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Currently the blog contains 113 entries.
Elisabet Sahtouris - After Darwin
Sahtouris is a rare thing; a biologist who is not a materialist. By that I mean she does not adhere to the philosophy that matter, or at least some kind of nonconscious stuff (energy, quanta) is primary. Sahtouris prefers to see consciousness as primary and therefore that the universe is alive and sentient. She sees the materialist idea that we are living things in a nonliving universe as false, and the corresponding problem of how life emerged therefore does not exist for her.
Why does this position, which has an ancient philosophical heritage from Plato to Kant to Berkeley, seem so heretical for a biologist? There is an insidious tendency in science to become very entrenched in a philosophical worldview, despite the non-empirical nature of that philosophy, and then to pretend that that philosophy is reinforced by science, when it is not. This is where science attempts to do more than it can do - to overstep its limits as a form of knowledge.
It takes courage to propound rational and coherent ideas that are squarely outside of common consensus and which do not conform to oversimplified polarities, and that is what Sahtouris is doing. Here are three parts of a brief presentation entitled "After Darwin."
Dr Olly Robinson
Are we living in a computer simulation?
In 2003 Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom had an article published in the journal Philosophical Quarterly. In this article he suggested that at least one of these three propositions must be true:
Deja Vu and Paramnesia
Last week I was travelling through London en-route to a business meeting in Kent. I stopped off at Euston and walked down to Foyle's Bookshop in Tottenham Court Road (probably my favourite bookshop). Foyle's is always a great place to find the more obscure and specialist books. In the psychology section I found two or three books that I hoped to find together with another that I had never heard of. It is called The Uncanny and was written by Nicholas Royle, professor of English at the University of Sussex. It was published in 2003. What attracted me to it was that it was a review of the implications of Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "Das Unheimlich" - the Uncanny - in regard to contemporary thinking in literature, film, psychoanalysis etc. Although quite expensive I decided to add it to the pile.
Youtube and the Middle Way
Youtube is a great service. It is arguably the democratic source of knowledge that formal knowledge dissemination outlets can never be. In universities and the academic system that I work in, everything has to go through carefully vetted processes of application and peer review that maintain quality of output but keep very close tabs on who and what can be published. In a world where one has to attract funding and grants while progressing one's career, there are strict limitations on what one can and cannot say. Science, certainly social science, is at times a frustratingly politicised process. On Youtube, almost anything can be said and posted and publicised, and this means that it is a great forum for debate. Here are two videos from opposites sides of the science-religion fence. The first video is of John Polkinghorne describing why he believes that science and religion are friends, and the second is Richard Dawkins describing why he thinks religion is all delusion. I am inclined to believe some of what both say, and believe that there are valid middle-way positions on this issue. All arguments get polarised, and the resolution always lies, in Hegelian splendour, somewhere in the messy middle.
A Hypothetical Conversation on Consciousness with a Materialist Scientist
So you, as a materialist science would state that consciousness is a product of the brain. Am I right?
Book Review: INTEGRAL CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE FUTURE OF EVOLUTION by Steve McIntosh
My understanding is that IC, a term coined by Jean Gebser, and much explored by Ken Wilber, is a species or ‘structure’ of trans-rational consciousness that transparently subsumes other ‘less integrated,’ mental, mythic, magic and archaic predecessor structures. These structures diversify or evolve throughout human history (and ontogeny). Each individual and culture tends to have a centre of gravity in one or more of these structures while, at different times, also revealing the potential to manifest all structures to some degree. McIntosh essentially agrees. He labels the stages of cultural evolution as Archaic, Tribal, Warrior, Traditional, Modern, Post-Modern, Integral and Post-Integral (the latter barely mentioned) and estimates the percentage of the world’s population centred in each structure. Next McIntosh’s ‘integrates’ this progressive linear approach with a spiral dynamics model, citing the work of psychologist Clare Graves, and sees an alternation between collective (tribal, traditional, post-modern) and individual (warrior, modernist, integral) emphasis as the pendulum spirals rhythmically from one structure to the next, and each mode or thesis is dethroned by its antithesis, but partly preserved by subsequent synthesis. [This model has much in common with the ‘Fourth Turning’ model espoused by Strause and Howe for the shorter but nevertheless rhythmic 4-generation time scale of the seculum or century: see Network 79]. Thus, the synthesis part of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis process is inherently ‘integral’ [manifesting cybernetic, feedback dynamics] that avoid throwing babies out with the bathwater.
Quantum consciousness: The evidence for quantum coherence in living organisms
The debate about the possibility of a quantum basis for consciousness was given a new twist by an article in ‘Nature’ in 2007. The quantum consciousness discussion has been centred on the question of whether or not quantum features could persist in the conditions of the brain for long enough to be relevant to neural processes. The normal assumption is that they could not, because they would be obliterated by the hot, crowded environment of the brain in too short a time to be relevant to the activities of the brain. Advocates of quantum consciousness have argued for various forms of shielding to allow the persistence of quantum features, but there has been a lack of definite evidence for the existence or effectiveness of such shielding.
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