Lent 2018: Day 31
A sign of a good book is when an air of sadness descends over me as I approach its end, like knowing that a good conversation with a friendly mentor is drawing to a close. And this I feel as I begin the penultimate chapter of Stuart A. Kauffman's Humanity in a Creative Universe, a book that has not so much transformed my thinking as clarified it and put it into a far more scientific framework. More on that in my conclusion tomorrow.
Kauffman states his wish for "a gently transforming civilisation", or indeed multiple woven
civilisations (of which Kauffman claims there are around 30 on this
planet right now). I hope so too, but fear that human progress to date has been achieved in fits and starts, with bouts of destructive chaos smashing against order and progress. “Reason alone cannot guide us sufficiently for
living our lives forward,” says Kauffman, quoting Kierkegaard. What is needed is intuition.
Intuition, rather than reason, is what happens when rather than working something out logically, we stumble upon an answer in a flash of inspiration, building on something that went before, often something unexpected or unplanned. So often, in science, in economics, in the arts, what happens is a recombination of old ideas and new questions, creating new concepts that become new Actuals.
Kauffman gives as an example the way that improvisation comedy works. Unscripted, a comic throws in a line, an idea, and the next one works it into something comedically appropriate, then the next comic, following the thread, but giving it a twist, taking it to a higher level. He cites Beyond the Fringe - the classic British comedy revue of the early 1960s, in particular Peter Cooke and Alan Bennett's Great Train Robbery sketch.
Oscillating between the electron, the galaxies, the evolution of the biosphere on our planet and human creativity - Kauffman attempts to place the works of Shakespeare, Keats and Dylan Thomas in an unprestatable universe of quantum mechanics.
Is there then a place for God in such a worldview? Kauffman is careful not to use the vocabulary of religion. He says 'consciousness' and 'Mind' rather than 'soul' or 'spirit'. There is no omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Deity; neither is there a Supreme Architect nor Watchmaker who created the mechanism, wound it up, set it off and watched it unwind from a neutral distance. Rather, there is an Unfolding, a Becoming, a Perfecting; an infinitely patient process of creativity, the evolution of Mind becoming exponentially more complex.
At the heart of Kauffman's worldview is the science of quantum mechanics, the notion that without a conscious mind to observe the outcome of a quantum experiment, the electron hovers in superposition; the Schrodinger's cat remains dead and alive until a human opens the box to see. Now, Kauffman, drawing on the controversial works of Dean Radin, moves a step further to say that the conscious observer can influence, or will, the outcome of the quantum experiment. "I want the cat to be alive! And hey! It's alive!" Verdict - still needs plenty more experimental work to show that this is the case. The next scientific question mark hovers over the the seat - and indeed - the nature of consciousness. Does it reside exclusively in the brain of higher-order animals (a cat, a mouse, an octopus yes - an ant, no) - or controversially - is consciousness also to be found in single-celled life forms like amoeba and bacteria such as E. coli?
Kauffman goes further. He claims, on the basis of intuition, that consciousness resides at the subatomic level. I have posited such an idea on this blog, but with no scientific background whatsoever, it is pure poetry on my part. The notion that the dark energy and dark matter - invisible, unmeasurable - that is believed to make up over 95% of the universe's mass-energy content - could be consciousness is also something I have considered.
Science will either one day show this to be false - or true. Or metaphorically true. Or neither and both. We shall see - or not.
A final summing up of Humanity in a Creative Universe in my next post.
This time last year:
Rzeszów [coincidentally, I was back there just yesterday]
This time four years ago:
A tipping point in European history
This time five years ago:
Random sentiments from London suburbs
This time six years ago:
A week into Lent
This time eight years ago:
Afternoon-dusk-night in the city centre
This time nine years ago:
A particularly harrowing reality
This time ten years ago:
Wetlands waiting for the spring
Intuition, rather than reason, is what happens when rather than working something out logically, we stumble upon an answer in a flash of inspiration, building on something that went before, often something unexpected or unplanned. So often, in science, in economics, in the arts, what happens is a recombination of old ideas and new questions, creating new concepts that become new Actuals.
Kauffman gives as an example the way that improvisation comedy works. Unscripted, a comic throws in a line, an idea, and the next one works it into something comedically appropriate, then the next comic, following the thread, but giving it a twist, taking it to a higher level. He cites Beyond the Fringe - the classic British comedy revue of the early 1960s, in particular Peter Cooke and Alan Bennett's Great Train Robbery sketch.
Oscillating between the electron, the galaxies, the evolution of the biosphere on our planet and human creativity - Kauffman attempts to place the works of Shakespeare, Keats and Dylan Thomas in an unprestatable universe of quantum mechanics.
Is there then a place for God in such a worldview? Kauffman is careful not to use the vocabulary of religion. He says 'consciousness' and 'Mind' rather than 'soul' or 'spirit'. There is no omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Deity; neither is there a Supreme Architect nor Watchmaker who created the mechanism, wound it up, set it off and watched it unwind from a neutral distance. Rather, there is an Unfolding, a Becoming, a Perfecting; an infinitely patient process of creativity, the evolution of Mind becoming exponentially more complex.
At the heart of Kauffman's worldview is the science of quantum mechanics, the notion that without a conscious mind to observe the outcome of a quantum experiment, the electron hovers in superposition; the Schrodinger's cat remains dead and alive until a human opens the box to see. Now, Kauffman, drawing on the controversial works of Dean Radin, moves a step further to say that the conscious observer can influence, or will, the outcome of the quantum experiment. "I want the cat to be alive! And hey! It's alive!" Verdict - still needs plenty more experimental work to show that this is the case. The next scientific question mark hovers over the the seat - and indeed - the nature of consciousness. Does it reside exclusively in the brain of higher-order animals (a cat, a mouse, an octopus yes - an ant, no) - or controversially - is consciousness also to be found in single-celled life forms like amoeba and bacteria such as E. coli?
Kauffman goes further. He claims, on the basis of intuition, that consciousness resides at the subatomic level. I have posited such an idea on this blog, but with no scientific background whatsoever, it is pure poetry on my part. The notion that the dark energy and dark matter - invisible, unmeasurable - that is believed to make up over 95% of the universe's mass-energy content - could be consciousness is also something I have considered.
Science will either one day show this to be false - or true. Or metaphorically true. Or neither and both. We shall see - or not.
A final summing up of Humanity in a Creative Universe in my next post.
This time last year:
Rzeszów [coincidentally, I was back there just yesterday]
This time four years ago:
A tipping point in European history
This time five years ago:
Random sentiments from London suburbs
This time six years ago:
A week into Lent
This time eight years ago:
Afternoon-dusk-night in the city centre
This time nine years ago:
A particularly harrowing reality
This time ten years ago:
Wetlands waiting for the spring
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