Science, Culture and Integral Yoga

The Future Body: Disappearances

Rich — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:21:09 -0800

Thacker then makes the claim that tissue engineering is an example of the disappearance of technology into the human:

"Technology in tissue engineering seems to disappear - (into the body, my emphasis) - because no prosthetics, mechanical parts, foreign DNA, or even surgical interventions are required. With the lack of a readily identifiable technological apparatus, it appears that the body produced in tissue engineering is a fully natural body-something akin to a biotech supplement. Technology is thus invisible yet immanent"......(Thacker 2006)

When technology becomes so transparent as to be indistinguishable from the body it is because it has been discursively incorporated into the flesh. That is technology becomes part of a feedback loop that sustains the physical being.

"The more the discourse of the natural body is asserted within tissue engineering and medicine , the more this vision of a regenerative body is instituted as a normative constraint defining the normal healthy biomedical body. The version of the biomedical body is simultaneously natural and unable to do without technology separate from it. The result is that the body is objectified but in a particularly unique way such that the body can be seen , in the right conditions, as a self-regenerating, self-curling black box." (Thacker 2006)

Now startlingly he indicates that -albeit the methodological differences- the goals announced by Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine of overcoming our mortal destiny may actually be facilitated by the process of tissue engineering:

Here is Sri Aurobindo:

"today we see humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last -God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. (Aurobindo 1972)

Now here is Thacker describing one of the more extreme outcomes that may result from tissue engineering technology:

“Tissue engineering deeply invests the materiality of the body with a force that attempts to break out of the constraints of materiality and corporeality. For example , if we return to the opening description of the standard techniques in tissue engineering , we can see a set of practices that harbor within themselves some implication about the body surpassing itself. In the first step, the very idea of cell sourcing looks forward to the capacity to replicate an unlimited supply of raw materials for tissue an organ regeneration (especially when stem cells become the cell source. In the second step , the integration of cells and materials (cells seeded in biopolymer scaffold) evokes a process of spontaneous order in which, given the right combination of materials, the body simply self-assembles with minimal intervention. And in the third step the cultivation of the apparatus and its surgical implementation reinforce the modular , highly objectified approach to the body seen in anatomical and medical science. From this perspective , tissue engineering can be regarded as an instance in which the body gradually arises out of what Arthur Kroker calls a “torture chamber” of “mortality” and rapidly heads toward what can be viewed as a body without death. “ (Thacker 2006)

The Flames - a short story by Olaf Stapledon

Debashish — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 01:12:49 -0700
William Olaf Stapledon (1886-1950) was a British writer of Science Fiction, who dealt with themes which explored heightened utopic possibilities of human subjectivity. As one may see from his dates, he lived somewhat contemporaneously with Sri Aurobindo and it is not unlikely that he may have come across his writings or ideas. Stapledon's philosophical explorations into collective consciousness led him to use the term "supermind" for a global consciousness related to the mutual resonance and union of all human minds. Such ideas as also those of communication between different life forms and explorations of humanity's seeking for Truth and future perfection form the subject of many of his books. Stapledon may be thought of as one of the founders of modern Sci-fi and had a strong influence on other such masters of the genre as Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith. In this short story, The Flames, Stapledon brings together many of these themes and explores them from a certain perspective.

MAYAN SYNERGY, by Alehandra Libelula

ronjon — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:11:00 -0700
This article is a change of pace from the rather scholarly nature of many of SCIY's articles. It's a true report by a Mexican friend of mine named Alehandra of an unusually detailed dream that turns out to be remarkable synchronistic with events in her life. If it seems a bit too far out, I suggest viewing it as an interesting case study of the cultural imbededness of experiences that seem objectively real. - I can personally attest to the unpretentious honesty of the author.

'Reflections on Machine Consciousness,' by William Irwin Thompson

ronjon — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 20:57:32 -0700
I've taken the liberty of typing in all of Chapter 4 of my copy of this important book, because it powerfully addresses one of the main themes of SCIY, the manifold relationships between science, culture, and consciousness. (ron)

"It is a paradox of the work of Artificial Intelligence that in order to grant consciousness to machines, the engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as they work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets. As the caricature goes into public circulation with the help of the media, it becomes an acceptable counterfeit currency, and the humanistic philosopher of mind soon finds himself replaced by the robotics scientist. ...

"Both the mechanists and the mystics say that we are now at a great bifurcation in human evolution. The mechanists like Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and Hans Moravec prophesy that we are at the end of the human era, and that 'nanobots' are about to be embedded in our bodies until our antique organs of flesh are entirely surrounded by a new silicon noosphere of networked computers. Like ancient mitochondria or chloroplasts surrounded by the gigantic eukaryotic cells, we are about to be engulfed in the next evolutionary stage. So the mechanists see noetic technologies surrounding human culture and consciousness and compressing it into an endosymbiont in a larger and swifter and more elegant evolutionary vehicle. ...

"Mystics flip this literalism over to see technology as a system of externalized metaphors that derive from pre-existing ontological modes at play and at large in the universe... For the mystic — be she Cabbalist or Sufi — an angel is a 'Celestial Intelligence' — a form of cosmic noetic organization that does not require a detour through animal evolution. So when Kurzweil claims that by 2030 implanted nanobots in the bloodstream will enable humans to turn off to the outside world to attune to a virtual reality, the mystic would recognize a literalist rendering of the process of meditation. Kurzweil's vision of the world in 2030 reminds me of Borges's 'Library of Babel'. 'I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, useless, incorruptible, secret'. [2] And here we need to be sensitive to the full force of Borges's use of the word 'Babel'. ... "

Panoptic to Cyberoptics by Alexander Ried

Rich — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:14:14 -0700

In his 'Postscript on Control Societies,' Deleuze marks our emergence from the disciplinary, panoptic societies Foucault studies. He describes a movement from a society 'equipped with thermodynamic machinces presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage' to a society functioning 'with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise and the active, piracy and viral contamination' (Deleuze, 1995: 180). Deleuze's observations suggest more than a shift in the metaphors by which we understand society; they indicate a shift in the material relationship between humans and machines. Deleuze and Guattari's work has extensively explored this relationship, from molecular proto-machines of desire to the molar assemblages of the state. Their work operates, in part, on the shifting boundaries between aesthetic and technological paradigms. Science Fiction has also worked upon this boundary. Though the generic term 'Science Fiction' only hints at the multiple possibilities for communication (and contamination) between the two, Deleuze and Guattari recognize its potential, noting that the genre 'has gone through a whole evolution taking it from animal, vegatable and mineral becomings to becomings of bacteria, viruses, molecules, and things impreceptible' (1987: 248).

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies III

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:05:34 -0700
The concluding section on Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies by Debashish Banerji continues its second installment's reflections on the Omniscience, Omnipotence and Omnipresence presented to us as the emerging destiny of post-Enlightenment Modernity and compares this destination with its appropriation and supercession in the Neo-Vedantic teleology of Sri Aurobindo. What are the differences, dangers and promises of these destinies and what are the conditions for achieving an alternate destination? ...

Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - II

Debashish — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:04:11 -0700
This is a fragment constituting a continuation of Debashish Banerji's reflections on Techno-Capitalism as the epistemic regime of modernity and posible post-human futures at the eschatological cusp of history. Here the alignment of Marx and Hegel with the Enlightenment vision/teleology is contemplated and questions asked regarding a comparative alignment with the Neo-Vedantic teleology (if it can be called that) of Sri Aurobindo.

Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers N. Katherine Hayles

Rich — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 20:40:17 -0700

I understand "human" and "posthuman" to be historically specific constructions that emerge from different configurations of embodiment, technology, and culture. A convenient point of reference for the human is the picture constructed by nineteenth-century U.S. and British anthropologists of "man" as a tool-user.(15) Using tools may shape the body (some anthropologists made this argument), but the tool nevertheless is envisioned as an object, apart from the body, that can be picked up and put down at will. When the claim could not be sustained that man's unique nature was defined by tool use (because other animals were shown also to use tools), the focus shifted during the early twentieth century to man the tool-maker. Typical is Kenneth P. Oakley's 1949 Man the Tool-Maker, a magisterial work with the authority of the British Museum behind it.(16) Oakley, in charge of the Anthropological Section of the museum's Natural History division, wrote in his introduction, "Employment of tools appears to be [man's] chief biological characteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb" [p. 1]. The kind of tool he envisioned was mechanical rather than informational; it goes with the hand, not on the head. Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once "detachable" and an "extension," separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and kind of tool marks his affinity with the epoch of the human, its construction as a prosthesis points forward to the posthuman. Similar ambiguities informed the Macy Conference discussions taking place during the same period (1946-53), as participants wavered between a vision of man as a homeostatic self-regulating mechanism whose boundaries were clearly delineated from the environment,(17) and a more threatening, reflexive vision of a man spliced into an informational circuit that could change him in unpredictable ways. By the 1960s, the consensus within cybernetics had shifted dramatically toward reflexivity. By the 1980s, the inertial pull of homeostasis as a constitutive concept had largely given way to theories of self-organization that implied radical changes were possible within certain kinds of complex systems.(18) Through these discussions, the "posthuman" future of "humanity" began increasingly to be evoked. Examples range from Hans Moravec's invocation of a "postbiological" future in which human consciousness is downloaded into a computer, to the more sedate (and in part already realized) prospect of a symbiotic union between human and intelligent machine that Howard Rheingold calls "intelligence augmentation."(19) Although these visions differ in the degree and kind of interfaces they imagine, they concur that the posthuman implies a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which it is enmeshed. Accompanying this change, I have argued, is a corresponding shift in how signification is understood and corporeally experienced. In contrast to Lacanian psycholinguistics, derived from the generative coupling of linguistics and sexuality, flickering signification is the progeny of the fascinating and troubling coupling of language and machine.

Beyond Reductionism: by Jaron Lanier (Edge)

Rich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:39:09 -0700
First of two articles on a new science whose principles are that of emergence rather than reduction. The idea of reinventing the sacred is an interesting one since emergence rekindles a wonder in an irreducible Mystery. Interesting also is the fact that even as Lanier, Kaufmann, and other complexity scientist steadfastly avoid mapping a specific metaphysical narrative on to their descriptions of reality, in the end wind up with a view which shares much with Advaita or Buddhist constructions of the world. However, although the new science of emergence attempts to speak to human agency and observation, the phenomenological and social spheres of experience seem lacking in their calculations for achieving what could be called an integral view rc...

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Thus, beyond the new science that glimmers a new world view, we have a new view of God, not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself. This God brings with it a sense of oneness, unity, with all of life, and our planet — it expands our consciousness and naturally seems to lead to an enhanced potential global ethic of wonder, awe, responsibility within the bounded limits of our capacity, for all of life and its home, the Earth, and beyond as we explore the Solar System....

Future Bodies: Discipline, Control, & "the Yoga of Resistance"

Rich — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:58:01 -0700

              Michel Foucault
In speaking of the disciple of the body especially, when the task of disciple is simultaneously intended to improve its utility for production, here are some riffs on Foucault's: Discipline & Punish. Historical context is primary and Foucault's archaeological method helps uncover the rupture within the Enlightenment whose legacy still haunts us, as Deleuze observes, because they have now morphed into technologies of control.

In the European tradition Foucault traces the disciplining of the body back to medieval Monastic exercises, which were intended to facilitate renunciation of the world. These exercises were transformed when adopted by the socio-political regimes of the 17th & 18th century, (especially military, pedagogical, and industrial) into a method for maintaining control over the actions of the bodies it governed through disciplining processes. These disciplining practices have co-evolved with technology (and are in fact technologies in themselves) to become ever more omnipresent as tools of surveillance and control. Going forward it will be the omnipresence of ubiquitous technologies (bio-technical/computational/networked) that will largely determine the environmental parameters in which our future bodies must structurally couple.

Resistance to the virus of docility, to the infection of the gaze, to the insertion of discipling technologies is often the unintended consequences of the mechanisms of control themselves, as William Gibson says, "the street finds its own use for things". The future is a random other. For example, what we know as the internet today has evolved from technology first designed for survival after a nuclear holocaust.

Activism whose interests lie in discovering alternative, non coercive, paths to human development would be well served to find patterns created by resistances to, and ruptures from, the paradigms of control and technological will organizing the human resources of the planet. Such an activism proceeds by both locating those ruptures in the paradigms of organizational control and cultivating resistance practices to them in ones own life and community. One such practice to resist the discipling machinery of global socio-economic power exchanges is yoga. Although the aim of yoga is to achieve a frictionless flow between individual and cosmos, the many and the one, a yoga such as integral yoga whose concern is not merely a transcendental urge but an immanent concern for the world, is a unique resistance form because its own monastic traditions of psycho/physiological practices, established well before the body was appropriated by the exercises of technicity, allows one to leverage the silence of ones own embodiment as a method of resisting external regimes of control. rc..

Future Bodies: Evolution & Progress

Rich — Sat, 03 May 2008 13:44:42 -0700

(courtesy Google Images)

This paper seeks a long overdue critical exploration of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision and how it might inform contemporary discourse on globalization and those regimes of techno-science whose productions propel its advance. That such a critical inquiry is overdue is regrettable because we live at a time in which we are undergoing what is perhaps our most rapid period of change in human history. We live in an era in which the dislocation of our physical, life and mental worlds seems to result from the pull of three strange attractors accelerating at different speeds.

Gazing out from the edge of digital culture in North America to do a critically inquiry into the future is problematic because our perspectives are already conjoined to the gaze of a culture entrained in exponential change. But what would constitute a future view? An epistemology of the Other? A discourse on the never quite? The future is that distant coordinate which is only know through its proximity to our present. So what does the present teach?

In America we are travelling so rapidly that from here we do not hear the voices of indentured knowledge workers standing in lines of up to mile, amidst the smoke and decay of south India, to compete with the multitudes of Heidegger's “standing reserve” for their conditions of economic bondages; of eight to twelve partitioned hours a day spent facilitating the global flow of virtual capital. Although the gaze from here may sense the desiring nature of the machine it lacks an epistemology for coping with its assemblages and a methodology for resisting its discipline.....

Albert Hofmann, 102; Swiss chemist discovered LSD

ronjon — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:00:00 -0700

Albert Hofmann was a synthetic chemist with Sandoz Laboratories, now Novartis, in Switzerland when in 1943 he stumbled on the hallucinatory effects of LSD. After it became seen by Harvard's Timothy Leary and others in the '60s as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment, and then as a major recreational drug, ...

James Howard Kunstler: April 28, 2008 - A Collective Psychic Bubble

ronjon — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:34 -0700
...This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of "The Long Emergency" accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. We'd like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up -- what's wrong with that?

But there's an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We're on the edge of something. We're at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you're spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There's no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days? ...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Adults Recognition and Management

rakesh — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:04:59 -0700
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is considered the most common psychiatric disorder experienced during childhood. Some references indicate an incidence as high as 10% of American school-age children. Most references, however, place the incidence in this age group at around 2%–5%. Approximately 80% of children with ADHD continue to have symptoms of the condition as adolescents, and more than 60% of children experience symptoms as adults. If these estimates are correct, between 2 and 5 million adults who had ADHD as a child continue to be affected by the condition. Many adults with ADHD have not been diagnosed as such.

Could Science and Art Become One and the Same?, by Greg Wendt

ronjon — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0700

Science aims to help us gain an understanding of reality, yet how can that which is dictated by the laws of logic be used to explain the parts of reality that are non-logical? -- Is it possible that art can be used in a scientific way to create a more accurate expression of reality and a greater understanding of human experience?

A recent article by Jonah Lehrer in SEED Magazine called "The Future of Science....Art?" asks whether art is better suited than science to portray the reality of inner experience: ...

Brain Doping In Academics, No Joking

ronjon — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 02:00:00 -0700
Nature magazine publishes the results of an online survey of 1400 scientists from 60 countries. -- One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory.

For those who choose to use, methylphenidate (Ritalin) was the most popular: 62% of users reported taking it. 44% reported taking modafinil (Provigil), and 15% said they had taken beta blockers such as propanolol, revealing an overlap between drugs. 80 respondents specified other drugs that they were taking. The most common of these was adderall, an amphetamine similar to methylphenidate. But there were also reports of centrophenoxine, piractem, dexedrine and various alternative medicines such as ginkgo and omega-3 fatty acids. ...

'Going beyond God,' Karen Armstrong's transformed views of religion

ronjon — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 15:29:03 -0700
Imho, this is an important article about the pluses and minuses of religion, an interview with a former nun who has had many deep experiences of what she writes. Highly recommended. ~ ronjon

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God. ...

Goodbye To All That: Nature and the Future Body in Sri Aurobindo

Rich — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:08:20 -0700

This is the first part of a longer meditation on the future bodies. I have entitled this section “Goodbye To All That” which is the title of Robert Graves autobiography in which he recounts his experiences in the trenches in WWI. What he is saying goodbye to is the passing of an era: of the naive, carefree, class based culture of Edwardian England, which did not survive the war. Sri Aurobindo wrote the passages referenced here at about the time the Edwardian era ended and the great war began. Because our views and valorization of nature are cultural constructions, to appreciate why Sri Aurobindo extrapolates a certain form of naturalism into the future body we must first excavate his conceptions of “what is natural.”

The context of his writing referenced here on evolution and the future body seems to flow naturally out of a post-romantic protestant view of Nature he must have been exposed to growing up in England which lived on well into the Edwardian era. To the British upper classes it was a view of nature as pristine, which they enjoyed in well manicured English country gardens, not yet smeared with the blood of the trenches. Above all nature was clearly distinct from the machinery given to us by culture.

In forming his view of nature Sri Aurobindo took account of Ruskin's, Carlyle's, and Arnold's critique of industrialism. This view of nature was certainly valuable for sacramentalizing nature at a time when the Industrial Revolution was rapidly desecrating it. Today however, the interpenetration of nature by information technologies and genetic engineering has added enough complexity to what it means to be natural/human that we can no longer escape environments which are increasingly mediated by technology. Electricity undergirds much of our phenomenological experience of the world, bio-technology sustains our physical presence in it. In such a brave new world the continuity of the already developed evolutionary form with all its biological naturalism seems to be a reality to which we have already said goodbye

But, what is important for us in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future body ....

1) The Anthropic Principle: Leonard Susskind's Reply #1 to Lee Smolin #1

ronjon — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:23:59 -0800
1) Here's Leonard Susskind's answer to Lee Smolin's first email:

Yesterday I received an email message from Lee Smolin asking for my comments about a paper he had posted the previous day [1]. Having not had a chance to read the paper I asked if he would summarize the arguments. He was kind enough to do so in an admirably concise and clear summary. (See above). -- I took a quick look at the paper just to make sure that there was not more that I might have missed in the summary. -- I noticed that in the paper Smolin quotes the philosopher, Karl Popper. Personally I don't think these are deep philosophical issues requiring a heavyweight like Popper. Weinberg was just using good old fashioned common sense.

Weinberg's argument, which is clearly stated in his general audience book Dreams of a Final Theory is not that the cosmological constant has to be smaller than the limit from galaxy formation. If it were, then Smolin would be correct: the Anthropic Principle doesn't add much to the observed fact that galaxies exist. What Weinberg argued was that if the Anthropic Principle is correct, then the cosmological constant will probably not be much smaller than the galaxy formation limit. Weinberg was just expressing the common sense opinion that if anthropics is the only reason the cosmological constant is small, then it is unlikely that it will be orders of magnitude smaller than the anthropic limit. -- Was it a prediction that could be proved wrong? Most people thought so. Just about everyone I know was certain that the cosmological constant was exactly zero.

Smolin's next argument involves what he calls a scientific alternative to the Anthropic Principle. He argues for a Darwinian natural selection principle. Smolin believes, as I do, that universes can reproduce and give rise to mutated offspring that differ in the values of the constants of nature. He believes the mechanism involves black holes while I believe it involves eternal inflation and Coleman de Luccia bubble nucleation. But either will do. ...

0) Smolin vs. Susskind: The Anthropic Principle. Lee Smolin's first letter to Leonard Susskind

ronjon — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:11:50 -0800
Introduction

Recently, I received a copy of an email sent by Leonard Susskind to a group of physicists which included an attached file entitled "Answer to Smolin". This was the opening salvo of an intense email exchange between Susskind and Smolin concerning Smolin's argument that "the Anthropic Principle (AP) cannot yield any falsifiable predictions, and therefore cannot be a part of science".

After reading several postings by each of the physicists, I asked each if (a) they would consider posting the comments on Edge, and (b) if they would write a new, and final "letter". -- Both agreed, but only after a negotiation: (1) No more than 1 letter each; (2) Neither sees the other's letter in advance; (3) No changes after the fact. A physics shoot-out.
While this is a conversation written by physicists for physicists, it should nonetheless be of interest for Edge readers as it's in the context of previous Edge features with the authors, it's instructive as to how science is done, and it's a debate that clarifies, not detracts. And finally it's a good example of what Edge is all about, where contributors share the boundaries of their knowledge and experience with each other and respond to challenges, comments, criticisms, and insights. The constant shifting of metaphors, the intensity with which we advance our ideas to each other — this is what intellectuals do. Edge draws attention to the larger context of intellectual life. ...

"The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus & the World of Renaissance Magic and Science," a review by Erik Davis

ronjon — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 02:00:00 -0800
...[I recently read] "The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science," by the British science writer Philip Ball. As part of an ongoing but essentially lazy quest to wrap my psyche around alchemy, I had recently been drawn towards Paracelsus: the wonder-working itinerant sixteenth-century healer who is sometimes cast as the Copernicus of medicine. Rejecting the leech-loving, bass-ackwards, and literally by-the-book healing practices of most medieval doctors, Paracelsus instead made room for a medicine based on plants, material causality, and self-healing powers of the body.

Having already brushed up against Paracelsus' own rich but impenetrable prose, I was immensely relieved that Ball had appeared to lead me through the Renaissance thickets by the secondary hand. (I told you I was lazy.) Given the noodle-limp dollar, The Devil's Doctor was about the only thing I purchased in the UK. I read almost the whole thing on the plane ride home, in between marveling at the glittering, melting majesty of Iceland and Greenland as they unrolled below me and marveling at the complete absorption of all but one of my fellow travelers in the movies flickering across their cramped little screens. ...

The Final Days: The Mayan 2012 Calender (NYT Magazine)

ronjon — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:43:02 -0800
...Daniel Pinchbeck, author of the alternative-culture best seller “2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl” — and a guest on “Coast to Coast AM” — has introduced a young and savvy audience to the school of millenarian thinking that has gathered around Mayan calendrics. To do so, he has employed viral marketing and a tireless schedule of public appearances at bookstores, art spaces, yoga studios and electronic-music festivals...

Over breakfast at Cafe Gitane in Manhattan, Pinchbeck told me recently that “there’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.”... “Apocalypse literally means uncovering or revealing,” Pinchbeck went on, “and I think the process is already under way. We’re on the verge of transitioning to a dispensation of consciousness that’s more intuitive, mystical and shamanic.”

Far from its origins, divorced from its context and enlisted in a prophetic project that it may never have been designed to fulfill, the Mayan calendar is at the center of an escalating cultural phenomenon — with New Age roots — that unites numinous dreams of societal transformation with the darker tropes of biblical cataclysm. To some, 2012 will bring the end of time; to others, it carries the promise of a new beginning; to still others, 2012 provides an explanation for troubling new realities — environmental change, for example — that seem beyond the control of our technology and impervious to reason. Just in time for the final five-year countdown, the Mayan apocalypse has come of age. ...

Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth: An Interview with Astrophysicist Janna Levin

ronjon — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 15:48:14 -0800
Thanks to RY Deshpande for recommending this article. ~ rj
As a theoretical physicist, Janna Levin probes whether the universe is finite or infinite. As a novelist, she explored the separate but parallel lives of two influential 20th-century scientists: Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. Their work laid the foundations for computer intelligence while challenging fundamental notions about how we can know what is true. ...

Climate Change, Courage & Celebration, by Frances Moore Lappe

ronjon — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:57:52 -0800
...I’ve spent much of my life focused on learning that, in regard to world hunger, fear and guilt don’t truly motivate systemic change. Sometimes they have the exact opposite effect. Telling people “no” can intensify our craving, our grasping for even more before it’s all gone.

Yet many impassioned, well-intentioned environmentalists believe that now we must sound the shrillest possible alarm, for Americans are asleep—unaware of the now near certainty that unless we cut carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 or earlier, the consequences of climatic disruption will be catastrophic.

But what if many of our messages are themselves trapped in mechanistic and moralistic thinking that helped get us into this mess in the first place? And what if, to make this historic turn seem possible—even compelling—we changed the way we talk and think about it?

Instead of scolding people for being wasteful, we encourage ourselves and others to shed a belief system that denies us power and happiness, and keeps us on a treadmill wasting the Earth’s plenty. In that inefficient system, only 6 percent of the material extracted and processed actually ends up in products we use. Rather than “power down” we can offer ways to “align with the Earth’s answers.” After all, the sun provides daily doses of energy 15,000 times what we currently use from fossil sources. The message might also shift from “simplify” to enrich and diversify as we make new connections in our heads and in our communities, as we learn new skills and ways of being. The challenge becomes less about restriction and more about trusting our common sense and curiosity. ...

Hitching a Ride on the Infinite Subway (Dr. Stan Grof's 'holotropic' research)

ronjon — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:35:50 -0800
Here's another excerpt from Michael Talbot's fascinating book The Holographic Universe. I continue to recommend this book.
...Other experiences included the accessing of racial and collective memories. Individuals of Slavic origin experienced what it was like to participate in the conquests of Genghis Khan's Mongolian hordes, to dance in trance with the Kalahari bushmen, to undergo the initiation rites of the Australian aborigines, and to die as sacrificial victims of the Aztecs. And again the descriptions frequently contained obscure historical facts and a degree of knowledge that was often completely at odds with the patient's education, race, and previous exposure to the subject. For instance, one uneducated patient gave a richly detailed account of the techniques involved in the Egyptian practice of embalming and mummification, including the form and meaning of various amulets and sepulchral boxes, a list of the materials used in the fixing of the mummy cloth, the size and shape of the mummy bandages, and other esoteric facets of Egyptian funeral services. Other individuals tuned into the cultures of the Far East and not only gave impressive descriptions of what it was like to have a Japanese, Chinese, or Tibetan psyche, but also related various Taoist or Buddhist teachings.

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness," and other suprahuman entities...

Perhaps Grof's most remarkable discovery is that the same phenomena reported by individuals who have taken LSD can also be experienced without resorting to drugs of any kind...The Grofs call their technique holotropic therapy and use only rapid and controlled breathing, evocative music, and massage and body work, to induce altered states of consciousness. To date, thousands of individuals have attended their workshops and report experiences that are every bit as spectacular and emotionally profound as those described by subjects of Grof's previous work on LSD...

'Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within', a new feature length documentary

ronjon — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 22:41:25 -0800
Entheogen: Awakening the Divine Within is a feature length documentary which invites the viewer to rediscover an enchanted cosmos in the modern world by awakening to the divine within. The film examines the re-emergence of archaic techniques of ecstasy in the modern world by weaving a synthesis of ecological and evolutionary awareness, electronic dance culture, and the current pharmacological re-evaluation of entheogenic compounds.

Within a narrative framework that imagines consciousness itself to be evolving, Entheogen documents the emergence of techno-shamanism in the post-modern world that frames the following questions: How can a renewal of ancient initiatory rites of passage alleviate our ecological crisis? What do trance dancing and festivals celebrating unbridled artistic expression speak to in our collective psyche? How do we re-invent ourselves in a disenchanted world from which God has long ago withdrawn? Entheogen invites the viewer to consider that the answers to these questions lie within the consciousness of each and every human being, and are accessible if only we give ourselves permission to awaken to the divine within. ...

'The Holographic Universe', by Michael Talbot

ronjon — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:29:21 -0800
As part of my preparation for an intensive training I'm starting in January on the Big Island of Hawaii with the innovative physicist Nassim Haramein, I'm now reading the book The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot. I recommend this book.
...The idea that consciousness and life (and indeed all things) are ensembles enfolded throughout the universe has an equally dazzling flip side. Just as every portion of a hologram contains the image of the whole, every portion of the universe enfolds the whole. This means that if we knew how to access it we could find the Andromeda galaxy in the thumbnail of our left Hand. we could also find Cleopatra meeting Caesar for the first time, for in principle the whole past and implications for the whole future are also enfolded in each small region of space and time. ...

"Al-Kemi: A Memoir"

Kim — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:59:43 -0800
Al-Kemi recounts the story of the eighteen months that Andrew VandenBroeck, a painter and writer, spent in daily contact with the remarkable French philosopher, hermetist, and Egyptologist, R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1887-1961). Structured like a mystery, and distilled in the crucible of memory for fifteen years, Al-Kemi provides a passionately felt, personal, and dramatic introduction to the startling world of this contemporary alchemist (from back cover).
... Before reaching these particulars, it must be known that de Lubicz held the traditional conception of an esoteric science and its transmission: true knowledge is inaccessible to the rational mind. This epistemological tenet caused his writings to be spiked with metaphor, innuendo, and at times, obscurity. He mistrusted the written word, disliked writing because truth was inevitably degraded when committed to paper through a profane language. This attitude most clearly ordinates the lineage along which he inscribes himself by his premises and his results. His low regard for “demotic” writing as a means of truth-communication made personal contact with him invaluable, for he had no such reservations concerning the spoken word, the word of gesture. Thus he actively believed in oral transmission of a kind of knowledge best called “gnosis,” [3] and in private, I always found him accessible to leisurely conversation on the most exalted topics. As our relationship soon proved more than casual, his information became increasingly direct, in contrast to his written expression which often presents problems of meaning and referent.

   To such an epistemology, personal contact is the kingpin of communication, and I found out later to what extent his frame of reference was tailored to his correspondent. ...

"Code Name God" – Science Could Support Spiritual Beliefs

ronjon — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:33:07 -0800
Dr. Mani Bhaumik is the co-inventor of the laser technology that made Lasik eye surgery possible. His contributions to science merited the rare dual election as a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, while his successes won him a spot on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Eventually he discovered that :happiness is an inside job," and immersed himself in study of the hidden relationship between science and spirituality and the integration of mind and matter. He has published over fifty papers in professional journals and maintains a lively correspondence with other physicists around the world. His alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology, bestowed him with an honorary D.Sc. degree for lifetime academic achievements. Dr. Bhaumik is the founder of the Mani Bhaumik Educational Foundation, which currently provides full scholarships to sixty seven extremely bright but underprivileged Indian young men and women to enable them to earn a university degree in science, engineering or medicine. His US Foundation, Cosmogenics, is set up to foster research in consciousness and healing as well as mind/body integration. ...

The Spiritual Tradition at the Roots of Western Civilization

ronjon — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:02:51 -0800
Here's another remarkable article from Vol 1, No 2 (2007) of SCIY Editor Ulrich J. Mohroff's superb new journal: Anti-Matters. I'll soon post another article from a different source to conclude this series re the roots of western civilization. (Hint: the original meaning of the word "philosophy" was "love of Sophia," the Goddess of Wisdom.) ~ ronjon
So many of us today are concerned about the extinction of all the species that the western world is wiping out. But there's hardly anyone who notices the most extraordinary threat of all: the extinction of our knowledge of what we are.

Perhaps the simplest way of describing the situation would be to say that, two and a half thousand years ago in the West, we were given a gift and in our childishness we threw away the instructions for how to use it. We felt we knew what we were playing with. And, as a result, western civilization may soon be nothing but an experiment that failed.

Even in these modern times, what half-heartedly is described as mystical perception is always pushed to the periphery. When it's not denied it's held at arm's length out there at the margins of society. But what we haven't been told is that a spiritual tradition lies at the very roots of western civilization. ...

Blue Brain Project Moves Onto Whole Brain, Really?

ronjon — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 14:40:11 -0800
"An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone," writes today's Technology Review. "Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal's brain, appears (emphasis added) to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade..."

The article goes onto to share the response of Christof Koch from Caltech who calls the 10 year target of modeling the human brain "ridiculous." Despite the fantastic progress to date I agree with Christof on this. ...

Taking Science on Faith, by Paul Davies (NYT)

ronjon — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:14:52 -0800
Thanks to RY Deshpande for referring this article.
SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term "doubting Thomas" well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do? ...

What I'm optimistic about (and not), by Ray Kurzweil

ronjon — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 19:34:01 -0800
Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope. Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of information technology will solve within twenty years the problems that now preoccupy us. -- Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more than required to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not very good at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-based assembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massively parallel information processes, which will be feasible within twenty years. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple within that time, we'll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meet our energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive, highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, and we'll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe) nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1 part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling every two years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I've seen about energy and its consequences (such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of future nanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This development will be motivated not just by concern for the environment but also by the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is already a major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogram biology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing through the same exponential growth of information technology, which we see in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of genetic data we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price per base pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost a billion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now starting a project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We can turn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults) with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteins and enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gaining the means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processes as information processes. In ten years, these technologies will be 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will be a very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off disease and aging. ...

Invitation to participate in the "Aim of Life" Integral Education Leadership survey

ronjon — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:18:13 -0800

I just received the following request from my friend, Prapanna Smith, principal of the innovative and very successful Integral Elementary School and Rainbow Kids Integral Preschools in La Jolla, a small oceanside suburb of San Diego, California, USA. I can speak personally for Prapanna's skills and integrity. I recommend participating in the survey he describes below. ~ ronjon
Hi Ron,

Can you please post the request below to the SCIY Blog where people will see it and hopefully participate? I tried, but I was not sure how or where to do so.

Thanks.

Prapanna
**********************************************
I am currently working on a Doctorate (Ed.D) in the Joint Doctoral Program in Educational Leadership at UC San Diego and CSU San Marcos. Through some of the research for my dissertation I discovered some really interesting ideas regarding life purpose. In light of Mother's opening in her essay on "The Science of Living" ("An aimless life is always a miserable life. . .") life purpose is a particularly relevant idea in the context of Integral Education research.

Recently I found two interesting surveys on life purpose and sources of meaning in life, which I would like to use as a sort of trial run for the collection and analysis of data. I have uploaded the questions from these surveys to Survey Monkey, a website where one can create, store, and administer research instruments. I am calling this the Aim in Life Survey.

I would be very grateful if we can get as many members of the worldwide Sri Aurobindo community as possible to fill out the survey on-line by going to the link below. The survey consists of six pages and should only take about 15-20 minutes to complete. The survey is completely confidential. My interest in doing this is to validate the survey and then share the findings with anyone here who would be interested in them.

The more participants the better. There are hundreds of people on the SCIY Blog and I need a minimum of 200 respondents to get reliable data. If you take the survey, make sure you complete all six pages and answer all the questions.

If you choose to participate, please click here:

<a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=4i_2fZx0hoAZ7aRGumkXBWPQ_3d_3d">Click Here to take the Aim in Life survey</a>

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Thanking everyone in advance,

Prapanna
***************************************************
Prapanna Smith, MAED
Principal, Integral Elementary School
Rainbow Kids Integral Preschool
http://www.IntegralElementary.com
http://www.RainbowKidsSchool.com
Office: 858-450-4321
Cell: 858-204-2096

Are we entitled to be happy? - by Andrew Cohen

ronjon — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 23:45:23 -0700
...After more than two decades of working intensively with men and women who claim to want to transform and develop spiritually, I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons it is so challenging for us to attain and sustain higher levels of spiritual development is that we expect so much and are willing to give so little in order to get what we think we want. The truth is, it's hard to be happy. These days, it's become almost a truism that simply fulfilling our narcissistic and materialistic desires will not necessarily make us truly happy. But how many of us have really dug deeply enough to reconfigure our won ideas of what happiness means in light of a higher set of values than those held by our crazy culture? For our values to change in a way that is nothing less than dramatic, we have to be willing to make a hell of a lot of effort. More and more of us are turning to the spiritual dimension of life. But it is telling that many of the most popular expressions of postmodern spirituality are based on a philosophical perspective that encourages us to pursue the promise of effortless peace, happiness, and release rather than an engagement with the life process that would always require more from us.

Why, for the luckiest people who have ever been born, should happiness be a birthright? Why should our spiritual aspirations be focused on the pursuit of inner peace alone? Did God create the universe so that you and I, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, could be happy? Is that really all there is to this fourteen-billion-year process? And why is it that so many of us presume that we deserve to be happy in the first place? What is it that we have actually done to give us such an innate privilege? ...

The Universe in a Single Atom, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama

ronjon — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:56:17 -0700
I'm reading this book now and am quite impressed by it. Highly recommended!

~ ronjon

I have often wondered about the interface of key Buddhist concepts and major scientific ideas. This book is the result of that long period of thinking and of the intellectual journey of a Buddhist monk from Tibet into the world of bubble chambers, particle accelerators, and fMRI. ...