All language subtitles for The Living Universe - Consciousness and Reality (2019)

less than a century ago humanity's

cosmological picture underwent an

unprecedented expansion when the

astronomer Edwin Hubble revealed to the

world that the Milky Way is far from the

only galaxy in existence it suddenly

became apparent that the cosmic horizon

spanned unimaginable distances in every

direction and in which our home galaxy a

spiral of some 200 billion stars was

just one in a sea of trillions in this

moment humans

open their eyes to a new appreciation of

the scales and immensities of the cosmos

the last century has been a time of

incredible human discovery and in which

the field of cosmology has acquired new

scientific status among other feats

scientists can now determine the

elemental composition of distant stars

and the trajectories of galaxies in

relation to our own they've gained

insight into the birth and death of

stars and planets as well as the fabric

of space and time in this new

understanding our universe appears to us

as never before as a developing an

evolving system of fantastic forces and

energies and dynamic displays of order

and chaos

perhaps most extraordinarily small

patches of this fabric have become

conscious of themselves

we live in a universe that our ancestors

never imagined and it is now apparent

that making sense of our new

cosmological picture requires a

departure from old ideas and metaphors

and the exploration of new frames on

reality our journey begins with the

observation that the way we talk about

nature can ultimately be scaled to a

grounding cosmic metaphor which itself

comes to serve as the lens through which

we form our deepest questions about what

we are and our place in the universe

the Western scientific lineage can be

seen as having moved through to epoch

defining paradigms as characterized by

their grounding cosmic metaphor these

are the view of the universe as a great

mind moving into the view of the

universe as a great machine the long

standing cosmic metaphor of the universe

as a great machine has become so closely

associated with the science that it is

often viewed synonymously with it this

is not the case however and today the

great machine metaphor no longer serves

to further our understanding as it once

did and there are now telling signs that

the modern mind is in the midst of a

transition toward an organismic lens on

reality apprehended as in evolving

self-generating an ultimately

living process

furthermore this organismic paradigm may

offer greater explanatory and predictive

power as well as a deeper more

meaningful understanding of our place in

the universe of course none of this is

to say that the universe has not been

historically compared to an organism

both in the Western lineage and in many

other cultures we'll return to this

point later to be clear the purpose of

our discussion is not to argue that the

universe is an organism the universe is

the universe the question of whether it

is more like an organism than it is like

a machine has only a subjective answer

the manner by which we apprehend the

universe may reveal more about ourselves

as we meet reality in our historical

moment than it does about the character

of the universe itself this is however

not to say that progress in our

understanding cannot be acknowledged and

as we will explore it is growingly

apparent that we indeed appear to see

further and with greater understanding

through an organism a cleanse

than through any other concept available

to us mind a machine understanding the

rise of the organism ik paradigm

requires that we understand some of the

historical forces that have shaped the

outlook of Western science as well as

their resulting influence on the modern

mind

the narrative offered in this section is

at best an incomplete summary and at

worst a caricature however it is

necessary for us to weave the essence of

this story albeit crudely in order to

articulate and give contrast to the

organism occasion and its implications

in the Western academic lineage the view

of the universe as a great mind was

conceived by early Greek philosophers

around the 4th century BCE the view that

the world is essentially alive and

imbued with spirit has been a

perspective of many cultures throughout

history Greek thought had its roots in

earlier polytheistic religions which in

turn have their roots in animism in

recognition of an essentially mantle

ground of reality Plato forged a

worldview recognized by scholars as a

form of idealism for Plato and his

contemporaries the world of form that

surrounds us is in essence a projection

from a transcendent domain of being more

mind like than classically physical this

was the realm of the ideas a greater

reality from which all manifest

phenomena receive their form in essence

Nature had intentionality meaning that

it was purposive teleological a job

stone fell to the earth by its innate

desire for proximity with the center of

creation

these views originating largely from

Aristotle and Plato were adapted by

early Christian scholars in the Middle

Ages who revered the high culture of

ancient Greece the transcendent realm of

what Plato called the ideas both

informed and was used to justify the

Christian idea of heaven in the Platonic

dimension of perfect forms existed the

highest transcendent good as Christian

theologians sought to distance

themselves from pagan nature religions

they came to perceive a deeper piety in

viewing the creative impulse of the

universe as entirely outside of this

world in the inscrutable intentions of

their all-powerful creator in this sense

the creative impulse of reality became

estranged from the world but for the

occurrence of rare instances of divine

intervention for Christians living in

this period all areas of life were to be

interpreted in terms of the Christian

doctrine fundamental questions of death

birth morality value meaning and

judgment were to be understood without

exception through the authority of Rome

to challenge the church was

inconceivable to most and to do so was

to tempt exile torture or death the

theologians growing preoccupation with

worlds beyond life further heightened

their sense that the world within which

they currently inhabited was fallen

imperfect and separate from God

though created in his image to live in

and be of this world was to be corrupted

by sin fated to endure the terrible

sufferings of the flesh admittance into

heaven had become a near impossible feat

of piety and asceticism and the

unspeakable horrors of the alternative

hung like a shadow over medieval

Christian life in the 17th century the

ideas of philosopher Rene Descartes

played a significant role in shaping

what science would one day become among

his influential contributions they can't

brought to light the distinct characters

of mind and matter identifying them as

the two primary ingredients of reality

they can't ontological distinction

between the mental and the physical

eventually came to serve as a boundary

marking the territories of the church

and the new science then emerging the

mantle would remain the province of

spirit and the divine order leaving the

remaining crude matter of the world

available for scientific interrogation

within this delicate truce scientists

are now enjoyed a relative freedom to

consider bold new questions and ideas it

wasn't long however before their

reported discoveries appeared to pose

conspicuous challenges to the truth

claims of Scripture

despite this many of the thinkers

comprising the Scientific Revolution in

Europe were Christian in Outlook the

father of the machine metaphor of the

universe Isaac Newton conceived of the

great machinery of the universe as first

set in motion by God who upon creating

the world stands back and attends its

progress we can only speculate about

what Newton really thought but if you'd

asked him he would have told you that he

was a Christian and the behind the

machinery of nature resides an

all-powerful God and yet as the decades

and then centuries passed the sheer

power and efficiency of the mechanistic

model led scientists and philosophers to

increasingly regard such supernatural

forces as obsolete and superfluous

reality was in essence material as the

machine metaphor rose to prominence all

phenomena including the mantle were

viewed as reducible to mere matter while

there were several notable counter

currents such as the rise of German

idealism in the late 18th and early 19th

century the Scientific Revolution of the

early modern period with its mechanistic

materialist philosophy portrayed an

inert and essentially meaningless world

devoid of consciousness value purposes

or meaning even the revered rational

human mind was in the final analysis an

illusion a mirage of complex biological

processes

by the mid 19th century the ideas of

Charles Darwin had sent the intellectual

community alight as he and others

brought into view the radical idea that

all life has a common ancestor with a

simple molecular origin under miming the

Christian creation story in this view

the human is no more than a relatively

intelligent animal privileged only bias

adaptive capabilities to an

unsympathetic and changing environment

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evolution bears upon nothing more

transcendent than the physical

transference of genetic material from

one generation to the next and in their

apparent compliance with deterministic

mathematical laws the processes of life

seemed aptly framed within the

mechanistic paradigm animals and plants

were machines as were humans and

ultimately so too was the universe the

outworking of inert immutable and

purposeless natural laws and while this

self became an ever more peripheral

bystander on the cosmic stage the

mechanistic view continued to justify

itself as associated with extraordinary

advancements in anatomy medicine

cosmology and technology as well as

providing a rationale stability to the

worldview of secular culture the shift

in consciousness initiated by the rise

of science can be framed through what is

sometimes termed the Copernican

revolution when humanity learned that it

was not the physical center of the

universe this discovery challenged not

only Sacred Scripture but also our sense

that we all life holds any significance

on the cosmic stage

the Copernican revolution describes an

intellectual movement in which

scientists and philosophers vowed to

themselves never again to be deluded

into notions of human significance the

consolation was a sense of empowerment

and release from the stifling moral

dogma of the church

scientific knowledge was a power that

could be wielded over nature and with it

we could transform the world to serve

our own ends instead of these victims we

could be masters over nature we could

build our own heaven here on earth this

was a view championed by the English

philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon

and captured in his famous aphorism

knowledge is power

many contemporary thinkers observe that

the mechanistic materialist frame has

deeply shaped the worldview and values

of the modern mind while science and its

mechanistic materialist understanding

liberated the modern mind from the

oppressive doctrine of the church the

new frame emerging from the Scientific

Revolution

while amazing and humbling in its reach

and power profoundly decentralized the

human mind its meanings values and goals

several contemporary scholars have

argued that apprehension of this reality

apparently devoid of mind and meaning

has contributed to a shared sense of

isolation meaninglessness and separation

from nature from other beings and from

the larger universe

but does the machine metaphor of the

universe really provide the most

accurate appraisal of the true nature of

things is reductive materialism the only

rationally defensible interpretation of

our scientific discoveries as we will

now explore in a little over a century

the machine metaphor has faced a series

of unexpected and unprecedented

challenges which have led to the

empowering of an alternative perspective

that given the same empirical scientific

evidence a more powerful and explanatory

metaphor for our universe is that of an

organism a greater reality in the early

20th century while working by day as a

patent clerk the physicist Albert

Einstein began developing a theory which

would eventually convince the academic

world that space and time are not

fundamental features of reality as it

long been assumed but are in fact

generated out of a deeper underlying

order the universe is not simply a place

or a container in which things happen

it is rather a developing system

during the same period the emerging

field of quantum mechanics went on to

describe a deeply interconnected reality

within which no single part could be

truly obstructive from the whole and in

which every particle is potentially

interconnected with every other particle

in the universe through eyes lies

discovery that light travels at an

astonishing though finite speed we

realized that our most distant

observations reveal the universe at its

most ancient the light from distant

galaxies captured them as they had

existed when the light was first emitted

billions of years ago as we gazed out

into the vast cosmos we realized that we

are in fact also gazing through time

both eye signs relativity and the

emerging physics of the quantum came as

a surprise to then senior physicists of

the early 20th century many of whom

believed that physics was approaching

completion as an exhaustive description

of nature and yet coming discoveries of

the next 100 years were begin to

intimate a much deeper and more

mysterious reality for the early

scientific foreigners such as Kepler and

Newton the Earth Sun Moon and planets

comprised the entire universe few took

seriously the possibility that the stars

those mysterious points of light moving

together across the night sky could in

fact be other Suns

the most sophisticated cosmology was

primarily concerned with modeling the

predictable movements of the observable

celestial bodies theories were

demonstrated through the literal use of

clockwork models with pirouettes in

planets encircling first essential Earth

and then later amended to a central Sun

earlier models of the universe were

attempts to grasp and apparently

timeless reality in which the celestial

bodies moved eternally and unchanging

today however cosmologists understand

themselves as inhabiting a very

different universe a universe which has

undergone a long developmental evolution

prior to arriving at its current state

and while Newton's classical physics of

a deterministic causal matrix remains

highly practical for many purposes its

grounding machine metaphor hardly seems

to fit our understanding of the

developing universe nor does it

correspond with our deepest observations

of it the new cosmological picture is

decidedly evolutionary understanding how

the universe came to assume its current

state is no longer a matter of

explaining a timeless order but a

developmental story within which the

greatest climax of novelty and

complexity is unmistakably the emergence

of life and mind life and consciousness

is there life beyond Earth

there are now believed to be 20 billion

or so earth-like planets in the Milky

Way galaxy places where the primordial

conditions that were necessary for life

on Earth may exist interestingly there

is evidence of single-celled life on

Earth virtually as soon as the right

conditions were present it's not clear

if this is a sign that life is common

throughout the universe but if that is

the case it's also true that

single-celled life existed for an

exceedingly long time billions of years

before the first multicellular organisms

emerged there's a very long and

uncertain road between single-celled

slimes and relatively intelligent life

such as us but of course the universe is

also a fantastically large place keep in

mind that while our galaxy could contain

these twenty billion earth-like planets

it is just one galaxy among trillions

nobody can truly grasp these numbers but

it seems implausible though not

impossible that intelligent life is so

fantastically rare that it only happened

once this seems out of keeping with the

rest of what we know about cosmological

phenomena but whether or not conscious

life has arisen billions of times or

just once its presence on the cosmic

stage is revealing of a reality capable

of supporting its existence subtle

enough deep enough to carry value

meaning and significance with

consciousness comes the very possibility

of significance itself

it is an extraordinary fact about

reality that it supports the existence

of consciousness the mechanistic view

with its materialist philosophy

neither predicts nor has an explanation

for consciousness the possibility of

subjective experience discloses a depth

to reality that the outwardly viewing

mechanistic paradigm cannot meaningfully

articulate by the latter decades of the

20th century philosophical materialism

had lost significant stock in both the

science and philosophy of mind the

materialist view did not seem capable of

incorporating

the extraordinary fact that certain

arrangements of matter are subjects of

conscious experience this became known

as the hard problem of consciousness the

philosopher David Chalmers who famously

coined this term offered a radical

alternative for the ailing mechanistic

materialist approach to explaining

consciousness

Chalmers emphasized an assertion

previously attributed to Rene Descartes

three centuries earlier that

consciousness possesses an undeniable

and immediate reality which cannot be

doubted they can't famous I think

therefore I am

is today updated to I have consciousness

therefore I exist for Chalmers and a

growing number of philosophers and

scientists the irreducible reality of

consciousness must be preserved in any

account of the universe that aspires to

completeness what is vitally missing

from our understanding of brains argues

Chalmers may also be missing from our

basic description of the world

discussion in this area often centers on

the so called intrinsic nature of

reality which has long been a mystery in

science we simply do not know as the

physicist Stephen Hawking once put in

what it is that breathes fire into the

equations of physics and gives reality

to the world so what does this have to

do with consciousness in recent times a

constellation of philosophers have

argued that the exclusively outward

facing description of the world provided

by physics both implies and requires an

interior landscape an intrinsic ground

to which the equations of physics point

developing on ideas first put forward by

Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington in

the early twentieth century a new

generation of philosophers and

scientists argue that the intrinsic

nature of matter may also be the

essential nature of consciousness as the

philosopher Thomas Nagel has put it

quote we ourselves are large-scale

complex instances of something both

objectively physical from outside and

subjectively mental from inside perhaps

the basis of this identity pervades the

world unquote

far from there being no space for

consciousness at the foundations of

reality for these thinkers physics seems

to require something very much like

consciousness in order to be complete

recent years have seen a new flowering

of such thinking which in the

philosophical literature is known as Pan

psychism but whether or not Pan psychism

is true it is an example of an

alternative frame on the same

scientifically revealed universe while

the mechanistic materialist paradigm has

been the default lens of science it is

now becoming recognized as containing

underlying and often unexamined

assumptions about reality and other

plausible metaphysical frames including

Pan psychism exist to be explored one

thing is certain the universe is

unmistakably a very different place due

to its supporting the existence of

consciousness and while the last 300

years of empirical science has

systematically factored out subjective

experience truly confronting the reality

of consciousness unavoidably reframes

our cosmological picture and should

inform our considerations about the

basic character of the universe we will

return to consciousness but for now

let's move on to intelligence

intelligence the relative

intelligibility of the universe by human

minds has been viewed as a deep mystery

by scientists including Einstein

our brains evolved too much of their

current cognitive capacities when we

lived as hunter-gatherers and yet it

turns out that such brains are also

capable of understanding highly abstract

concepts in mathematics and theoretical

physics how humans acquired their

capacities for abstract in rational for

is a matter of ongoing debate it is

certainly not been bestowed upon all

sentient life we should of course

acknowledge the significant displays of

intelligence in other species notably in

other primates as well as dogs Birds

octopuses dolphins and whales

intelligence like consciousness is a

striking feature of life the existence

of which may in fact hold wider

implications to cosmology in recent

years several scholars have considered

that the ongoing evolution of

intelligence could actually play a role

in the long-term development of the

universe as the Princeton physicist

Freeman Dyson has written quote it is

conceivable that life may have a larger

role to play than we have yet imagined

life may succeed against all of the odds

in molding the universe to its own

purposes and the design of the inanimate

universe may not be as detached from the

potentialities of life and intelligence

the scientists of the 20th century have

tended to suppose end quote in a similar

vein the futurist and inventor Raymond

Kurzweil known Fairs predictions about

the coming technological singularity has

argued that today's cosmologists largely

under appreciate the fantastic potential

of life and specifically intelligence to

eventually shape the entire universe

quote

intelligence is very powerful it is the

most powerful force that we are aware of

intelligence can overcome supposed

natural limits not for any kind of magic

but just by figuring ways to manipulate

forces at finer and finer scales so that

ultimately what seem to be natural

limits can be superseded it won't take

us that long for us to do this at a

solar system scale and then a

galaxy-wide scale ultimately we will

turn the universe into a large mind that

is trillions of trillions of times

greater than all of human intelligence

today end quote

perhaps a pervasive cosmic intelligence

developing over billions of years will

eventually redirect the course of the

universe's development perhaps even

prevailing over the apparent

inevitabilities of entropy of course

nobody knows what possibilities might

one day be realized on the cosmic stage

but it would certainly be unwise to rule

out the greater potentialities that

exist for consciousness and intelligence

and neither should we dismiss them in

our considerations of the basic

character of the universe

the cosmic ensemble the more we know

about the universe the more becomes

relevant to ask why are things the way

they are could for example the strength

of gravity have been different could the

speed of light have been faster or

slower what if anything constrains these

apparent constants of nature in the 20th

century physicists and cosmologists

recognized and then turned their

attention to this question their

findings however sparked controversy

throughout the field the values the

governed cosmic evolution were indeed

extraordinarily precise in many cases

the tiniest alteration to these values

produced dramatically different

universes the overwhelming majority of

which being entirely inhospitable to

either life or complexity of any

conceivable kind cosmologists calculated

that the chances of such a life friendly

universe as ours occurring as a result

of chance was many trillions to one for

some the solution to this enigma is to

suppose the existence of trillions of

universes of multiverse with in which

every intelligible arrangement of

nature's values is borne out for its

proponents this is a mere extension of

the Darwinian selection principle but

applied to the universe itself within a

multiverse of trillions of universes

it's not surprising that we discover

ourselves in one that could have

supported our existence no matter how

tiny the arts

and yet other prominent voices in the

scientific community have criticized

this ad hoc and apparently in elegant

solution were reminded that other

universes let alone trillions of them

only became the subject of serious

consideration after the discovery of

apparent fine-tuning in the multiverse

view the true explanation and cause of

the universe originates from outside of

itself in the transcendent multiverse

and it's mysterious universe generating

mechanism of which empirical evidence of

any kind may in all likelihood be

forever impossible to acquire provable

or not the multiverse theory may in fact

be the most accurate description of our

cosmic situation yet it remains possible

that the multiverse is not the reason

why the universe appears so finely tuned

to support complex conscious life a

contingency of scientists skeptical of

the multiverse theory have focused on

explanations of the universe which do

not appeal to which one send an

unknowable exterior this however has led

them to reconsider the apparent

fine-tuning of nature's constants

including the possibility that life had

to evolve several physicists and

philosophers including John Wheeler Paul

Davies Freeman Dyson Andrei Linde Philip

Goff and Thomas Nagel have argued that

we should not rule out that the

mysterious and striking phenomena of

life and consciousness are somehow

necessary value giving features of

reality that ultimately contribute in

some still mysterious way to the

metaphysical integrity of existence

itself

keep in mind that any motion of value is

unintelligible in a universe without

mind and several contemporary

philosophers have argued that it is not

unreasonable to consider that some

primordial notion of value is required

to explain the universe's existence

perhaps as speculated by the physicist

Paul Davies a truly self-consistent

account of the universe necessitates

that it be self-explanatory and as such

produce beings capable of explaining it

in view of the apparently observer

driven character of quantum physics the

decorated physicist John Wheeler

tentatively offered that the quote self

excited circuit of reality involves

Minds quote giving meaning to the world

developing on wheelers ideas Davies has

further suggested that over trillions of

years life and mind will eventually

saturate the entire universe permitting

it finally to achieve a kind of

metaphysical closure in becoming as

Davies puts it completely self known

quote there's really nothing in

principle that I can see that would

limit the spread of life and mind right

across the cosmos

and so that conjured up the alternative

image of a universe in the very far

future saturated with mind if the

universe is about realizing its own

mental potential in some way if it's

going to end up in effect a mental as

well as a physical phenomenon that

completely changes the character of

things we wouldn't view the universe the

same way again end quote

the speculations that we've explored in

this section are likely to remain as

such and in some cases may be entirely

unverifiable and so technically

unscientific and yet the important point

and the reason it is necessary to

acknowledge these alternative

possibilities is that contrary to the

proclamations of mechanistic scientism

it is far too early to dismiss the

possibility that mind holds some

ontological significance and may even

play a role in the long term evolution

of the universe our discussion about the

organism ik paradigm does not rest on

the truth of these speculations and yet

it is important to keep in mind that

there exists a wider range of

cosmological possibilities than

mechanistic materialism can acknowledge

as Freeman Dyson has put it quote the

architecture of the universe is

consistent with the hypothesis the mind

plays an essential role in its

functioning and quote

organism we begin with a quote from the

18th century philosopher David Hume

quote the world plainly resembles more

an animal or a vegetable than it does a

watch or a knitting loom and does not a

plant or an animal which Springs from

vegetation and generation bear a

stronger resemblance to the world than

there's any artificial machine which

arises from reason and design unquote

the organism is the archetypal metaphor

of all deeply and connected and

interrelated systems it is firstly a

holistic entity a system within which

all constitutive entities exist in

meaningful relationship with all other

entities the entities comprising an

organism carry nested self-similarity

and fractal properties which is to say

that observation of multiple scales

reveals information about the larger

self-organizing system through

discoveries of the past century

physicists and cosmologists today

observe deeply holistic even holographic

aspects of nature's fundamental

organization which are distinctly

reminiscent of the holistic

self-generative properties of organisms

machines on the other hand are generally

not self-organizing systems their

structure is based on goals which exist

outside of them in the minds of their

creators to the modern mind the notion

of a designer God who sets the machinery

of the universe in motion seems naive as

scientists and philosophers have come to

regard the existence of such a God as

superfluous to their explanations of

nature the machine metaphor has also

come to lack its justifying designing

Authority in this sense the machine

metaphor of the universe is broken

incomplete

even in itself the universe instead

seems to develop much more like an

organism moving through developmental

stages of organization and engaged in

its own iterative and self-creating

process and while any full accounts of

an organism will include an exterior

world which shapes its adaptive

functions the universe might equally be

viewed as creating its own developmental

environment today's scientists have

assigned specific behavioral attributes

to organisms which while very useful in

a range of contexts can make a direct

comparison with the universe more

difficult yet if our interest is in a

more archetypal view of the organism

profound insights come within reach a

primary attributes of an organism is its

being alive but what exactly does it

mean to be alive especially from the

mechanistic materialist perspective the

machinery of the organism is ultimately

constituted from the same inert

processes of matter and at no stage

acquires any new property of the

alive the mechanistic frame therefore

cannot see into the essential meaning of

being alive even at the level of

familiar biological organisms a

contemporary scientist versed in physics

biology and computer science might

describe life in terms of flows of

information through biochemical

algorithms what is lost in this

explanation however is any sensitivity

to the imminent dimension of Valley

which exists for the organism this

dimension of value is invisible to the

materialist approach for the same reason

that consciousness is it simply cannot

be described in purely behavioral or

mechanistic terms it is normal s

undeniably present and must be included

in any meaningfully complete account of

an organism whatever physical or

behavioral characteristics we reach for

in defining life be they energy

metabolism information processing or

reproduction I would argue that our

understanding of the universe for it to

be in proper apprehension of its self

generating unfolding and creative

dimensions necessarily invokes this

property of aliveness if alive

is to mean anything

the organismic frame subsumes the

explanatory power of the machine

primarily because there exists a

mechanistic level of explanation of

organisms but while the organism

contains these aspects it is not

exhausted by them the archetypal

organism evokes both the physical and

mental poles of reality of a real and

existing physical nature associated with

a real and existing dimension of

consciousness of volume meaning and

significance to be clear a shift to a

more organismic lens does not

immediately transport us into a solution

to the ancient mind-body problem

but while the minds relationship with

matter remains mysterious mind becomes a

known quantity to be included and

formalized as opposed to explained away

cosmic identity many in the scientific

establishment retain an ardent

skepticism to any notion of possible

human significance in many ways science

can be seen to have produced a trail of

discoveries which challenge humanity's

beliefs about their importance or

sensuality in God's universe as it

happens humans are not the center of

existence occupying a very small and

peripheral place on the cosmic stage and

yet while this is undoubtedly the case a

physical centrality is firstly quite a

naive criteria for significance

secondly and more importantly we are

more than humans deeper and more

essential than our identity as humans is

our identity as minds as creative

conscious beings with aesthetic

sensitivities and relative yet scalable

intelligence as biological organisms we

are in certain respects the most complex

and novel phenomena known to exist in

the universe and so are therefore within

various dimensions the greatest known

expressions of realities latent

potentials in these ways we and other

life are a potential source of deep

insight into the basic character of the

universe similarly in our subjective

dimensions our minds are a glimpse into

the vast psychic depths of potential

experience and the unfathomable value

that awaits to be realized in

consciousness growing recognition of the

significance of consciousness may

provide the counterpoint to the

decentering narrative of the Copernican

revolution in our most primary identity

we are as the cosmologists Carl Sagan

once famously remarked a way for the

cosmos to know itself this has always

been a perspective worth aspiring to and

yet there is a distinct and

consequential difference between the

view of ourselves as illusory

experiencing fragments in a meaningless

mechanistic environment and viewing

ourselves as experiencing on behalf of

an evolving system

the cosmology of organism instead of

diminishing the human and its inner

dimensions encourages us to recognize

our own mental landscape as an extension

of the ongoing creative activity of the

universe it has now become relatively

common knowledge that the elements in

our bodies were forged in ancient stars

but the 20th century revelation that we

are Stardust is moving into the 21st

century

realization that we are the universe as

conscious expressions of this unfolding

reality our identity shifts from and the

looser we know where to in a sense

everywhere and every being the

philosopher Daniel Kolak has termed such

broader conceptions of identity open

individualism and in its consideration

of the experience of all conscious

beings in all times and in all places

many consider open individualism to be

the basis of a truly rational and post

human ethics while a discussion about

the broader meaning of open

individualism would take us beyond the

scope of our discussion the organism ik

paradigm is decidedly open

individualistic because within it we

share in a single meaningful identity

and in which our fundamental

relationship with other entities is one

of cooperation rather than competition

the mechanistic paradigm on the other

hand more embodies what Kolak terms

empty or closed individualism in which

value is unregistered

and the emphasis on identity is in its

isolated and temporary nature

in the organiz m'q frame our identity

moves from that of a single finite human

to an expression of a developing

principle of consciousness being

variously expressed in the world our

scientific journey of knowledge becomes

reframed as the exploration of valued

states of consciousness and

understanding and as an experiencing

aspect of this unfolding reality the

ongoing journey of knowledge becomes a

journey of self-knowledge scientific

animism there is a clear resemblance

between the organismic perspective and

the ancient world view of animism of a

living world populated with myriad

spirits and intelligences today's

biologists no longer believe in a

mysterious life force which surges

through living matter the main reason

for this is that their models do not

require it but while the organismic

paradigm might a plea be viewed as a

form of scientific animism it is not

because we have finally discovered a

vital energy which flows through living

cells it is because our developing

understanding of nature brings ever more

clearly interview the profound unity of

reality the evolutionary and

developmental nature of the universe the

extraordinary possibility space of

life's future and the ocean of

explorable states of mind

in a deeply mysterious way the universe

is the source of its own existence the

manifest living reality of the world

what the equations of physics actually

point to while a complete mystery

from the materialist paradigm connects

deeply with the archetypal organism with

its self realizing and self-regulating

functions moving to a more organismic

frame does not require us to adopt an

exotic new metaphysics it does however

invoke a more receptive sensitivity to

the open metaphysical questions which

are undeniably raised by the striking

phenomena of life consciousness and the

existence of the universe itself

in some ways the move away from a

mechanistic view is to realize that it

was even there in the first place along

with its distinct idiosyncratic

assumptions about reality many of which

no longer seem justified recall that

machines are things that humans

understand they are entirely built out

of our concepts as a cosmological lens

it infers that we already understand the

world in principle the entire tool set

of concepts is already in hand a

mechanistic frame therefore tends to a

naive scientism dogmatic hostile to

anomalies and in conspicuous ways akin

to the stifling church authority that

was once Sciences oppressor

a machine is a human-made artifact found

nowhere in nature but in our own

creation the move to a more organized

McClendon's is therefore a move away

from a profound and ferpa morphism

toward a more naturalistic perspective

capable of greater explanatory power

deeper aesthetic meaning and a more

unitive and integrated world view

through the organist meg lands modern

cosmology offers the beginnings of an

intelligible yet extraordinary

creation story which honors rather than

diminishes the inner and spiritual

dimensions within us we are no longer

isolated fragments of a dead world we

are conscious participated in the

ongoing evolution of a deep and vital

cosmos in which we rediscover ourselves

in a universe which is once again alive

and a part of us

[Music]

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