The Rebirth of Nature

I'm very privileged and honored to be able to introduce the Chandra to you well thank you hard oh and thank you for this opportunity to speak online this is the first time I've done this well today you asked me to speak about the theme of the rebirth of nature made the recovery of nature the coming to life of nature again life coming back where there was death and in a sense that's the story I'm going to tell today we have a scientific worldview at present which says that nature is inanimate machine like unconscious or non conscious that we live in a world where everything is just based on the action of blind physical forces random trance mechanical events the whole of nature is non conscious the entire universe the Stars the galaxies everything we look at is non conscious animals and plants nothing but machines and we're nothing but a machine either a lumbering robot to use Richard Dawkins vivid phrase our minds our computers our consciousness doesn't actually do anything it's a kind of illusion everything you go on just as well with the computational machinery of our brains even if we weren't conscious if we were zombies there's no purpose in nature this is the worldview that we've all been brought up with it's the official worldview it's its name philosophical name is mechanistic materialism materialism is the doctrine that matter is the only reality mechanistic means that it's machine like in its nature now what's happening today and what's very exciting I think at the moment is that science itself is breaking out of this worldview which it's actually held to in his mechanistic form for 400 years I'm going to start with a historical overview because it makes it easier to understand where we are now when we look at how we've got here and then I get to show how changes in science over the last century or so have been gradually loosening the grip of this mechanistic world view until we're finally almost breaking out of it and coming to a whole new phase of science and because science has so much influence on our intellectual life a new phase of society and our culture now the view of nature is inanimate and machine-like is extraordinarily unusual in the history of humanity virtually all cultures all societies have taken it for granted that nature's of life that we live in a living world and they've just assumed that plants are really alive animals are really alive the Earth Mother Earth is alive the stars and the planets are alive living beings and we still call the planets by the names of the old gods and goddesses Mars Mercury Venus and so on everyone assumed that hidden in romantic societies for example this is still taken for granted our ancestors took it for granted - and I even our intellectual ancestors in ancient Greece the view that nature was alive was the common normal view and the great philosopher Aristotle put this into philosophical language and probably made the clearest statement of this animistic or worldview Aristotle said that everything in nature that's alive as a soul or rather is within a soul for Aristotle the bodies within the soul not the soul within the body every plant has a soul every animal has a soul um we have souls the earth has a soul the stars and planets have they're alive and eris awful then went on to say more than just that he said what does the soul actually do well the role of the soul is to give form to the body so the the soul of a bloke tree for example shapes the growing seedling oak seedling and turns it into an oak tree gives it the form or pattern or shape of the oak tree and it works by attraction it attracts the oak tree as it grows towards his material form souls work through attraction and they give what Aristotle called final causes they as well as formal causes I didn't want to get too deeply into ancient philosophy but this is an important part of understanding of what's happening today Aristotle pointed out to explain anything you need for causes the material cause the thing of which it's made and the example he gave was a sculptor making a sculpture you need a block of marble to make the sculpture without the material nothing will happen you need an energetic cause a moving cause allows the chisel hitting the stone that's what makes the the sculpture possible but if you just had those two you just have a tripping and you'd end up with a pile of marble chippings you also have to have a form and that's the form in the mind of the sculptor say it's a statue of an eminent citizen who's recently died and who's being put up in the marketplace as the formal cause that the form the shape in the mind of the sculptor and then as the final cause which is the purpose why is he making the sculpture well he's making it because he'd been paid to do so he's had a commission to do so and because they want to honor this person and put his statue up in the marketplace nunna none of this would happen without all four causes and Aristotle pointed out that in the realm of life thieves soul the soul of a plant as it shapes the plant gives it its form like the form of the oak tree as I mentioned it also attracts it towards its end or goal which is its mature form setting seed in reproducing so in animals and plants and in us the soul gives the shape the form and a purpose so anyway this is the kind of philosophy of nature which was taken up in the Middle Ages in Europe particularly by some Thomas Aquinas the 13th century theologian and philosopher who did much to shape the orthodoxy of medieval thought he formed a kind of Christian animism he took over Aristotle's idea nature's alive every all animals and plants are truly alive the Earth's alive the Stars the planets are alive they all have souls the souls shapes the bodies of all these things and the ultimate source of all these souls and nature is God so there's a Living God who works in and through nature a living nature with souls which give everything their life humans share with plants a vegetative soul that shapes their body with animals an animal soul that gives from their instincts and of course the Latin word animal comes from the the latter our English word animal comes to Latin word and Amalia and the that comes from animal the soul so the idea is that we also a part of nature our souls connect us with plants and animals but in addition we have a rational mind a soul is concerned with recent thought language and so on but that's embedded with a much larger psychic system well this was the worldview in the Middle Ages and it's the worldview out of which the great Gothic cathedrals emerged it was a very sophisticated view that brought together science theology philosophy and an understanding of living nature and a sense of participation in it now is precisely this worldview that was rejected with the foundation of modern science in 17th century the mechanistic revolution was a revolution precisely because it overthrew that ancient worldview and what it replaced it with was the vision of nature as a machine the universe was like um seen an obvious example that enabled people to think like this with the clockwork models of the universe in those great clocks that still exist in some cathedrals medieval clocks like in Wells Cathedral in England which modelled the universe have modeled the movements of the moon and the Sun in clockwork so the universe was a machine animals were machines transfer machines this vision which came to the young French philosopher Rene Descartes in 1619 says just over four hundred years ago that this happened was for him a liberating vision because it showed that everything in nature could be treated as a machine mathematically it could be treated in terms of mathematical physical laws and it opened up the possibility of a new kind of science mechanistic science and this was of course immensely successful and it enabled Newton to come up with his laws of gravitation to enable movements of planetary motion to be understood in a new way as enabled all sorts of machinery to be built by the end of the 18th century this mechanistic view of nature was enormous ly prestigious and it was the basis of Enlightenment rationalism you know that humans have now found out the secrets of nature can conquer nature through their minds and through science and technology and through Economic Development and social progress a whole new future opens for Humanity this was the Enlightenment vision based on mechanistic science now in the 17th century Dec our vision I was basically realistic it had a mechanical inanimate machine like nature it didn't get rid of God or angels or the religious realm it simply put them in a completely separate compartment outside space and time outside nature in a realm of supernatural being outside nature nature was went on mechanically but there are God angels and human reason human minds existed outside time and space outside the material universe they were separate and discrete adass Emperor realm of science which got the whole universe and religion which got God angels and human morality still could carry on but in kind of parallel separate track it also created a separation between humans and the rest of nature we had rational minds from a part of a Link to the spiritual realm but animals plants and the rest of nature were inanimate machines and therefore inferior to us to be exploited at will and it led of course to the separation between body and mind the matter and spirit this is called Cartesian dualism after Descartes his name was cart Cartesian so this is what prevailed really in science and until the 18th century then there were two movements which shaped the modern world and which I think we need to again focus on a little bit the first was that this mechanistic view of nature is inanimate machinery was obviously at variance with our n direct experience and in the late 18th century the Romantic movement was a kind of rebellion against that it said no we're not just calculating machines we're not just rational minds we have emotions we have passions we have enthusiasms and nature's not just dared it's full of life and the Romantic poets like Wordsworth in England gave a new vision of living nature under the Romantic movement and what it actually happened as a result of that was a kind of split in European civilization most people were influenced by romantic visions of nature it became a major feature in landscape gardening it became a major part of our culture but it came part of our private world the romantic vision and what we've ended up with is a split culture we're in our private lives in the evenings and weekends on holidays we want to get back to nature people get rich so laden by a place in the country and get back to nature away from it all but Mondays to Fridays 9:00 to 5:00 the official world viewers mechanistic materialism nature's a collection of raw materials to exploit the world as just a machine understood scientifically and mathematically and mechanically and so we've ended up with a split culture and we've exported that to the rest of the world Indians Chinese the South Americans Africans they all go along with this mechanistic materialist worldview during working hours but then they revert their more traditional cultural views at weekends and in the evenings and on holiday so not a very satisfactory state of affairs so that was one change that occurred the other change in the 19th century was that more and more people grew tired of this split the dualistic split of Cartesian dualism and wanted to go beyond it and most of them wanted to have just one thing not two things one school of thought was called the idealists and they said everything is consciousness matters sort of done done mind and that was very influential in 19th century philosophy in Germany for example Hegel was an idealist philosopher but leads a school that predominated really within science was materialism this took the cartesian splattered matter and spirit and said there's no such thing as spirit there's only matter does just one thing not two things and therefore at one stroke this inanimate matter became the only reality God and angels simply vanished they were like a puff of smoke puff they're gone because if you say there's no such thing as the realm of spirit there's any matter they these supernatural realm of garden spirits and angels is just simply doesn't exist and all that's left is human minds and they're now just nothing but the activity of human brains they're inside heads and if people want to go on believing in God or angels or spirits or anything like that then these are just ideas in human minds and therefore inside human brains they're not really out there they're just human fantasies or delusions so we get to the standard materialist mechanistic atheistic worldview which is the predominant default setting of most university graduates today it's what's taught in universities maintained through the serious media and is the standard worldview well all that reached his peak really in the 19th century when people imagined that suden science would be able to explain everything at the beginning of the 19th century of the famous French physicist pierre laplace famously said that and in a disembodied intelligence that was told the position of every particle in the universe and the knew all the laws of motion could work out absolutely everything that was going to happen because there was no freedom everything was determined and fixed by the laws of nature and in the 1860s Thomas Henry Huxley the main defender of Darwin's theory of evolution said that such an intelligence if given enough information about the original state of particles and the laws of nature could predict in every detail the fauna of Great Britain in 1869 the whole of evolution would be totally predicted and predictable and foreseeable everything was determined rigidly determined no free will and that was the worldview of 19th century materialism but that worldview which is still the worldview which is is the kind of standard background of modern atheism and a materialistic atheism has been coming unraveled gradually at first and then more rapidly and as the story I know I want to tell how we're going beyond it one of the first unraveling was through a quantum theory in the 1920s with the realization that processes at the quantum level are indeterminate unpredictable in principle any predictable in terms of probabilities the so-called uncertainty principle of Heisenberg means that the there's no longer this rigid determinism at least at the quantum level because genetic mutations of quantum events this meant that in the neo-darwinian theory of evolution there was true randomness in mutation there was a freedom of spontaneity that hadn't been there before in like in th Huxley's vision there was a kind of emerging freedom and openness in the whole evolutionary process and then with chaos and complexity of theories there was a realization that actually most of nature has never been predictable the breaking of a way of the behavior of the weather all sorts of perfectly normal natural phenomena are not predictable in detail there's a kind of openness spontaneity and freedom in the whole of nature that in the 19th century no one could imagine so that's one change that's occurred mmm-hmm another change came about really in the 1920s partly because of quantum theory the great philosopher Alfred North Whitehead realized that modern science was pointing us towards a vision not of nature being reducible just to one level atoms as in reductive atomism but as a series of organisms and this was the beginning of a holistic or organismic view of nature Whitehead had the idea that that an atom is a kind of organism and a molecule is a kind of organism with parts interacting together it's not a machine these are interacting parts they're parts of a process because as whitehead realized what quantum theory is telling us is that nature's processes before that people thought that nature was made up of stuff little bits of stuff like little billiard balls like atoms that were just hard and impenetrable and just remained the same forever but quantum theory shows that there's no such thing as in animate stuff those processes an electron is a vibratory process an atom is a vibratory process it's a structure of vibrations a crystal is a structure of vibrations so at what Whitehead showed was that physics is talking about small organisms atoms and molecules biology is talking about larger organisms animals and plants and microbes and fungi and but then when we look at the cosmos there are even bigger organisms as the Sun as the solar system does the galaxy in the 20th century this holistic view of nature has come to a recognition that nature's made out of many levels of organization at each level the whole is more than the sum of the parts I have a diagram here that illustrates this and in this diagram we can see a series of levels let's show that diagram now there's a series of levels and at each level the whole is like a larger circle containing parts which are parts within it and the those parts could be subatomic particles they could be within atoms there could be atoms within molecules molecules within crystals all those smaller smaller circles could be organelles in cells and tissues in organs in organisms and societies and organisms in ecosystems well they could be planets inside solar system's inside galaxies inside galactic clusters we see this pattern of nested hierarchy or hierarchy all through nature at every level and indeed our n language models there's their mirrors this is one reason language can enable us to understand nature because it has a similar kind of structure itself the smaller circles with phonemes inside words inside sentences inside paragraphs so we have a series of hierarchical levels of organization in nature we can call it a nested hierarchy but if you don't like the word hierarchy a better word is hierarchy which the philosopher and writer Arthur Koestler suggested and he suggested that each level the wholeness that's more than some of the parts is a whole on a hol o and a whole on and hollands contain parts which are themselves Holland's at a lower level and they themselves can be parts of a larger level of organization so this gives us a view of nature as made up of nested hierarchies and instead of trying to reduce everything to atoms or subatomic particles and explain everything in terms of quarks or or some other subatomic particle we have to understand that nature is always nested at all these different levels and in practice what the sciences do is study different levels physiology studies the functioning and inter-relational organs within the bodies it doesn't try and reduce them to quarks sociology looks at the movement the social groups and their patterns and individuals within them and how social groups interact what kind of functions and structures they have you know crystallography looks at the molecules within crystals in the way they're organized within crystals cosmology looks at galaxies and the way that stars are organized within them astronomy looks at the patterns within solar systems we have all these different levels and all these different sciences that look at different levels there's no one level this supreme above all the others to which everything can be reduced that so that's one another aspect of the this changing world view of this holistic worldview which is gradually increasing in its influence one aspect of it is Gaia the idea of the earth as a living organism rather than just a misty ball of rock hurtling around the Sun in accordance with dilute Newton's laws of motion so now another way in which nature's coming to life is through the rediscovery of purposes in nature within the branch of mathematics called dynamics they've found that the best way to model many different processes in nature is in terms of pull from a head rather than a push from the past and this is called the concept of the attractor or dynamical attract or the basic model in dynamics is the basin think of a pudding basin in which you to which you throw little balls the balls the balls roll around the basin it doesn't matter which angle you throw them in from or how big the ball is they roll around and they all end up at the bottom of the basin that's called the basin of Attraction and the bottom of the basin is where they'll end up and you can make a mathematical model in terms of how they'll end up by being attracted to that rather than how they're pushed and pulled each one different weather is much more complicated to do each individual push from the past and the angle and everything easier to model them in terms of an attractor in chaotic dynamics there are chaotic attractors and many branches of science and no models in terms of attractors including the growth of animals and plants there are models in terms of Morpho genetic fields fields which shape the organism as a whole being drawn towards attractors this kind of theory was worked out by a great french mathematician rene tom and provides a way of thinking of the development of an oak tree as being pulled towards an attract or in a field which shapes the developing oak this is very like Harris idea of the soul of the oak tree instead of a soul we got a field and in many ways in modern science fields have replaced souls in the ancient world they thought magnets had souls and those were abolished with mechanistic science but then in the 19th century Michael Faraday introduced the idea of the magnetic field and the electric field which were within and around the magnet the thing they organized now we have the whole universe in the gravitational field we have lots of fields in nature in quantum field theory quantum particles each have their own kind of field so what we got now is is fields with the tractors which draw things towards ends or girls and that again is to step back towards a more animistic view of purposes within nature then we have another huge step in in this reanimation of nature was the big bang theory which became scientifically orthodox around 1966 before that cosmologists thought that the universe was static or eternal some of them thought it was running out of steam and heading towards a heat death that the whole universe would eventually end up the Percel to frozen forever and that was a Misha still a machine view of an eternal machine running out of steam but in 1966 everything was changed with the Big Bang Theory the universe now began very small and very hot tiny much less than the size of a head of a pin very very hot with almost no structure and ever since then it's been expanding and cooling down and as it cools down and expands more and more things come into existence within it more and more patterns of activity at first atoms and molecules and then stars and and galaxies and then on earth rocks and crystals and and then animals plants microbes the evolution of life all of these things are happening within the developing evolving cosmos is nothing like a machine it's as if the whole universe has come to life the Big Bang is like the hatching of the cosmic egg in ancient myths which saw the universe coming forth from a kind of biological origin and growing like a growing plant or like an embryo with new forms and structures coming within it so this is cosmology has given us a very different view of nature there's nothing like a machine is much more like a developing organism cosmology has also given us another remarkable insight into the nature of nature in order to understand the way the universe is physicists have postulated that 95% of reality consists of dark matter and dark energy forms of matter and energy about which we know nothing and basically what they're saying is 95% of reality is utterly unknown to us as nature is totally obscure it's as if science has discovered the cosmic unconscious it's no longer a bit like early 19th century science where they thought you have clear distinct ideas in which everything's predictable and understandable 95% of matter and energy is nothing like what we've studied in physics or know about it through physics textbooks or biology textbooks or and it's utterly unknown to us and yet it shapes the whole of reality that we live in that again is a very remarkable discovery and I think the final change that's happening in our worldview which is bringing us back into an animistic view of nature is a discussion about the nature of the mind the materialist theory tells us that the mind is nothing but the activity of the brain minds are what brains do is a materialist slogan that your mind and my mind are nothing but the activity of our nervous system well that view it has been taken for granted in science for a long time and an end twentieth century psychology in the english-speaking world it was the basis of psychology itself the behaviorist school of psychology pretended the consciousness didn't exist all of it at least didn't do anything and that the business of scientific psychology should be to study muscular movements and behavior and glandular secretions because these were scientifically and objectively measurable and totally ignore consciousness incredible a full a psychology that denies or ignores consciousness and that was mainstream you know the most eminent professors in our greatest universities were teaching that for decades however that the reign of behaviorism began to wane in the late 20th century firstly because of the rise of cognitive science that said well we can get further by thinking the brain of the brain as a computer and then making computer models of brains that was still very mechanistic and computers are unconscious so that was a in a sense it made it more mechanistic insensitive gave a more persuasive machine model for the nature of minds but that became begin began to unravel for several reasons first in the late 20th century there was the rise of consciousness studies people started studying consciousness itself instead of ignoring it for example through the study of meditation and the effects of meditation studies that began in the 1970s through pioneering studies showing how people's consciousness changed through meditation and this change in consciousness had effects on physiology and well-being this was a spiritual practice that became scientifically measurable sharing their distinct effects on consciousness in the late 1960s the rise of psychedelic research when psychedelics was still legal led to an enormous expansion of people's views of and understanding of consciousness and that phase is resuming as psychedelic research is becoming legal again in various parts of the world then there were studies of near-death experiences and other altered states of consciousness all of them revealing realms of consciousness that didn't fit very well into the mechanistic model that wouldn't have been predicted by the computer model of algorithms and data processing and then in the 1990s devastating shock to that view came with the revelation that was new to scientists but not very new to most other people that emotions played a part in thinking the Antonio Damasio red book called de cars era in 1994 in which he argued that human thought and behavior is influenced by emotions and that we have our emotions like fear and so on which we share the physiology of with animals well it's obviously true we do share the physiology adrenaline fight-or-flight reactions yeah but what time are supported out was that emotions affect the way people think the rate their way they evaluate options they and that they make choices well this was a terrible shock to scientists because computers don't have emotions and therefore they were our brains or not to have emotions or be influenced by them and so this again opened up the debate within science now for people who aren't within science telling them the science has now revealed that emotions influence the way people make choices and and and the way they think is not a devastating novelty it's not a brilliant new discovery it's common sense but nevertheless scientists have had to take it on board and it's led to an enlarged view of minds now the attempts to reduce all Minds to nothing but the brain the materialists attempt has now become challenged philosophically as well increasing numbers of philosophers are finding it difficult to persuade themselves and other people that consciousness does nothing that we have no free will that it's just an illusion some philosophers of material think consciousness does nothing is an epiphenomenon that come is physical pursued in the brain but doesn't affect them some think it's just another way of talking about physical processes and again it doesn't do anything some think is an illusion and they can think they can explain consciousness away by saying it's an illusion produced by brains the trouble is doesn't really explain it away and becomes illusion itself as a mode of consciousness it presupposes consciousness and materialist philosophers go round and round and in circles trying to explain away consciousness or get rid of it and that's why the very existence of human consciousness is called the hard problem for materialists materialism just can't deal with the hard problem it remains the hard problem and that's why some philosophers are now trying to find another way forward which is called pen psychism pan means everywhere and psyche means mind or soul the Greek word psyche as in psychology is if so the Latin word is anima and leading to the idea of animism and psychism and animus of a very similar pen psychism attempts to solve the hard problem by saying well instead of saying the consciousness is different in kind from everything else in the universe so that the entire universe is unconscious until the light bulb of consciousness is switched on inside complex brains just on earth and basically we've got more than anyone else humans are the most conscious things in the universe because our brain brains are more complex than anything else that's the standard view and that it's different in kind from everything else what they're saying is that is different in degree that if you say there's a small amount of consciousness in an electron and has a mind of experience you can use different words awareness experiences perhaps the best word then a molecule might have more experience than more complexities more possibilities of experience than an atom in a single living cell would have more than a nonliving system and a complex brain like ours has many more possibilities and more experience and more consciousness it becomes a difference of degree and many pen cyclists find us a much more attractive philosophy than old-style mechanistic materialism now Galen Strawson was one of the first to open this debate in his modern form a British philosopher of mind Thomas Nagel the American philosopher of mind came out for Penn psychosom around 2012 in a book called mind and cosmos why the materialist near Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false arguing that there are purposes in nature and that there are many kinds of mind in nature recently Philip Goff another Penn psychist philosopher has put forward a particularly clear statement of this view in his book Galileo's era and so Penn psychism is now very much part of academic debate and essentially what it's doing is opening up a new era of animism most contemporary Penn cyclists though are still quite close to materialism they're saying that materialism doesn't explain the inner nature of things we're just put psyche or experience there but it doesn't really make much difference to the scientific worldview it makes a different way of thinking about it but it doesn't lead to new experiments or new measurements or anything like that and a much more radical form of pan psychism was put forward by Alfred North Whitehead who I've already mentioned in the 1920s when white had realized that quantum theory tells us that nature's made of a process is not things that an electron is a wave of vibratory wave pattern of activity what he realized is that this wave that must take time a wave can't be a wave at an instant you can't have a wave at a potato at any point or in space or in time think of the waves on the sea if you just look at a tiny sliver of a wave it would try to make the point it stops being a wave and it takes time to wave and the fact that it takes time is the ultimate reason and space for a wave to exist is the ultimate reason for the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics you can't pin things down to a point or an instant so Whitehead pointed out that even electrons of processors atoms of processes everything in nature is a process lot of thing and if it's a process it's a process in time and if it's in time it has time within it a polarity in time the past and a future pole and Whitehead then had the brilliant idea of thinking in terms of the relation between mind and body in terms of time not space usually when we hear discussions of the mind-body problem they're couched in spatial metaphors the inner life the outer world even mystics and people talk about the inner life or look within I mean these are all spatial metaphors about the nature of the mind the inside of things as opposed to the outside of things which is the physical world what Whitehead argued was that actually this polarity in time gives us a completely different view and and one that I personally I found much more meaningful and helpful the future Pole is the mental pole the mental pole of things is about possibilities minds are about possibilities and about choosing among them I'm not talking about conscious minds as opposed to unconscious habits so consciousness is about possibility and possibilities are what the future contains the future is full of possibilities they're not yet physical facts when they become physical facts then they're measurable and science can deal with them in the new normal way and what right had suggested is that the mind is the future pole and body is the past pole as soon as it becomes a bodily effect it's scientifically measurable and even in the case of electrons this is so the electron is described in quantum physics by the Schrodinger wave equation and the wave equation tells you all the possible things the electron could do an electron starting out from a cathode ray tube right now for example has a whole range of possible things that could do described by this equation there all possibilities they're not physical facts when the electron interacts with something a measuring apparatus or another a term or whatever it when it interacts all these different possibilities collapse down to one actual measurable fact which is now measurable and it's sometimes called the collapse of the wavefunction out of these possibilities a kind of decision is made and something happens it's now physically effect now what Whitehead is suggesting is that's what's going on in our own minds two conscious Minds choose among possibilities then we make decisions and those become measurable facts and the whole of nature is working that way everything that self-organizing has a kind of mind which is open to different possible futures and when it chooses among them often on the basis of habit so it doesn't require much consciousness most of our own choices are a visual but it then becomes a measurable fact so what Whitehead suggesting is there are two strains are two kinds of causality there's one kind of causality coming from the past the ordinary kind physics is familiar with the energy the flow the ball rolling down a hill and electric current at the light that left the Sun eight minutes ago that's falling on us now these causality is a flow of through energy from the past that's regular physical causality it's what Aristotle called moving cause it's that aspect of Aristotle's Thorton and matter which physics deals with very well as what majima Aristotle called the material cause but what this idea of whitehead shows us that the final cause the purpose of things in the future which and the formal causes are coming from this future realm of this realm of possibility which is working whereas a directional causation that works from the future towards the past and in the present these realms of causation these kinds of causation overlap so you have mental causation interacting with physical causation in the present that's why we can make decisions why our minds can influence our brains why our brains are influenced by material causes and also energetic causes that I penned on energy and food and all the kinds of things physiology tells us about so anyway whitehead opens up a way of thinking about the mind-body relationship not just in us but in all nature which i think is very liberating and and very stimulating one footnote or perhaps clarification I should add to the pen psychist view the pen psychist view says the self-organizing systems have some kind of mind or experience organisms that holo thinks that her Hollins that are self-organizing plants animals molecules crystals galaxies stars planetary system the solar systems flocks of birds it doesn't apply to aggregates of matter mere aggregates like a heap of stones or a chair or a table things that have put together and that don't organize themselves or a machine a computer or a car or a sock or a stone or a chair sometimes people make fun of pen psychism buzzer oh you're saying this chairs beside conscious they're no do you mean this song do you mean your socks or conscious and well so a common kind of objection but that's not what pen cyclists are saying they're saying the socks may contain crystals and molecules which may have some degree of psychic awareness the aggregate of these things is not in itself conscious that means that the mechanistic theory which takes the machine as the central metaphor for the whole of nature couldn't be a worse model because machines are some of the very few things in nature which are not self-organizing which don't have organizing psyche or holistic organizing principles and whereas animals and plants and planets and so and our own bodies and minds and our everything else does there's much better to think in terms of organisms as Whitehead suggested so all these changes mean that while effectively as happening knows we're returning to a sense of living nature the earth is a lie of Gaia the animals and plants are truly organisms with fields that organize them holistic organizing fields with attractors that help motivate them with Minds and awareness and experience our experience is different from other organisms experience but they have experienced two of their own kind no butterfly has butterfly experiences a hummingbird has hummingbird experiences we have human experiences but then it also opens us up to realms of thinking that most of us are very unfamiliar with we've got used to thinking of the Sun for example as an inanimate hydrogen bomb like object in the sky governed by laws of physics and studied by astronomers and dealt with in physics textbooks but in a holistic living world then the Sun could become a living organism the galaxy is a living organism the entire solar systems a living organism not just Gaia the earth and and if the Suns a living organism it might have a mind is the Sun conscious well this is a topic I've been exploring recently and with a group of colleagues in physics and another branches and in philosophy and I think one can make a very strong case for the Sun be conscious first of all it's a self-organizing system clearly it organizes itself it's not being put together in a factory or it's not a random assembly of things it's it's got a boundary of the photosphere that we see it's got beyond that the corona at the whole solar system has a membrane around it called the heliopause and the whole solar the heliosphere is the larger organism within which the earth is the the Sun also has complex very complex electromagnetic patterns of activity going on within it which our brains do too and many people even materialists think that the interface between the mind and the brain is somehow the electromagnetic activity of the brain some would say that is the mind well the Sun has much more complex electromagnetic patterns going on within it within the granules on its surface within the super granules within the solar flares within the magnetic fields between the sunspots in coronal mass ejections in the solar wind that pours out from the Sun all the time it's vastly electromagnetic in fact it's made of electromagnetic plasma that's what the sun's body consists of and it has waves and ripples and all sorts of fractal versions of electromagnetic patterns going on within it all the time that could easily be the interface of the sun's mind with the sun's body and we are within the sun's mind whether within its extended body the heliosphere and if the Sun has a mind other stars would have minds too if they have minds then the whole galaxy can have a mind the stars are like cells were than the body of the galaxy that could be a galactic mind if there's a galactic mind a cosmic mind ultimately the entire cosmos was is not just an inanimate machine but it may have a cosmic mind that works in and through the universal gravitational field and the universal electromagnetic field that permeates the entire universe well this is a very different way of thinking about nature from the one we're used to and it's unfamiliar it's certainly a scientifically unfamiliar but it's certainly not irrational to think like that we can if the Sun has a mind and if the electromagnetic fields are an interface between the mind of the Sun and the Sun we can study something about it by as we already are doing looking at those electromagnetic patterns of activity after all with animal Minds I mean even the most hardcore materialists are usually prepared to admit that dogs have some kind of mind or cats I mean the older type materialists didn't they denied that but there's been a change in animal behavior studies about 10 years ago there was a conference in Cambridge that issued the so-called Cambridge declaration on animal consciousness that said that after studying lots and lots of facts and animal behavior and reviewing scientific literature researchers on animal behavior it comes to the conclusion that animals might have some kind of consciousness well anyone who's kept a dog or cat reached that conclusion a very long time ago but this is now official and if but of course we can't know what it's like to be in the mind of a dog we can imagine to some extent we can empathize to some extent we can measure electrical changes in dog's brains and we're in a similar position about consciousness of anything in nature we can't I can't prove you're conscious we have to assume other people are conscious we can't prove it and when we're coming to the inner life of other creatures animals are the easiest to empathize with because they're most like us mammals specially mammals like dogs and cats and indeed many people do this every day with their animals they live with when it comes to something like the Sun is much harder because its mind may be vastly beyond ours in its scope or it may be concerned with much more mundane matters just keeping his own body and the solar system functioning in terms of electromagnetism and gravity but it may have a mind that includes and understands what's going on here on earth and in fact in traditional animistic societies people have tried relating to the Sun treating it as if they can have a conscious relationship with it in shamanic cultures shaman's sometimes journey to or make relay or connect with the Sun in India practitioners of yoga often do [Music] salutation to the Sun every morning the it's called the Surya Namaskar the Sun Salutation I do it myself actually it's a yoga practice which is a salutation for the morning sun prostrating to the Sun the Gayatri mantra one of the key mantras in Hinduism is a prayer to the Sun asking the Sun to illuminate our meditation the glorious divine splendor of the Sun it's not saying the Sun is God it's saying the Sun is a portal through which divine light can shine that the light in nature is not totally separate from the ultimate conscious source of nature that there's a kind of consciousness working through all nature so our ancestors in the Middle Ages and in almost all other cultures took the view that nature is alive that our life in nature is related to the natural world is deeply connected with it and that in in religious cultures where there was a God over and beyond nature God was in nature and beyond nature of you called Penh and here some God in nature and nature in God that's what most medieval theologians theologians thought God was not separate from nature nature was not outside God with God in a separate compartment supernatural all of nature reflected God's being the great Franciscan medieval philosopher st. Bonaventure said that every being in nature reflected the Holy Trinity the ultimate inner conscious nature of God was actually reflected in all beings in nature every plant every animal and as he'd now say every molecule every atom reflects this nature now you may not want to go as far as God and many people don't but the idea of a nature a living nature is something that more and more people are coming to recognize as making sense it makes sense of our own experience of course other living organisms are alive and of course and or dogs and cats have a kind of consciousness of course a butterfly flying and looking at fliers and is aware of what it's seeing and choosing which flower to land on of course the whole universe seems more like a living organism than like a machine and of course it creates hard problems if you try to pretend that we're nothing but a machine and our minds are nothing but computer algorithms it causes intolerable problems because it's so obviously false and so obviously a limited view and by growing up by going beyond us mechanistic world view by recovering a sense of the life of nature I think we can also come to recognize that we totally depend on the living nature of which we are part the ID mechanistic view gave us the sense we are separate from nature our minds are superior to everything else in on earth if not the entire universe and we can do with it what we'd like or where the lords and masters of the cosmos of nature when we see we're part of a living world and that the living world interacts with us as it is doing through the viral epidemic the covet virus it's remarkable that this all those thing in the biological realm viruses but the smallest and least significant things that just get you know a little mention in biology textbooks on the very borderline of life have come to change our all our lives and not only our lives but our economy and the way we live on the earth and we have to find new ways of living on the earth and living with the earth and living in the earth and I think that having a science that tells us nature is alive and that we're part of the living world is a major step in that direction it can't possibly harm us to recognize this and I think it can help us a great deal what's more I think it can lead to science being better more exciting more true and something's actually more inspiring and less life denying than it can often be at present I think it will lead to a better kind of science and a kind of science that can undergo a kind of renaissance of new discovery

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

Views: 58,677

Rating: 4.9405479 out of 5

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Id: 90fD3FWL53s

Length: 58min 36sec (3516 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020