The Living Universe - Documentary about Consciousness and Reality | Waking Cosmos

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 [Music] 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] you

Channel: metaRising

Views: 1,058,841

Rating: 4.7158351 out of 5

Keywords: consciousness, panpsychism, thomas nagel, universe, cosmology, philosophy, full documentary, space documentary, BBC documentary, closer to truth, new paradigm, paradigm shift, anthropic principle, David Chalmers, hard problem of consciousness, idealism, fine tuning, consciousness documentary, panpsychism documentary, cosmos documentary, consciousness documentary BBC, philosophy documentary, nature of reality, Ray Kurzweil, omega point, cosmic consciousness, Waking Cosmos

Id: HD4WthE414k

Length: 55min 7sec (3307 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 18 2019

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Electric Universe Theory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uzw6s4nbTZA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mINsiT70OHE

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'A Greater Reality' | Timestamp 16:55 | https://youtu.be/HD4WthE414k?t=1015

'Intelligence' | Timestamp 28:05 | https://youtu.be/HD4WthE414k?t=1685

Cosmic Identity' | Timestamp 45:06 | https://youtu.be/HD4WthE414k?t=2706

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QEM | https://www.reddit.com/r/neuronaut/search?sort=top&q=flair%3AQEM&restrict_sr=on

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