Theos-Talk Archives (November 2005 Message tt00054)

As cutting edge science sees it... They are getting closer and closer... See 
below: 
(extracted from a post to the Journal of Consciousness Study online e-mail 
forum)

Unfortunately, not many on that list are yet inclined to risk their peer 
reviewable professional status to follow these radical (to them) precepts. Could 
established science give up materialism entirely? They would have to learn 
a whole new processs of transcendental deductive thinking and give up 
measuring the parts to induce the whole. How unthinkable... </:-)>  

Lenny

*********************************

"The Universe is a system.   Knowledge of how the brain works  requires
knowledge of how a system works.  The essential property of a system inthe 
most
general sense is a working together of the relational  elements.  Knowledge 
of
how individual elements work does not tell us how  the elements work 
together. 
How the elements work together is a different  ontology involving
interactions rather than entities. The notion that chance and  competition 
rule
evolution is a political diversion. There are no instances of  competition to 
be found 
in the brain. By working together new forms are created.  These new formsare
emergent properties of the relationships between the  constitutive elements. 
They are not entities per se, rather they are what entities are doing to each 
other.
Consciousness is not a thing which can be found, consciousness is an emergent 

property not unlike the meaning found in these marks before you."

DAVID BOHM  
____________________________________

"Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for  man,in
his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of 
reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is 
applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which 
he 
lives, (i.e., in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant 
divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and 
experience himself and
this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments.  What is
needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that  the
world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to 
view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes."


KEN WILBER  
____________________________________

Bergson was also aware of the spurious reality of "things" because, -  ashe
himself pointed out - thought creates things by slicing up reality into  
small
bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are  
thing-ing.
Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things,  and,
as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the  
real
to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and 
separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have  in this
manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts. Therefore the  
Madhyamika
declares that Reality, besides being void of conceptual elaboration,  is
likewise Void of separate things. The doctrine of mutual interpenetration 
and  mutual
identification of the Dharmadhatu represents man's highest attempt to put 
into words that non-dual experience of Reality which itself remains 
wordless, 
ineffable, unspeakable, that nameless nothingness. The Dharmadhatu is not 
entirely foreign to Western thought, for something very similar to it is 
seen 
emerging in modern Systems Theory, in Gestalt psychology, and in the 
organismic 
philosophy of Whitehead. As a matter of fact, Western science as a whole is 
moving very rapidly towards a Dharmadhatu view of the cosmos, as 
biophysicist 
Ludwig von Bertalanffy states: "We may state as a characteristic of modern 
science that the scheme of insoluble units acting in one-way-causality has 
proved 
to be insufficient. Hence the appearance, in all fields of science, of 
notions
like wholeness, holistic, organismic, gestalt, etc., which signify that in
the  last resort, we must think in terms of systems of elements in mutual 
interaction."
GENERAL SYSTEMS THEORY  
____________________________________

Ludwig von Bertalanffy
"Compared to the analytical procedure of classical  science with resolution
into component elements and one-way or linear causality as basic category, 
the
investigation of organized wholes of many variables requires new categories
of interaction, transaction, organization, teleology..." 


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