INTRODUCTION

 

After the work of Copernicus and others had demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe but only a part of a much larger system, the world began to change its vision of reality. The process took hundreds of years. Today, because humanity has become a dominant influence on earth, we are faced with another such change: from nature being a convenience for people, to people being a part of nature. The scope is similar. The practical significance is of far greater consequence than the Copernican revolution but we have only a generation to complete the change.

Mike Nickerson, Change the World I Want to Stay On

INTRODUCTION

Our understanding nature has always been directed towards four main areas of knowledge: energy, matter, life, and consciousness. Cosmic evolution itself has followed the same avenue. Our own evolution is repeatedly going through a similar process: first, we recognize, at different degrees of definition, that there is energy present in matter, then this matter is organized into objects for our benefit, and finally, this process has the effect of expanding our consciousness. Presently, we are going through one of these phases, which will eventually raise our consciousness to a level never attained before. Our present understanding of life processes, and the uses, excessive in many instances that we make of matter are setting the stage for such a necessary step toward a higher level of consciousness.

Since evolution is a dynamic process,  it is absolutely necessary to know where we come from to  understand where we are at the present and where we are going in the future. It is a matter of momentum. Today, in all areas of science, a great deal of energy is being expended in the service of discovering where we stand in this nature’s quartet: energy, matter, life, and consciousness. Unfortunately, since these efforts are made by specialists practicing their “art” in solo, they are mainly being employed to maximize the efficiency of our species’ partitions, instead of being applied in concert with Nature in a symphony of life.

Ultimately, play in tunes with nature we will, or suffer dire consequences. The odds are not on our side. Ninety nine percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. It is serious. Our next move will be decisive. We have reached the point of no return. All our energies will have to be used in conjoint efforts towards the common goal of survival. Many other species have been confronted with the same predicament, but none, as far as we know, has ever known beforehand that they could do something about it. Now, we know, and we can.

CHAPTER I “YES WE CAN”???

CHAPTER I

“The human brain stores factual knowledge about the world in a relational manner, … That is, an item is stored in relation to other items, and its meaning is derived from the items to which it is associated.”

Is the Brain Good at What It Does- – NYTimes.com

 “Yes We Can.”???

Of course we can, but we won’t do anything about it until we understand what is really happening to us. And we don’t, since none of the experts in all sectors of society, who know everything there is to know about our problems, are remotely fitted to understand the true nature of the evolutionary fallacy lying at their roots.
It is not the first time that such a fundamentally false premise opens up a unbreachable space between our ability to know and our capacity to understand. In Ancient Greece, astronomers knew everything there was to know, at the time, about the celestial bodies that they were observing in the heavens. However, they were incapable of understanding the true nature of the stars and the nature of the irregularities among the planets, because of their belief that the earth was fixed at the center of the universe. The same is true today for our elites, who know enough to dominate their own sectors of society, but who cannot understand the true nature of our present existential problem, because of their ignorance of the evolutionary fallacy at its root.

If such a close parallel can be made between the Ancient Geek and today’s elites, it is because the two false premises causing their respective limitations stem from the same fundamental natural phenomenon: inertia. For the Greeks, it was the ignorance of physical inertia that was keeping them from understanding the true nature of the Heavens.  For our elites, it is their intellectual inertia created by the mass of specialised knowledge assiduously accumulated during their years of formation that is preventing them from understanding that they are integrated part of  the global problem that their learned eloquence has contributed to create and which is being dramatically worsened by their primeval ignorance.

It is my understanding of this fallacy that made me perceive humanity’s elites as “degenerated baboons” who, in time of dangers, have forgotten how to step ahead on the first lines of defence to protect us. As dominant baboons do to protect their troupe, which initially gave them their social standings for this reason alone. Of course, our elites are still driven by the same urge to protect and defend, and they do it well. However, because of this fallacy, they have to constantly create new enemies to satisfy  the needs of a global war economy. Ignoring the fact that the real enemies of our species are not among ourselves, but still in nature, on the forms of catastrophic events, as floods, droughts, famines, severe weather conditions, diminution of species diversity, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanic irruptions, and today, human-made catastrophes. All of which we would be well equipped to overcome, if we were not using all the resources that we are presently using to wage irrelevant wars to satisfy the exorbitant wants of  the overdeveloped-world’s elite.

* * *

To illustrate the ground of my argument, let me tell you what happened when I met a new acquaintance of mine, for the first time after the Gulf of Mexico disaster. During our conversation, I eventually came to tell him how offended I was to see that the trillions of dollars floating around in the world markets were not used in a way or another to do something about the Gulf of Mexico spill. He looked at me, stunned, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and told me: “But…but… that is “investment money.”

What he was telling me was that this money cannot be used to overcome any man-made catastrophe, such as the one presently threatening the whole Gulf of Mexico, but that it is “investment money” exclusively used to  “make money.” I hope to show you that this is the essence of the invalid argument that our elites are making to affirm their social dominance.

For instance, the reflections about profit for material “security,” made by investment specialists who claim to “play the role of God” in the economy, and who are the ones benefiting the most from the virtual wealth that they are “managing,”  are like the preaching of clergymen before the Reformation about the need to buy indulgences for “spiritual” security. Indeed, the  present days’  investments in “security” will be as irrelevant for the survival of  the human species, as the buying of indulgences were for individual salvation.

To come back to my conversation on this subject, it stopped soon after his mention of “investment money.”  It would have taken me too long, since what I was thinking about was too much in the line of a “mobilization” of all our resources against  the oil invasion of the Gulf of Mexico, as we did to counter the German invasion. Today it is not our freedom that is at stake if we don’t succeed in stopping these oil leaks soon,  but the health of the North Atlantic and, eventually, the whole Earth.  Doesn’t it call for the conversion of our war economies into a global “maintenance economy,” so we could use our resources, including all arm forces of the world, united in an allied effort to save the world? For this, though, we need political leadership, but, as I already realized many years ago, political leadership has become an oxymoron, since politicians have only one preoccupation, their own reelection. And it happened that the Gulf of Mexico’s oil spill has followed  Finagle’s Law to the letter (Anything that can go wrong, will at the worst possible moment) by happening during a year of US election.

* * *

The only reason that kept me going through all these years was the need to find out what was the “mistake” which I always believed we made as a rational species, somewhere during our evolution. After forty years, I have finally found it. If you want to know what it is, stick with me, if you can! It won’t be an easy realization for anybody, since it has to do with a fallacious assumption that we made hundreds of thousand years ago, if not millions, when we first  acquired consciousness.

And, given that the Ancient Greek couldn’t know about this original misconception―they were themselves descendants of “specialized” gods― it happens that this “original fallacy” has imbued all of our philosophies of life since then, and that it will be a lot tougher to accept now for the high priests of finance and business (all linked-at-the-hip puppeteers), and for their political and academic Pinocchios, in decreasing order of resistance, than heliocentrism was for the clergy and the angel-counting scholastic of the prescientific era. Believe me!

CHAPTER II Artisan of Global Thinking

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CHAPTER II Artisan of Global Thinking

The world is in a bad state: famine plagues the poor, while over consumption of the rich asphyxiates the world. The selfishness of the wealthy condemns us all to death.

René Dumont (1974)

“When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the moment expediency —not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehow—or they can identify the situation check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.”

Ayn Rand*

“That is how history is made: by first-timers”

Hilary Clinton

*Rand is a perfect example of the fact that we can still utter brilliant statments, even when we are fundamentally wrong.

It is in the late 60s that I became convinced, mainly because of the obvious insanity of wars and the apparent saneness of those who believe in it, that “we must have made a mistake somewhere throughout of our evolution.”  In the 70s, I also became thoroughly convinced, influenced by many French writers and by Buckminster Fuller, that it was the extreme specialization of our elites that was leading humanity toward a crisis of an unprecedented nature.

The two caricatures of Maya and the 1900 to 2100 World Model of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth,  below, perfectly depict the state of mind in which I came to be by the mid 70s regarding this coming crisis they all made me perceive.

Source: Limits to Growth,

As for specialization being the ultimate cause of this state of affairs, it is the hypothesis that I adopted at the time, and which I intended to test with my own formation as a generalist, after reading Buckminster Fuller’s  Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which he observes that:

“Of course, our failures are a consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking.”

At the time, I was looking for a master program to return full time to university as a mature student, after an all-over-the-place BA equivalence.  However, after reading Fuller’s Manual, I decided to undertake, instead, a second general BA to become a “generalist,” in a conscious attempt to uncover, from a “comprehensive” point of view, the mistake which I already assumed we made early in our evolution. This was the middle of the  70s, or 10 BPC (before PC).

Here is how I rationalized  my decision to become a generalist. I persuaded myself that I didn’t have to learn anything in depth, since I was the unconscious product of all the great minds in history who had influenced all my teachers, and the somewhat conscious product of everything else that had “nurtured” (sic) my mind up to this point (books movies  and all the rest). I felt that this way, the “mistake,” which I assumed we made when we first started reasoning—mistake which I believed then, and know now, to be still  concealed deep in the teaching of all the intellectual “giants” who preceded us, whether he be Plato or Einstein—would not be an obstacle to my searching for it. Specifically, I wanted to go to university to solve a problem that hadn’t developed yet, but that would have when I would be in graduate studies, and for which nobody would have prepared her/himself as a generalist.

It is during my second BA (78-81) that I began to sense that it was the specialists’ inability to perceive the original human fallacy, for which I was looking, that was precluding them from perceiving clearly, from a professional points of view, the obvious environmental and social crises looming in our future.

My search for this mistake has been conducted in “empty footsteps.” Indeed, all the specialists I have encountered during my stays in four universities were all securely standing on shoulders of giants, looking down at me, while looking ahead through the rear view mirror of their specialties, and while accepting as given what I was challenging.   It is there, alone in the “footsteps  of giants,” that I have had all the freedom to go wherever I needed to go, and do whatever I needed to do, while receiving good passing grades, no matter what: my originality always winning over the specialists’ deep ignorance of what I was doing.

However, if they were not looking down at me, and they were not all doing so, they still couldn’t understand —and neither did I completely at the time— that,  as a student of knowledge, I was their as a field tripper, studying them as an outsider.  As anthropologists study unknown “indigenous people” in foreign lands.

And don’t take pity on me. I soon realized that I didn’t want to be accepted in the “normality” of their office, no more that I would have entered the great apes’ cage while visiting a zoo, to see if I would be accepted by them.

For example, I once saw a physicist or a philosopher of science standing in an embarrassing long silence,  frozen in a state of ecstatic admiration in front of an “icon” of Einstein projected on the wall of the class during a slide presentation of the “pilgrimage” that this professor  had made from Munich to Zurich to follow Einstein’s steps to the Swiss Patent Office.  This was an unbelievable sight for a mature student, who was taken this course on  science to see what was wrong with it, and who was beginning to identify science to a religion.

Twenty years ago, when I received my masters, I was not yet ready to solve any problems, as I had hope I would.  Now, I am;  I have finally figured out what is the error of perspective inducing us to sustain fallacious beliefs about human nature.  As for the problems that it has caused, they are becoming more and more obvious everyday and to everybody.  And you know what?  Nobody seems to be prepared to solve them, as I  had assumed it would be the case.

                                                                             8 8 8

Before I divulge my findings, though, I first need to establish my credentials, so you know who is talking to you. Furthermore, I need to expend on my views on specialization, so everybody understands how it has come to limit the sane development of the rational species composed generalist individuals. And finally, I also need to expose the universal dialectical pattern that I have as well uncovered, since it is viewed from this pattern that the “original mistake” takes all its significance.

I call this mistake, “original,” for I came to realise that it is identical, in essence, to believers’ “original sin,” since they both come from the same misunderstood  “cosmic dialectics”

I absolutely need to proceed this way, for if I told you about this mistake right now, and I could, it would have as much significance for you as it would have had for a skilled and respected blacksmith of the Middle Ages busied creating a complicated piece of cutlery for his king or a sword for is Lord, while being distracted by a ragged passer-by telling him about the earth not being still, but turning on itself and around the sun.  You know perfectly what would have happened to this poor wretch. . . . Normally, I should not have to do this. My “peers” would know who I am and what type of research I did during my years of sporadic studies at the university, while acquiring two generalized BA’s in six different colleges and universities, and one “unspecialised” Master of Arts in a department of sociology and anthropology while mainly working with a Zoologist.   However, I have no peers. I am neither a sociologist nor an anthropologist or a zoologist.  If I must have a title,  it should be “transdisciplinarist“. I used to call myself “artisan” of global thinking, following someone I once met in a bar thirty years ago calling himself technicien de la pensée globale, “technician” of global thinking.

Here is how it I became a certified transdisciplinarist:

My undergraduate studies consisted of two general BA’s (no major), during which I have explored a dozen fields of knowledge, through not much more than a couple of semesters for a few, and for some even less than one. However, these sporadic explorations have always focused on who we are as biological, conscious and social animals, thus, biology, psychology, and economy. (I have been registered at least once in each of these programs of study in college or university).

I started my master’s degree ( in blue) at the University of Montreal, where I was conditionally accepted to the Master’s degree in anthropology because I had no anthropology credits in my two previous BA’s.

During my first and last term at this University, I was enrolled in a class of over one hundred students of anthropology 101, led by Prof  Michel Verdon,—the best comprehensive course I have ever followed at the university. And since I knew that a good performance in this course was the main condition for my final acceptance to the masters, I decided to work hard at it.

One week after I wrote the final exam of this course in anthropology 101,  I haphazardly encountered Michel Verdon , who told me, while enthusiastically shaking my hand: “Congratulation, you came second of the class in the final, with  90% [or somewhere in this vicinity]. Now you understand!”

Now I what? “Understand“? That made it for me: I wasn’t there to understand the theories of dead anthropologists, who’s work contributed to the disarray of the global world in which we live presently by all together ignoring the “original mistake” on which all their theories have been erected.  I was there to find out what was this mistake, and nobody seemed to care. This has been the last time I have ever been in this University.

For their defense, though, I didn’t have yet a clue about what this mistake was. I was then leaning towards the belief that the objective world that we perceive as human doesn’t have an independent reality, but that it exists only because we perceive it as such. This is true, but it is also true for all the other species.  I could never infer anything  from this idealistic hypothesis elucidating our present predicaments.

I didn’t know at the time that it was not scientists’ business to look for mistakes, as I learned later from Robert Oppenheimer:

“Scientific thinking proceeds within a framework of presuppositions that it is the business of the scientist to use, not to argue for and still less to challenge… “A perpetual doubting and a perpetual questioning of the truth of what we have learned is not the temper of science.”

Atom and Void, Essays on Science and Community,  Princeton University press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1953.

Not long after my stay at the University of Montreal, I expatriated myself to an English-speaking province,  where, after a couple of years of independent thinkering, I was eventually admitted at the University of Guelph into the master’s degree in sociology and anthropology on the basis of  two different evolutionary models on which I had been working, and which I will present to you later.

After four years at this last university, I finally acquired a master degree, after having been ignored by most of the anthropologists and sociologists with whom I had been in contact, and while mainly working with a Zoologist on different subjects—from which he was completely alienated, as he avowed me later. Consequently, I couldn’t get any reference from anybody to further my research. No one knew then what I was doing, which was neither in zoology, anthropology nor sociology. And, I must admit, neither did I totally.

My postgraduate work (in red) consisted of almost twenty-year of in absentia survey on the Internet of the ill consequences of progress when observed from the point of view of nature. It is these ill consequences that the pioneers of progress (our elites) cannot explain from any of their professional point of views, since they emerge from their practical interrelations, and can only be perceived by an outsider, as my life adaptation of Kanizsa’s triangle evidences. These studies has made of me a “certified ignorant,” or maybe, as I learned later from Walter Kaufmann in The Future of the Humanities, a “visionary”:

There are visionaries and scholastics.  The distinctions is essential for the understanding of the humanities as well as the natural and social sciences.  No diagnostic of the ills of higher education should ignore the basic contrast. Visionaries are loners.  Alienated from the common sense of their time, they see the world differently and make sustained attempts to spell out their vision.  Usually, they find existing languages inadequate, and often they encounter serious problems of communication. [I couldn’t have said it better] Scholastics travel in schools, take pride in their rigor and professionalism, and rely heavily on their consensus or their common “know-how.”  [Don’t they ever?]  They are usually hostile to contemporary visionaries, especially in their own field, but swear by some visionaries of the past. In religion the visionaries are often called prophets and the scholastics priests.  In philosophy and literature, history and the arts, there are not traditional terms for the two types, but sometimes the visionaries are called geniuses.” (pp. 1-2)

[My emphases, and since these define me thoroughly  (except for the last;  I don’t think I am a genius, but only stubborn), page 1 and 2 may have been the further that I have ever been in this book; I didn’t need to read more of it. That was enough.]

Throughout this quest, I have indeed been alone, but  in time mentally secured by Max Planck’s personal experience, who had been in the same situation while developing his quantum theory, as he described in his biography:

“None of my professors at the University” “had any understanding for [my doctoral dissertation] content, I found no interest, let alone approval, even among the very physicists who were closely connected with the topic.  Helmholtz probably did not read my paper at all.  Kirchhoff expressly disapproved . .. I did not succeed in reaching Clausius. He did not answer my letters, and I did not find him at home when I tried to see him in person at Bonn.  I carried on a correspondence with Carl Neumann, of Leipzig, but it remained totally fruitless”  . . . .  “This experience,” he said “gave me also the opportunity to learn a new fact—a remarkable one, in my opinion: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

If I replaced the boldface names with my own, both quotes become perfectly congruent:

“Ted Hadwen [my supervisor] probably did not read my major paper at all. [He was in Europe.] Ken Menzies expressly disapproved. [He made me redo a paper many times, because I hadn’t read all the papers he had read during all the time he studied sociology.] I did not succeed in reaching Hans Bakker. [He never answered my email.] I carried on [a postgraduate relation] with Denis Lynn [the zoologist], but it remained totally fruitless [except for his support and his incessant editing of my writing, for which I will be forever thankful].

8 8 8

“To be fully alive today [in 2010] is to live with anguish, not for one’s own condition in the world but for the condition of the world, for a world that is in collapse.” 

Alex Doherty

Now that you know who I am, I need to tell you how I came to see the rest of you.  I say that because I know that in a way or another, you, who ever you are, are specialists of one kind or another, even if you are “generalists” or “interdisciplinarist” or “new-born Christians” or whatever, if you are “effective” in what you are doing, whatever it may be, in my view you are specialists or professionals, and you are all acting on the basis of what I have found to be wrong,  as I hope to convince you.

Here is what Alfred North Whitehead already had to say about “effective knowledge” in the first quarter of the 20th century, when the consequences of specializations were not as critical as they have become today:

Effective knowledge is professionalised knowledge, supported by a restricted acquaintance with useful subjects subservient to it. This situation has its dangers. It produces minds in a groove. Each profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove. Now to be mentally in a groove is to live in contemplating a given set of abstractions. The groove prevents straying across country, and the abstraction abstracts from something to which no further attention is paid. But there is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life.Thus in the modem world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts. Of course, no one is merely a mathematician, or merely a lawyer. People have lives outside their professions or their businesses. But the point is the restraint of serious thought within a groove. The remainder of life is treated superficially, with the imperfect categories of thought derived from one profession. The dangers arising from this aspect of professionalism are great, particularly in our democratic societies. The directive force of reason is weakened.The leading intellects lack balance.They see this set of circumstances, or that set; but not  both sets together. The task of coordination is left to those who lack either the force or the character to succeed in some definite career. In short, the specialised functions of the community are performed better and more progressively, but the generalised direction lacks vision. The progressiveness  in detail only adds to the danger produced by the feebleness of coordination…

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World; emphases mine.

Decades later in a less cerebral manner, Buckminster was saying the same thing about specialists:

“If the total scheme of nature required man to be a specialist she would have made him so by having him born with one eye and a microscope attached to it.”

During my graduate studies, I often compared my teachers to these microscope-burdened cyclops having gained the ability to understand how colors mixed on the canvas background of the painting they make us study, but having lost the capacity to see the whole masterpiece.   After the Gulf of Mexico’s oil disaster, though, I included in this comparison all Modern-World entrepreneurs and politicians who independently, while being all part of the same world project, busied themselves coloring the small spots of a painting by numbers, using pallets supplied by scientists, and while ignoring the global end result of what they are doing. And this is what I saw. Scary, isn’t, to see how accurately Edvard Munch already depicted by 1893 the horribility of the Gulf of Mexico’s mess?

Horribility, unintentionally brought about by goodwill scientists operating in a value-free environment, in connivance with shortsighted entrepreneurs financing their research; for all of whom it is not the business to consider the ultimate environmental consequences of their enterprises, while all being pro-actively “governed” by politicians having the attention span of one election, the next. That is a scary picture, indeed!

Later, while surfing the Internet, I came across the site Pictures of Pictures, which allowed me to add another dimension to this analogy of responsibility: All specialized knowledge workers create as individuals beautiful small pictures of the world inside different disciplines, which all together contributes to the representation of the whole human reality. Being all people of good will, they all believe that their work will eventually contribute to the edification of an ideal world, looking like this, like this, or like this, depending of their personal aspirations inside their respective disciplines. Alas, again for me, the world that scientists have created looks  more like this than anything else.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find a Scream made of small pictures of specialized fields, and I don’t have the competence to create one.

However,they are not the only responsible, we are all. For instance, without oil I wouldn’t be able to use the computer that increases my efficiency to write in English by at least 60%. Can you imagine?  Still,  the persons the more responsible for what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico are Bill Gate and Steve Jobs. Without PCs, indeed,  we couldn’t have dug that deep. That’s a conundrum, isn’t it? We need computers to be efficient in what we are doing, and it is computers (progress) that is the most responsible for what is happening at the moment. Indeed, no PCs, no mega-farms and other mega projects, and no multitude of new modern obsolescent gadgets choking the environment.

It all comes back to the reason why we are using our intellectual capacities. “Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons” (Buckminster Fuller). We have indeed reached a point where we are so focused on what we can do for ourselves, that we have forgotten that the main reason why we are doing everything we are doing is to adapt ourselves to the environment. The problem resides in the fact that we have become so efficient in our capacity to adapt to a global environment, and so alienated from it, that nature cannot control our development, like it controls the development of all the other species. Furthermore, since we are proactive and haven’t yet found ways to control ourselves, we have become our own out-of-control threat.

Nevertheless, if we ever succeeded in humanely controlling ourselves for the benefit of all and of the environment, the computer will have come to play a crucial role in this endeavor, and Bill Gate and Steve Jobs will then be considered as being the Twentieth Century’s Gutenbergs and the saviors of civilization.

However, until then, if you are a specialist of any kind, you cannot see the real cause of the present human crisis. Since, if you are efficient in what you are doing, especially if you are “articulated,” you have brought it on ourselves from the inside, and, being integrated to it as a part of a continuous process, it has become the blind spot in your vision of the world.

If you are unhappy in what you’re doing and about the state of the world that you are occupying, though, I will please you by telling you that you are in right state of mind, and by giving you the basis on which you can use your talents to quit making it worse for the whole environment while “making a living” for yourself, and start making it better.  This stand for everybody, even those who are working for the betterment of the environment or strongly criticizing the present state of the world: nothing concretes will ever happen, until everybody acts in his or her life for the right reason.  And presently nobody can, because this “reason,” which will become obvious once divulged, stems from the “antithesis” of the present-day accepted foundations of our sociobiological  nature.

Before I reveal the logical fallacy that is the root cause of the present mayhems, though, I need t to make some final remarks on the limitations of specialization.

Almost one hundred years ago, long before specialized science became as critical as it is today, Georg Lukács’, in “History and Class Consciousness,” was already perceiving their limitations:

Capitalist division of labour engender a corresponding fragmentation in philosophy and in the sciences. This fragmentation results in narrow specialization and in an effort to interpret all the specialized sciences in terms of an abstract and mathematically oriented system of formal laws. The more highly developed a specific scientific endeavour is, the more it tends to be a formal, closed system of its own partial laws. Thus, the specialized sciences lose sight of the “whole”,and more and more consider their own concrete ontological or material base [premises, my understanding] as being outside of their sphere of investigation. . . . “it is the very success with which the economy rationalized and transformed into an abstract and and mathematically oriented system of formal “laws” that creates the methodological barrier to understanding the phenomenon of crisis” [My emphases] …

Emil Oesterecher, referring to Georg Lukács’ History and class consciousness (1923),in “Praxis: The Dialectical Source of Knowledge, (1975) p. 225

It is such a thoughtful lecture on division of labor that supports my belief that science as a whole has reached its practical limits and that no scientists within it is “remotely fit” to understand the present world crisis from a professional point of view. Of course, as a group, scientist and philosopher minutely know all about the effects of this crisis, but individually they have never been prone to look for its deep cause, since they are all part of, or closely associated with, the 10% of adults accounting for 85% of the world total assets who have benefited the most from its making. Not because they intended to, but, again, because they were all ignorantly working on the basis of a false premise about our biosocial nature, which is only today showing its morbid consequences.

Here, a nota bene must be made about the difference between applied and fundamental sciences. If I have never been burdened by such a difference, it is because both adepts are equally responsible for the present state of the world, but for different reasons. Applied scientists, because they have become very good at applying their science in a now-obvious wrong context, which they contribute to maintain, not being their responsibility to remodel, and the fundamental scientists, although it is their responsibility, won’t ever do anything about it,  on account of their above-mentioned intellectual inertia.

The same can be said of business.  Science and business, being both individual as well as collective enterprises, are both parts of the same dialectics.  They both represent the thesis and the antithesis of a rational cooperation.  While science uses the work of individual scientists to accumulate shared knowledge for the sake of it (thesis), entrepreneurs use the collective work of people in society to accumulate riches for their own sake (antithesis). Furthermore, they both mainly contribute to the imbalance of nature, since they both use each others—scientists, business fundings to accumulate knowledge, and business, scientific knowledge to accumulate riches—to attain goals that are unsound, since they all stem from an understanding of our biosocial nature that is itself ill founded. (This dialectical link that exists between science and business is only one example of what the “universal dialectical pattern” that I have uncovered allows me to perceive in human nature.)

Here are two more instances of commonly accepted fallacies that will sustain my point that science and economy have become completely alienated from nature: The fallacies of progress in general and of the efficiency of transportation in particular.

Simply put, in nature there is no progress. Progress is an illusion, as were the retrograde motion of the planets, when we still believed the earth to be at the centre of the universe and not subject to the same laws as the stars in the heavens. Likewise, the earth is a finite environment from which we are not set-apart, but to which we are totally interconnected in a zero-sum reality.

Progress is an illusion, since every time it makes life easier for ourselves, it inevitably creates more pressure on the environment. Modern cities are a lot cleaner than medieval or 1900’s towns were, but the latter were all still surrounded by pristine forests, and the oceans of the world were still immaculate and swarming with life. Similarly, life expectancy and cleanness have dramatically increased in the West during the last three centuries of progress, but at the cost of the life of many species and by the actual creation of huge garbage accumulations on land and in the oceans.  As a whole, the earth is a lot dirtier than it used to be before our era of “progress.”

As for transportation, if we calculated the total distance travelled by all of humanity in a year and divided it by the time needed in social activities directly or indirectly link to transportation: the time use for modern commutation; the time it takes to build and maintain our systems of transportation; to make laws and have them respected, the time used in R&D; to dig for oil; the time people spend working in airports and for transportation elsewhere all over the world; and even the time spent at the racing tracks (automotive industry’s testing ground) as drivers, mechanics, or spectators; etc., I am certain that we don’t go faster per hours now than by horse and buggy, while creating a thousand times more pollution than horses did in 1900. Moreover, if we include the time it took nature to create the oil needed for transportation, we don’t even go at the pace of snails! Outrageously irrelevant? Not for Nature!

And the same can be said about the argument that we are less violent now that we have ever been in the past (Steven Pinker).  Indeed, considering as violent everyone who is now or has ever made a living while directly or indirectly working for the military-industrial-corporate-institutional-media complex, or who benefit from its R&D or lobbying (e.g. academic research and politicians), there are a lot more violent people alive today or recently dead that has ever been.

From the point of view of nature, humanity is a disaster of the magnitude of past massive extinctions. If we were not as destructive prior to 1900, it is because science was only at its outset; we didn’t have the means, yet. However, if we only understood the “logical fallacy” at the base of our maladaptation, it doesn’t have to be this way.

8 8 8

At this point, I am sure that many of you would like me to expose this “fallacy” buried deep in the foundations of our social nature and the “dialectical pattern” that made me uncover it, but I can’t.  It would mean nothing to you at this point. You would still look at these concepts from your own perspective, and it wouldn’t reveal anything that you would consider crucial to our present crisis. You would only understand all that I would be telling you from the point of view that all your past learning have instilled into you, which, again, is totally based on an error of perspective, like the understanding of the heavens was before Copernicus and Galileo.

Our problems today are not with our understanding the behaviour of the planets, the “wanderers” on the background of the stars, though, but with the understanding of our own rational behaviour on the background of nature. To expose to you now what I have learned in the last forty years from my particular unspecialised perspective would be like trying to explain the theory of relativity to medieval scholastic, still believing that the earth doesn’t move and knowing nothing about the relativity of motion. It would be impossible. This is harsh, but unfortunately true. I know. I have many years of experience in such deaf-ear turning.    Here is what I mean:

If I exposed my theory about this original fallacy now, without revealing to you the pattern that puts it in perspective, it would come out to you like the mingled pieces of piano in this  Shigeo Fukuda‘s sculpture.  And moreover, if I revealed to you now this pattern, here the mirror  showing a well-formed piano, without stating my theory, the only thing that it would reveal to you is yourself, burdened by everything that has been “nurturally” scripted up until now on your already “loaded slate.” So, I am asking you to be patient and accept these epistemological difficulties of mine.  What I am going to tell you will at first look like a pile of junk from your different perspectives. However, eventually, if you give me the chance to  throw light on my theory, it will hopefully all make us think like we need to, differently.

Firstly,  before I expose the “universal” pattern that made me uncover all this, I need to tell you about the thought process that eventually made me infer from Chomsky’s notion of “human universal” this “fundamental error of perspective” in speakable terms.   And only in conclusion, will I allow myself to expose the fundamental “logical fallacy” that this error of perspective made us accept as the driving force behind all our progressive endeavors.  To follow this exposé of mine, you will need to put aside what you have learned up until now, silent your mind and listen to me. I believe that I have owned the privilege. And if you think that my sentences are long and intricate, go read the writings of the past Renaissance thinkers, who also didn’t know in modern terms what they were talking about.

© 2010 A.Gaudwin

CHAPTER III Universal Force of Motivation: The Building of a Holistic Theory

CHAPTER III Universal Force: The Building of a Holistic Theory

We need new knowledge like we need a hole in the head.

Robert Oppenheimer (1950s)

Those who lack all idea that it is possible to be wrong can learn nothing except know-how.

Gregory Bateson

Scientific theory do not spring on stage fully developed, with their range fully established and with their empirical credentials in hand. They may begin as the recommendation of an alternative kind of answer to traditional questions or from the recognition of new questions in need of an answer. They develop historically, often in ways unimagined by the originators.

Merrilee H. Salmon

BACKGROUND

If I were a specialist, I would already have mastered the theories of a sub-discipline; used its specialised language to define my concepts; exposed incongruities among them; proposed some elements of solution, and be well on my way to present my evidence. However, there is no established disciplines, nor any theories, allowing my work to be well understood by everybody. Like it needs to be, to not merely serve the advancement of knowledge for its own sake, which I condemn as irrelevant to our survival, but to serve humanity as a whole, as I have hoped from the outset my university research would serve.

And I have potentially succeeded. What I have uncovered, indeed, is not only relevant to one particular field of knowledge, but to all sectors of science without any exception, from fundamental physics, the oldest, to evolutionary psychology, one of the newest, en passant by linguistics, one of the most expertly defended, and the one which ultimately allowed me to narrow down my findings.

EVOLUTIONARY FREE-FALL

… one should … examine the intellectual bases of psychological principles, or theories, … Because, everybody, who speaks a language at all, has underneath the surface of the language that he uses, certain basic assumptions that are usually unexamined. And these unexamined systems of beliefs are extremely powerful in their influence over our lives.

Allan Watt

It is only when I came across Chomsky’s notion of “human universal,” in my attempt to lay down the bases of my theory of human evolution—unintentionally developed “in ways unimagined” during my life-long questioning of the academic establishment—that I finally realised I was not working at the same linguistic level than “normal science.” Indeed, while scientists use well defined concepts to explain the parcel of reality that they have set themselves to study with great care, I have used their own well-established theories as my “fundamental morphemes” (Chomsky), as my basic vocabulary, to uncover the original mistake that I assumed from the outset was affecting all of them.

During this life process, I have found out that, while natural scientists, guided by a proven method, can present us with a relatively adequate picture of nature; life, mind, social scientists are incapable of doing so with human nature, because of a commonly held misconception that is precluding them from understanding the natural biotic force behind the evolution of life—like gravitation explains the working of the observed physical universe, and atomic forces, the activity of atoms —thus inadvertently contributing all together to our “evolutionary free-fall.”

Here, I need to point out two things. Firstly, that Darwin’s law of evolution by natural selection is not this force, but its consequence—like Kepler’s laws were the consequences of gravitation. And secondly, that this wrong (restricted) affirmation of the force of natural selection behind evolution, made by Darwin’s followers, happens to be the closest scientific expression of what I have found to be “human’s evolutionary fallacy.”

And don’t presume that I am on the side of  intelligent design movement. I am not. This force is as materialistic and universally present, as gravitation and  the atomic forces are.

I must admit, though, that when I began to write this dissertation I didn’t yet know about the existence of such a universal biotic force.

I was already aware that the force behind the human economy, its absolute need for growth, is an anomaly of nature. In nature, indeed, everything stops growing once it reaches its ideal size, but not national economies: constant growth is the essential condition of their “health.” This is the contradiction (anomaly) that I wanted to explore from the outset, and what I came soon to diagnose as a cancer affecting Mother Earth, itself in a constant state of dynamic equilibrium.

However, I was not yet aware that this pathological condition of human economy (Ecos: environment; nomos: management) was caused by our ignorance of the universal law behind all life processes. All my life I have been burdened by the fact that everybody does not regard this need for growth in all sectors of society as a cancer, as it is central to my thinking, but as being the driving force behind all human endeavours.

In the economy, for instance, the need to grow cannot be questioned, especially not in these terms. It can be seen as “sustainable” (for a while), which would give our generation the time to die, but never as eradicable, which would give future green generations the time of their lives.

It’s only later, during my post-graduate research on the Internet, that I came to uncover the error of reasoning at the root of this state of affairs. However, by then I had learned to keep my mouth shut, until I succeed to build irrefutable arguments supporting my findings.

Which I finally could, once I came across Chomsky’s notion of “human universal,” which exemplify what I had been looking for all my life: the mental error of perspective keeping us from being aware of the logical error at the root of the problems pervading all human institutions, from religions and science to the financial markets, and all the others.

However, before I expose how I came to see Chomsky’s notion of “human universal” as a mental error of perspective, as geocentricism has been in the pre-scientific era, I need tell you how I came to see the scientific community in the light of my developing theory.

PAVING THE ROAD TO HELL

There was a time when people look to stars to find answers to their problems. . . . We have real problems that demand real answers.

Richard Dawkins

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when created them.”

Albert Einstein

“We know more than we can tell and we can know nothing without relying upon those things which we may not be able to tell.”

Michael Polanyi

“There is no solution to a lack of knowledge.”

Jason Summer

To use a new “kind of thinking,” we first need to acquire a new language. Today the problem resides in the fact that scientific language has become so atomistic, that no one can see the logical fallacy affecting all our behaviour.

Academic “stars” are still using the same aging science and reasoning to “describe” our contemporary problems, which they cannot properly “define,” because of their professional near-sightedness.

If there ever has been in history of science an “extraordinary claim in need of extraordinary evidence,” this is it! Isn’t it? However, if you stay with me, you I will soon be presented with some extraordinary ones, as unexpected as this alluded claim that the good-willing scientists cannot find the solutions to our problems, because, while they easily can see the speck of ignorance in the eye of our forebears, as they show us here, they cannot see the beam in their own eye. As I will show you.

I once been told by my one of my academic advisor: “You are hard on us!” He hadn’t seen nothing yet!

Let me tell you how I came to resolve the fact, of which you must have become aware by now, that I was not getting along with ‘normal” scientists… with all scientists!

I always thought that it was because specialists look at the world from the perspective of their theories, and I was not, that we could not communicate properly.

However, I hadn’t recognised the fact that to be understood, I also needed a theory. And it is only when I began to realize that I was already in control of an unformulated theory of my own—inadvertently developed during my string of unspecialised university studies—that I became able to identify this mental error of perspective on which our humanity is founded. Error of perspective, which I had suspected from the outset, but which I never could specify.

Incidentally, through all my stays at the university, nobody ever directly questioned me about this mistake I was looking for. The only mention of it came from a doctor, whom I unexpectedly met after my university period, who told me: “What if there were no mistake?” Well, if there were no mistake, there would be no hope.

This realisation that I was already in possession of a theory stems from my already-mentioned chance encounter with the site Pictures Made with Pictures, supporting my contention that specialisation would have been an obstacle to my search for the common mistake affecting all sciences.

Indeed, I then began to realise that, while specialise minds have two levels of language, one learned in school for the “small picture” of their specialisation and one worldly for the “big picture,” I had only one, the latter, made of superficially learned theories, allowing me to perceive the effects of scientific knowledge when selfishly used for the benefits of humanity. (Again, I could not find my own vision of the world made of nice small pictures made of i-gadgets, scientific labs, university campuses, and all sorts of social institutions, which taken altogether would have depict this world.)

It is also then that I began to realise that I had inadvertently built my own theory using established ones, specifically understood for my purpose. As specialists use precisely defined concepts to support their circumscribe viewpoints.

The first thing I did, when I became aware that it was my using established theories in a manner that made me see the state of the world as an “emergent anomaly” of scientific knowledge, was to Google “emergent anomaly,” to see how it was treated in scientific literature. To my astonishment, this came up on top of the list: YOU CAN NEITHER REMEMBER NOR FORGET WHAT YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

This assertion immediately supported my point. The only thing I needed from this theory was the title. Indeed, my whole research is based on its reciprocal: WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHAT WE DON’T REMEMBER. While the former study is related to the causes of a particular historical conflict (Croats/Serbians), my research has to do with the universal ignorance of the principle at the root of all human conflicts, among ourselves and with the environment.

Next, I needed to know how science usually deals with “ first principles.” The best theory for this purpose was Einstein’s theory of relativity, which I knew was dealing with the principle of equivalence, having conceptually studied it for one aspect of my research. What came clear to me, this second time, was that Einstein had it easy compare to me. Indeed, the anomaly that he wanted to explain, the constancy of the speed of light in a universe in relative motion, was already recognized as an anomaly to be explained by the scientific community of the time. I my case, our incessant need for growth in a homeostatic biotic universe (in a constant attempt of equilibrium)  is not considered as an anomaly, but as the driving force behind all our creative endeavors.

Source: Jacques Attali’s Anti économique

While Einstein succeeded in explaining the constancy of the speed of light by accepting it as a natural phenomenon, I couldn’t do the same and consider as natural our incessant need for growth.

By considering this need for growth as a pathology in a homeostatic environment, I wanted to find a cure for it, as Copernicus assumption that the Earth was not at the centre of the universe explained away the anomalous behaviour of the planets among the regular motion of the Heavens.

However, I didn’t know what this error of perception was. It had to be, for my purpose, analogous to geocentrism, affecting all unsuspecting scientists.  I was not yet aware that I was only a few steps away from discovering it in Chomsky’s.

This parallel with the theory of relativity became even more astounding when I considered Einstein’s second axiom, that all physical laws are the same in all uniformly moving reference frames. Einstein was dealing with two levels of reality: the physical, in which motion is relative, and the electromagnetic, in which the speed of light is constant when observed from all moving frames of reference of the physical universe. I was equally dealing with two levels of reality, nature, in which a dynamic equilibrium is maintained by negative feedbacks, and nurture, our proactive cultural universe, in which human’s “constant” need for growth is producing a series of devastating positive feedbacks altering the natural equilibrium of nature.

And, again, since I assumed that it is these positive feedbacks of growth that ultimately alter the whole life process on earth, I couldn’t set myself to accept them as facts of nature, but as consequences of the fundamental ignorance of our holistic unity with it. Here is how Chomsky’ “universals” fit in all this.

***

UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR

Insofar as we are a mental process, to that extent we must expect the natural world to show similar characteristics of mentality.

Gregory Bateson

What is real is rational and what is rational is real.

Hegel

It is during my second venture into the theory of relativity, corroborating my belief that my research has a global significance, that I realized I needed to formulate a theory that would allow me to communicate my findings to everybody. It is during this latter activity that I Wikied Norm Chomsky’s universal grammar, in which it is mentioned that“…some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest without being taught. “

It is while I was looking into this matter on the Internet, that I happened to come across the microscopic presentation of a white cell attacking a bacterium, which lead me to a series of animated films about the inner life of a cell.

If you take the time to explore these videos and others on YouTube, you will be as astounded, I believe, by these microscopic “observations” of living cells behaving as we do, as Galileo must have been by his 1610 telescopic observations of the “irregularities” of the moon and by the changing configurations of Venus.

This parallel with Galileo becomes even more astounding if you look at the video Powers of Ten, in which you will see that Galileo’s moon is situated between 10⁸ and 10⁹ meters away from us, and our genes and their component from 10^-8 to 10^-9 meters. In which comparison, the true distance in the void immensity of space is substitute by the many layers of complexity of the materially-crowded inner world.

 Source: Powers of Ten: A Flipbook

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

David Bohm

It is the parallel that I then could make between Chomsky’s notions of “rules of grammar hard-wired into our brain” and the actual “communication” which I assumed needs to happen between brainless organelles and the rest of the cell, that made me realise that Chomsky’s analysis was absolutely right, but”anthropocentric,” as Ticho Brahe observations were accurate, but geocentric.

There are indeed universal rules, but they are not specifically human. They already exist, as fundamental rational principles, functional at each level of complexity, from atoms to humans (Cf Cosmic pattern of evolution, Chap V). For instance, if you watch again this video, you will hear things like: “First proteins are just floating around, and they suddenly come together to form a road”; …. And they do this all the time as required.”;. . . “Their orientation is dictated by the microtubules…”; . . .“Here, the free ribosomes translate the mRNA molecules into proteins.”

If these living organelles “come together” “to form roads” “as required” to allow kinesin motors to “carry proteins to the correct part of the cell to perform their intended functions.” And if this has happened for billions of years, and still happens thousands of time per second in all the trillion cells of all living organisms of all carbon-base life, vegetal as well as animal, there must be some fundamental “rules” allowing for this “universal regularity” of life.

It is these regularities, understood from the point of view of the cosmic patter of evolution, which I had already uncovered, that had on me the same effect as the falling apple had on  Newton, and which made me equate the universal biotic law of force, which must be needed to regulate life so keenly, with the the universal law of gravitation holding the universe together, and with the atomic forces at the foundation of all matter. © 2011

(Bergson already mentioned that there must be an “élan vital” behind the phenomenon of life. However, it has never been universally accepted, since never shown to be a necessary evolution of the atomic and gravitational forces, like the dialectic pattern of evolution, which I have uncovered, will show it is, in chapter V)

This also supported my long held belief that physicists’ attempts to unify the forces of nature are limited in scope and will only be successful once they take life into consideration.

Before I didn’t know I was dealing with a “force.” However, I have very early speculated that energy, matter, life, and the mental (sic), are four disparate dimensions (sic) of the same absolute reality (Hegel), linked together by the same Dialectical pattern, as I found out later.

Before we uncovered the law of gravitational force, we could not master it, nor use it to our benefit. The same is true with the law of biological force. Until we uncover it, we won’t be able to control human behaviour for our benefit and for the benefit of nature, with which we constitute an integrated whole.
TIME TO GROW UP

Enlightenment is mankind’s leaving behind its self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to employ one’s own intelligence without being directed by someone else.” “Because of laziness and cowardice, many supposedly grown men remain happily immature throughout their lives, readily allowing others to serve as their guardians.

Immanuel Kant

If there is such a force expressing itself at the biological and the mental levels of complexity, like it does at the atomic and the cosmic levels, it cannot be ignored. In nature, all entities (atoms. molecules, macromolecules, proteins, organelles, cells, organisms, etc.) are the chance/necessary expressions of this force at different levels of complexity. “They are the force.” However, we are not anymore. To use it, we first need to uncover it, understand it, and teach it: That’s what we do at our level of mental objectification.

For instance, all species of organelle in cells or species of animals in the environment necessarily behave all the time in accordance with this force since the moment they were generated.” They all have individually the same set of behaviour in accordance with the ones ‘necessarily” characterizing their species, whether they be motor proteins or any other species of animals. A cat is a cat is a cat, whether it be in America, China, or in the Middle Ages.

In relation to this force, we are different. We have reached a higher level of complexity than all the other animal species’. Animal species are specialized for specific environments. All their members possess the resources needed to behave in an environment of which they are the necessary extensions and components.

We are the antithesis of this evolutionary process. We are generalists as a species, but specialists as individuals. We can adapt to all viable environments, whether it be in space, or in time.

We are the only “true” social animal. To survive, we absolutely need to exchange our knowledge and trade its produce. (Wilson’s ants also do it to a certain measure, but they do it unconsciously. Individual ants are not “social individuals,” but “supra cells” composing a super organism blindly following the laws of matter.)

While species are defined by the living environment to which they are adapted, fish swim, birds fly, and mammals do what they do in their bio-physical environment, we learn and continuously define and redefine our all encompassing mental environment at each generation. —For instance, the  mental slate is assumed to be empty by some original thinkers in one generation, and full in the next, by some opportunistic opponents.

If this is so, we are not the same species as we were when we perceived the earth as flat or at the centre of the universe; we have evolved in a constantly expending environment. The time has come to expend it again. It’s a matter of survival. The one in which we are living has become too restraining for our means. I don’t want to say “too crowded” because, again, the experts who are looking for “real answers,” will easily jump to the conclusion that there are too many people in the world. Not considering that it is not people that are congestioning our living environment, but the greed of the One Percenters, Ten Pourcenters, and Twenty Pourcenters among us, who respectively own control and consume up to 85% of the world production. Of which hierarchy scientists are at or near the top. However, knowledge workers are not the only benefiting,  everybody in the over-developed world is.

I was lately mentioning this to one of my graduate counsellor, who defensively retorted, “But, there are hierarchies in nature.” Of course, there are.  However, natural hierarchies serve the survival of species, while ours serve themselves.

I have surfed an article lately on the Internet, in which Upton Sinclair is quoted saying: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” And it happens that in the develop world, we are all, at different levels, making a living from the chronic inequality of the world.

“People see what they’re incentivized to see. If you pay someone not to see the truth, they won’t see the truth” Says Michael Lewis. There, he is talking about “Wall Street big shots,” who, according to him, are responsible for the present global financial crisis. But they are not the only one, they are but the visible top of the iceberg. Here, I am talking about the submerge rest of them, the elites of the developed world, who are themselves the cause of the present humanity financial and moral debacle. And, in final analysis, since these latter don’t even understand the true nature of their “remorse,” whenever they feel them, even their ensuing new-born philanthropy will only serve but to “pave the road to hell.”

This is the first “pieces” of my theory.

before I expound on it and expose the dialectical pattern of evolution that will make sense of all the other pieces,

Source: Scientific American

I need to elaborate on the limits of sciences to understand human nature.

Part iv

THE BUILT-IN INABILITY OF SCIENCE TO RECOGNIZE CONSCIOUSNESS AS A DISTINCT DIMENSION OF REALITY

(in progress)

Homo Novus

HOMO NOVUS

BORN-AGAIN HUMANS:
FROM CAPITALISM TO HUMANISM

An Introduction
by A. Gaudwin

After the work of Copernicus and others had demonstrated that the earth was not the center of the universe but only a part of a much larger system, the world began to change its vision of reality. The process took hundreds of years. Today, because humanity has become a dominant influence on earth, we are faced with another such change: from nature being a convenience for people, to people being a part of nature. The scope is similar. The practical significance is of far greater consequence than the Copernican revolution but we have only a generation to complete the change.

Mike Nickerson, Change the World I Want to Stay On

Our attempts to understand nature have always been directed towards four main areas of knowledge: energy, matter, life, and consciousness. Evolution itself has followed the same avenues. Our own evolution is repeatedly going through a similar process: first we recognize, at different degrees of definition, that there is energy present in matter, then this matter is organized into objects for our benefit, and finally this process has the effect of expanding our consciousness. Presently, we are going through one of these phases that will eventually raise our consciousness to a level never attained before. Our present understanding of life processes, and the uses, excessive in many instances, that we make of matter are setting the stage for such a necessary step toward a higher level of consciousness.

Since evolution is a dynamic process,  it is absolutely necessary to know where we come from to  understand where we are at the present and where we are going in the future. It is a matter of momentum. Today, in all areas of science, a great deal of energy is being expended in the service of discovering where we stand in nature’s quartet: energy, matter, life, and consciousness. Unfortunately, since these efforts are made by specialists practicing their “art” in solo, they are mainly being employed to maximize the efficiency of our species’ partitions, instead of being applied in concert with Nature in a symphony of life.

Ultimately, play in tunes with nature we will, or suffer dire consequences. The odds are not on our side. Ninety nine percent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. It is serious. Our next move will be decisive. We have reached the point of no return. All our energies will have to be used in conjoint efforts towards the common goal of survival. Many other species have been confronted with the same predicament, but none, as far as we know, has ever known beforehand that they could do something about it. We do.

8 8 8

In this essay, I will attempt to clarify the fundamental fallacies that our collective unconscious have committed throughout our historical evolution, and which have come to blur the perception that we have of our stance in the symphony of life.

“To set the tone,” let us look, at how Francis Crick (Discoverer of DNA) is looking at the soul and consciousness from the point of view of science in “The Astonishing Hypothesis” (1994). Although we must agree with Crick’s learned description of neurophysiology’s state of research on these subjects, we should not agree with his philosophical standpoint nor his conclusions.

Our disagreement should not be with his beliefs in the urgent need to step up research on consciousness, but with his beliefs in the way this research should be conducted. From the start, indeed, he wholeheartedly dismisses philosophy and strongly calls for an escalation of scientific experiments, because, according to him, the record of science in the search for truth is a lot more convincing than that of philosophy.

I must say that the record of one is not better than that of the other. All the assertions about truth are matters of timing and points of view. Indeed, as is the case with our past beliefs, many of today’s “scientific” beliefs will eventually be looked at with contempt by future generations of people, who will be in the process of uncovering today’s hidden philosophical jewels and posthumously paying respect to the philosophers among us who are presently treasuring these jewels.

This is the price that true philosophers have to pay to perceive Reality’s leading edge.

That today’s scientists can be so sure of their philosophical stance and convinced of their own endurance, follows from the fact that the last relevant philosophical breakthroughs supporting their beliefs were opportunistically made at the beginning of this century — a long time ago in scientific terms— by giants like Einstein, Mach, Plank, De Broglie, Heisenberg, Bohr, etc.

Of course, it is also true that other important breakthroughs outside of science have also been made by professional philosophers during the same period, but these breakthroughs were always made in accordance with the scientific points of view that were in style at the time.

That these scientific standpoints could not, and still cannot be drastically criticized, as they should have been and still should be, is due to the fact that those outside of the specialized sciences lack the knowledge to differentiate between the “profundity” and the “obscurity” of these standpoints.

Consequently, all the latest breakthroughs in science have been made from academic disciplinary point of views that have the effect of restricting scientists, and all of us with them, to setting a course on the particular path of realism, which we are now condemned to follow for economic reasons, given the many existing social activities that are following the presently well established trends that modern scientists have convincingly set for us.

We are, indeed, condemned by science to keep to the beaten track of a limited representation of nature. But there still remain a possibility for us to realign our minds on other aspects of reality. I believe, along with Mike Nickerson, who wants to “change the world,” that our efforts in cognition have to be drastically redirected, in much the same manner as they were when Copernicus reorganized the heavens at the dawn of the scientific era.

This overdue revolution and the discovery of the new meanings that our present established knowledge will have in our every day lives, will be as important and distressful for science as were Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus and Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius for religion at the time.

Some are calling for a new Einstein in social science who will create a theory to solve our present existential problems. I am calling for a change of point of view in the mental realm that will be accepted by everybody, — whether they be lay persons, natural or social scientists, or philosophers — and which will have the potential to transform our concept of reality, before it is too late.

The alarm has already gone off. We must awaken to this new “reality” that is emerging in our mist, and unite our minds in a spirit of cooperation across all realms of social activities: politics, business, judiciary, academia, religion, art, and domestic affairs. It should not matter that from within each of these realms the present situation of the world seems overly complex. The solutions to our present predicament, if there are solutions to be found, will not come from within any single realm of activity, but from a point of view encompassing all of them. The infrastructures needed to achieve together this integration are already being set up in a World Wide Web of information.

This essay is an attempt to lay down stepping-stones amidst the stream of uncertainties that is the consequence of the aimless pathway of information on which humanity has been dragged by normal-science since the beginning of the twentieth century, and which is presently beeing flooded by a super “Grid” of information.

I intend to show that it is this stream of uncertainties that we have to bridge, in order to enjoy the openness of the other bank where we will all be more at ease in our respective fields, to work at finding viable solutions to the problems created by our chaotic entry in the Third Millennium

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“Our time is a time for crossing barriers, for erasing old categories—for probing around. When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in opposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result.” (Emphasis mine)

Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Message

The reason we are driving ourselves into an evolutionary morass is that we have indeed let the ultimate medium, ourselves, become the message. We have thus created an “environment of knowledge,” in which we have evolved as contented prisoners of a four-dimensional reality that we perceive from our limited point of view.

“. . . who will have the responsibility for lifting us out of the social and ecological morass into which we are inexorably driving ourselves[?]”

Noam Chomsky

It has become our common responsibility to liberate ourselves from this intellectual and emotional confinement. Once we set ourselves free, we will have the opportunity to explore new dimensions of reality, while still using at the outset the mental tools that were perfected with the meager resources that we had at our disposal, during the relatively short period of our sapiens incarceration in philosophical caves. But, before we make any significant move as a species, a new sense of direction will have to be given to humanity as a whole.

Who will accomplish this task? Scientists? I doubt it. They are too respectful of the established rules. Philosophers? Please! They are still prisoners of Plato’s cave. Politicians? Good grief! These days, the term elected leaders has become oxymoron. Financiers? My Lord! I implore you, don’t let it ever happen. Businessmen? Well, maybe, if they are shown in time how to use their entrepreneurship, not solely for their own benefit, but for our survival.

To attempt such a move, though, is not the business of any of these people. If we are entering “the outer edges of reality,” we need concepts that are at the outer edges of science, philosophy, politics and religion. We need ideas that haven’t been tried yet. So, by definition, none of the members of the previously mentioned establishments can go there, before these concepts have been established.

It is not that these institutions have to be relinquished. Not at all. In these outer edges of reality—once we learn how to transform Western economy into a peace economy—all of our present social institutions, especially science and military, the most capable of all, will become objective entities that we will use for the betterment of humanity as a whole, as our ancestors learned to use sticks and stones for their own survival, when they first grew out of their instinctive state of mind and evolved into the self-centered gender Homo that we have become.

The time has come for us to go forward in evolution and consciously become Homo novus.

For this, we will need a new paradigm— again, made of trials and errors. This time though, it will be somewhat easier, since we will have a collective memory of the mistakes that we made as Homo sapiens. But, even then, this new paradigm will still be “incommensurable” (it will have nothing to do) with the one we are presently using to make sense of our sapiens perspectives.

We have become used to thinking we know what we are talking about. The truth is, we simply don’t know. At the “End of History,” we are newborns: we have all the potential, but we still have to raise ourselves in a new environment, as mature Homo novus.

However, we should not worry. From now on, everything will be okay. I believe that the worst of this rebirth process is behind us. As a pregnant species, indeed, we have suffered all the pain that we can endure, and spilt all the blood that we can afford.

We need to set ourselves free from our own womb and take our first breath in this dimension that is opening up in front of us. Our first moment of rebirth will not exhibit itself as a burst of tears, as it does when we transit alone out of the whomb, as individuals, but conversely, as a burst of laughter, once we have finally entered collectively the “supramental”* stage of our development as a new species.

*The onus is on us to understand the supramental reality that is opening itself up at the outer edges of our individual mental confinement, and which will become our next theater of operations. (The term “supramental” was coined by Sri Aurobindo; and Satprem used it in La genèse du surhomme / Essais d’évolution experimental. Buchet/Chastel, 1974. )

If the biosphere is a living organism, as I believe it is, then it is obvious that human individuals are behaving like cancerous cells. This is the problem: The biosphere is suffering from a brain tumor, a cancer only interested in its own growth.

If this is the case, then the only rational thing to do at the moment is to find ways for humanity to go into remission. The present essay is an attempt to show the world that such a remission is possible; and that, if it happens, it will be exquisite in ways that cannot be foreseen.

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“… populations and organisms are quite different kinds of systems with different kinds of structure. To speak of them as ‘sharing a common attribute’ [cancer, in our case] is to obscure what should be kept clear.”

~ T. A. Goudge

Goudge is basing this assertion on the differentiation that he previously made between the concepts of organism and population, in the section ‘Populations as the units of evolution’ in his book, The Ascent of Life:

“[Many] considerations are relevant to the contention that both individual organisms and populations have a ‘structure’. If this term is understood in a general sense to refer to the fact that in both cases we can distinguish a set of parts having a certain spatial arrangement and certain modes of functional correlation with each other, then the contention is no doubt defensible. But such a general approach fails to take account of the important respects in which the two cases differ. Thus, for example, the parts (cells, tissues, organs, etc.) which enter into the structure of a multicellular plant or animal are so intimately co-ordinated that as a rule they are in direct organic continuity with one another. But the structure of a population is not usually characterized by the organic continuity of its parts (the individuals that compose it). Furthermore, the functioning of the parts of a plant or animal structure is directed toward maintaining a state of relative equilibrium within the organism as a whole or between the organism and its environment [homeostasis, my annotation]. The behaviour of individuals in a population, however, is not ordinarily directed towards preserving its equilibrium.”

~ T. A. Goudge

But, during the next decade, at the same university, the University of Toronto, Marshall McLuhan was visualizing the effects of the oncoming World Wide Web on the world population in these terms:

“Electric circuitry involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a state of active interplay.” [Also a good description of homeostasis, my annotation.]

We can see that these two thinkers of the University of Toronto, Goudge and McLuhan, did not agree. The first was telling us that there is no direct “organic continuity” in populations of individuals, and the second that human populations “coexist in a state of active interplay.”

Both support my hypothesis, though, that Homo sapiens is evolving into a new species, Homo novus. Goudge was talking about human populations prior to the advent of the Internet, McLuhan, about the effects that these nascent channels of communications would have on the behavior of human populations. They both were talking about the possibility of the human population being a superorganism. The first did not believe that we were, simply because, at the time he wrote, we were not yet one. And the second, without mentioning that we are effectively one, was describing the emerging Web of communications between humans (WWW), using the same terms that he would have used to describe a living organism, in which “all factors of [their] environment and of [their] experience coexist in a state of active interplay.” (M. McLuhan)

If we belong to a living organism, we must prepare our youth to act as individuals belonging to ONE, by directing their behaviour “toward maintaining a state of relative equilibrium within [society] as a whole [and] between [society] and its environment” (T. A. Goudge). We must stop preparing our youth to be part of a viral economy, obsessed by its own growth, at the expense of everything it can invade, just as our financial and political leaders are presently doing with their selfish and environmentally pointless investment schemes and their lingering and transparent war peddling.  (NTE, This was written circa 2000)

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“The aim of science is to understand and explain the evolution of natural phenomena by studying the relations which exist between them.”

~ Pierre Lecomte du Noüy

At this point I do not expect anybody to understand, from my perspective, the relationship that exists between the stock market and military activities. Many people “know” about these relationships, but they don’t “understand” them, they ‘know’ them from inside the system, from the point of view of progress, NOT EVOLUTION, from where they must be understood.

It is not easy to explain. No terms are readily available to explain what I mean. All the terms that I can use have obsolescent progressive connotations. I am not interested in progress —especially when I realize where it is leading us. Evolution is the antithesis of progress. I have to forge every sentence in the teeth (William James) of progressive conformists, our leaders, from the left as much as from the right who are making a living leading humanity towards the edge of the deadly cliff.

Since evolution is a dynamic process, “it is absolutely necessary to know where we come from [as animals], if we want to understand where we are at present, and where we are heading in the future.”

While the other animals are aware of and adapt to the immediate environment in which they live, they are not aware of the global environment in which they evolve. Everything they perceive (preys, offsprings, burrows, etc.) exists as an extension of themselves (they don’t “objectify” them—my hypothesis), and the global environment in which they evolve is “invisible” to them : e.g., fish are not aware of the sea in which they swim nor lions of the savannah in which they hunt.

The same is true for us: the “four dimensional reality” of physicists in which we exist is also an extension of ourselves. During our own evolution as Homo, we have always been aware of the rational environment of knowledge in which we were progressing, but we never had any clues about the global environment in which we were —and still are— evolving.  We progress within existing rational paradigms, but evolve into new ones, allowing us to eventually expose other levels of reality.

To show this, let us look at some paradigm shifts that happened during our evolution.

It all started when we understood that we could use sticks and stones to manage our ways through life as a group. The great apes were also using tools—probably the same they are using now; the difference between them and us resided in the fact that we have abstracted the meaning that these “tools” had for us as individuals living in society, while apes never did. Tools, thus, became objective entities that we could use mentally to collectively plan ahead.

It is at this point that we started our journey into the mental dimension of reality, into the “abstract domain” (Genesis [sic] and Monod). From then on, we gained the capacity to “objectify” the whole reality and gradually use it for our own purposes. At first, it was in caves around fires, then around chiefs and elders. By then, we knew a lot about nature, but we were not yet aware of it as a whole objective entity. We were still like fish in the water, not yet able to objectify such an encompassing entity. There was still a lot of mysticism surrounding the global environment in which we were living. It was only much later, from 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, around the time of the agricultural revolution that we probably became aware of the earth per se. Paradoxically, it was only after we needed to observe the heavens to make out the times of planting and harvesting that we must have gained the mental capacity to objectify the earth. Even then, it was not the earth as we know it now. It was perceived to be flat and supported by turtles swimming in the sea surrounding us. Yet we were probably not consciously differentiating between the heavens and the earth. It was only later that we came to understand that there was a heaven above, and that it was of “another nature” than the earth on which we live. By then, the earth became round, for some of us at least, but still fixed at the center of the universe. It was only 500 years agothat we finally understood that the earth was spinning on its axis once a day and revolving around the sun once a year.  And it is only later, did we finally begin to understand that our galaxy itself was just an speck in the immensity of the universe.

It probably did not happen this way. Our mental development must have been intermittent, with much starting and stopping. The fact is, though, that our understanding of nature was not given to us from the start, but by every step forward that we made in knowledge via paradigm shifts that transformed us as a species and gave us new opportunities as individuals. It is such a momentous step forward that I believe we as a species are presently making.

To understand what is happening at the moment, let us look at one of these step in our understanding of nature that we made as a species: the Copernican revolution, when we “shifted” from the “geocentric” paradigm (the earth fixed at the center of the universe) to the “heliocentric” paradigm (the earth revolving around the sun). Before Copernicus, we were all raised with the belief that the earth was fixed at the centre of the universe. This belief was not formulated as such, but it was simply obvious that the earth itself does not move and that the sun travels daily from east to west.

To explain these phenomena, and the others that we were observing in the heavens from this point of view, we had to invent many concepts:

* The world was divided into two different realms of reality: the heavens above, ruled by a perfect order, and the earth below, the sphere of imperfection;

* The notion of perfect circular motion was used to explain the diurnal motion of the sun and the annual motion of the fixed stars;

* To explain the fact that the stars and the planets were not falling on earth, which was the natural thing to do for all objects heavier than air and fire, we invented the notion of crystalline spheres, to which the “fixed’ stars, the “wandering” planets, the sun and the moon were attached;

* Epicycles (small circles centred on the circumference of larger circles) were used to explain the apparent retrograde motion of the “wanderers” (the planets);

* Other ad hoc concepts, which we do not need to understand anymore, such as deferent, equant and prime mover, were also used.

By the time the Copernican system was perfected at the end of the 17th century, all these concepts had become obsolete; we did not need to know them anymore to explain the phenomena that we were observing in heaven. It did not come easy. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome, in 1600, for having anticipated the modern conception of the universe, i.e., the sun is a star, seen closely, and Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are planets like the earth, seen from afar, and to have “exposed the philosophical implications of the Copernican theory.” (Funk & Wagnalls) The church and the secular establishments did not accept that, since they were grounding their power on the belief that they were at the centre of it-all. But, after they all died, the truth, as usual, triumphed.

We have reached the same point today. We need to let go of some concepts that have guided our social behaviour up until now. The thinking-shift that needs to be accomplished at this point, though, does not have anything to do with the revolution of the heavenly bodies nor with our knowledge of nature or with our understanding of the elementary particles of matter, but with the knowledge of our own evolving nature.

We look at our nature as if it is “fixed” in time: ” It is human nature”; “Human nature does not change”; “We cannot change our nature.” No? If we define species in relation to the environment in which they live, are we the same now as we were when we thought that the earth was flat? or at the centre of the universe?

What would happen if one day soon we discovered that there is a reality beyond space and time — a “fifth dimension” (the one that physicists our perceiving in their equations)— that we will be able to collectively apprehend and use to our benefit?  As we did when we first entered the spatio-temporal reality in which we live presently, and understood that we could use “sticks and stones,” at first to “break bones,” and to soon after to go around the world in 90 minutes. (C.f., 2001, A Space Odyssey, where it all started for me. Remember the foetus at the end?  This image has hunted all my adult live.) Would it not be the beginning of a new era, as it was when we first transcended our biological nature and unconsciously started our rational progression into human nature?

This new era has already been recognized by some of us. Satprem, following Sri Aurobindo, has already mentioned in La Genese du surhomme that humanity is evolving into a “super species,” and that our descendants will be as different from us as we are from the great apes from which we descended. We are presently entering the supramental realm of reality in which, I am sure, we will regain consciousness of the aspects of the environment that were lost in the process of our becoming conscious individual human beings, but which are still perceived by the other animals. (cf. Rupert Sheldrake’s work).

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It is at this point that I have once encountered the empty eyes of my supervisor, who told me that: “This is Mystical!” In the sense that “this is not scientific,” to get rid of me. And he did!

This remark sent me back 10,000 years, to when we still believed that the earth was supported by turtles. It is not mysticism any more than it is normal science! Mysticism is the antithesis of normal science: mystics firmly believe in what they do not see but can spiritually experience, while scientists systematically doubt everything they see, even if they can experience it rationally. Both camps are in possession of a complementary aspect of the truth.

As with quantum mechanics’ complementary, each of these aspects of knowledge (Science and religion)  entails the other. Neither mystics nor scientists, on their own, can come close to what truly is. The next level of truth will be found in a synthesis of these two types of cognition, spiritual and rational. We will come back to this aspect later. For now, before looking at some evidence that supports my hypothesis that we are on the verge of becoming a species aware of being collectively “implicated” in a “supramental” reality, let us look at how this synthetic point of view of mine allows me to look at Quantum Reality from the original perspective that space as no substance and the process of reality (“time”) is  A QUANTUM PROCESS.

© 2000