Well with the Pollock, fractal controversy raging, we went to the Tate collection of Modern art in London yesterday. Interestingly next to their Pollack painting they reference the Taylor article on fractals so maybe they still find the idea attractive. But more interesting was the note next to the work of the Dutch expressionist Piet Mondrian. If you know his works you can visualize his rather sparse canvases with only straight lines formed into rectangles with a bit of primary color here and there. Mondrian who was much influenced by Theosophist in the 1930s was attempting to paint the underlying form of nature, which he reduced to straight lines and rectangles. Well the interesting factoid at the Tate was that according to neurobiologist the visual system most readily responds to straight lines and rectangles. So Mondrian was intuiting the ordering of nature according to how we actually perceive it some 50 years before science discovered the reason.

Although I hate to reduce aesthetics to scientific explanations it would be interesting however if Mondrian using his meditation on the underlying forms of nature had not stumbled on to a truth about how we organize natural forms in our consciousness.

Anyway here is an article that goes into Mondrian and some other Modern masters such as Klee and Calder and their influence on the science of neurobiology.   more »

This is the personal blog of Robert Godwin, the author of "One Cosmos under God," which he discussed in the WIE interview in my previous SCIY posting. Godwin describes his book as: "the fruit of a lifetime of thought attempting to synthesize material from a number of diverse domains, including cosmology, theoretical biology, quantum physics, developmental psychoanalysis, attachment theory, anthropology, history, mysticism and theology, into a coherent, self-consistent, non-reductionistic whole." — In "One Cosmos," Dr. Godwin reveals a humorous alter-ego whom he calls: 'Gagdad Bob.' His posting for today begins as follows:

Now, I'm not an anthropopogist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn, and I do know a thing or two about a thing or three. And one of the things I know is that pre-human hominids only became human because of the specifically trinitarian nature of the human developmental situation: mother-father-helpless baby. This, by the way, is one of the many reasons I do not believe intellignt life will ever be found on other planets, because genes and natural selection are only the necessary but not sufficient cause of our humanness.
In other words, even supposing that life arose elsewhere and began evolving large brains, a large brain would never be sufficient to allow for humanness. Rather, the key to the entire enterprise -- the missing link, so to speak -- is the extremely unlikely invention of the helpless and neurologically incomplete infant who must be born approximately 12 months "premature" so that his brain can be assembled at the same time it is being mothered. If we had come out of the womb neurologically complete, then there would be no "space" for humanness to emerge or take root. We would be Neanderthals. Literally. ...    more »

Robert Godwin is ... an “outsider” thinker, and a masterful litterateur to boot. In his book "One Cosmos under God," he attempts nothing less than to reenvision the entire story of creation, both scientifically and spiritually, and audaciously and stunningly presents an often poetic, quasi-scriptural rendering of what a new cosmic narrative could be. It’s a book that breaks boundaries, thrills and teases, and ultimately makes very much sense in its Herculean embrace of cosmology, biology, quantum physics, psychology, anthropology, history, mysticism, theology, and more.

A practicing clinical psychologist, Godwin, in his words, became voraciously interested in everything at some point in his mid to late twenties. He also credits himself with having a synthetic versus analytic mind. So in order to make sense of what he was learning, he sought to find relationships and patterns among the truths he had gleaned from disparate fields of study. In short, he wanted to know. To that end, he recognized that the only way to grasp spiritual truths was through direct experience and he became a serious practitioner of Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga. One Cosmos under God is the result of what he discovered as a follower of the Indian sage’s teachings, together with the fruits of his relentless curiosity. ...   more »

A gene variant linked to living a very long life--to 90 and beyond--also serves to help very old people think clearly and retain their memories, according to new research by scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. Their findings are published in the December 26, 2006 issue of Neurology. ...   more »

This seemed like an appropriate article to post in honor of Christmas Day. ~ ron

...if you've been following the evolutionary trajectory of What Is Enlightenment? over the past couple of years, you may have noticed that a new kind of thinking has indeed been finding its way onto more and more of our pages. Call it integral, second tier, holistic, or systemic, this new thinking is the hallmark of a growing wave of visionaries with the eyes to look beyond the surface turbulence and grapple with the multilayered complexities undergirding our global dilemmas. Challenging us to face the elaborate interwoven forces that are shaping our destiny for better or worse, these evangelists of higher-order thinking offer what many feel may be the best chance we have at meeting the demands of the years ahead.

So, in attempting to come to terms with our uncertain future, and particularly with the role that religion will play in it, for this issue we decided not just to speak with a number of these leading-edge thinkers but to bring them together and have them speak with each other. As firm believers in Plato's assertion that the highest form of knowledge is that which emerges in dialogue, we couldn't imagine what could give us a better chance of seeing the biggest possible picture than a roundtable discussion between some of today's brightest integral minds, who are each attempting, in their own way, to forge a more evolved course through our present and future world. ...   more »

This is a fascinating website. Ulrich Mohrhoff teaches math, physics, and quantum philosophy at the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, India. He has developed a new perspective re the ontological implications of quantum mechanics known as the "Pondicherry Interpretation," which has been called "startingly original." ~ ron

...Scientists are the myth makers of our time. If a story is believed by a large fraction of the scientific community, it becomes part of our (socially constructed) reality.
Take electromagnetic waves. Even if you agree with me that we cannot observe them directly, you will probably insist that we can observe them indirectly: their effects are all over the place.
But it isn't their effects. The jiggling of that charge over there isn't the effect of an electromagnetic wave acting on it. It is the effect of my jiggling this charge here. The rest — the generation of an electromagnetic wave here, its propagation, and its action on that charge over there — is a myth. ...   more »

...What I've basically been saying is, right now we carry a fourteen-billion-year history within us, a fourteen-billion-year history of surprises. You are a lump of quarks. So am I. Those quarks are joined in atoms. Those atoms are joined in something very complex called molecules. But we also carry fourteen billion years or more of another kind of time within us—future. The future's as real within us as the universe was real in those first tiny axioms of the Big Bang. I'm not predicting that you and I will be around to see that future. But in one form or another, our basic ingredients sure as heck will be.
And we have a unique responsibility. We're among the first batch of quarks we know trying out this new surprise called consciousness. Every new surprise—every new upgrade—is tested. Protons, for example, were tested to the nth degree. They've gone through every kind of catastrophe you can possibly imagine. They've gone through the bashing of the initial high-speed plasma soup. They've gone through the crunch and shattering of dying stars. And they've pulled through it all. Right? They're the ultimate survivors in this universe. But we'll see whether consciousness is able to survive. We will see. ...   more »

Jaron Lanier is one of my heroes. Graced with an off-the-scale IQ, he is sometimes known as the "Father of Virtual Reality," in deference to his invention of the 'Data Glove,' one of the first practical interfaces between "meat reality" and VR (which landed him a front page article in the Wall Street Journal, with a photo of his now famous unruly dreadlocks). He is both a top computer scientist and a virtuoso musician who can play over 100 different instruments, including virtual instruments of his own invention. He has held research and teaching positions at a host of prestigious academic institutions, and is on a first name basis with many of the world's elite intellectuals, with whom he has an ongoing dialogue about a wide range of scientific and philosophical topics. For me, his monthly columns in 'Discover Magazine' are a continuing source of fascinating new ideas, so I'm pleased to share some of them here on SCIY. I hope you enjoy them. (ron)

... If cephalopods someday evolve to become intelligent creatures with civilizations, what might they do with their ability to morph? Would we be able to communicate with them? Perhaps they offer a useful surrogate for thinking about one way that intelligent aliens, if and wherever they are out there, might one day present themselves to us. By trying to develop new ways of communicating using morphing in virtual reality, we do at least a little to prepare for that possibility. We humans think a lot of ourselves as a species; we have a tendency to suppose that the way we think is the only way to think. Maybe we need to think again.    more »

I'm posting this portion of Chap. 5 of "Trialogues at the Edge of the West" because I think it may relate to the discussion presently under way re the article titled: "Instruments of Knowledge and Post-Human Destinies." My hope is that some of the new theories now surfacing in contemporary science may support our work in deconstructing the insights presented both in traditional Hindu and Buddhist texts and in Sri Aurobindo's more recent writings.
For example, the initial section of "Trialogues" that I quote below raises some interesting ideas about the possible relationship between light, perception, mind and consciousness. (ron)   more »

The two postings on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies (I and II) generated a thread on the relationship between physical instruments of observation and knowledge in the scientific sense (microscopes, telescopes, nuclear accelerators), human organs of observation and knowledge (mind, intelligence, sense organs) in the cognitive / psychological sense and possible mutations of human consciousness in the ontological / phenomenological / epistemological sense (change of being, change of consciousness, change of modalities of knowledge). The last (possibilities of a change of modalities of knowledge) opened up a consideration of Sri Aurobindo’s phenomenology of supramental knowledge and its subsidiary action in human forms and instruments of knowledge – specifically sense-knowledge through the sense organs with the “sixth-sense” of the “sense mind,” manas in the Indian Sankhya formulation behind them at/as their origin and the supramental Samjnana further behind/beyond but with a concealed and subsidiary operation in/through manas. Here we are reproducing the relevant parts of this very fertile thread for focused consideration.   more »

There's a profound crisis in the scientific world at the moment that is going to change science as we know it. Two of the West's fundamental models of reality are in tremendous conflict. The existing worldview of science is an unstable combination of two great tectonic plates of theory that are crashing into each other. Where they meet, there are major theoretical earthquakes and disruptions and volcanos of speculation. ...    more »

...In our culture, we tend to move into cities that push nature away from us. In our mental environment, we do the same thing. Most people live within a very conventionalized set of notions that are deeply imbedded in a larger set of notions. When we go to the physical edges, such as the desert, jungle, and remote and wild nature, and when we go to the mental edges with meditation, dreams, and psychedelics, we discover an extremely rich flora and fauna in the imagination. This realm is ignored because of our tendency to see in words, to build in words, and to turn our backs on the raging ocean of phenomena that would otherwise entirely overwhelm our metaphors...
If we ask what has caused this blindness, we might answer that it's the satanic spirit of science. In the seventeenth century, the spirit of Satan was portrayed in Milton's Paradise Lost, with a whole taxonomy of various demons and fallen angels that acted as malevolent powers, such as Mammon, the demon of commercial greed. The primary sin of Satan and of the other fallen angels like Mammon was pride, the turning away from God toward their own self-sufficiency. This was the beginning of the whole humanist illusion that turned away from the spirit world and declared humans to be self-sufficient. From this point of view, all gods, demons, and spirits are projections of the human mind, creating a kind of anthropocentric universe. ...    more »

...Teilhard speaks not only as a research scientist but also as a priest and poet who discerns with Meister Eckhart the ‘interdependency of all things.’ He shares with the medieval poet Dante the conviction that it is ‘love that moves the sun and the other stars.’
Claude Cuénot describes him as a ‘cosmo-mystic’ while Louis Barjon SJ speaks of him as ‘a mystic of the cosmos’ who rejoices in the wonder of an evolutionary creation that brings together love of God and love of the earth. He sees cosmic evolution telling us of the correlation between complexity and consciousness. ‘Consciousness,’ he says, ‘presents itself and requires to be treated, not as a particular and subsistent kind of entity, but as the “specific effect” of complexity.’
He combines scientific knowledge and mystical intuition to envision a universe in process towards its completion at a ‘centre of cosmic spiritualisation’ or ‘ultimate centre of personality and consciousness’ he calls Point Omega. ...   more »