instance is the one who constructs these expressions and therefore there is no need to say "I think, therefore I am' to prove existence. The simple utterance 'I - AM' is all that is necessary to prove agency, existence and consciousness.

'I - AM' is the ultimate self-referral which it is possible to speak. The realised meaning of this self-referral implies a state of consciousness beyond words, a formless state of meaning beyond thought, a state of 'no-mind', a state of being where the individual self expands into the cosmic Self. This is a state of stillness beyond the defences of the ego where meaning rests with the infinite and eternal symmetry of that stream of consciousness which 'I - AM'.

Relations

While it is common to refer to derivative meaning in terms of relationships it is also possible to speak about this formless stream of 'AM-ness' in terms of fundamental relations. It was proposed by the present author (Lohrey 1997) that all relations derive from three basic formless relations. These are the relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry. In turn these three relations are seen to derive from the one fundamental relation of symmetry. In reverse, symmetry represents the one universal relation from which all others have emerged.

Symmetry is therefore the ground state of a universe full of relations. From this ground state arises non-symmetries which, when complex enough, produce irreversible systems of relationships or asymmetries. The transformation of these three basic relations automatically establishes an order and a priority ranking so that symmetry is ranked the most important and has a firstness while non-symmetry has a secondness and asymmetry a thirdness.

Difficulties arises however, when we try to come to terms with the concept of symmetry. For example, how do we identify and represent symmetry, the ground state of an interconnected universe? This is a state in which there is said to be nothing, a void, a zero-point. As such, symmetry exists before representation, that is, as formlessness, before form. Any representation - that is, any representational form - can therefore only point to it by indirect implication, but not directly represent it in symbolic form. The meaning of symmetry can to some extent be implied by words such as 'invariance', 'sameness', 'vacuum', 'nothingness' and 'zero point'. The equals sign '=' in mathematics also implies symmetry. We can however, signify symmetry negatively, by what it is not; by its non-locality, its atemporality and its pre-spatiality.

Representing Symmetry

Symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry are the relationships of formless meaning. They are formless because they cannot be represented by forms. We can discover our inability to represent them quite easily. For example, to represent symmetry by a formula (such as, b=a identical to a=b ) is to automatically impose a non-symmetrical formula on symmetry. This is so because 'a' and 'b' are always different and difference is another name for non-symmetry. If we try and represent symmetry by the formula for identity: (a=a), then again we impose a non-symmetrical representation on symmetry - the two 'a's are always different one from another. If we then say that the equals sign '=' represents symmetry we again impose a non-symmetrical relation on symmetry - the two lines of the equals are always different one from another.

The simple point of this exercise is that it is not possible to represent symmetry (a firstness) directly because all representational forms involve the interaction of stable asymmetrical systems (a fourthness etc). (Some linguists hold that difference, that is, non-symmetry is the defining quality of language but here they confuse a secondness with a fourthness). I have suggested that we can capture some of the meaning of symmetry with certain words and also by the equals '=' sign in mathematics. While the meaning of symmetry is implied by these words it is done so in a second order manner - by inference and implication.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us in a position where we are unable (through the vicissitudes of the structure of consciousness and meaning) to have a formula for symmetry. There is therefore no direct 'sign' of symmetry in the physical world or anywhere else. There is no sign because signs are forms constructed, within conscious awareness, as interacting asymmetrical systems. This is the case for mathematics as well as the rest of the universe.

If this inability to represent symmetry should worry us then it may concern us even more that the greater part of meaning is always invisible. For example, the man who says, "I only believe what I can see" is very confused for he does not even believe in the meaning of this sentence since most of its meaning is beyond his sense perception. While we may perceive the explicit forms of the 23 letters of this sentence, that is all there is which is visible. The rest, which is about ninety percent of the meaning of the sentence, is quite invisible. This ninety percent of meaning is composed of implicit meaning from which the 23 forms have emerged and by which the 23 forms produce the stable concepts of language.

As implicit relations are always non-conscious, ninety percent of the meaning of this sentence is invisible to the senses. Again there is an implication of an ordered ranking here which suggests that the semantic processes that create consciousness and observations are unable to be directly observed, and further, that the implicit processes which construct thought and representation also cannot be explicitly thought or represented. To know these processes of implication as we do is to rely entirely on that which is non-empirical, non-explicit, non-expressible and non-perceptible - which is meaning in its fundamental, formless state. To know this kind of meaning is a spontaneous act, for meaning has meaning for us simply because this is the medium of beingness, in which I - AM.

Representing Non-Symmetry

If we are unable to directly represent symmetry then our difficulties do not end here. A precise formula for non-symmetry (difference) is also impossible for the following reasons. Any simple formulas (for example, a­ b ) may represent non-symmetry if we wish to say so but such a representation is actually an illusion for all representations of any kind are always interactions from complex asymmetrical systems. For example, the 'a's and 'b's of the formula as well as the non-equal '­' sign have meaning for us only because they are elements within larger linguistic systems. It is the implicit meaning we import into these formulas from their larger background contexts which provides the sense of such formulas.

Non-symmetry therefore cannot be isolated from symmetry or asymmetry. In addition, non-symmetry is unable to be represented in any direct manner. This means that the secondness of non-symmetry and the firstness of symmetry can never be reduced to the fourthness, etc of semiosis. Such reversed ordering is actually impossible and any linguistic attempt simply creates illusions and confounds the natural order of this hierarchy.

Representing Asymmetry

Our inability to directly represent symmetry and non-symmetry carries over so that we are also unable to represent individual asymmetrical systems. An asymmetrical system always has a gestalt structure, that is, it has a background of implicit meaning and a foreground constructed by an explicit form which has differential and explicit meaning. A form therefore, is always an asymmetrical system. It should be noted however, that an asymmetrical system never exists on its own as an individual form but is always one of many that interact with each other within a larger ensemble of forms that are located within a background context of implicit meaning.

The collective nature of forms can easily be seen in language where no form can exist on its own and be a signifier, that is, have meaning. A form becomes a linguistic form - a signifier - once it becomes part of a linguistic system and interrelates to the other forms within the system. Thus an individual linguistic form, such as the letter 'a' only has meaning because it is: i) a gestalt of relations, ii) part of an ensemble of forms, and iii) an explicit form within a series of overlapping, implicit, formless contexts.

Our inability to represent the thirdness of an individual asymmetrical system is significant. This inadequacy provides powerful evidence that conscious awareness (the consciousness associated with thought and representation) only functions at the level of the interactions of forms. This level of complexity can be called a fourthness, etc. From the point of view of meaning, conscious awareness only comes into being - exists - through a complex interaction of asymmetrical systems within the nervous system. Conscious awareness therefore exists as semiosis, at an order and at a level of abstraction of a fourthness, etc.

This means that an awareness of forms and their interactions is not a fundamental state of consciousness (as is often assumed by cognitive scientists). Rather, it is a very derivative state, being at least a fourth or more level of abstraction. Yet we think and we speak on these levels of abstraction. Often we even believe that the truth we speak, which is generated by the propositional logic of these levels, is fundamental. However, the meanings generated by the interaction of the forms of our thoughts and words can only ever be derivative. Thinking and expression will always contain a great deal of implied meaning which by necessity represents evidence of ineffable and formless foundations. These foundations are constructed out of at least three prior levels of abstraction: symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry. Something of the 'feel' for these ineffable and formless foundations of implicit meaning can be had from the condition of 'blindsight'.

Blindsight

The term 'blindsight' refers to "the presence of unconscious visually-guided behaviour in patients with lesion of the visual cortex." (Marzi, 1999: 12) Blindsight has become interesting to those who write about consciousness because it presents a dilemma. The patient who cannot see objects, because their visual cortex is damaged, can however, 'see' these objects unconsciously. If one holds the traditional view that consciousness is only an awareness of forms, then non-conscious sight is incomprehensible.

Non-conscious sight is comprehensible however, if the model of consciousness we use is one based on formless meaning and on a hierarchy of relationships. Such a model provides a background of implicit meaning which is not simply a blank, rather, this background context represents an active consciousness that is non-explicit. Conscious awareness is only a derivative system involving perhaps no more than ten percent of the relations within the whole perceptual system. This means that approximately ninety percent of any particular sensory system will be non-explicit, that is, non-conscious, being made up of symmetrical, non-symmetrical and asymmetrical relations. (These are rough percentages extrapolated from an analysis of meaning in language).

If blindsight is a condition which prevents the coming into being of visually explicit meaning (which is what it appears to be) then the ninety percent of the visual system which is still intact will be operating normally. The normal functioning of implicit meaning is to operate as an active agency involving non-explicit consciousness. In the visual system this active agency can be termed non-conscious sight, or blindsight.

Within the whole system of subjectivity we should be able to discover evidence of the active agency of implicit meaning in a range of functions associated with sense perception. In other words, there should be clear evidence of non-conscious hearing, non-conscious sensation and non-conscious sense perception generally, as well non-conscious concept formation. Such non-conscious sense perception should be overlapping and integrated and its function will be to create, generate and bring into being the explicit forms and meanings related to each of the senses as well as to the more general area of thought. In this latter capacity the active agency of implicit meaning has a major role in meaning making and can be called intuition. In this sense, intuition represents non-conscious thinking and non-conscious perception. Such consciousness takes on a priority and significance above the derivative status of words and thought.

Cartesian Dualism

Western intellectual traditions have tended to ignore and erase formless meaning through strategies that reverse the natural order of abstraction. This is what happens in the Cartesian view of the world. The view presented here suggest that the Cartesian coordinates of x, y, and z of space and t, of time - the coordinates at the heart of Newtonian physics - are derivate systems unable on their own to create any order at all. Rather, each coordinate represents a complexity of interacting asymmetrical systems that are generated by morphic fields structured by the formless relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry. These are energetic and formless relations which in science constitute the domain of pre-space, non-locality and atemporality. Interestingly, in psychoanalysis the domain constituted by pre-space, non-locality and atemporality represents the repressed unconscious.

If in our research we accept the Cartesian order as basic (by ignoring its contextual and energetic foundations) and focus on the semiotic interaction of the forms in this order (interactions which are a fourthness, etc) then such a focus will tend to produce the illusion of dualism and all its attendant difficulties. This will occur whether the research is in the arts or science. Dualism always occurs whenever a system's explicitness, that is, a system's differences are privileged over the symmetrical processes which have constructed the system in the first place. Such research will then be predicated on the illusion that there is a physical 'out there-ness' as opposed to the subjective 'in here-ness'.

In the binary systems of Cartesian thought the illusion of division is created by reversing the order of abstraction - a fourthness, etc becomes a firstness. As a consequence of this illusion (of a fourthness, etc becoming a firstness) the role of implicit meaning and the formless character of its morphic agency and its infinite interconnection are all conveniently erased. What is left over is the semiosis of forms which stand, as if alone and separate, from the processes of observation. This erasure and reversal of the order of abstraction through the prioritising of separation and difference is common to artificial intelligence (AI) which relies on binary systems. The illusions which such systems create, I suggest, is one of the reasons why AI is always so artificial.

Symmetry's Attributes

Although symmetry is formless it has infinite attributes. As all meaning is constructed from the three relations of symmetry, non-symmetry and asymmetry and as these three can be reduced to the one metaphysical relation of symmetry, this relation, which is 'omni' present throughout the universe at every point in space/time, comes to represent the Self or God. If this is so, then the nature of the Self is the nature of symmetry and the meaning of Self is the meaning of symmetry.

In contemporary terms, the principle of creation can be called the principle of symmetry. In the 'Creation Hymn' of the Rig-Veda, one of the oldest texts in the world, we are told in beautiful and poetic language about a single, primordial, abstract principle designated THAT, from which the entire universe has evolved. From the oneness of THAT the world of many is said to have come. Down through the ages sages have called IT by various names but usually employing pronouns to emphasise the impersonal and attributeless character of this principle.

From the pronouns of the past we have moved to the noun of today, the noun of symmetry. Symmetry is no less abstract and impersonal than THAT but as a signpost of creation it does have the advantage of implying the processes of creation and ITS' connectedness to the many through various forms of symmetry transformations. Connectedness and transformation are thus prime attributes of this historically attributless principle.

From the present perspective the meaning of 'I - AM' represents the kind of significant self-referral made possible within a holistic, symmetry system which is itself infinite and circular. While symmetry and the notion of a cosmic Self are difficult to define and understand they both have certain 'omni' attributes. Symmetry and Self constitute a formless consciousness which is non-local, pre-spatial and atemporal. The reflexivity of these words implies the circularity of symmetry within itself as a total, circular and holistic system. In spiritual terms such an holistic system is usually referred to as Self or God.

Evidence of symmetry's ever present presence is found within the context of subjective experience. As meaning and consciousness are identical, symmetry is the first and background context of subjectivity and in this role it represents the psychological nature of our unconscious mind in its various modes. Symmetry is also the structural feature of pre-reflective consciousness produced by the interactions of the sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems. Symmetrical relations are always implicit and hidden from conscious awareness, which, as we have said, is itself generated and structured by and through an ensemble of asymmetrical systems which when complex enough become explicit. Evidence of symmetry within subjectivity is therefore evidence of the immanence of the Self within the individual self.

Symmetry is also the basis of all languages and all representational forms. It is impossible to communicate anything without using symmetry. The processes of representation are themselves symmetrical; for example, the word 'dog' stands in for - is symmetrical to - the non-symbolic, pre-reflective experience of. . . . The dots stand for - are symmetrical to - the un-nameable experience common to all. 'Common to all' implies symmetry.

Symmetry is also the basis of love and beauty. These feelings can be described as the harmonious re-connection, through self-reflection, of the universe with itself. For example, a sense of love is the sense of connection; a timeless, spaceless symmetry of feelings; a bonding involving something larger than the local time and space of the individuals involved. As for beauty, if beauty is in the eye of the beholder then this relativity is made holographic by a sense of unqualified connection, a connection where the beholder senses a symmetry within the symphony of a self reflected in Self.

In spiritual terms symmetry is created by love and beauty. Most religions acknowledge that God is love and this is entirely in accord with the formless state of symmetry. Meaning in its formless state of symmetry can be realised as love, as love which is open, expansive and holistic. This love which is turned inward towards itself so that it becomes self-love, this love is distinct from the body-love of narcissism or the physical love of two individuals. This is a spiritual love which seeks a communion with the universal Self through self-reflection. This is symmetry doubling. With such a love we are able to come to the holographic realisation that the self within is the Self within all beings, and that the river of life which flows through us is part of the wave function in an ocean of symmetry which flows throughout the universe.

As the ground state of the universe, symmetry also represents the basis of science. This means that the force, energy and agency of symmetry is present in every point in space/time, both before the Big Bang as well as in the eternal now. Pointing to this conclusion are the comments of a variety of scientists. For example, Heinz Pagels saw the task of modern physics as one of uncovering the symmetries of the world, (Pagels, 1982: 304) while Hermann Weyl said that "all a priori statements in physics have their origins in symmetry", (Wade, 1993: 17) and Werner Heisenberg argued that what was truly fundamental in nature "was not the particles themselves but the symmetries that lay beyond." (Peat, 1987: 94)

The evidence of formless symmetry within language, within non-conscious subjectivity, within love and throughout the entire universe at every point in space/time tells us that there are no gaps between inner and outer worlds because there is not inner or outer world. There is only one, undivided, interconnected, formless, unmoved agency of cosmic consciousness. The differences we see are the differences created by the derivative meaning of forms, the apparent relative autonomy of which has itself been created by the agency of formless meaning. We are therefore already connected to each other and to the environment without the need for conscious design. What is needed is a conscious design to re-learn about what is already there - to learn about coming home to what is already there.

The Bridge

The bridge connecting science and spirituality is now built. It rests on a common view and commitment to truth that is beyond cultural relativities. The structure of this bridge is provided by subjective experience which is the context for both spiritual observance and scientific endeavour. The component members of this structure are called by several names but whatever terms we use they represent the explicit features of a gestalt framework of experience that has a background constructed of formless, implicit, non-conscious meaning.

Meaning is common to both science and spirituality and the making of meaning, through the interaction of component features of subjective experience, is also common to both fields. Meaning in its fundamental role as formless relations provides a new language and a mode of analysis for re-assessing the activities of science and spirituality within an undivided universe. The short exposition I have put forward here rests on the meaning of symmetry. This formless relation, this non-local, atemporal and pre-spatial Reality we call Self, or God, provides us with both the means for analysis (in semiosis) and the ultimate goal of science and spirituality.

The gap between science and spirituality is now closed, for the scientist who seeks after symmetry walks a parallel path to the spiritual seeker who yearns for Self-realisation. The scientist looks outwards to trace the origins of the universe to the symmetry that lies beyond matter. The spiritual seeker looks inwards to the silence of the recursive symmetries of Self-realisation. While the paths are different, the goal of realising the one-ness of symmetry is the same for both seekers. That these paths do converge in symmetry should not surprise us once we have accepted the holistic implications of an interconnected universe built on the firstness of perfect symmetry - a Reality which has agency, consciousness, life (sakti) and which is present within every point in space/time. Another form of the same message is, that this should not surprise us if we have accepted the immanent and transcendental implications of a panenthestic spirituality which moves ever forward through processes of self-reflection to the final goal of Self-realisation.


http://www.swcp.com/~hswift/swc/Essays/lohrey.htm

What does this mean in street lingo?

not sure I get your drift Bill

What does it mean in simpler, high school diploma-type terms?

ok I'll explain it momentarily....I think we discussed a bit of David Bohm and holography before.....I'm posting a few articles first to give some food for thought..but basically some who are trying to bridge the divide between "spirit" and science have utilized the physics of Bohm....he probably came closest to what Einstein was looking for in terms of a Theory of Everything.....something quantum theory physicists are trying to resolve in relation to Einstein's special relativity theory....

The way I define spirituality (the opposite of materialism), I don't see a gap between spirituality and science. A true scientist is motivated by the spiritual act of putting exposure of truth over personal gain.

The conflicts over methodology in finding truth are between Religion and Science. That can only be addressed through discoveries in social science, not natural science. The only thing natural science can do is deny claims of the supernatural that Religions have made, and not until they are disproved, which I doubt is possible.

The gap is between social science and natural science. The only way to bridge that gap is to integrate the languages between the two, and study the medium that connects the two.

Two Words:
Media Science

I agree with you pretty much Bill...but I wouldn't negate natural science....their findings are quite valuable even if seemingly antagonistic.....(and I think most of the antagonism comes from creationists rather than scientists....but that's another subject) at any rate I'll be holding up a scientific bent primarily.....with a mind towards integration.

Keep in mind that various modalities of the sciences such as paleoanthropology, sociology and neurobiology etc are now overlapping more and combining their information and theories.

Media Science? I've always liked your ideas in this area.

There's also a difference between discovering the spirit (meaning the soul or the observer) and discovering spirituality. We've all ready discovered spirituality. At some point natural science may discover physical evidence of the observer, but until then we can only assume. I think the answer isn't in the hardware, but the software. Natural science assumes that the hardware came first, but maybe not.

I agree that most creationist are not out to prove anything, but instead create doubts about scientists and the scientific method. I'm not. I think science is our last hope for spiritual enlightenment even if God is real.

Found an interesting site Bill....I'll just post a portion of the article as it is quite long but the site itself seems worth exploring..






The Social Superorganism and its Global Brain

Society can be viewed as a multicellular organism, with individuals in the role of the cells. The network of communication channels connecting individuals then plays the role of a nervous system for this superorganism, i.e. a "global brain".


It is an old idea, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks, that the whole of human society can be viewed as a single organism. Many thinkers have noticed the similarity between the roles played by different organizations in society and the functions of organs, systems and circuits in the body. For example, industrial plants extract energy and building blocks from raw materials, just like the digestive system. Roads, railways and waterways transport these products from one part of the system to another one, just like the arteries and veins. Garbage dumps and sewage systems collect waste products, just like the colon and the bladder. The army and police protect the society against invaders and rogue elements, just like the immune system.

Such initially vague analogies become more precise as the understanding of organisms increases. The concepts of systems theory provide a good framework for establishing a precise correspondence between organismic and societal functions. The fact that complex organisms, like our own bodies, are built up from individual cells, led to the concept of superorganism. If cells aggregate to form a multicellular organism, then organisms might aggregate to form an organism of organisms: a superorganism. Biologists agree that social insect colonies, such as ant nests or beehives, are best seen as such superorganisms. The activities of a single ant, bee or termite are meaningless unless they are understood in function of the survival of the colony.

Individual humans may seem similar to the cells of a social superorganism, but they are still much more independent than ants or cells (Heylighen & Campbell, 1995). This is especially clear if we look at the remaining competition, conflicts and misunderstandings between individuals and groups. Thus human society is still an ambivalent system, balancing between individual selfishness and collective responsibility. In that sense it may be more similar to organisms like slime molds or sponges, whose cells can live individually as well as collectively, than to true multicellular organisms. However, there seems to be a continuing trend towards global integration. As technological and social systems develop into a more closely knit tissue of interactions, transcending the old boundaries between countries and cultures, the social superorganism seems to turn from a metaphor into a reality. Although many people tend to see the super-organism philosophy as a totalitarian or collectivist ideology, the opposite is true: further integration will basically increase individual freedom and diversity



http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SUPORGLI.html

The Primacy of Consciousness


This essay presents the argument as to why the ultimate nature of reality is mental not material.
(Chapter contributed to The Re-Enchantment of the Cosmos by Ervin Laszlo)



Ervin Laszlo has proposed that the virtual energy field known as the quantum vacuum, or zero-point field, corresponds to what Indian teachings have called Akasha. the source of everything that exists, and in which the memory of the cosmos is encoded. I would like to take his reasoning a step further and suggest that the nature of this ultimate source is consciousness itself, nothing more and nothing less.

Again we find this idea is not new. In the Upanishads, Brahman, the source of the cosmos (literally, "that from which everything grows"), is held to be to Atman ("that which shines"), the essence of consciousness. And in the opening lines of The Dhammapada, the Buddha declares that "All phenomena are preceded by mind, made by mind, and ruled by mind".

Such a view, though widespread in many metaphysical systems, is completely foreign to the current scientific worldview. The world we see is so obviously material in nature; any suggestion that it might have more in common with mind is quickly rejected as having "no basis in reality". However, when we consider this alternative worldview more closely, it turns out that it is not in conflict with any of the findings of modern science—only with its presuppositions. Furthermore, it leads to a picture of the cosmos that is even more enchanted.


All in the Mind

The key to this alternative view is the fact that all our experiences—all our perceptions, sensations, dreams, thoughts and feelings—are forms appearing in consciousness. It doesn't always seem that way. When I see a tree it seems as if I am seeing the tree directly. But science tells us something completely different is happening. Light entering the eye triggers chemical reactions in the retina, these produce electro-chemical impulses which travel along nerve fibers to the brain. The brain analyses the data it receives, and then creates its own picture of what is out there. I then have the experience of seeing a tree. But what I am actually experiencing is not the tree itself, only the image that appears in the mind. This is true of everything I experience. Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every color, sound, sensation, every thought and every feeling, is a form appearing in the mind. It is all an in-forming of consciousness.

The idea that we never experience the physical world directly has intrigued many philosophers. Most notable was the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanual Kant, who drew a clear distinction between the form appearing in the mind—what he called the phenomenon (a Greek word meaning "that which appears to be")—and the world that gives rise to this perception, which he called the noumenon (meaning “that which is apprehended"). All we know, Kant insisted, is the phenomenon. The noumenon, the “thing-in-itself,” remains forever beyond our knowing.

Unlike some of his predecessors, Kant was not suggesting that this reality is the only reality. Irish theologian Bishop Berkeley had likewise argued that we know only our perceptions. He then concluded that nothing exists apart from our perceptions, which forced him into the difficult position of having to explain what happened to the world when no one was perceiving it. Kant held that there is an underlying reality, but we never know it directly. All we can ever know of it is the form that appears in the mind—our mental model of what is "out there".

It is sometimes said that our model of reality is an illusion, but that is misleading. It may all be an appearance in the mind, but it is nonetheless real—the only reality we ever know. The illusion comes when we confuse the reality we experience with the physical reality, the thing-in-itself. The Vedantic philosophers of ancient India spoke of this confusion as maya. Often translated as “illusion” (a false perception of the world), maya is better interpreted as “delusion” (a false belief about the world). We suffer a delusion when we believe the images in our minds are the external world. We deceive ourselves when we think that the tree we see is the tree itself.

The tree itself is a physical object, constructed from physical matter—molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. But from what is the image in the mind constructed? Clearly it is not constructed from physical matter. A perceptual image is composed of the same "stuff" as our dreams, thoughts, and feelings, and we would not say that these are created from physical atoms or molecules. (There might or might not be a corresponding physical activity in the brain, but what I am concerned with here is the substance of the image itself.) So what is the mental substance from which all our experiences are formed?

The English language does not have a good word for this mental essence. In Sanskrit, the word chitta, often translated as consciousness, carries the meaning of mental substance, and is sometimes translated as "mindstuff". It is that which takes on the mental forms of images, sounds, sensations, thoughts, and feelings. They are made of "mindstuff" rather than "matterstuff".

Mindstuff, or chitta, has the potential to take on the form of every possible experience—everything that I, or anyone else, could possibly experience in life; every experience of every being, on this planet, or any other sentient being, anywhere in the cosmos. In this respect consciousness has infinite potential. In the words of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, "Consciousness is the field of all possibilities".

This aspect of consciousness can be likened to the light from a film projector. The projector shines light onto a screen, modifying the light so as to produce one of an infinity of possible images. These images are like the perceptions, sensations, dreams, memories, thoughts, and feelings that we experience—the forms arising in consciousness. The light itself, without which no images would be possible, corresponds to this ability of consciousness to take on form.

We know all the images on a movie screen are composed of light, but we are not usually aware of the light itself; our attention is caught up in the images that appear and the stories they tell. In much the same way, we know we are conscious, but we are usually aware only of the many different perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that appear in the mind. We are seldom aware of consciousness itself.

"All phenomena are projections in the mind."

—The Third Karmapa

No Matter?

Although we may not know the external world directly, we can draw conclusions from our experience as to what it might be like. This, in essence, has been the focus of our scientific endeavors. Scientists have sought to understand the functioning of the world around us, and draw conclusions about its true nature.

To the surprise of many, the world "out there" has turned out to be quite unlike our experience of it. Consider our experience of the color green. In the physical world there is light of a certain frequency, but the light itself is not green. Nor are the electrical impulses that are transmitted from the eye to the brain. No color exists there. The green we see is a quality appearing in the mind in response to this frequency of light. It exists only as a subjective experience in the mind.

The same is true of sound. I hear the music of a violin, but the sound I hear is a quality appearing in the mind. There is no sound as such in the external world, just vibrating air molecules. The smell of a rose does not exist without an experiencing mind, just molecules of a certain shape.

The same is also true of the solidness we experience in matter. Our experience of the world is certainly one of solidness, so we assume that the "thing in itself" must be equally solid. For two thousand years it was believed that atoms were tiny solid balls—a model clearly drawn from everyday experience. Then, as physicists discovered that atoms were composed of more elementary, subatomic particles (electrons, protons, neutrons, and suchlike) the model shifted to one of a central nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons—again, a model based on experience.

An atom may be small, a mere billionth of an inch across, but subatomic particles are a hundred thousand times smaller still. Imagine the nucleus of an atom magnified to the size of a golf ball. The whole atom would then be the size of a football stadium, and the electrons would be like peas flying round the stands. As the early twentieth-century British physicist Sir Arthur Eddington put it, “Matter is mostly ghostly empty space.” To be more precise, it is 99.9999999% empty space.

With the development of quantum theory, physicists have found that even subatomic particles are far from solid. In fact, they are nothing like matter as we know it. They cannot be pinned down and measured precisely. Much of the time they seem more like waves than particles. They are like fuzzy clouds of potential existence, with no definite location. Whatever matter is, it has little, if any, substance.

Our notion of matter as a solid substance is, like the color green, a quality appearing in consciousness. It is a model of what is "out there", but as with almost every other model, quite unlike what is actually out there.

Even the notion of mass is questionable. In his General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein showed that mass and acceleration are indistinguishable. A person in an elevator feels lighter when the elevator accelerates downwards, and heavier when it decelerates to a halt. This is no illusion, scales would also show your weight to have changed. What we experience as mass is the resistance of the ground beneath our feet to our otherwise free fall towards the center of the Earth. According to Einstein, we are being continually decelerated, and interpret that as mass. An astronaut in orbit experiences no mass—until, that is, he bumps into the wall of the spacecraft and experiences a temporary deceleration.

"Whatever matter is, it is not made of matter.'

—Prof. Hans-Peter Dürr

Spacetime and Action

Einstein's work also revealed that space and time are not absolutes. They vary according to the motion of the observer. If you are moving rapidly past me, and we both measure the distance and time between two events—a car traveling from one end of a street to another, say—then you will observe the car to have traveled less distance in less time than I observe. Conversely, from your point of view, I am moving rapidly past you, and in your frame of reference I will observe less space and time than you do. Weird? Yes. And almost impossible for us to conceive of. Yet numerous experiments have shown it to be true. It is our common sense notions of space and time that are wrong. Once again they are constructs in the mind, and do not perfectly model what is out there.

Kant foresaw this a hundred years before Einstein. He concluded that space and time are the dimensional framework in which the mind constructs its experience. They are built into the perceiving process, and we cannot but think in terms of space and time. But they are not aspects of the objective reality. That reality, according to Einstein, is something else, what he called "spacetime". When observed, spacetime appears as a certain amount of space and a certain amount of time. But how much is perceived as space and how much is perceived as time is not fixed; they depend upon the motion of the observer.

If space, time, and matter have no absolute objective status, what about energy? Physicists have a hard time saying exactly what energy is. It is defined as the potential to do work, that is, to create change. Energy comes in many different forms: potential energy, kinetic energy, chemical energy, electrical energy, heat energy, radiation energy. But we never measure energy as such, only the changes that we attribute to energy.

Energy if often said to be a fundamental quality of the cosmos. But that too turns out to be a mistake. According the Special Theory of Relativity, energy and mass are interchangeable, related by Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2. Observers traveling at different speeds will differ in their measurements of how much energy an object has.

Quantum theory offers further clues as to the nature of energy. The quantum is commonly called a quantum of energy, the smallest possible unit of energy. But that is not strictly correct. The quantum is actually a quantum of action.

What is action? It is another physical quantity like distance, velocity, momentum, force, and others that we meet in physics, but it is not usually given much attention in our basic math or physics

The amount of action in a quantum is exceedingly small, about 0.00000000000000000000000000662618 erg.secs (or 6.62618 x 10 erg.secs in mathematical shorthand)—but it is always exactly the same amount. It as one of the few absolutes in existence, and more fundamental than space, time, matter, or energy. The Zero-Point Field is not therefore a potential energy field—despite the fact it is often referred to as such. It is a potential quantum field, a field of potential action.

A photon is a single quantum of light, but the energy associated with a photon varies enormously. A gamma-ray photon, for example, packs trillions of times more energy than a radio-wave photon. But each and every photon, each and every quantum, is an identical unit of action.

When the photon is absorbed—by the retina of the eye, say—it manifests as a certain amount of energy, measured by the amount of change it is capable of creating. This change is what is conveyed to the brain and then interpreted as color. The amount of change, or energy, is dependent upon the frequency, which is why we say different colors correspond to different frequencies of light.

What is frequency? Again it is another model taken from experience and then imagined to apply to the photon. It is most unlikely that a photon has frequency as we think of it. Indeed, even the idea of a photon is another example of how we have projected our experience on to the external world. We experience particles so imagine light might be a particle. We also have the experience of waves, so imagine light as a wave. Sometimes light seems to fit one description, other times another. It is much more likely that light is neither wave nor particle. For reasons of space, I will not go into the details of the argument here, but the interested reader can find more in my book From Science to God.

To summarize the argument so far: Our whole experience is a construction in the mind, a form appearing in consciousness. These mental forms are composed not of physical substance but of"mindstuff". We imagine that the world out there is like the forms that appear in consciousness, but it turns out, that in nearly every aspect, the external is not at all like the images created in the mind. What appear to us as fundamental dimensions and attributes of the physical world—space, time, matter and energy—are but the fundamental dimensions and attributes of the forms appearing in consciousness.

"Matter is derived from mind, not mind from matter."

—The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation


Two Aspects or One?


In Chapter Four, Ervin introduces panpsychism: the hypothesis that consciousness is not unique to human beings, or higher animals, or even creatures with nervous systems. It is in everything. As he is at pains to point out, this is not to imply that simpler systems have thoughts or feelings, or any of the other mental functions that we associate with consciousness, only that the capacity for consciousness is there in some form, however faint. Even a lowly bacterium has a glimmer of the inner light, maybe a billionth of the inner light we know, but not nothing at all.

The current scientific paradigm assumes the exact opposite—that matter itself is completely insentient, it is completely devoid of the capacity for experience. Consciousness only comes into existence with the evolution of complex nervous systems. The problem with this view—David Chalmers', "hard problem"—is explaining how conscious experience could ever emerge from insentient matter. Why doesn't all that neural processing go on "in the dark?"

Ervin argues that the only tenable answer, anathema as it may be to the current scientific worldview, is that the capacity for inner experience does not suddenly appear, as if by magic, once a particular level of complexity has arisen. The potential for inner experience has been there all along.

Panpsychism is usually taken to imply that there are dual aspects to everything. There is the physical aspect, that which we can observe from the outside, and there is a mental aspect, the experiences known from the inside. For a long time I went along with this dual aspect view. But recently I have begun to question it. I have not questioned whether or not there is a mental aspect, which is the question that most people raise. I have come to question whether there is, after all, a physical aspect. I realize this is radical to many, but let me briefly go over the reasons behind this suggestion and the implications.

Every time we try to pin down the physical aspect we come away empty-handed. Every idea we have had of the physical has proven to be wrong, and the notion of materiality seems to be evaporating before our eyes. But our belief in he material world is so deeply engrained—and so powerfully reinforced by our experience—that we cling to our assumption that there must be some physical essence. Like the medieval astronomers who never questioned their assumption that the Earth was the center of the universe, we never question our assumption that the external world is physical in nature. Indeed it was quite startling to me when I realized that the answer might be staring us straight in the face. Maybe there really is nothing there. No "thing" that is. No physical aspect. Maybe there is only a mental aspect to everything.

We would then have to think of the Akashic Field as a field that is entirely mental in nature. Its essence is the essence of mind. It's hard to imagine, I know. In fact all we can imagine are the forms arising in our minds. We cannot imagine consciousness itself. It is the imaginer, that in which images arise. It is probably best not even to try to imagine what a mental field is like, for we would surely be as wrong as when we try to imagine quanta, or spacetime.

All we can say about it is that it is not a uniform field. It must contain distinctions of some kind, for it is these variations that are the origin of our perception of the world. If there were no variations in the field, there would be nothing to observe, nothing to experience.

These variations in the field are the "objects" of our perception. But they are not objects in the sense of a material object. They only become material objects in the mind of the observer. There then appears to be a material "thing" out there. We then assume that the physicality we experience, which seems so intrinsic to the world we know, must also be an intrinsic aspect of the external world.

Even though there may be no physical basis to the external world, the laws of physics still hold true. The only thing that changes is our assumption of what we are measuring. We are not measuring physical particles or such, but perturbations in the Akashic mind-field. The laws of "physics" become the laws governing the unfolding of a mental field, reflections of how perturbations in this field interact.

What we call an elementary particle would correspond to an elementary variation in the field. We might better call it an elementary entity rather than particle. Elementary entities are organized into atoms, molecules, cells and suchlike, just as in the current paradigm. The difference is that we no longer have to think of consciousness sensing matter (with all the difficulties that involves of how the physical influences the mental), consciousness is now sensing consciousness directly.

Interaction might now be thought of as perception—the perception of one region in the mind-field by another. In the current view every interaction is mediated by a quantum of action (an inter-action). In this alternative view, the smallest item would be a unit of perception, a unit of experience. It would be a quantum of consciousness, a quantum of chitta.

In the physical world of our experience we have discovered action to be a fundamental quality. In this alternative view, that still is true. Consciousness acts as it takes form. A quantum of action is a quantum of experience, a quantum of chitta.

We can now begin to understand why the material world appears to be devoid of consciousness. The qualities that appear in the mind—the color, sound, smell, substance, or whatever—become objects of perception, "the material world". But there is no sign of consciousness itself in the images of matter that appear in the mind. Just as when we watch a movie, the picture on the screen may be composed of light, but there is no evidence in the unfolding story that this is the case. The forms that arise in the mind give no hint in themselves that they are all manifestations of mindstuff. They appear to be other than consciousness. And so we assume that the stuff of the world "out there"—the matterstuff—is insentient.

"Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness.
The "stuff" of the world is mindstuff."

—Sir Arthur Eddington

The Hard Question Revisited


The hard question of how insentient matter could ever give rise to conscious experience is now turned inside-out. There is no insentient matter—apart from that appearing in the mind. The question now becomes: How does mind take on all these qualities that we experience, including that of matter?

That question is best answered by direct awareness; by turning the light of consciousness in upon itself, and observing the nature of mind first-hand. Those who have chosen this path are the great mystics, yogis, seers, saints, rishis, and roshis who are found dotted throughout human history.

Despite the differences in time and culture, they have come to remarkably similar conclusions. These conclusions do not, however, make much sense to the contemporary Western mind. In most cases they seem to be so a odds with the current scientific worldview that they are rejected out of hand—and with them any credibility there may be for spirituality in general.

Consider, for instance, the statement by Baba Muktananda that "You are the entire universe. You are in all, and all is in you. Sun, moon, and stars revolve within you." Most people would be puzzled, if not confused. It clearly goes against the contemporary worldview in which I am a small point at the center of my universe, around which everything else revolves. Muktananda appears to be saying the exact opposite. Possibly, we might surmise, a mind deranged by too much meditation.

However, if we see it in terms of an intimate personal acquaintance with the arising of mental phenomena, and hence of our whole world, it makes much more sense. Every experience, every thing we ever know, is taking place within us.

Likewise, when we read such peoples' accounts of creation, we are likely to interpret them in terms of how the physical world was created. In a sense they are. But they are talking of the physical world as it appears in the mind—how that is being continually created.

The Ashtavakra Gita, a highly venerated Indian text, says: "The Universe produced phenomenally in me, is pervaded by me. . . From me the world is born, in me it exists, in me it dissolves." Hardly comprehensible, until we consider it from the point of view of consciousness.

"In the beginning was Logos." Often translated as "The Word", logos also means "thought, or essence." In the beginning was the mental essence, chitta.

"Be still and know that I am God" is not necessarily an injunction to stop moving around and recognize that the person speaking is the creator of the entire cosmos; it is much more likely an encouragement to still the mind—in the words of the great yogi Patanjali, "let the manifesting of chitta die down"—and discover through direct knowing, that "I", that ever-present, never-changing, innermost essence of your own mind, is the essence of everything.

It is in this that I find a personal reenchantment of the cosmos. If our own essence is divine, and the essence of consciousness is to be found in everything, everywhere, then everything is divine. Panpsychism becomes pantheism. It doesn't matter whether we call it Universal Mind, Allah, God, Jehovah, the Great Spirit, or the Quantum Vacuum Field, we are all of that same essence.

This raises my level of awe for the world in which I live, or seem to live. When I consider that—despite all appearances to the contrary—this world is, in the final analysis, of the same essence as my own being, I am filled with wonder. Every thing is enchanted anew.


http://www.peterussell.com/SP/PrimConsc.html

Sociobiology and Politics

BEYOND THE SUPERCOMPUTER:
SOCIAL GROUPS AS SELF-INVENTION MACHINES

by Howard Bloom

In the new evolutionary disciplines there is a debate with major implications for the way in which we view politics, citizenship, emotions, health, ideology, and even the perceptual processes that produce a consensual reality.

In one sense, the scientific argument resembles that between the Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians who, in Gulliver's Travels, warred over whether a breakfast egg should be opened at the large or at the pointed end. Dominating the field are individual selectionists, those who believe that the emergence of all behavior must be explained by forms of self-interest which embody what author Robert Wright, in his summation of "the credo of the new paradigm," calls "head to head competition" between individual genes and often between individual animals or humans (Wright, 1985: 188). Group selectionists, on the other hand, are convinced that new evolutionary forms can emerge both from the battle for personal advantage and from the competition between social coalitions.

The formulae upon which individual selectionism rests were enunciated by biologist William Hamilton in the early 1960s. Hamilton's conclusions were based on an analysis of bees and other Hymenoptera. The view that all behavior is ultimately based on self-interest had strongly taken hold. How, then, could one account for altruism? Hamilton focused on the selfless manner with which female worker bees sacrifice their reproductive rights and chastely serve their queen. His triumph was a mathematical demonstration that the workers were carrying essentially the same genes as the queen. Hence when an individual lived out her life on behalf of her monarch, she only appeared to be ignoring her own needs. The genes she carried were closely related to those in the eggs laid by her mistress. By pampering the colony's egg-layer, each worker was coddling replicas of her own internal blueprint. Altruism, asserted Hamilton, was self-interest in disguise.

Hamilton's ideas and those built upon them have contributed mightily to our understanding of evolutionary mechanisms in fields from psychology, medicine, and ecology to the study of animals in the wild.

But roughly twenty-five years after the Hamiltonian epiphany, examination of real world bee colonies demonstrated that Hamilton's mathematics did not correspond with fact. There was far more genetic variety in clusters of unselfish insects than the equations would allow (Queller et al., 1988; Seeley, 1995: 7). Individuals were not abjuring their interests simply to protect near-clones of their own genomic material. Apparently something else was going on. Nonetheless, concepts based on what became known as the selfish gene (Dawkins, 1976) are now dogma.

Many scientists have been tempted to propose non-Hamiltonian approaches to the activities within and the competition between groups. For decades, these thinkers have been stopped by the quiet threat of exclusion from professional respectability, expulsion from career advancement, and banishment from the possibility of academic tenure.

However it is becoming increasingly obvious to a small group of heretics that a new breed of evolutionary insights can emerge if one accepts the coexistence of both group and individual selection. In other words, indications are that the social and biological sciences may benefit enormously from a truce between the Blefuscudians and the Lilliputians.

In my book The Lucifer Principle: a scientific expedition into the forces of history (Bloom, 1995), I've attempted to show the many ways in which we are both selfish competitors and pawns of the social group. For example, The Lucifer Principle presents evidence that individuals are biologically wired as expendable cells in a social "superorganism." The book goes on to contend that human groups follow the rules of dominance hierarchies uncovered by naturalists but normally applied primarily to individuals. The Lucifer Principle combines naturalists' observations with those of psychoendocrinologists and others to shed new light on phenomena from the bickering of local cliques to the machinations of nation-states and from the maneuvering of economic competitors to the butchery of armies.

But perhaps the best way to demonstrate how far one can move if one accepts both individual and group selection is to reveal one of the many potential approaches to a post-individual selectionist sociobiology. I propose to outline five elements which turn virtually every form of social group--from a teenage gang to a multi-national culture--into a collective intelligence, a complex adaptive system whose powers of perception and invention both utilize and transcend those of the individuals within it. Next I'll show how social groups at every level on the evolutionary ladder operate as group brains. Finally, I'll present examples to suggest how the five principles can throw individual passions, mass mood swings, geopolitics, fashion, fads, and health into surprising new perspective.

A great deal of work has been done since 1980 on complex adaptive systems--biological and electronic learning machines. Most of this scholarship has taken mathematical form. However, it is possible to sum up a complex adaptive system's quintet of key elements entirely without equations. These elements are (1) conformity enforcers, (2) diversity generators, (3) utility sorters, (4) resource shifters, and (5) intergroup tournaments.

•Conformity enforcers impose sufficient similarity on group members to give the social structure coherence, relative permanence, and the ability to carry out large-scale, integrated, multi-participant projects.

In humans, conformity enforcers lead, among other things, to a collective perception, a socially constructed view of reality which influences both childhood brain development and adult sensory processing, and which produces a Weltanschauung displaying many of the characteristics of a shared hallucination.

•Diversity generators spawn variety. Each individual represents a hypothesis in the group mind. It is vital for the group's flexibility that it have numerous fallback positions in the form of individuals sufficiently different to provide approaches which, while they may not be necessary today, could prove vital tomorrow. This can easily be seen in the operation of one of nature's most superb learning machines, the immune system. The immune system contains different antibody types, each a separate conjecture about the nature of a potential invader (Farmer et al., 1985: 188). However diversity generators take on their most intriguing dimensions among human beings.

•Next come the utility sorters. Utility sorters are systems which sift through individuals, favoring those whose contributions are most likely to be of value. These pitiless evaluators toss those whose presence represents excess baggage and faulty guesswork into biological, psychological, and perceptual limbo. Some utility sorters are external to the individual. But a surprising number are internal. That is, they are involuntary components of a being's physiology.

•Fourth are the resource shifters. Successful learning machines shunt vast amounts of assets to the individuals who show a sense of control over the current social and external environment. These same learning machines cast individuals whose endowments seem extraneous into a state of relative deprivation. Christ captured the essence of the algorithm when he observed "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath" (Mark 4:25).

•And bringing up the rear are intergroup tournaments, battles which force each collective entity, each group brain, to continue churning out fresh innovations for the sake of survival. Psychoneuroimmunologists have found that we come complete at birth with a myriad of seemingly self-defeating and maladaptive physiological reactions. It is currently fashionable to suppose that self-destructive built-ins are misplaced leftovers from our hunter-gatherer days. But there is an enormous amount of evidence that each of these biological handicaps gives the group intellect a competitive edge. In fact, there is good reason to believe that autonomic shut-down devices help produce an even more positive byproduct: the constant enrichment of the environment, the complexification of the planetary biomass.

To understand how these five principles affect you and me, it may be helpful to examine the workings of a group brain in an organism normally thought to have no intelligence at all: the bacterium
In the late 1980s, University of Tel Aviv physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob and the University of Chicago's James Shapiro were perplexed. Bacteria, which we are popularly regarded as loners, are extraordinarily social, clustering in highly structured colonies. Traditional neo-Darwinism says that bacteria stumble from one innovation to another by random mutation. But a growing body of evidence has accumulated to indicate that bacterial mutations are not completely random (Kiely, 1990; Weiss, 1990; Lipkin, 1995a; Lipkin, 1995b). Seemingly every month fresh studies suggest that these mutations may, in fact, be genetic alterations "custom-tailored" to overcome the emergencies of the moment.

Ben-Jacob detoured from normal physics and spent five years studying bacillus subtilis. Meanwhile Shapiro focused on such organisms as E. coli and salmonella. Unlike the traditional biologists who had preceded them, both Shapiro and Ben-Jacob applied an unconventional tool to their data: the insights they had absorbed from the mathematics of materials science. Gradually their work indicated that, rather than being a mere carrier of construction plans, the package of genes carried by each individual subtilis functions as a computer. What's more, the genetic bundle seemed to accomplish something even computers cannot achieve. Says Ben-Jacob, "the genome makes calculations and changes itself according to the outcome." Unlike a silicon chip, the genome adapts to unaccustomed problems by remodeling itself (Eshel Ben-Jacob, personal communication, 1996; Ben-Jacob, 1993; Ben-Jacob, 1997; Ben Jacob, 1998; Ben-Jacob and Dworkin, 1997; Shapiro, 1991).1

Reaching this conclusion left a puzzle. Gödel's theorem implies that one computer cannot design another computer with more sophisticated computational powers than its own. So how does the individual bacterium's central processing unit confront large-scale catastrophe, natural disaster so overwhelming that it dwarfs the bacteria's solo computational abilities? The answer, Ben-Jacob hypothesized, lay in networking--in knitting the colony's multitude of genomic personal computers into something beyond even the massively parallel distributed processor known as a supercomputer. A supercomputer is only faster than its less sophisticated cousins, but does not transcend many of the smaller machines' most basic limitations. However the "creative net" of the bacillus, unlike a machine, can recast its form to face an unfamiliar challenge.

Ben-Jacob has now analyzed thousands of colonies of bacillus subtilis to find out if his creative network hypothesis is true, and if so what makes the collective information-processor work. His conclusion: bacilli are in constant contact, communicating through a wide variety of means, measuring their environment's limitations and opportunities, and feeding their data to each other, then finally summing the product through collaborative decision. In short, bacilli engage in many of the basic activities we associate with human beings.

Here's how Ben-Jacob's work appears when filtered through the lens of a social learning machine's five principles:

1) Bacillus subtilis colonies utilize the most basic conformity enforcer--the genome, which restricts the range of forms and of operating methods among the colony's individuals. The resulting semi-uniformity makes it possible for each and every member of the community to "understand" a common collection of "languages."

2) Bacillus subtilis colonies employ a variety of diversity generators. Says Ben-Jacob, bacterial clones (genetically identical offspring of the same mother) can assume intriguingly different variations. Which each dons depends on the chemical signals it picks up from the herd around it. These cues activate or deactivate individual genes, redrawing a bacterium's design and replacing its old operations manual (Ben-Jacob, personal communication, 1996). In the best of times, when food is plentiful, the colony clumps together for the feast. Divergent appetites and digestive abilities are vital to a gorging group's survival. The bacteria which concentrate on mining the new food source produce a poisonous by-product--bacterial excreta, the equivalent of feces and urine. Other bacteria adopt an entirely different metabolic mode. To them the excrement is caviar. By snacking heartily on toxic waste, they prevent the colony from killing itself (Ben-Jacob, personal communication, 1996).

More diversity generators kick in when the colony's banquet runs out. As famine approaches, individuals send out a chemotactic signal of repulsion, a signal that says "spread out, flee, explore." This prods roughly 10,000 groups of cells to act as scouting parties, setting forth in a trek which looks to the human eye like a spreading circle of fractal lace. Meanwhile other cellular cohorts apparently set up posts in the wake of the outward advance and channel the findings of the explorers toward the center.

3) At this stage the teams of pioneers (technically called "random walkers") utilize the third principle of a complex adaptive system: the colony's utility sorters. Those exploration parties which find slim pickings have an internal device, the bacterial equivalent of what British theorist Michael Waller, writing about human beings, has called a "comparator mechanism" (Waller, 1995). This gauge determines that the outriders have chanced across parched and dangerous territory. Their mission, in short, has failed. The unfortunates send out an altruistic repellent which makes others in the group avoid them, leaving them to starve in isolation.

Conversely, discoverers which encounter a cornucopia of edibles have their comparator mechanisms tweaked in the opposite direction. They disperse an attractant which makes them the star of the party.

4) Now the fourth principle of the complex adaptive system enters the petri dish: the resource shifters. Those stranded in the desert are deprived of nutrients, which their location cannot provide, of companionship, and, most important from the point of view of the group brain, of what might best be termed popularity. Meanwhile, those who find an overflowing buffet eat their fill and command the attention and protection of a gathering crowd. They are transformed into leaders, guiding the group mind. "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath" (Mark 4:25).

Should things prove truly grim, however, and even the most strenuous searchers confirm that food is nowhere within reach, another diversity generator, the most startling of them all, may rouse to meet the challenge. It is a mechanism which James Shapiro calls the "genetic engineer." Explains Ben-Jacob, "the cell carries a complete set of tools for genetic self-reconstruction: plasmids, phages, transposons, and too many others to mention,... the same tools, in fact, used in the lab today for genetic engineering." A microscopic research and development squadron goes to work recrafting its own genetic string.

Which raises a question: does the genomic skunk works merely trot out pre-fabricated parts which have worked in the past? Or is it capable of true innovation?

Explains Ben-Jacob, "We've tried exposing bacterial colonies to conditions so novel that the creatures could never have encountered them before. Tough conditions, conditions of life and death. We wanted to know how inventive the colonies could be in reworking their genetic code. For example, we took bacteria that can't move on agar but are able to roam freely in liquid. We put them on the wilderness of their worst nightmares, agar, and deprived them of food. The need to branch out in search of grazing land was a true creative challenge." By forming a modular network beyond the supercomputer, by assembling a group mind, the massed genetic engineering teams were able to solve the problem.

Thanks to the synergy of the conformity enforcer, the diversity generator, the utility sorter, and the resource shifter, the colony was capable of something numerous humans never achieve--creativity.

5) In a natural environment, the fifth of a complex adaptive system's principles would presumably come into play: the intergroup tournament. Alas, Ben-Jacob has studied each colony isolated in its own petri dish, sealed off by glass walls from competing groups. But as the resources which feed the bacillus subtilis run out, imagine what might happen if a spore of another bacterial species were to drop in, a species which found the inedible plateau on which the subtilis was stranded to be more nourishing than roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The race would be on. While the bacillus subtilis reworked its genome in an effort to gain sustenance from the now (to it) barren waste, the newcomer would rush to reproduce, taking advantage of the fact that subtilis' inedible slabs are its entrée du jour.

As the two groups struggled to take over the petri dish, would a new innovation emerge from the contest, an innovation of the sort which enriches the fate of a species for eons? One which transforms ever more of this once entirely barren planet into food for life?

Ample evidence indicates that complex adaptive systems, with their enormous competitive advantages, have progressed from kin‑groups through to mega-societies with little or no regard for the interests of solitary selfish genes. This is particularly apparent in large-scale human societies, societies seemingly ruled by the same five principles which structure colonies of bacillus subtilis:

CONFORMITY ENFORCERS. Humans are biologically programmed to "fit in". For example, an infant's brain is shaped by the culture into which it is born. Six-month olds can either distinguish or produce every sound in virtually every human language. But within a mere four months, this capacity has decreased by roughly two thirds (Werker, 1989; Werker and Desjardins, 1995; Werker and Pegg, in press). This slashing of ability, like other cultural blinkers of perceptions (Eisenberg, 1995; Segall, et al. 1996; Shi-xu, 1995, Lucy, 1992; Berridge and Robinson, 1995; Lancaster, 1968; Emde, 1984; Belsky et al. 1996; Bower, 1995; Caporael, 1995; Nisbett and Ross, 1980; Shweder and D'Andrade, 1980), is accompanied by extensive alterations in the cerebral tissue. During human development, brain cells are measured against the requirements of the physical and socio‑cultural environment. The 50% of neurons found useful thrive. The 50% which remain unexercised literally cease to be (Gould, 1994; Young et al. 1994; Nadis, 1993; Levine, 1988; Elbert et al. 1995; Barinaga, 1994; Pascual-Leone and Torres, 1993; Holden, 1995; Korein, 1988.). The cerebral floor plan underlying the mind is redrawn to conform to a larger social pattern.

Experiments by memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus (Loftus, 1980), psychologist Solomon Asch (Asch, 1956), and numerous others have demonstrated that even among adults there is a propensity to form a shared perception of the world, a view so distinctive that it can give outsiders the impression of a mass delusion. Pressures to conform arise from the urge to belong, the fear of social ostracism, and the appeal of role models. Nearly forty years ago sociologist Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1959) demonstrated that even much of what we think of as our most willful behavior is guided by scripts drafted for us by the social organism of which we are a part.

DIVERSITY GENERATORS. All cultures impose conformity. Yet all benefit from the contribution of their marginal personalities--those who do not fit the mold. Numerous tribal groups turn their cross-dressers and their insane into shamans or seers and use the quirks of their vision as a guide in times of uncertainty. Large-scale societies benefit even further from singular individuals and unorthodox subcultures. Between 361 and 206 BC, the Chinese empire gained its unity, its bureaucratic structure and its standardized writing system from the most eccentric section of the future country, Ch'in, a territory constantly nourished by the input of traders shuttling between one culture and another. The religious non-conformists of 17th and 18th century England were excluded from the country's official schools. Formulating their own educational substitute, they abandoned the traditional Latin trivium and quadrivium in favor of the newly emerging sciences. Forbidden to participate in traditional high-status occupations, they turned their attention to such déclassé new enterprises as canal building and the mining of coal. The result: the non-conformists saved Britain from possible stagnation and helped usher in the Industrial Revolution.

Productive deviants frequently benefit from "field independence" and a strong "internal locus of control" (Lefcourt, 1982). All too often, one era's despised tinkerer--an isolate like Gregor Mendel--will lay the groundwork for a later generation's innovative whiz kids.

Additional diversity generators include impulses toward self-assertion, individuation, and youthful rebellion, not to mention Sigmund Freud's "narcissism of minor differences"(Freud, 1989; Scherer and Ekman, 1984; Boorstin, 1953; Birenbaum and Lesieur, 1982; Stevens and Price, 1996), Eric Erikson's "pseudospeciation," and the closely related ecological phenomenon of "character displacement" (Grant, 1994; Schluter, 1994). In all of these, fundamentally similar individuals seize on petty discrepancies and magnify them until they become insurmountable barriers (Stevens and Price, 1996). Even in tribal societies, the resulting differences of opinion easily overleap genetic barriers, turning brother against brother (Johnson and Johnson, 1995; de Waal, 1989: 247f.). In the last two and a half millennia, these forces have often gone one step further and created camaraderie among those of wildly varying chromosomal background.

Human diversity generators are shifted into high gear by precisely the type of signals which trigger diversity generation among bacteria‑‑signs that the environment is overcrowded, under‑resourced, or lacking in other critical requirements for survival. A large body of studies demonstrates how stressors ranging from a rapid rise in taxes to a dramatic increase or drop in temperature and even an intolerable noise level can break down group cohesion, increase conflict, and encourage restlessness. The result is often a group split which provokes dissenters to search for a new environment, a new world view, and/or a new modus operandi (Griffitt, 1970; Griffitt and Veitch 1971; Weber et al. 1988: 129, 341; Horney et al. 1995; Roberts, 1983: 558-562; Ferguson and Rogers 1981: 141; Dollard et al. 1957: 44; Braudel, 1981: 144f; Weber, 1968: xxiii; Russ et al. 1979). These mechanisms and their effects eerily parallel the chemotactic repulsers which drive stressed bacteria apart, turning human migrants, malcontents, and rebels into feelers who scour the technical, social, and geographic landscape in search of a new way forward for the wider group.

UTILITY SORTERS. The evidence, at this point, is not looking good for the selfish gene and its promoter, the individual selectionist. Among bacteria, a built-in comparator mechanism requires each forager to let the world know whether it has succeeded or failed. If its quest has been productive, physiology drives the bacillus to broadcast the message "follow me." If its expedition has failed, it has no choice but to signal "leave me to my fate." Voluminous evidence indicates that comparator mechanisms are virtually standard equipment in all social animals, from the microbial level (Ameisen, 1996) to that of crustaceans (Lange, 1996; Barinaga, 1996; Kravitz, 1988; Adler, 1996), birds,2 and mammals. At each evolutionary level these internal and external sensors of adaptation become more varied and complex. Are humans slaves to similarly implacable biological impulses?

Through a variety of means, among them a sense of control (Lefcourt, 1982: 3-18; Miller et al. 1977; Shors et al. 1989; Shavit, 1983; Davis et al. 1980; Buchsbaum et al. 1982; Sagan, 1988; Davis et al. 1979) over circumstance and the intake of social feedback (Bloom 1995: 60-70, 140-145; Kemper, 1990: 7, 54, 197; Freedman, 1979: 100f; Kroeber, 1952: 43-47; Holmes, 1979), comparator mechanisms indicate to you and me our utility to the social group. A sense of being unneeded leads to a collapse of our self‑esteem (Brown et al. 1986; Price, 1988; Barkow, 1989; Festinger, 1944; Aronson and Linder, 1965; Goleman, 1988; Bloom, 1995: 47-72, 140-145; Maslow, 1973; I.H. Jones et al. 1995) and a range of physiological changes which, in the natural world, would sharply increase the odds of death. Our immune system is impaired (Bower, 1986; Ader, 1983; Sapolsky, 1990; Sapolsky, 1988; Davidson, 1992; Bower, 1988); our perceptions are dulled (Miller et al. 1977; Gazzaniga, 1992: 191-193); our sexual drive diminishes (Sapolsky, 1987; Miller et al. 1977); in males, sperm count and motility both fall; our appetite shrinks or is lost (Gallagher, 1992: 12-15; Lefcourt, 1982: 10; Thomas and DeWald, 1977: 229; Seligman, 1990: 69); our social magnetism evaporates (Gilbert et al. 1994: 149-165; Bloom, 1995: 140-145); and we tend to experience a profound sense of lethargy, negativity, and hopelessness (Dabbs and Leventhal, 1966; Gilbert and Allan, 1994).

A multitude of psychophysiological and psychoneuroimmunological deactivators contribute to these effects, among them "learned helplessness" and the chronic secretion of glucocorticoids and endogenous opiates. A persistent bath of glucocorticoids, for example, literally kills tissue in the hippocampus--a part of the brain vital to memory.

Comparator mechanisms in those who feel un-needed go a step further. They produce a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle signals which drive others away, thus marginalizing the victim as thoroughly as the bacteria whose quest has failed (De Vries et al. 1994: 108; Bloom, 1995: 47-49, 55-56, 60-66, 110-115, 325).

By contrast, those of us who've continuously had a handle on our fate:

are blessed with chemical tonics like androgens and serotonin, which boost health, sexual appetite, and energy (Sapolsky, 1988);


experience heightened acuity and independence of perception (Triandis 1993, Hollander 1958, Kandel and Hawkins 1992, Herskovits 1965: 39, Ezzell 1992);


become socially captivating (Thibaut and Riecken, 1995; Freedman, 1979: 68; Hurwitz et al. 1953; Torrance 1954); and send out variants of the successful bacterium's chemotactic "gather round and follow my ways," using such devices as postural cues, verbal subtleties (Erikson et al. 1978), body languages (Henley, 1977; Thayer, 1989: 22; Hurwitz et al. 1953; Strodtbeck, 1957; Freedman, 1979: 96; K.R.L. Hall, 1967: 270; McGinley et al. 1975; Mehrabian 1981), and status symbols (Sahlins, 1986; Veblen, 1934; Johnson and Earle, 1987: 219; Galbraith, 1976; Fraser, 1989: 50; Braudel, 1981: 333).

In other words, the folks with the firmest grasp on the challenges facing their group become its opinion-makers. They are given the privilege of steering the collective mind. The bumblers and wrong-guessers either submit to the leadership of others, or, if the community undergoes a severe lack of resources, succumb to disease or suicide.

This concept and the empirical data from which it is derived run directly counter to the tenets of individual selectionism and current neo-Darwinism. In many instances, the victims of self‑perceived failure damage or eliminate, not only their own evolutionary interests, but also those of their kin. For example, a business failure can result either in suicide or other patterns of behavior equally damaging to both spouse and offspring. The case of the hospitalized is even more illustrative. Studies show that depressed patients become withdrawn (Zuckerman, 1995), cranky, inarticulate, lacking in wit, and deprived of verbal flexibility (E.E. Jones and Berglas, 1978; Paloutzian and Ellison, 1982; W.H. Jones et al. 1981). Even their facial gestures and body language drive others away (Altman and Vinsel, 1977; Raven, 1983: 253, 685; Argyle, 1989: 60; Kalin, 1993; Clore and Byrne, 1974; Gotlib, 1992; Myers and Diener, 1995; Emmons, 1986; Myers, 1993; Veenhoven, 1988; Seligman, 1990: 187-198; Bull, 1986: 121; Mehrabian and Williams, 1969; Kiritz 1971). The depressed also suffer from a severe reduction of immune function. They become sitting ducks for illness. In a hospital setting, studies show that depressed patients' avoidance cues are nearly suicidal. Those in the throes of depression receive far less care than others with a more cheerful demeanor (H. Hall, 1989; Lerner, 1980; Tavris, 1982: 233f).

What causes depression in humans and other vertebrates? Two factors...an isolation which signals that one is socially dispensable (Raven and Rubin, 1983: 56f; Stolzenberg et al. 1995: 85; Lynch, 1979; Lynch and McCarthy, 1967; Lynch and McCarthy, 1969; House et al. 1988; Pelletier, 1983; Sarason and Pierce, 1988; Cohen et al. 1992: 301; Durkheim, 1951: 217, 241; Martin, 1968; Phillips, 1979; Phillips and Lu, 1980); and the loss of control which indicates that one is not capable of coping--that the hypothesis represented by one's "personality" is inappropriate to current circumstance. The result: depressive humans suffer the utility sorter's most extreme negative effects and are those most likely to die. (Depressive monkeys, rats, grouse, and numerous other creatures are subject to a similar fate.)

RESOURCE SHIFTERS take over where the utility sorters leave off. Those who demonstrate the ability to generate or accumulate resources are given even more. It may be yams and pigs among Polynesians, copper and blankets among the Kwakiutl (Benedict, 1934: 178; Johnson and Earle: 1987: 168f; Harris, 1978: 94-98; Harris 1977: 104-108; Sahlins 1986: 308), cattle amongst the Masai and the Xhosa (Mostert, 1992), and cash, Lamborghinis, and yachts in the West. But most humans are inordinately drawn to the material indications of success.

Resources are shifted in great quantities to those like Microsoft's Bill Gates and Wal-Mart's Sam Walton, who become the apotheosis of business success. People shower them with luxurious gifts. Hotels attempt to lure them with free rooms and restaurants with free meals. Men and women of exceptional talent take pride in becoming members of their team. And, most important, like the pay‑dirt‑striking bacteria who find themselves the center of a crowd, successful humans become hubs of influence (Johnson and Earle, 1987: 52; White, 1993; Freedman, 1979: 36; Bernays, 1928), commanders of what primatologists call the social "attention structure" (Chance, 1967; Tiger and Fox, 1971: 39f; Washburn and Hamburg 1968: 471; Fossey, 1983: 64; Altmann, 1967: 349). In short, their attitudes, thoughts, and styles set the trend for the group.

Success produces the equivalent of the bacterium's chemotactic attractant; failure generates the counterpart of a chemotactic repellant (Lipkin, 1995; Zullow and Seligman, 1990; Seligman, 1990: 187-198). As the old song says, "Nobody loves you when you're down and out."

THE INTERGROUP TOURNAMENT. Everything from the subtle warfare between colonies of sea anemones to the territorial machinations of wolf packs and the outright pillage inflicted by armies of ants indicates the universality of intergroup strife. The forms of competition and bloodshed between troops of monkeys or apes are nearly innumerable. And then we have those primates who have left us eloquent histories, elaborate tapestries, equestrian statues, oil-on-canvas masterpieces, and heroic friezes testifying to their battles. "It is well that war is so terrible...", said one member of this species, "or we should grow too fond of it." The name of that Homo sapien was Robert E. Lee.

Beating the opposition is central even in peaceful commercial enterprise. Two decades ago the supercomputer company led by Seymour Cray seemed invincible. But Cray's last enterprise was shattered well before his death, the victim of a new technology, the microprocessor. This superchip made possible a silicon version of what bacilli long ago evolved--the massively parallel computer (Verity, 1995). As Cray Computer Corporation fell, Bill Gates' Microsoft rose. Cray had been admirably adapted to the environment of the mainframe. But Gates was a creature of a new ecology--that of the microprocessor-powered personal computer.

These are small‑scale battles compared to those which constantly unleash their brutalities across the face of this planet. Zoology, ecology, history, and current affairs abound with examples of competing group brains using their individual members as modules, sensors, parallel‑distributed information processors, pawns, and experimental test components in relentless battles for supremacy. The largest of them, we call nation states. These collective intelligences have frequently reengineered their organizational blueprints as thoroughly as the bacterial colony retooling its genome.

Individual selectionists have two major fallback positions to account for the otherwise difficult to explain--kin‑selection (the surrender of self to benefit those who carry genes like your own) and reciprocal altruism (the swapping of generous deeds). But a plethora of studies indicates that among humans, the victims of elimination are the group members with the fewest family ties or close friends (House et al. 1988; Severino, 1983; Pelletier, 1983; Jarvinen, 1955; Arnetz et al. 1983; Cohen and Syme, 1985; Broadhead et al. 1983; Berkman, 1984; Bloom, 1995: 60-65; Konner, 1990: 27f; Catanzaro 1995: 393.). The self-sacrificers' pre-programmed renunciation does not add a scrap of benefit to genes identical to their own, nor does it store up favors for the future. This makes accounting for the survival of utility sorters ,and resource shifters in terms of individual selectionism exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

Group selectionism can provide a richly productive alternative explanation. Individuals within a social unit are ranked on the basis of perceived relevance to a larger community. They either move to the sidelines or to the center depending on the verdict rendered by their psychophysiology and by their social or environmental milieu. Thus they become components of a communal intelligence. Put yet another way, conformity enforcers, diversity generators, utility sorters and resource shifters aid in the construction of competitive machines far more powerful than mere individual organisms. When matched against genes whose disguised selfishness restricts them to family support and reciprocal exchanges, genes free to participate in the computational and inventive power of a group brain will roll over their rivals like a tank flattening a Volkswagen.

***************************
Eshel Ben-Jacob has been forced to infer from his data on bacillus subtilis that we may be viewing "a new picture of cooperative evolution" (Corning, 1983; Corning, 1996; Smillie, 1993; Smillie, 1995), one entirely "orthogonal" to standard neo‑Darwinism (Ben-Jacob, 1998; Ben-Jacob, Cohen, and Czirók. In press.). What does "orthogonal" mean? In Edwin A. Abbott's classic book, Flatland, creatures operating on only the two-dimensional axes of depth and width felt their world was infinite (Abbott, 1953). Yet there was an even larger infinity above them--if only they had been able to look up.

When using the light of both group and individual selection, the new evolutionary sciences are able to lift their eyes and see our kinship with three-and-a-half billion years of precursors, thus vastly expanding their range of explorable evidence and explanatory mechanisms. The world of the petri dish sheds light on the conference halls of the Hague. The mathematics of materials science and of such non-linear newcomers as fractals and chaos theory, the insights of cell biology and endocrinology, and the mysteries of psychology find a new place in the puzzle. If the evolutionary dogmatists of Lilliput and Blefuscu will simply recognize the equal importance of each end of the egg, they may finally make it possible for science to reveal something far more fascinating--the workings of an egg's interior. The inner workings of you and me.


http://www.howardbloom.net/index.htm

The following is
The formal academic paper
In which the theory
Laid out in
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century
Was first was introduced to the scientific community.
It was presented before a joint session of
The European Sociobiological Society, The International Political Science Association,
And The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences,
And later appeared in the book
Research in Biopolitics, Volume 6, 1998.
Sociobiology and Biopolitics.
Edited by Albert Somit and Steven A Peterson.
Greenwich, CT: JAI Press Inc., 1998: 43-64.

This is an absolutely georgeous thread, DWB. Really well done. I love the images!

BEYOND THE SUPERCOMPUTER:
SOCIAL GROUPS AS SELF-INVENTION MACHINES

This is a very nice article. Thank you for sharing some of your readings with us, DWB.

And I really like the concept of diversity generators. How incredibly cool!





Definitely. But the individual selectionists and the group selectionists are one in the same, aren't they. I mean the individual has to survive to join the group and the membership in the group helps the individual survive. Certain groups will have evolutionary advantage over others, as well.

It's just the unit of individual changes from the individual member to the individual group.

I love this guy!

A small group of heretics!!!

These are great reads!!!! Thanks!!!!

I like the pictures

I love the comparison of cities and societies to organisms in biology. It works great up until you consider cancer.

I have a theory that cancer is related to greed. The day we find a cure for greed, will be the same day we find a cure for cancer.

Gabe, I think what Bloom is describing here are scientists like the Neo Darwinists who believe in the "selfish gene"etc... they are scientists who believe in individual selection in terms of evolution..so in their thinking members of a species were in essence "loners" (survival of the fittest mentality)

Scientists like Bloom believe in group selection....and as he illustrates there is more reason to believe in group cohesion in terms of evolution...you can see that with the earliest forms of life such as bacteria, schools of fish or colonies of bees etc....so he and others are considered proponents for group selection.

This is the basic premise for his Global Brain theory........but as you noted he thinks that scientists need to open their minds to both individual and group selection......that would get us past the current Neo Darwinism!!!

Odd that you should say that Bill, in fact I saw a short fim clip ...it may have been on Peter Russells site...in it they compare cities that are irregular or in urban sprawl to a cancer cell...in fact it is eerie that it has a similar structure to a cancer cell.....I'll see if I can find it.....

Here you go Bill...35min quicktime video by Peter Russell, The Global Brain
the example of the cancer cell is towards the end but this is a pretty good video for the whole picture....

http://www.peterussell.com/TV/

I love the way this guy thinks! Absolutely love it!!! He compares diversity generators to the genetic variability in the major histocompatibility complex displayed on Tcells in the immune system. How diversity generators in society mimick the diversity generators in the genetic code that can be seen in the immune system. This guy has a beautiful mind!






Don't really understand utility sorters.





I wish he would explain this better. What self-destructive built-ins is he talking about? Is he talking about apoptosis of cells? How does this apply to the human group? I suppose it lends the group a competitive edge by killing off it's non-functional parts.

What does he mean by autonomic shut-down devices?



I really enjoy how he takes genetics and shows how it applies to the way human beings react with one another in groups to facilitate our group survival.





Yes, exactly. And this is why I think the group of human beings is smarter than the individual.

Gabe I'll try to get back to you on the autonomic shut down...I'll check his book to see if it is further defined....but in the book he does not refer to 'utility sorters"...it's possible he changed that to "inner judges".....Now, he says that the inner judges can be positive in the sense that other people can reinforce our feelings of self worth through praise, adulation, acceptance etc (releasing stimulant hormones like amphetamine) or they can by withholding those things cause one to succumb to depression, low self worth, low immune response etc and this causes stress related hormones to be excreted.

The inner judge is a biological "built in" in each human that relates to its environment. It is important as a complex adaptation device, but we can also let it control our lives to the extent that it can be detrimental.

Letter from Utopia

Nick Bostrom



Dear Human,

May this letter find you at peace and prospering! I hope you will forgive me for writing to you out of the blue. Although we have never yet met, we are not complete strangers. We are in a certain sense related. Closely related…

I am one of your possible futures. If all goes well, you will one day become me. If that does happen, then I am not only a possible future of yours but your actual future. In that case, I am a coming phase of you.

I want to describe what my life is like so that you can see how wonderful this possible life is. You may then choose this future for yourself, making me real.

While I am writing this in the singular, I am really writing on behalf of my contemporaries, and we are addressing ourselves to all of your contemporaries. We are writing to you to ask you to make us real. Among our numbers are many who are possible futures of your people. Some of us are possible futures of children that you have not yet given birth to. Some of us are possible artificial persons that you may one day create. What unites us is that we are all totally dependent on you to make us real. You could think of this letter as if it were an invitation to a ball – but the ball will only actually take place if you decide to turn up.

We call the lives we lead here “Utopia”.


How can I tell you about Utopia and not leave you mystified? What words could convey the wonder? What language could express the happiness that we have here? I fear that my pen is as unequal to this task as if I were trying to use it to kill an elephant. Yet I will give it a try. My hope is that you will see through the inadequacies of my exposition and somehow intuit what I am trying to describe. I wish I were a better writer because there is so much at stake in this attempt at communication, for both of us.

Well, let me begin. As I look around this place, I see… But never mind what my eyes see!

Have you ever experienced a moment of surpassing bliss? Maybe on the rapids of creative work when a force greater than yourself is guiding your movements to trace out the shapes of truth and beauty? Or perhaps you have found such a moment in the ecstasy of romantic love? Or in an extraordinary success you achieved with a team of good friends? Or perhaps there was a song or a melody that managed to smuggle itself into your heart, setting it alight with kaleidoscopic emotion?

If you have experienced such a moment, experienced the best type of such a moment, then a certain idle (but sincere) thought may also have presented itself to you: “Oh Heaven! I never realized it could feel like this. This is on a different level, so much more real and worthwhile than anything else. Why can’t it be like this always? Why must good times end? I was sleeping and now I am awake.”

And yet look, a little later, a few hours gone by, and the softly-falling soot of ordinary life is already beginning to accumulate. The silver and gold of exuberance lose their shine. The marble becomes dirty. Everything takes on a slightly ashen appearance.

Every way you turn it’s the same: soot – casting its veil over all glamours and revelries, despoiling your epiphany, sodding up your white pressed shirt (and the clergyman’s collar if you care to look). And once again the familiar beat is audible, the beat of numbing routine rolling along its tracks. The commuter trains loading and unloading their passengers… sleepwalkers, shoppers, solicitors, the ambitious and the hopeless, the contented and the wretched… like human electrons shuffling through the circuitry of civilization.

We do so easily forget how good life can be at its best (and how bad at its worst). The most outstanding occasion: barely is it over when the street cleaning machines move in to sweep up the rice. Yellowing photos remain.

And this is as should be. We’re in the business of living and we’re pros; the show must go on. Special moments are out-of-equilibrium experiences in which our puddles are stirred up and splashed about, and yet when equilibrium returns we are usually relieved. We are not built for sustainable bliss.

So you might once or twice have caught a glimpse of how good life can be, but the memory is difficult to access, perhaps you doubt that realizing such a state on a more permanent basis would be compatible with remaining functional in the world, and in any case you do not see how this could realistically be achieved. The door that was ajar begins to close; the sliver of hope disappears behind a blank surface.

Quick, put a foot in that door! Hold on to your yellowing photos and examine them more closely, for they contain a clue. Your view of what is possible has been expanded. However dim your immediate prospects may be, the fact is that you have glimpsed the in-principle possibility of life above the clouds. I ask you to preserve this realization. Set aside a little conceptual space in some corner of your mind for the possibility of a higher state of being. Make sure there is always at least one coal left alive.

I have invoked the memory of your best experience – to what end? I’m hoping to kindle in you a desire to share my happiness.

And yet, what you felt in your best moment is not similar to what I feel now. I’m pointing to it as a landmark only. It shows a direction.

If the distance between your plateau and the tallest peak you know is eight kilometers, then to reach my location you would have to continue for another million light years. It is beyond the moon and the planets and all the stars your eyes can see. It is beyond your dreams. You cannot imagine what it is like here.

My consciousness is wide and deep. I’ve read all the books that you humans had written by your time – and a good deal more. I know life from many sides and angles. I have swum in a whole spectrum of different cultures, more numerous than the words in your dictionary. Quite a bit of culture builds up over a million years (even as the humble polyps amass a reef given enough time). Well, all this information I have incorporated into my mind, and much, much more. Each etching, each record-cover, each toothpaste tube design – they are all lodged in my memory banks, and my appreciation of each object is as intimate as the appreciation that the most sensitive connoisseur has of her favorite artifact.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It’s not just the particular things, the paintings, books, epochs, lives, leafs, rivers, the random encounters, the satellite images and the particle collider data – it is also the complex interrelationships between these particulars that make up my mind. There are general ideas that can be formed only on top of such a wide experience base. There are depths that can only be fathomed with such general ideas.

My experience is clear and intense. I don’t conceive of this the way you would if you could somehow cram it all into your mind. My mind is shaped by what it has assimilated. I don’t just think about deep truths; my thoughts themselves are deep.

You could say I am happy, that I feel good. You could say that I feel surpassing bliss. But these words are used to describe human experience. What I feel is as far beyond ordinary human feelings as my thoughts are beyond human thoughts. I wish I could show you what I have in mind. If only I could share one second of my conscious life with you! But that is impossible. Your container could not hold even a small splash of my joy, it is that great.

You don’t have to understand what I think and feel. If only you bear in mind what is possible within the present human realm, you should have enough of an idea to get started in the right direction, one step at a time. At no point will you encounter a wall of blinding light. At no point will you have to jettison yourself over an end-of-the-world precipice. As you advance, the horizon will recede. Although the transformation you will undergo is profound, it can be as gradual as the growth that transformed the baby you once were into the adult you are.

This is not a religious vision. I do not presume to advise you in religious matters. The game that I am talking about is the one that is played out in the material world, with pieces of metal, glass, and silicon; muscle, skin, and nerve. What I am urging on you is nothing more and nothing less than a new situation in this material world. Of course, you cannot effect this kind of change by the power of wishful thinking or by any simple change of mindset, nor by mental acrobatics, yoga, meditation, affirmation, magical incantation, nor yet by democratization alone. Many of the key pieces on the board are not moved by those means.

Fundamentally, the challenge before you is one of self-transformation. You need to grow up. This is not only about technology, but technology is necessary to achieve the deep changes that will enable you to participate in new ways of life. If you want to live and play on my level, you will need to acquire new capacities. To get to Utopia, and to experience firsthand what life is like here, you will need to discover the means to achieve three radical transformations.

Transformation one: Extend your healthy lifespan.

Your biological body, in it its current form, will not take you far. It wears out too soon. Eighty years is not enough even to get started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Genuine maturity of the soul takes more than eighty vigorous years to develop. Why, even a tree-life takes more time than that to complete.

Take on the causes of early death – infection, violence, malnourishment, heart disease, cancer. Take on the deterioration your body undergoes as you age: find ways to reduce the rate of aging, or to reverse the negative effects of aging via rejuvenation therapy. Develop control over the biochemical processes in your body in order to eliminate, more and more, illness and senescence. In time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable mediums by augmenting your nervous system with hardware and by migrating into computers. Improve the system over time, so that the risk of death and disease continues to decline. Asymptotically zero involuntary mortality over cosmological timescales is your ultimate aim. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.

Oh, aging is a cruel cage. Gnaw and pull at the bars, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you will break the grid that kept your forebears imprisoned. Gnaw and pull, redouble your efforts!

Transformation two: Boost your cognitive capacities.

You have many special mental faculties: humor, spirituality, eroticism, music, mathematics, aesthetics, nurturing, gossip and narration. Aren’t these the capacities and sensibilities that give life much of its meaning? Blessed you are if you possess several of these capacities to any significant degree; but their higher-order manifestations are even better. These rooms have no ceilings. Be not afraid to grow.

But what other capacities are possible beyond those that you currently have? Imagine the poverty of a world without music. What other harmonies are there that you lack the ears to hear? What riches are you foregoing because you lack the specific sensibilities required to unlock those vaults of value? What a pity to go through life in mental squalor because you are deaf, dumb, and blind to the infinite wealth of meaning that you would discover or invent if only you had the needed capacities. There is always music in the air, but without a suitable receptacle the waves are imperceptible and travel in vain.

Your capacities and sensibilities need to be enhanced, beyond the level of any genius of your kind. You will also want to develop new faculties and acquire more general-purpose intelligence so that you can learn, remember, and understand better. Sagacity is a means: you need understanding to find your way around the obstacles you will encounter on your journey. But it is also part of the end, for it is in the spacetime of awareness that utopia will exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding.

Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and pull at the poles, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you will break the fence that held your forebears captive. Gnaw and pull, redouble your efforts!

Transformation three: Elevate your emotional well-being.

What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and euphoria? Pleasure. A few grains of this magic ingredient are worth more than a king’s treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It infuses everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.

The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship. It creates a bubbling celebration of life! Joy is the birth right of every creature.

There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow. I wish I could elaborate but language abandons me. I grope in vain for words to convey to you what all this amounts to…

It’s like a rain of the most wonderful feeling, where every raindrop has its own unique and indescribable meaning – or rather it has a scent or essence that evokes a whole world… And each such evoked world is deeper, richer, subtler, more multidimensional than the sum total of what you have experienced in your entire life.

I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too horrible to dwell upon, and you are already aware of the ethical urgency of palliation. My point is that in addition to removing the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are not currently realizable.

The roots of suffering are set deep in your brain. Weeding them out and replacing them with sustainable nutritious crops of well-being will require sophisticated methods and tools for the cultivation of your neuropsychological soil. But the problem is multiplex. All emotions (including hate, contempt, jealousy, and sadness) have a natural function. Take heed when you trim your feelings lest you accidentally reduce the fertility of your plot. Fortunately this is not a necessary consequence. Yet fools will build fool’s paradises. I recommend you go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right.

It is worth getting it right!

Oh, what a gruesome knot suffering is! Pull and tug on those loops, and you will gradually loosen them up. One day the coils will fall, and you will stretch out in delight. Pull and tug, and be patient in your efforts!

May there come a time when suns rise and are greeted with joy by all the living creatures that they shine upon.

How do you find this place? How long will it take to get here? I am not able to pass you a blueprint for utopia, no timetable, no roadmap. All I can give you is my assurance that there is something here, the potential for a better life. There is a shore and a land, such that if you could visit me here for but a day, you would henceforth call this place your home. This is the place where you belong. I have been trying to indicate the direction in which you have to go. Like Odysseus you must journey and never cease to journey until you arrive upon this shore.

“Arrive?” you might now be saying; “But isn’t the journey the destination? Isn’t utopia a place that doesn’t exist? And isn’t the quest for utopia, as witnessed historically, just a dangerous folly and an incitement to mischief?”

My friend, that is not a bad way for you to think about it. Utopia is not a place or a particular form of social organization.

The blush of health on a convalescent’s cheek. The sparkling eye in a moment of wit. The smile of a loving thought… Utopia is the hope that the scattered fragments of good that we come across from time to time in our lives can be put together, one day, to reveal the shape of a new kind of life, the kind of life that ours should have been. Vitality, understanding, and pleasure are among its essential aspects.

I am concerned that the pursuit of utopia could bring out the worst in you. Please take my message in the right spirit. Many a moth has been incinerated in pursuit of a brighter future. Seek the light! But approach with care, and change course if you smell your wingtips burning. Light is for seeing, not dying.

When you take up the quest you will need a cool head. A difficult set of problems will confront you. To solve them will take your best science, your best technology, and your best politics. Yet for each of the problems, there is a solution. The laws of nature permit a life like mine to exist. The building materials are all there. Your people must master the skills to use these physical elements to build yourselves up and to set the human spirit free.

Do not accept that it is good for you and your friends to get sick and die in a cage. Do not assume that it’s a blessing to be confined forever behind the fences of stupidity. Do not believe that there is nothing worth experiencing outside your current psychic limitations.

Ever since one hairy creature picked up two flint stones and began knocking them together to make a tool, your ancestors have been rattling those bars, and they are getting looser all the time. The day of the breakthrough is drawing nearer.

And when finally the bars break, go out and deal with the problems of a free life! What sadder image of humanity’s future could there be than that of a liberated beast that continues to pace the confines of its former cage?

*

We love life here every second. Every second of life is so good that it would knock you unconscious if your mind had not been strengthened beforehand. My contemporaries and I bear witness, and we are asking for your help. Help us come into existence! Join us! Whether this tremendous possibility becomes a reality depends on your actions. If your empathy can perceive at least the outlines of the vision I am describing, then your ingenuity will find a way to make it real.

Human life, at its best, is fantastic. I’m asking you to create something even greater. Life that is truly humane.



Yours sincerely,

Your Possible Future Self

I think most people want spirituality. No one can be denied the ability to be spiritual if that is what they truly want. Spirituality is fine until we attempt to show one another the way to be spiritual. The only way we know how to do this is through some sort of religion.

Every religion is seen as attempting to impose a moral standard on the world in addition to directing people to spirituality. Even if the religion commands nothing, those sharing the religion are seen as expecting a change in behavior from their prospects.

Mixing science with humanitarian goals is kind of like a religion without speculations of an afterlife or celestial beings. Without universal humanitarian goals attached to science, it could be seen as the problem as often or more often than the solution. So how can science play an active role in achieving peace with religion with or without universal humanitarian goals?