Perhaps the most important challenge to those who would like to make a positive future is to better understand ourselves. This essay written a few years ago serves as preamble to later papers on evolutionary psychology.

Psychology, Evolution and Pandora

John Stevenson

Many years ago I was an engineer working with airborne combat computers. These were constructed from vacuum tubes, therefore terribly unreliable, and based on analog techniques and therefore as inaccurate But it was the leading edge in technology at the time and they were quite effective. I had spent years learning the intricacies of the components we used and the circuitries that forced these recalcitrant parts to behave. It was at Hughes and we were known all over the world for our technical proficiency.

Then we began to hear rumors about digital computers, and other rumors about a little gadget called a transistor. It was all very interesting, but hardly practical. Digital computation would require millions of active devices, we were working with hundreds and almost overwhelmed with that. Transistors were terribly non-linear and quite prone to thermal blowout. Besides, what we had was working quite well. And surely, we told ourselves, we could work this new stuff in with the old. It would be an easy transition.

The path became clearer every day. These were the coming things. The change might not be so leisurely or easy. There was a growing demand in both civilian and military sectors for computers that far exceeded the capability of even the largest vacuum tube mechanisms and requiring accuracy that would have been impossible with them. The transistors were much smaller than the vacuum tubes, with promise of being made much smaller yet. And that smallness could allow a practical digital computer of reasonable size. It became time to get on the band wagon with both feet.

The problem was that the one excluded the other. Vacuum tubes were not electrically compatible with transistors. Digital methods are not compatible with analog except in input/output devices. Packaging was entirely different. Even the power supplies were not compatible, and cooling requirements were different. Essentially none of the prior technology carried over. It was an entirely new ball game. Bookcases full of the latest MIT publications on active electronic theory became obsolete, to be replaced with a small volume on boolean algebra and a physics text on semiconductor theory. Then the flow of information began. It seemed so fast. One day you are a bright and productive engineer. The next you are a fumbling clod, struggling not to look foolish. The newer engineers coming on line were more resilient. A few of our older ones found the transition too difficult and turned to selling real estate. The rest of us burned the midnight oil. Thankfully, we found the engineering thought patterns to be the same and we already had a good grasp of the problems that needed solution. All we needed to do was cram in the new knowledge, most of it being developed as we studied.

This same process is happening in the field of psychology today. Psychologists have paid lip service to genetics and evolution for many years, while the evidence mounted to critical mass. It must now be faced. Genetics describes the human mind as consisting of billions of neural cells. In comparison with the old ideas of discrete but overlapping behavioral functions, this new approach becomes far more complex. Moving from the idea of the brain being a knowledge bucket to learning how it developed into its now visible far more complex structure and function will be a painful one. As with the computer revolution, two new texts have been added to the psychologist’s library, “Molecular Biology of the Cell” by Alberts and “Neurobiology” by Shepherd. The rest of the library will then slowly and agonizingly follow my old MIT electronic series into the round file, to be replaced one by one with new texts from an entirely different viewpoint. Unfortunately, in the case of the psychologist, even the old thought patterns must be retrained. No longer will imagination, conjecture, speculation and hearsay (other people’s imagination, conjecture and speculation) suffice. The emphasis now turns from philosophy to science.

Pandora’s Box Has Been Opened

How can this be? Why can’t these new ideas coexist with the old?

The answer is simple: They are directly opposed. The one contradicts the other. This is not the acquisition of an optional and parallel approach. Genetics and evolution can’t be tacked on current knowledge, it underlies all psychological knowledge with all the authority that only measurable fact can have. It negates all dogma which disagrees. The situation is one much like the old saw which says that no one can be just a little pregnant.

All modern psychological knowledge is based on three premises:

1. The human is intelligent. He will behave properly with proper education (nurture). Aberrant behavior indicates trauma, disease, chemical imbalance or poor environment. Proper behavior is judged against the current academic elitist ideology (or is it that the current ideology was formulated by the psychologist?).
2. The human mind can create knowledge without reference to the outside world. In fact, some believe, true knowledge is best developed without the taint of the real world. Perfect thought comes from pure minds. Psychologists have pure minds.
3. Sufficient data about human behavior can provide a basis for determining the cause of that behavior. Determining cause from effect is a valid logical process.

It is now recognized: that: genetics is a strong factor in the behavior of man; the current genetic configuration of man is the result of a process called evolution; and the human neural system is a part of that genetic configuration, therefore subject to the same forces as the physical part of the body. Once the human neural system is recognized as an evolved neural biological mechanism, none of the above three premises hold true. If they are not true then all of the knowledge based on those suppositions becomes highly suspect.

The myth of human intelligence

Man has studied the evolutionary process by which he was formed, and has found it to be primitive, unpredictable and brutal, without intelligence, planning or goal. His physical and mental structures are both poorly engineered and suffer frequent malfunction, poor and erratic performance and early wear out. As man progresses into the study of the genetics of man and the process by which man was formed, it becomes more and more apparent that man, far from being a wondrous creature, is a makeshift creature at best, one which is now archaic and a misfit in a world suddenly crowded and technically complex. The wonder is that he is able to function as well as he does.

The human is quite proud, and justifiably so, of his technological accomplishments. He looks at the chimp, his nearest relative, and finds him dim-witted and with deplorable social habits. All other animals fall even farther behind. Man then becomes arrogant as he surveys the differences between himself and all others. This is an arrogance that is not justified. Man is intelligent only when compared with the others. Actually, he is quite error prone and self delusional.

The human neural system began its development when the first hominid appeared (the ape that walked). That was about 4 million years ago. During the next 2 million years, the early hominid developed as a herd herbivore. Almost all of the tribal social instincts were developed during that period. With the invention of tools and fire, about 2 million years ago, the human shifted from the herd herbivore to the hunter/gatherer tribe form of social structure. It was successful. The population began growing. Competition developed between tribes for territory. Relationships between tribes became militant. The hunter/warrior tribal system began forming. The neural system of modern man is honed for the hunter/warrior mode of living. The need was for fast decisions while under stress. Speed was more important than accuracy. Survival depended on it.

The human neural system is primarily a parallel mode reactive decision mechanism, one ideal for controlling an automobile, hunting tigers, or designing a trap for the tribesman next door. The conscious thought system makes iterative use of the same mechanism. It was designed for relationships within the tribe and waging a defensive posture against territorial encroachment. The human mind was not developed for tribes with memberships in the millions, for urban (ant hill) living, for mixing of cultures, for being ruled by strangers of another tribe, for high-technology living, etc.

The truth of the matter is that the function of the human brain, the mechanism which accepts and processes knowledge received through the senses, then provides behavior appropriate to the situation, is determined by a genome formed by chaos squeezed through a mindless random variable filter. Evolution is a process which is unplanned and without goals or standards. As is to be expected with any complex mechanism which was built with no engineering, our genome is a pile of junk. Worse still, man, having eliminated the filter portion of the evolution mechanism, is now subject to the accumulation of all mutations not immediately fatal. Since the neural system is more complex than the balance of the body, it receives a major share of these mutations. Not only is the thinking apparatus fixed by a genetic code designed by an idiot, that code is now wandering all over the map, and deteriorating all the while.

In the lottery of being born with a genome of a particular configuration, the individual human may be an imbecile or a genius, or anywhere in between. Since the reasoning apparatus is a fixed mechanism, its change in capability with experience is quite small. Only the behavior of the individual changes, in response to the quality and quantity of the knowledge absorbed as processed by the fixed intellectual quality of the individual. The intelligence of man, therefore, is very questionable. One only needs to read the front page of a newspaper a few days to understand that. It only appears wonderful to us because there is nothing better around.

Instead of boasting about his intellectual ability, man should be humble and careful, knowing that his every thought is suspect.

The myth of human intellectual creativity

If the human neural system is a biological mechanism (genetics and evolution prove this is so), then it is shorn of magic, spirituality and mysticism. It can not create gold from lead, truth from falsehood, or knowledge from dogma. Any mechanism has a finite capability. No machine can provide more than its fuel. There is always a loss in every machine, none may even reach 100% efficiency, much less produce more than it is given. The human brain can no longer be considered creative. It can not create knowledge, it may only discover it. The knowledge produced by thought must be contained in the premises (input data) on which that thought is based. Knowledge may be discovered by the human brain only when it has adequate truthful data on which to work. If the input knowledge (data) is inadequate or untruthful the output conclusions can be disastrous, and often are. Using unproven premises negates the reasoning that follows by the amount of its error. In the computer world we refer to this process limitation as “garbage in, garbage out.”

Conjecture, imagination, hearsay, and introspection are all useful tools in the formation of new theory. They will not reliably provide working knowledge, separately or collectively. Theory must be proven before it is applied, whether the subject is a space shuttle, bridge, or airplane. It is even more important if the subject is human. A human culture should not be used as experimental fodder.

Can cause be determined from effect?

Any study of primitive tribal knowledge (lore) is a study of cause determined from effect. If, for example, there should be a partial solar eclipse, it becomes obvious to the village shaman that the fairest village maiden must be sacrificed. The effect is quite visible. Without knowledge of the actual cause, however, there are a multitude of possible causes that may be imagined. One of those would be an angry God whose ire may be appeased only through the death of a lovely young woman.

In the modern engineering world, the source of designs for human service, it has long been known that the loop must be closed. No idea is useful unless both cause and effect are known (verified, measured), the effect is desirable and the side effects are known and are a reasonable price to pay. Only when both cause and effect are known sufficiently well to reliably predict the effect(s) should an idea be used in the service of man. It is dangerous to do otherwise.

The tribal shaman discovered the cause by noting the magnitude of the event. Obviously, this was an important occasion, one that only the Gods could control. Modern psychology uses similar logic. It ascertains the cause of human behavior by analysis of human behavior. And its answers are often no better.

An excellent example is shown by the current controversy in our schools over the proper method for teaching small children to read. The two procedures in question are “whole language” and “phonics”. The problem provoking the argument is that children are not, on the average, learning to read very well.

The psychologist says that the human learns everything in the same way. The brain is a bucket into which knowledge is poured, therefore, if a young child learns to speak through immersion in an environment rich in the spoken language, it will learn to read if immersed in an environment rich in the written language.

The problem is that the two processes (learning to speak and learning to read) are not even remotely equivalent, and that difference lies in the structure of the brain, a structure defined by genetics. The human brain is not a sponge. It has structure and that structure determines its capability to learn. As a result of that structure, it learns different things in different ways.

The first hominid, four million years ago, required tribal living for survival. Tribal living requires communication. Tribal success depends a great deal on communication. Those tribes with the best communication tended to survive the best. The ability to communicate verbally is instinctive in the human, as it is in all animals, though to a lesser extent.

Internal thought is composed of electrical and chemical signals. To communicate, these internal thought signals must be converted into physical movement (behavior). To send a message, those internal thoughts to be expressed aurally must be converted into a combination of phonemes (aural elements). To receive a message, those phonemes heard must then be converted into internal thought equivalents. A bidirectional thought/speech lookup dictionary is required. Evolution developed a specialized area in the brain which mechanizes the learning of phoneme-to-thought and thought-to-phoneme conversions. It is called the Broca’s area and is located in the male human brain in the left frontal lobe and in the female in both frontal lobes.

Immerse a child in an environment rich in spoken language and it will instinctively learn to verbally communicate. Careful instruction in proper pronunciation and idea construction augments this natural ability.

Written language is a different thing entirely. From the viewpoint of evolution, a multimillion year process, written communication is a very recent invention. It is an intellectual skill that has no special neural circuitry to aid in its acquisition. There is no mechanism in the brain for converting the written word, as seen by the eye, to thought. A different sense is used. Verbal communication uses the voice and ears. Written communication uses the hand and eyes. There is, however, a mechanism available for converting the spoken word to thought. So when we learn to read, we convert the written word to its spoken equivalent and run that through the Broca’s area to obtain the meaning (internal thought equivalent). When we write, we run the thought through the Broca’s area to obtain the phoneme equivalent, recall the visual pattern associated with that phoneme set and then tell the hand to write that word.

It is a duty of the education system to teach a child the proper pronunciation of his spoken thought elements, for it is that pronunciation which is cross-referenced to the proper thought. It is sheer idiocy to expect a child to learn a written word that it does not already know both the meaning and the proper pronunciation.

Does this mean that the child can not learn to read using the whole language concept? Of course not. The human child is extremely adaptable. One could hang some of these children by the heels and require them to study with the book held sideways and they would still learn to read. For the maximum benefit to the most, however, the education process should fit the mechanism instead of requiring the mechanism to adapt to the process.

Does this mean we should cancel whole language and go back to phonics? Not completely. We have not been teaching phonics properly either, but that’s another story. And once a child is proficient with a verbal and written vocabulary of a particular size and complexity, his immersion into an environment rich in written communication that does not exceed his ability is indeed quite valuable. The key is that the child must know the pronunciation and meaning of a word before it is allowed to tackle the written equivalent.

How many of these problems are there? There must be multitudes.

In Conclusion

My sympathy for the plight of the psychologist is sincere. I know from experience the devastating experience of having your life’s work suddenly tossed out the window like so much garbage. I write this text on a machine that is beyond the wildest dreams that I ever had in those early vacuum tube days. I now look at the widespread use of digital technology in music, business and communications and realize that it was worth all the pain.

A few psychologists will grasp the need and attack the new approach with vigor. Many will avoid basic learning by reading only the pop authors. Others will try vainly to fit genetics and evolution in with the old premises and reasoning. Still others will build a protective wall of cute quotations, hiding business as usual. Many will not make any change, choosing to blunder through. Some, like many of my engineering friends, will turn to real estate. It will be painful for all.

Worse still, it appears to be a long and arduous transition. Unlike an engineering field which produces a product directly for public use, a position demanding immediate accountability and responsibility, psychology is a behind-the-scenes function. It provides the basis for education, politics, journalism and jurisprudence without ever appearing directly to the public. If psychology errs in education, for example, it is the education system which bears the brunt of the blame. Complaints from the education system may then be shunted rather than corrected by claiming complexity, misunderstanding, improper application, etc. Psychology is largely peer controlled. It need not be right as long as a majority of other psychologists agree. The entire field of psychology is a mutual admiration society. It is also highly reactionary, staunchly resisting the shift toward becoming a true science.

Being cushioned from external accountability and responsibility, archaic premises and the resultant generation of dogma will survive for many years. Fifty years from now there will be psychologists who will claim, “The human is an intelligent creature, therefore, if healthy, its behavior depends on education and cultural environment.”

There are people even today who claim the earth is flat.

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More from John Stevenson’s Website

Our human culture is currently trapped in Neutrality. Our values are neutral values and we see the individual as supreme. While the concept of Humanity as Individual is valid, we have lost contact with the equally valid concept of Humanity as Community. Elisabet Sahtouris has explained that this identity crisis has occurred on planet Earth to earlier species of life. When competition fails emerging species must switch to cooperation or perish. Humanity is now at the cusp of its own crisis.

Yesterday Elisabet Sahtouris asked: How can the body of humanity function if half of its cells suppress the full expression of the other half ? … Our biggest job is to change our whole way of thinking to a larger perspective, to recognize ourselves as a body of humanity embedded in, and with much to learn from, our living parent planet, which is all we have to sustain us. How can we as a species live in harmony within it? How can we as people live in harmony within our own species?

This morning Elisabet Sahtouris continues her story of the EarthDance. Also see: The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

A Matter of Maturation—17

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

We have seen human worldviews change dramatically from the early view of nature as the Great Mother to a view of nature as the mechanical creation of a Father God, then to the portrayal of nature as mechanism evolving by accident, without purpose or design, there to be used for human purposes.

A psychologist might see this sequence of worldviews that is the heritage of industrial and post-industrial humanity as having something in common with those of an individual member of our present society passing through stages of personal development. Technological culture, on which this book is focused, has clearly become — for better or for worse — the dominant human culture that will make or break us as a species. What matters, then, is to recognize that this culture is still immature from a developmental perspective. We may then hope it will learn not just from its own experience but also from that of the few remaining non-technological cultures it is wiping out in its drive to so-called progress, though they may be far more mature in their relation to our parent planet. In Chapter 19 we will look more deeply at who they are and how we might cooperate with them fruitfully at this critical transition time for humanity.

Of our species infancy we know very little; our earliest artifacts, as we said in earlier chapters, indicate a recognition of nature as mother and of our closeness to and respect for her. In our long, relatively peaceful childhood we learned nurture from her, developing agriculture and art. Father figures existed primarily in absentia from the early agricultural civilizations — as the gods of nomads and hunters who eventually came to disrupt them with violent conquest and lasting domination.

Under the influence of paternal gods, we formed our ego the Greek word for `I’ — coming to see ourselves as separate from nature, growing out of the close union with nature-as-mother into seeing nature as separate from us, as the creation of an authoritarian Father God, in whose laws and demand for obedience we found some security.

In this analogy, the European Middle Ages seem to be our pre-pubescent phase — a stable God-fearing Christian society that lasted over a thousand years under His authority — until man began expressing his ego more boldly. In time he challenged religious stories, or revelations about the world with scientific observations, making discoveries and developing technology in ways that permitted him to transform nature ever more to his own purposes. Was it not as if humanity through its Renaissance and Enlightenment reached the stage of competence and confidence we associate with adolescence? As scientific knowledge and technological industry swelled the adolescent ego, the father’s authority was rejected and nature was seen as no more than a knowable and predictable environment for men to control and exploit as they wished.

Is it not to be expected that a smart and clever adolescent will reject or at least question the unchallenged parental authority in which the child believed? Is it not common to gain in adolescence, between bouts of insecurity, the conviction of knowing everything and being in full control? Why shouldn’t whole human societies go through the life stages of childhood and adolescence as each individual human does? Is not our whole species, quite like every child born to it, still young and free to learn from experience?

In mythology — mythology long having served as cultural psychology — the heroic cycle often represents the life cycle. The youthful hero leaves home, encounters challenges in the course of his adventures, then finally returns as a mature, wise man. Such myths often portray the hero as a brash youth with the hubris — the gall, as we would say — to believe himself as invulnerable and powerful as the gods themselves. For this he is invariably punished by a fall, which may be permanent if he does not learn the lesson of false pride.

In real life, the adolescent who strikes out with a false sense of maturity, believing he or she knows it all, can be expected to get into some kind of trouble before maturing into an adult. And the adolescence of civilized humanity is running true to form. Our view of nature as a mechanism to be exploited fostered great progress in technology, but we made this progress recklessly in our belief that all nature was ours to do with as we pleased. Now we find ourselves punished by the enormous problems we have created along with our modern technology.

Like any adolescent who is suddenly aware of having created a very real life crisis, our species faces a choice — the choice between pursuing our dangerous course to disaster or stopping and trying to find mature solutions to our crises. This choice point is the brink of maturity — the point at which we must decide whether to continue our suicidal course or turn from it to responsible maturity. Are we going to continue our disastrously competitive economics, our ravaging conversion of our natural supply base into things, our pollution of basic soils, waters and atmosphere in the process? Or will we change the way we see life — our worldview, our self-image, our goals, and our behavior — in accord with our new knowledge of living nature in evolution?

Will we come to hold nature sacred once again, as wise indigenous elders urge, so that seven or more generations to come will benefit from our decisions? We are at the point where we can see our own historical evolution and decide whether to hold up its natural advance into maturity — prolonging our adolescence dangerously — or whether to speed its course by making haste in the face of crisis to complete the mature cooperative body of humanity by conscious choice.

Growing up is not easy, as we all know. Youth must fall on its face in its ambition, must learn by experience; the hero must be wounded in battle and be knocked down for his hubris, his pretension to godhood. Maturity comes only when youth gains perspective on itself and is at last willing to admit there is still something to learn.

As we have not yet gained this perspective, many of us believe that today’s human problems will never be solved, that they have simply gotten too big for solutions of any kind or that, even if we solved them temporarily, human nature cannot itself change and therefore we would just get into the same mess again. This pessimistic view of ourselves as a species reflects the way we feel as individuals whenever we are depressed and our problems seem insoluble.

Hopeless pessimism often comes from lack of perspective. If we look at things narrowly, from within a difficult situation, they may well seem hopeless, but if we manage to step out of our dark hole, so to speak, to gain some perspective on ourselves within it, we may begin to see a way out.

The purpose of this book is to put human life into just this kind of perspective — to see ourselves within the whole evolving world, even within the whole evolving cosmos. When we look at things broadly this way, we see that the problems we humans have created may not be as great as problems other species have created, for which life found solutions. What could be more interesting, more exciting, than to be alive in the very age when we as a species have the opportunity to mature, to solve the adolescent problems we have caused ourselves and others?

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One solution to human problems proposed in the name of ecology is that we should recognize technology as an inhuman disaster, an evil to be rooted out along with the science that produced it, so that we may go back to a simple, more natural life. After all, those humans who never invented technological languages and machinery, who never built big cities or hierarchical class societies, never got to adolescent crises of their own making. In fact, natives of the Amazon, New Guinea, the Australian outback and other places where people remained in settings relatively undisturbed by themselves, cannot be said to be immature in the sense that technological humans are. Though they belong to our very young species, they have never rejected the parental status or lessons of nature, never developed our kind of ego, simply learning deeply what it takes — and does not take — to live as one species within a mature and balanced ecosystem.

The rest of us — the vast majority of our species — must recognize that our development has taken a different path for reasons of its own and that no living system can reverse its evolutionary history. Our technological development is as natural as was our pre-technological infancy, and we cannot turn back. We could, however, move forward with more mature restraint and wisdom.

Fortunately, our industrial technology is already in transition from crude adolescent efforts to more mature sophistication. In developing our heavy industry and feeding it with raw materials, fuel, and human workers, we have devastated or polluted whole ecosystems, alienated ourselves from our natural origins, formed ourselves into mechanical societies living in concrete jungles. Yet the information age has already moved us into the next phase of living more lightly upon the Earth. We have begun replacing heavy industry with light, energy sources that can run out with those which won’t, industrial cities with more distributed production networks connected through computers.

Many developing countries can now avoid the expensive and exhausting heavy-industry phase almost entirely by jumping directly into the age of electronics and information with the assistance of the most technologically advanced nations. This is already happening, but unfortunately it is happening in a context of profit motives and competition, often leaving beneficiaries worse off than before. They are forced to pay back assistance loans with heavy growing interest, to make political concessions and demonstrate loyalties. These development schemes continue to devastate ecosystems, as the World Bank has long admitted, and often help promote a climate of threatened, if not actual, hostility. Notorious are the post-colonial banana republics — single-crop economies that have created unstable ecosystems and dictatorships that keep their own people poor and hungry. Revolutions ensue; military might and the notorious `disappearances’ are used to crush them. Even where peace seems to reign, governments almost always work more for the interests of the rich and foreign investment industry than they do for the majority of their ever more impoverished people.

The building of dams to generate electricity, the burning and bulldozing of forests for monoculture crops or grazing cattle, the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the manufacture of fuels and metals from fossil and ore deposits, are all financially profitable to those who own or rule the land. But they are so ecologically destructive that the life of ordinary people may become intolerable or non-viable.

Nature works not for profits but for balance, recycling everything. Humans cannot much longer run their profit-oriented growth economies at the expense of planetary economics, as Thomas Berry, the economist and philosopher priest, has warned. Paul Hawken tells us business will survive only if it adopts the recycling economy of nature. Business ethicist and professor William Frederick points out that nature’s economy is about doing more with less — “the only way to survive, grow, develop and flourish.” David Korten tells us we need “a story that gives meaning to life beyond an eternal competition for material acquisition and consumption.” In fact, these voices are cropping up everywhere, making it evident that we recognize what has to be done.

If we are willing to see the problems we now face as those of a species on the brink of maturity, yet still in the fiercely competitive phase of belligerent adolescence, then we can learn as a species from our individual experience in maturation. Let us recall Mark Twain’s now classic joke about the young man who comes home again after having struck out to make his way in the world. He is shocked yet pleasantly surprised to see how much his father has learned in the few years of his absence, how much they can at last agree on. The joke, of course, is that the son has changed and not the father — his own experience of the world having given him new perspective on his father as a wise and sensible man with something worthwhile to say.

This is exactly what can happen to us as a species. As a result of our own experience and our recognition of the environmental trouble we have caused, we can take a new look at the planet that gave us birth and we can begin seeing it in a new light. Through our brilliant science, our measuring and computing instruments, our space technology, we can see our planet as a whole living being that we have misunderstood and mistreated at our own expense. We begin to understand that while the planet has great experience and wisdom to teach us, our own lack of understanding and respect have led us to exploit it as though it existed for no other purpose. Only now do we understand that we have been recklessly destroying the parent planet on which we depend and from which we can learn a great deal about using our gift of conscious freedom more wisely.

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In discussing the problems of free and conscious behavioral choice in earlier chapters, we spoke of our lack of innate rules for dividing land and resources fairly, for avoiding killing our kind, and for governing ourselves peacefully and cooperatively. We suggested that guidance in achieving these things by our own choice could be found in the organization and functioning of natural holarchies. We also recognized that turning our understanding into practice, instead of just reasoned ideas, requires a lot of responsible effort.

The Athenian democracy in ancient Greece was just such an effort, yet it seems to have collapsed at least as much from internal weakness — from the human reluctance to accept the hard responsibilities of freedom — as from external causes. Modern so-called democracies may work as well as they do only because they are much less demanding of their citizens than was ancient Athens, and this is important food for thought. In the United States today, compulsory taxation is the only requirement of citizenship, and compulsory taxation has never made a democracy.

Late in the nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky identified the problem of accepting responsibility for freedom as humanity’s essential crisis. Dostoevsky presents the crisis of human freedom in a myth within his novel the Brothers Karamazov, by having one brother tell it to another. In this myth, Christ reappears in sixteenth-century Seville at the time when the Holy Christian Fathers, in that city alone, were burning as many as a hundred heretics a day at the stake in actual fact. A Grand Inquisitor condemns Christ to his second death — this time at the stake — for preaching freedom to mankind. The grounds given by the Inquisitor for this sentence is that “nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and to human society than freedom.”

Men cannot bear, and so do not want, the responsibility of freedom, the Inquisitor claims, and the church has relieved them of that burden. Men will endure slavery for the sake of being fed and they will be happy only when their rebelliousness is turned to obedience, he insists, for they are sheep, preferring to believe they are free while actually doing as they are told by authorities who give them work, bread, rules to live by, and forgiveness for their sins.

Interestingly, Dostoevsky calls men “unfinished experimental creatures” in this passage, implying that they are immature as a species. Further, in his allegory, he deliberately pits two heroic images against each other in an analogy of personal adolescent crisis. Christ, on the one hand, represents the call to maturity — the acceptance of human responsibilities of free choice; the Inquisitor, on the other hand, represents retreat from maturity — the delegation of responsibility to an authority. Thus Dostoevsky portrayed his painful awareness of the human failure to practice responsible freedom.

Young people all over the world today reflect this dilemma in their personal lives, whether or not they are aware that it is as much a species dilemma as a personal one. Some struggle hard to develop and work in organizations that show all humanity how to accept the responsibility of freedom to end war, hunger, and ecological disaster. Others hurt so much from seeing the human failure to solve these problems that they fall into anarchy and depression, believing in no future at all and driving the youth crime and suicide rate to an unprecedented high. The rest — as Dostoevsky despairingly and accurately noted — do not concern themselves with such great problems but do what is asked of them to make their personal lives as comfortable as possible.

Perhaps most people search for comfortable security under some authority other than their own because we have been taught to fear failure if we fly in the face of tradition to exercise our own free choice. We have had the goal of perfection held up to us for thousands of years, and we fear failure and disapproval if we stray from whatever path we are told is the right one. Better to look to some authority for guidance, for the ideology, the formula, that will make us and our societies more perfect, than to risk acting on our own imperfect ideas.

For more than two millennia, ever since the ancient Greeks thought up the idea, we have been chasing after perfection. Now we are forced to wonder if we have not crippled ourselves in this chase after a chimera — a foolish and sometimes frightening fantasy. Let us consider it a happy discovery that the cosmos is not rigidly perfect as Plato thought, but an imperfect creative learning process much more as Anaximander saw it, with everything forming and re-forming in the never-ending process of making order from chaos.

Ever since Plato, western worldviews have held up the goal of making ourselves and our societies as perfect as God’s creation — as perfect as well-oiled machinery. Only now do we see that despite billions of years of experience, despite the marvelous integrity of life’s patterns, things go wrong in Gaian nature, unbalancing the dance here or there. Yet in going wrong, they create pressure to reorganize the dance of life, to try new steps, or new combinations of old steps, and so the imperfection leads to progress.

The story of Earthlife is the story of improvisation wherever and whenever a species or ecosystem became unstable. Yet in nature there is never any break with the past — there is always continuity in the dance, even through extinctions. And the dance always works to produce a remarkable integrity and stability after periods of competitive strife. Nature teaches us that order can be maintained through change — even, when necessary, through disastrous change.

When, for example, the dinosaurs were killed off by severely changing conditions due to an accident, Earth’s living systems continued to create new reptile, bird, and mammal species from the genes left in the small survivors of the disaster. We sometimes think of the great dinosaurs as unsuccessful species because they became extinct. But dinosaurs and their cousins flowered into a wonderful variety of species including the largest creatures the Earth has ever seen, and they flourished for nearly two hundred million years — forty times longer than our few million years as humans. Nor was their extinction their fault.

It is still up to us to prove that the human big-brain experiment is worth the risk, that freedom from innate rules — the conscious freedom to choose — will pay off in creativity that benefits, or at least does not harm, the whole Gaian system. If it doesn’t pay off, we, too, will become extinct, more likely by our own doing than by outside forces as in the case of the dinosaurs. We would be wise to remind ourselves often that Gaia’s dance will continue with or without us.

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Nature, as we said before, is far more like a wonderfully resourceful artist than like a grand engineer, more like a mother juggling family needs, economics, and conflicts than like a coldly calculating geometer. In the improvised dance of nature toward order and balance, complexity unfolds, becomes chaotic or fragmented, is reorganized to new unity, then permits new complexity to unfold, new disorder to arise. This evolving system of life protects what is stable and works well, yet is ever open to change when instabilities arise, using change to create both new unity and new variety — variety that gives nature, among other things, the resilience to survive disasters.

Every species is different from all the others and every individual is a variation of that species’ kind, just as in our bodies every organ is different from all the others and every individual cell a variation of that organ’s kind. Machines can be mass-produced to be all alike, but nothing in nature is exactly like anything else.

It is Gaian wisdom to balance variety and use it creatively in forming highly stable ecosystems. The greater this variety is, the more stable the ecosystem is as a whole, as ecologists such as Eugene Odum and Edward Goldsmith have pointed out. We are also discovering that tampering with such systems by introducing a new species that has not been worked into the dance may disrupt it entirely — as in the case of the gypsy moth or Dutch elm disease.

This variety principle holds also for the gene pool of any species. We have learned by hard experience, for example, that our practice of `perfecting’ our food crops and domestic animals by breeding out their genetic variety, while breeding in the features we like, leaves them weak and subject to diseases or developmental anomalies. The first `successfully’ cloned sheep, Molly, for example, proved to age at ten times the normal rate for sheep. When we reduce variety by breeding a particular strain or cloning a single individual, by replacing natural ecosystems with monocultures on bulldozed land, we creating highly unstable and vulnerable situations.

Human variety, in our physical makeup as well as in our languages and cultures, ideas and lifestyles, is surely equally important to our healthy survival. Yet oddly, while we humans fight for our individual right to be different from others, not to be forced into the same social mold, we cause ourselves a good deal of trouble as a species by thinking there is something wrong with people who are different from us. We discriminate on the basis of color, culture, or belief — convincing ourselves there is something in difference to be hated, feared, ridiculed, or stamped out. Let us hope such prejudice will disappear as we learn more about nature and begin to respect, welcome, appreciate, and love our individual and cultural differences, using them like genetic variety to create new and fruitful combinations.

It has become obvious, for example, that a common human language is essential to communication and cooperation in the newly formed body of humanity, and English appears to be naturally evolving into that common language. But that is no reason to suppress any of the languages of different cultures. It is no problem at all for human children to learn several languages, and the variety of human languages represents a very important variety in human thought and worldviews. Just as we are foolish to breed natural variety out of domestic food plants and animals while killing off one wild species after another, we are foolish to eliminate variety in human language, culture, and thought.

Many natural languages have already become extinct as a result of foreign conquests. Conquerors have killed off conquered peoples and sometimes even punished survivors for speaking their native tongue, as was done in mission schools that children of native North and South American tribes were forced to attend. Just as we have begun to work at preserving endangered animal and plant species, we should be working to preserve endangered cultures and languages.

Over half the world’s languages are already gone and it is estimated that half those remaining will be gone in one more generation. When we cut tropical forests, we destroy not only vital ecosystems but also the human cultures that are part of them, that cannot survive being transplanted to concrete jungles — cultures from which we can learn a great deal about living in harmonious balance with the rest of nature (see Chapter 19).

Nature’s adaptive ability to change creatively without ever falling back into chaos surely suggests that we humans should give up the idea of finding the ideal economic and political organization or social structure. Our basic and natural task is the same as that of any other species — to balance individual good with collective species good, to be conservative with what is healthy in human society while radically changing what is not.

Nature teaches us that evolution depends on competition and cooperation, on independence and interdependence. Competition and independence are both important to individual survival, while cooperation and interdependence are both important to group, or social, or species survival. Individuals and their society or species are holons at two levels, or in two layers, of the same holarchy. We can see that these levels or layers must achieve mutual consistency by looking out for themselves and working out between themselves a balance of competition and cooperation, of dependence and interdependence.

If we work creatively to maintain this balance between ourselves as individuals and ourselves as societies — local, national, and worldwide — we will complete the evolution of a healthy body of humanity. If we look to our own individual bodies as a rough model for making it work, we might see that cooperative peace is a real option for nations with different languages and cultures that can make different contributions to the worldwide economy. There is no reason why individuals should not have the freedom to pursue their own interests and also contribute to their society. There is no reason why all should not be well fed and cared for in an equitable system of work and income.

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From the Gaian perspective, solutions to the great human problems of war, overpopulation, and hunger are far simpler than from any other perspective. But simplicity does not mean ease. We could solve these problems by shifting our worldview from one of international competition to one of international cooperation, with the goal of producing a healthy body of humanity. But worldviews, as we said earlier, do not change easily.

The present perspective of the powerful nations, banks and multinational corporations — those powers capable of quickly transforming humanity into a healthy body — is not a Gaian perspective. To attain the Gaian perspective, their leaders must change their worldview and the behavior based on it. As it is, these leaders are uneasy at predictions of doomsday — at suggestions that their course is suicidal for all humanity — but they do not yet believe in a healthy alternative that would be as good for themselves as for all humanity.

The Cold War decades brought the world to the point where arms manufacture cost four times as much as it would cost to retire the developing nations’ debt, provide worldwide clean, safe energy, housing, health care and clean water, stabilize populations, eliminate starvation and malnutrition, prevent ozone depletion, acid rain, deforestation and soil erosion, according to an analysis by the World Game Institute. What could more graphically show the bizarre distortion of our human endeavors? During the Gulf War, the five peacekeeping nations sent by the UN were the very ones that provided arms to both sides in the conflict!

It is no easier to get the citizens of our modern democratic or communist societies to take on the informed and responsible task of running things, instead of submitting to the oligarchic rule of the few, than it was to get ancient Athenian citizens to do so. But trends toward more networks in place of top-down authoritarian structures are emerging in new organizations and in various existing industries, services, and other enterprises as they decentralize their management and make it more concentric than hierarchical. But nowhere is this trend as much in evidence as in the Internet, as we will see in more detail later. As more people come to understand and adopt a Gaian perspective, this trend will surely grow.

Just as individuals may grow out of adolescence without consciously assisting their own process of maturation, a cooperative body of humanity may evolve without our conscious intent — just by the force of evolutionary change that is already under way. But the process will surely continue with less turmoil and suffering if we stop opposing it and consciously, actively assist it. Would it not be healthier for us to give up our dangerous competition for the greatest financial profits and work together at creating an imperfect but ecologically sensible economics and politics — a system that works with its variety to give everyone the opportunity for a healthy life, just as our bodies give that opportunity to each of their cells?

In recognizing our planet as an experienced living system with a good deal of accumulated wisdom to teach us, we gain the perspective to see how we might apply some of that wisdom to our own human problems. All over nature, throughout the Gaian life system — right under our noses, so to speak, and all around us — we find the clues to making our own human affairs more organic and ethical, more creative and wise, as the earliest philosophers believed we would.

Let us continue gaining perspective by seeing that great problems can be the very challenges needed to push evolution along into new creativity. We saw that the oxygen crisis of billions of years ago became an opportunity for a new way of life and new forms of living creatures. The environmental crisis that caused the mass extinction of dinosaurs provided the opportunity for our own mammalian evolution. Both the bacterial oxygen crisis and the dinosaurs’ extinction crisis were more severe from a Gaian perspective then any trouble we humans have caused so far. Yet we have already initiated another extinction and it increasingly appears to be a life or death crisis for our own species. Our increase of the greenhouse gases alone may force Gaia to regain stability at an average temperature beyond human tolerance. Ozone holes, nuclear holocausts, poisoned air and waters, chemically depleted soils, epidemics caused by microbial defenses against our war-on-life antibiotics — we seem to be capable of inventing a remarkable number of potentially species-suicide weapons.

Why not put our cultural and ethnic differences and imperfections to creative use in dialoguing about a healthier future? Why not see the crises of our making as incentives to move forward in new ways. Gaian creativity might have come to an end without problems, challenges, opportunities for creating solutions leading to new species and ways of life. If we follow nature’s lead, we will make mistakes, juggle things about, find solutions, generate new problems without guilt — and on the whole, we will find our mutual consistency with other natural organisms and with each other.

Let us also remember that if we continue on our current path, our planet may be better off without us. Our species demise — by suicide or extinction — might actually promote Gaian health.

Yet we are potentially as creative as the whole Gaian system we belong to. If we find ourselves in an adolescent crisis of our own making, that is no reason for us to give up in despair. It should, instead, urge us to face ourselves, swallow our foolish pride, adopt a little humility, a wider perspective, and gain mature humanity in the best sense of this word we have coined for ourselves.

The wider perspective many humans are waking to now is the perspective that we are not humans capable of having spiritual experiences, but spirits having human experiences. This perspective was until recently found only among religious people, but with new discoveries in physics we talked about earlier — such as evidence of cosmic consciousness and intelligence, and the non-locality of a completely interwoven universe in which everything affects everything else at any `distance’ — scientists and other lay people are joining their ranks. This worldview connects especially easily with Gaian science and philosophy in Buddhism, which is enjoying great outreach in the West.

Another past province of religion now broadening its base is ethics, since science, in its love affair with objectivity, divorced itself from such concerns. Now we find there is no possibility of cold objectivity in a participatory and interwoven universe. Perhaps we can even find ethics built into nature itself.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Yesterday we learned: Nature is a live, self-creating process forever making order from chaos, forever free to do something new — to reorganize itself when necessary, even if only to stay the same; to create new forms when old ones no longer work. Perfection would be the end of evolution, the end of freedom, the end of creativity. We have learned that nature is far less than perfect for a very good reason — for the same reason that nature is far more than mechanism. … Our biggest job is to change our whole way of thinking to a larger perspective, to recognize ourselves as a body of humanity embedded in, and with much to learn from, our living parent planet, which is all we have to sustain us. How can we as a species live in harmony within it? How can we as people live in harmony within our own species? This morning, Elisabet Sahtouris continues her story of the EarthDance.

Also see: Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

The Body of Humanity—16

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

The new scientific worldview we are forming is already showing great influence on our broader cultural worldview. Just as mechanical images inspired the development of industrial and social technology, organic images of self-creating networks are beginning to inspire us to reorganize all human society as a more harmonious and humane venture.

Gaian evolution itself is pushing us in this direction. The evolution of a worldwide body of humanity is very much a step — in fact, the newest step — in Gaian evolution. Like the rest of evolution, it was not planned, but is free to occur and consistent with the overall pattern of the dance.

Much as we humans have been creating this step through our technology, we have not been creating it intentionally any more than we intended to destroy our environmental life support systems as we created our industrial lifestyle, or any more than we set out to create a means of committing species suicide when we invented nuclear weapons. We have just begun to understand that these are the real or threatened consequences of recent human activity and that they put our very survival in question.

In just the past few hundred years of our half-million years as tool-making humans, we have used our big brains and clever hands to produce a technology that changed the whole planet and united us into a new kind of being. Without strife, we have built an efficient worldwide system of mail, telephone and electronic communications, a worldwide air, sea and land transport system, a global money exchange, a United Nations with many cooperative agencies, and a vast system of non-governmental organizations. Our multinationals are global, we have a World Trade Organization and a World Parliament of Religions; we are continually working on international agreements of all sorts. Yet we have hardly even been aware that we were evolving into a single body of humanity. It happened as naturally as the evolution of our physical bodies.

Most of our understanding of ourselves, of our evolution, and of our social history has, after all, been gained only very recently. Before this century, we couldn’t even know what was happening in the rest of the world while it was happening, much less trace its roots into the dim past. Quite suddenly we live in an age of telescopes that show us the most remote parts of our universe and its most ancient history, an age of microscopes that let us look deep into the tiniest parts of our own bodies and the rest of nature. Only in this age have we begun digging up the fossils of our early ancestors and the remains of the first human civilizations, making them into books and films that tell an ever more connected and meaningful story.

Only now can we see our whole planet from space and begin to understand it as a great living being. Only now do we see that, from Gaia’s perspective, life evolves as a whole — rock transforming itself into what we perceive as a great variety of separate species, as well as into what we see as the various environments of land, sea, and air. But, as we have seen, environments are not lifeless geological habitats in which living species evolve; they are themselves collections of living species and their products. Sea, soil, atmosphere, and even hard rock are all products of Earth’s geo-biological metabolism as a live planet.

If all creatures and environments co-evolve by changing themselves and one another, then to understand any particular species we must try to understand how its evolution is related to the evolution of its environment. As we said, rabbits cannot evolve without their habitats and vice versa — all we have is rhabitats. In particular, we can only understand ourselves as humans by trying to understand our co-evolution with the rest of nature.

Let’s go through the story of our human evolution just once more, recognizing that its pre-historical phase is still very murky and that alternative stories are more plausible to some of us. Let’s imagine seeing this evolution from a distance and sped up as a short film.

First we see small groups of humans evolving in dense forests in the warmer areas of the Earth. The climate changes and the forests shrink — we see them walking upright on the ground, groups of them wandering in search of food, some finding permanent shelters in caves and other protected places. Using the resources of their environment, they begin to make things that are of use to them, things that compensate for their lack of fur, sharp claws, and long teeth; things that help them hunt other large animals for food, bone tools, and clothing; things that help them carry, store, and prepare food. They learn to control fire for warmth and cooking, and to carry live embers from place to place. When their families or tribes grow too large to live together easily, some members bud off to form new tribes.

The human creatures thrive, multiplying and spreading out as they follow food and water supplies. Great ice ages push them back to warmer climes, but each time the ice thaws, they are lured toward the lush new growth springing up in the wake of the ice. Eventually their food supplies draw them to all the continents. Some remain tribal hunter-gatherers or nomads while others begin the settling process we call civilization.

In the best climates, groups of them settle to make houses, villages and gardens, to keep animals and grow crops, to store food for dry or cold seasons. Some begin making boats to explore along rivers and venture out to islands in larger bodies of water. Villages grow into towns, and towns into larger agricultural societies that transform considerable areas into manmade ecosystems. Barter among settlements and wandering tribes develops an economy of exchange. For thousands of years they bud off new nomadic tribes and settled colonies as numbers slowly expand and they spread over the habitable areas of the world, developing their arts of plant selection, animal husbandry, pottery, painting, and metalwork.

Then we see the larger agricultural economies overrun by tribes of wandering nomads and hunters from harsher climates, armed with weapons, taking them over, establishing dominance systems of males over females, rulers over those ruled. They build kingdoms and unite them into empires through warfare. More and more land is taken for human use. The old self-creating, self-balancing ecosystems are destroyed as natural plants are cut or burned, their animals driven off, both replaced by human-bred monoculture crops and livestock, as well as by walled cities of stone and brick.

Within and between empires, wars are fought and goods traded, building networks of land and sea paths that connect human societies with one another. Along these paths, news, ideas, and stories flow together with people and their products, animals, seeds, microbes. Sometimes unwittingly, people change whole ecosystems as seeds or animals they import take over and drive out the native species. Cities, in which natural land is replaced by man-made buildings and streets, grow up as centers of ideas, inventions, new ways of life. Their crowded conditions also breed disease — plagues sometimes wipe out whole populations. Natural disasters parch their croplands, flood or bury settlements, reminding them of nature’s power.

The borders around kingdoms and empires change; continents are mapped into countries; human populations grow and divide into ever more languages and cultures. Ecosystems have shaped human civilization by drawing it to favorable climates, into fertile river valleys, along coasts, and wherever humans find the easiest overland transportation routes. In turn, humans transform the environment ever more to their use, especially by cutting forests for the use of wood and to clear land for crops; by breeding and herding hoofed animals that eat vegetation down to its very roots. Humanity proves to be a desert-making species — to the extent that the deserts it creates are the only sign of human existence visible from the Moon to this day!

Cities crowd more and more people together in artificial environments; raw materials are transported to the city centers from more and more distant places, while the products manufactured from these materials flow outward again toward markets. Crops and animals native to one part of the world are planted and raised in others.

Human technology evolves from horses and sailing canoes to steamships, jet planes, and spacecraft, from weaving looms to computer industries, from town criers to television. A world once dark by night except for forest fires is lit by a twinkling cobweb of electric lights. A world once silent by night except for the lone cry of a bird or mammal is filled with the sounds of machines and music. Mines and quarries have been dug deep into the Earth and scratched out of its surface, their stone, metal ores, and fossil fuels transformed into human products.

Rivers have been dammed up and diverted into unnatural paths, flooding ecosystems behind them, making deserts in front of them, for the sake of the insatiable human demand for electrical power. Whole forests have been cut for lumber and fuel or burned to clear land for grazing and agriculture. More and more natural land is plowed under by farmers and paved over by builders of cities. Deserts grow larger while more and more species of animals and plants are killed off as humans exploit nature for their own purposes.

The atmospheres, the waterways, the soil, and the oceans become polluted by man-made fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals, and other waste materials of human production. Yet food production and other technologies have suddenly exploded humanity itself into vast numbers with rapacious appetites for food and energy, destroying and outstripping the resources Earth can provide.

Wars are fought on an ever larger scale, ever farther from home, and involving greater numbers of people spending longer times in strange countries. A holocaust shocks the world with its unthinkable but true atrocity of man against man. Yet war brings people together in positive ways — soldiers stay to make friends with and marry their former enemies, raising children together; others leave their war-torn countries to adopt new ones in seeking a better living.

Wars drive technology and industrialization to new heights, especially through the development of an enormous fossil fuel economy that spawns vehicles on land, airplanes in the sky and ever more ships crossing seas. More resources are dug and stripped from the Earth than ever before. Nuclear energy is a product of war — two atomic bombs are blown up in warfare, deliberately destroying a part of man’s own civilization. Others are blown up as tests, destroying and polluting ecosystems, raining fallout from the atmosphere worldwide. The peaceful use of nuclear energy proves dangerous as well, with accidents creating radiation sickness and damaging foodstuffs. But the war that gave birth to the use of nuclear energy also gave birth to the widespread use of computers and the ability to create an Information Age to succeed the rapacious Industrial Age.

Despite an intense Cold War after the two hot ones, in a world divided into Capitalist and Communist camps arguing which of their systems is best for the world, more and more people swell transportation systems as they are sent to work and live in one another’s countries, or as they choose to go there on holiday. They learn one another’s ways, sharing more and more ideas. Cultures are mixed within political borders; cultures are shared through networks of local and foreign communication; ever larger numbers of people become literate and learn what is happening in their world. Even people who never set foot in another country can eat and use the whole world’s products and know the whole world’s ways of life in full sound and color.

People prove that they are capable of mingling and sharing, yet governments maintain hostilities. Artists and scientists try to bridge the gaps between hostile peoples, to share their works and knowledge, their fears and hopes for humanity. The threat of nuclear holocaust has driven even politicians to seek new ways of working out differences. The old separations of distance, language, and culture are bridged as the human technologies of transport and communications bind humanity inevitably into a single worldwide body. But that body is plagued by the vast numbers of people who have been dispossessed in its building, who go to bed hungry and ill, who die as children.

Human technology makes the leap into space — for the first time ever, we see our exquisitely lovely planet from afar, as a living whole. Humanity suddenly awakens to the recognition of the vast damage it has done to its environment and thus to itself. It is beginning to understand the threat of exhaustion or irreversible pollution of natural waters, fossil fuels, and other supplies; to recognize its power to destroy the whole human world and force the planet into new paths of evolution; to feel the effects of its greenhouse gases in an atmosphere that is growing uncomfortably warm and could kick the planet into an ice age or worse, a hot age. Just before the second millennium ends and the third begins, scientists recognize human effects on the planet as its Sixth Great Extinction — an extinction progressing more rapidly than any before it, even that caused by sudden meteor impact sixty million years ago. It is the first extinction caused by a single species. We see the enemy now, as Pogo told us, and it is us.

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On the other hand, an indigenous wise man, a Hopi Elder, tells us that “We are the Ones we have been waiting for.” We — not some imagined rescuing Savior — are the only ones who can turn disaster into opportunity; we are the ones who can understand our interconnectedness in the great web of life and our power to honor it, treat it as sacred, cease damaging it, restore it. Will we understand that in time?

The history we have just watched is an impressive scenario, its saga ending on a frightening note. One species — one new upstart species — has appropriated the entire planet to itself, turning rich and varied ecosystems into fragile monocultures, vast deserts, and choking pollution. Are we a kind of planetary cancer, looking heedlessly to our own expansion at the expense of our own support system? Why is the only species with so much capacity for hindsight and foresight so destructive?

Let’s be brutally honest with ourselves, for if we are the ones to change things, then we must look squarely at ourselves. The most obvious feature of human social, political, and economic systems continues to be empire building through dominance: humans dominate other species; the female half of our own species is still largely under the control of and exploited by the male half; most of the Earth’s countries are still dominated and exploited by the few most powerful ones or by the banks and multinationals they have created; individual countries maintain their own dominance systems of class, caste, and discrimination, the few hiring the many to work for them and bring them the financial advantage that drives our economies; vast numbers of people have been dispossessed by this domination and driven to abysmal poverty and ill health; wars continue to erupt as dominance over land, resources, and beliefs are contested; the dominant culture is eradicating natural and cultural diversity.

Why this pattern of dominance, of competitive exploitation? Are we unique, or is this a normal stage in our species evolution?

We have already compared the evolution of the body of humanity with similar events earlier in our planet’s evolution, suggesting that the development of communications and transportation, and the shift from competitive exploitation to a cooperative division of labor, are comparable to earlier processes — ancient bacteria evolving into protists, protists evolving into multicelled creatures, ants evolving into ant colonies, and so on. All these show us a pattern repeating now, as modern countries evolve into a worldwide body of humanity.

In this comparison, the body of humanity is not fully evolved, because exploitation and dominance still grow side by side with cooperation, and one of their most dangerous effects is the ability to destroy diversity in favor of monoculture — in energy production, in agriculture, in cultural fashions. The globalization of an adolescent American CocaCola and pop music monoculture that destroys all other cultures through the seduction of their own adolescents is no more viable than the genetic engineering of identical plants and animals. The vital importance of diversity to effective cooperation in nature has yet to be clearly recognized by the dominant human culture.

Surely there were far more failures than successes as ancient bacteria evolved into protists — countless instances in which unceasing exploitation and hostilities among bacteria multiplying within a single cell wall led to the destruction of the whole enterprise. Perhaps, in a parallel fractal way, globalization struggles to happen on countless planets in our universe that have evolved civilizations, but we humans cannot afford to be one of the failures, as we have only one chance — the common cell wall that binds us together is the boundary of our planet itself.

If we understand the evolutionary pressure on us now to complete the organization of this new body, we can work at the task consciously and rapidly. To see more clearly what needs to be done to complete our organization into a single healthy organism, let us look again at the successful evolutionary precedents of eukaryote cells and multicelled creatures.

The organization of the bodies of multicelled creatures — including us — is much like the organization of eukaryote cells, except that organs take the place of organelles, a brain evolves instead of a nucleus, blood and lymph vessels instead of cytoplasmic transport channels for supplies and wastes, and so on. Since most of us are more familiar with the workings of our own bodies than with the workings of single cells, it may be easier to see the relationship between our individual bodies and the whole body of humanity than to keep talking of cells.

Let us, then, play out this metaphor, or analogy — this comparison of our familiar bodies with the still unfamiliar great body into which we are uniting — by regarding countries and multinational corporations as organs, by seeing shipping routes that carry supplies and products as blood and lymph systems; communications networks that spread information and ideas as a nervous system; and attempts at building some kind of world government as first steps in the evolution of a brain that can coordinate all the body’s activities. And let us acknowledge that the Gaian experience accumulated in the evolution of our bodies, as well-functioning and representative living systems, is worthy of respect.

Consider economics and politics — the ways in which we manage our products and ourselves. How do we organize these basic functions of collective humanity and how does this compare with the organization of basic functions in our physical bodies?

Economy — the way we organize the making and shipping, the selling and buying of our human products and services — meant `rules of housekeeping’ back when the word was coined and everything people ate and used was grown or made within households. Now our human household includes all of Earth and we might call economics our `operating principles’ and ecology our `organizational design.’ Our economy is a worldwide system of manufacture and trade that works by both national and international rules. Yet this system did not evolve to serve a worldwide household at all — it was not intended to become a single system. It grew out of rather lawless competition among individual nations, though it was eventually forced by its own evolution to make international rules for managing it. Unfortunately, these rules still serve the interests of those who already have economic advantage better than those who do not.

The industrial countries that set up the international economy, with its World Trade Organization management, simply have more money and power to make political and economic decisions than do the poorer countries that supply their raw materials and cheap labor. If we continue the analogy with our own bodies, we can easily see why this is an unhealthy situation. The parts of our bodies — its `nations’ — work together as organs and organ systems, such as bone, blood, muscle, and digestive organ systems. If all these organs and systems did not work harmoniously within themselves and with one another, our bodies couldn’t function.

Imagine, for example, what might happen to us if our bodies’ economics worked like the economics of human society. Raw material blood cells are produced inside bones all over the body, just as raw materials are produced in supplier countries all over our world. The raw material blood cells are then transported to the `northern industrial’ lungs, where the blood is purified and oxygen and nutrients are added, making it a useful product.

So far, so good. But imagine the announcement of the heart distribution center, “Today’s body price for blood is such-and-such. Who will buy?’ Some of the bones in which the raw material blood cells are produced can’t afford the oxygen-rich blood they need to stay healthy. But rather than lower their prices, the industrial organs destroy the surplus blood that no one can afford to buy, or put it in storage, hoping to sell it later. Bone cells begin to die of starvation. The starving bones would soon affect the whole body, making it unhealthy, crippling or even killing it.

It is clear that a few organs cannot exploit the rest of the body to their advantage. Nor do we find families that starve three children to overfeed the fourth. When we think of our bodies or our families, we have no trouble understanding why all their parts must be healthy. Yet, we do not manage our national or global economies by this same wisdom.

Even though our products, including our food, originate all over the world, we do not share fairly the means of their production or their distribution. The UN tells us that our food supplies are presently enough for all humans to eat well, but industrial countries own or control the bulk of food supplies, and they can set prices for the world market. Rather than let prices go down by flooding the market with food, they hoard or destroy surplus food and pay farmers in their own countries to stop producing, while huge numbers of humans go hungry.

Countries that grow food crops for export to industrial nations often do not grow enough food for their own populations, many have starving people. Bangladesh and the Sahel countries of North Africa, for example, have suffered starvation during years in which their food exports were at their greatest height. So much of their productive agricultural land is devoted to export crops that the very people hired to grow these crops have insufficient land for their own crop needs.

It is for reasons such as these that our news media often report starvation side by side with `crises’ of overproduction! The solution, except in times of emergency, is not to give away surpluses to the hungry, but to redistribute the arable land so that they can feed themselves.

In our bodies, troubles of this kind do not arise, for our bodies evolved cooperative economic systems from the start. Illness or injury can of course stem from outside sources or from internal breakdowns, but our brains quickly detect such problems and see to it that any part in trouble gets immediate help from other parts. In its natural wisdom, our body recognizes that any unhealthy part threatens the health of the whole. It is no doubt fortunate that our everyday consciousness is not in control of such matters, for we have proved, at least so far, much less wise than the `automatic,’ unthinking parts of our brain that coordinates body affairs. We shall return to this observation in the next chapter.

It is obvious that a living body can be healthy only if its systems function cooperatively. As long as human economics remains more competitive than cooperative, we hold up progress toward the evolution of the body of humanity.

The problems in our world economy have become even worse because starving populations — strange as it seems — grow faster than well-fed populations. It is as though the bone cells of our bodies, seeing their kind dying off from starvation, produce ever more of themselves in a frantic attempt to preserve life. Poor people see their children dying and make more. It is natural for them to love their children and to feel that the more they have, the better off they will be. More children mean more workers to bring in family income and care for parents in their old age. Over-population began when the colonial process broke up the communities of self-sufficient and self-regulating populations, as will be further discussed in Chapter 20.

The well-fed people of richer countries do not have such worries, and they have the opportunity to do many interesting things besides raising children. There is no overpopulation problem among rich people — on the contrary, some rich countries have an under-population problem. It has become quite clear that if everyone in the world had plenty of food and opportunity, we would not have developed a population problem. Yet our efforts to solve this problem are all based on curtailing populations by law and contraception rather than by recreating self-sufficient communities, raising living standards and increasing opportunity.

People who are not hungry are also less angry. Much warfare in our modern world is a result of conflict between rich and poor — poor people trying to get back land and resources taken from them in colonial times by industrial countries, industrial countries trying to keep or get back their control over these sources of raw materials.

Which brings us to politics.

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After the Second World War, the most powerful nations divided themselves into two camps embracing the competing political-economic systems of capitalism and communism, as we all know. One side said people should look out for their personal interests and the whole society would flourish naturally through their competition, as in Darwin’s theory of evolution. The other side said people should cooperate by sacrificing their personal interests to work for the good of the whole society.

The differences between capitalism and communism actually proved to be a good deal less sharp in practice than in theory. Both systems had essentially the same industrial structure: bosses and workers filled communist as well as capitalist factories and lived basically similar lives on both sides. Both sides recognized to some extent that their own people could no more afford to ignore collective society’s interests than collective society could afford to ignore individual interests. Unfortunately, they did not extend this recognition and practice to their international politics.

What their international politics were really all about was the struggle for power — especially the power to control the cheap raw materials of the less developed world to feed their industrial processes, as Alvin Toffler well described, and as David Korten pointed out more recently. Each side concentrated power and disempowered its people, wasting much of its human potential. And each side claimed its system would be best for the whole world to adopt and did whatever it could to push or persuade developing countries into their camp.

The competition of the big powers — the United States and the Soviet Union — for the allegiance of the rest of the world fanned political conflicts and outbursts of warfare that periodically threatened all humanity with their escalation into global nuclear war. Both major powers made enough nuclear weapons to destroy their opponents as well as themselves and seriously damage the rest of the world, including other species. By the time the Cold War ended, their nuclear and germ warfare technologies had spread to China and many smaller nations, creating an ongoing threat. The international trade in arms has become an enormously profitable enterprise. In fact, worldwide revenues from the sale of arms and drugs exceed the entire budgets of many nations.

Everyone knows by now that there is no way to fight a nuclear war without bringing on catastrophe for both sides as well as for those not involved in the conflict. If the body of humanity continues evolving, rather than destroying itself, we will see ever more nuclear disarmament agreements. But disarmament will not be enough to bring peace and equity, for there is another danger perhaps even greater.

The human mania for making monocultures is apparent in our social behavior as well as in our agriculture, because we simply have not recognized the vital importance of variety or diversity in any natural system. No such system or body could function if some of its species or organs had the power to make the other organs over in their own image. Imagine just a single such circumstance — imagine your heart trying to persuade or bully your liver into being just like it. Its success would clearly be a disaster for the body as a whole. Do we really want the Malaysians or the Inuits or whoever is not like us to become just like us? Nature makes it abundantly clear that the secret of success is mutually cooperative variety.

The fact that humanity divided itself along lines that promote individual versus collective interest, is not so surprising when we look at nature. This conflict between individual and collective interests preceded the organization of protists from individual bacteria and the organization of colonies and multicelled creatures from protists. In fact, the whole Gaian system must constantly work out this conflict.

It is clear that every natural creature from paramecium to plum tree to puma looks out for its own interests by feeding and protecting itself as best it can, just as Darwin said. What Darwin failed to see was that nature is not made only of competing creatures in backdrop environments, but rather of those living holons we know as wholes in themselves, that are also parts of larger holons — all nested into holarchies. Now, if every holon at every level in such an arrangement looks out for itself, we have a situation in which selfishness continually transforms itself into cooperation!

How this is possible can be seen easily by considering our bodies once again, and in the next chapter we will show examples elsewhere in nature. Each of our cells is a living system, or holon, in its own right. Yet, as a holon, it is also a part of larger holons — organ, organ system, and whole body — together forming a physiological holarchy. Clearly every cell manages to look out for its own interests — to care for itself and to reproduce itself. But the organ it is part of also has self-interest, as does the body in which the organ resides. So we have a situation in which there is self-interest at every level of holarchy.

Two things can happen in this situation: one is that some level gains the power to destroy other levels to meet its self-interest, in which case the system will break down, as we saw in the example of blood distribution; the other is that self-interest at every level leads to negotiations that bring about cooperation and well-being in the whole system. This should remind you of our evolutionary pattern: unity-> individuation-> negotiation-> cooperation-> unity.

Darwin saw evolution as driven by competition among individuals. Later evolutionists noted cooperation and altruism within species, suggesting that evolution must be driven by competition among species for ecological niches in which to flourish. Richard Dawkins then proposed that both these theories were incorrect, as evolution was really driven by selfish genes that struggled to maximize their expression in the overall gene pool. What none of them had the vision to see was that they were all right, but only together. Self interest at all levels — species, individual and gene — motivates nature’s creativity and health.

Even a couple learns that couplehood has interests in its own integrity apart from the interests of either partner. That is, a couple is a two-level holarchy, with levels of individual and couple. As the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes put couplehood dilemmas: “You can’t live with `em and you can’t live without `em.” If the couple has children, they become a family with a new level of holarchy, which is embedded in a community, and so on. It is very important to recognize that self interest is not a bad thing, except when it is not contained and modified by negotiations with other levels of its holarchy. This clearly suggests that a world economy can work well only if it recognizes the need for strong local economies within it, rather than destroying them.

Nature works out dynamic balance between self-interest and interest beyond self, as we can easily see in our bodies. It is no doubt for good reason that every cell in our bodies contains the gene plans or resources for the whole body, since most of our cells must stay in place and thus cannot take what they need from a common gene pool when they need it, as do the streamlined free-flitting bacteria. The genetic directions, or resource libraries, in all our cell nuclei may even be organized as a holarchy of holons representing interests at all levels from the whole body to those of each individual cell. This is speculative, yet we do know that our whole bodies are clones of one cell and that each cell switches on the genes that concern its particular organization and work. What is speculative is whether each cell is in some sense directly informed by its nucleus about the rest of the hilarity’s needs. If that information is not in each cell and continually updated, then it must be available through non-physical communications among all cells. Otherwise our bodies could not function.

We know that there is communication among cells and that each cell’s organization and work are related to that of its organ, its organ system, and the whole body. This entire system unfolded during our embryonic development in such a way that each level of the physiological holarchy from cell to body looks out for its interests, and thus they are pushed or pulled into cooperation.

If every cell in an organ worked for its self-interest, but the organ as a holon did not, the cells might well kill one another off in competition. Surely they would be disorganized to the point where there was no functional organ. In the same sense, a society in which people looked out only for their individual interests, because they were not asked to do anything in the interest of their collective society, would not be a functioning society. This is why capitalist societies do have governments to manage the public interest, to create public works and institutions, to limit free enterprise and tax some of its profits to meet society’s needs.

Consider now the opposite situation, where the organ or the society is so powerful a holon that it can demand the complete self-sacrifice of its cells or people in serving its interests. The cells or people thus enslaved would no longer be individuals in their own right. Science fiction writers have tried to imagine humans becoming robot parts of a mechanical society, but people complain bitterly about being cogs in a wheel, and they stop functioning well. This is why communist countries have either failed, as in the Soviet Union, or discovered they must give people some opportunity to work for their individual interests if their societies are to work as a whole, as in China.

Capitalists were right that people must work in their own interests, and communists were right that society must work in its collective interest, but both were are wrong in claiming that one or the other will do by itself. The present worldwide shift toward free-market capitalism will work in the long run only if it incorporates the best aspects of socialism — the concern for the whole as well as the parts, including concern for the welfare of the entire body of humanity and its planet.

Nature never requires any individual to choose between its own interests and that of its larger body, society, or ecosystem as humans have been doing in forcing such choices, as we did between capitalism and communism. With the breakup of the communist world, it becomes ever more important to heed Toffler’s advice that we stop looking at every idea in terms of whether it comes from the left or the right and see instead whether it takes us forward or backward. And the best way to see that is to look at living systems and how they function when healthy.

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The body of humanity has not yet evolved the truly impartial and cooperative world government it needs to coordinate its interests as a whole. Looking back at evolution again, we recognize that there must have been a number of steps in the transition from monera to protists as competition among individuals gave way to their cooperation as members of a new whole. We know that one of the most important steps was the formation of the protist nucleus from the DNA of the various monera living within the same cell walls — the nucleus that could coordinate the information needed to carry out the activities of the whole. The same step was accomplished when nervous systems formed in multicelled animals that had evolved from protist colonies in which different member cells did different jobs.

Something of this ilk is clearly happening as the body of humanity struggles to form its new identity. Since the close of World War I, people have recognized the need for some kind of organization to coordinate and balance national and international interests. First they tried the League of Nations, then the United Nations. Although the UN has accomplished much in the way of programs and services, the competitive interests of member nations still dominate on important issues, limiting the powers and often preventing the smooth functioning of the UN. Some powerful organizations spun off from the UN — such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization — clearly serve the interests of powerful nations and multinationals over the poorer nations. In this situation the wealth of the world is ever more unfairly distributed and the gap between rich and poor grows dangerously wide.

The rise of official UN NGOs — UN-affiliated non-government organizations, many of them grass-roots base — is an interesting development. It remains to be seen whether they will be incorporated into the present UN structure as it is reformed, or whether they will become a kind of parallel UN and history works out which will become the main organization. A world government, if it follows evolution’s lessons, will not be autocratic or authoritarian but will become a world government in service to the needs and welfare of the body of humanity, as are our brains and nervous systems in our individual bodies. If our human civilization is to survive, we have no choice but to solve this problem before long, completing our evolution into a worldwide body of humanity with a functional coordination system.

We must also ask: How can the body of humanity function if half of its cells suppress the full expression of the other half ? It is a blight on humanity that neither the UN nor any single country in the entire world, not any multinational corporation, has yet paid more than lip service to training and selecting women for half of its governing and professional positions. Nowhere is it recognized that such equality may be fundamentally necessary to the health of any society, that a system of sexual inequality inevitably breeds conflict while losing valuable resources and justifying every other form of inequality, oppression, bigotry, and antagonism.

Our biggest job is to change our whole way of thinking to a larger perspective, to recognize ourselves as a body of humanity embedded in, and with much to learn from, our living parent planet, which is all we have to sustain us. How can we as a species live in harmony within it? How can we as people live in harmony within our own species?

The sooner we recognize ourselves as being in transition from exploitative and divisive practices on all fronts to a united and harmonious living system, and the sooner we recognize that there are natural models to guide us, the sooner we will complete our healthy evolution by our own choice and efforts.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

Elisabet Sahtouris continues her story of the EarthDance: In Chapter 5, The Dance of Life, we spoke of the differences between mechanisms and organisms in connection with the autopoietic definition of life, and of entropy as the catabolic side of a metabolic cycle which builds up as it breaks down. But to really understand the present scientific debate on whether nature is or is not mechanical, we must go back once again to look at just what we mean by the concept and physical reality of mechanism, and at what role it has played in human history.

Also see: Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

While the mechanical worldview and the explosion of technological progress it led to are historically Western innovations, their consequences in science, technology, economics, and politics have by now shaped the course of all humanity. Our invention and use of machines has become the guiding force of our species’ evolution — we are now, for better or worse, technological creatures.

The word technology comes from the Greek techne, which originally meant any art, but has since come to mean the art of building mechanical systems, including our computer and telephone systems. Machines have given us powers far beyond those of our bodies, and we probably began inventing them to compensate for body parts that we lacked, such as long teeth, claws, and fur.

Our earliest machines — designed to extend the power of our hands and arms — were levers to move rocks, slings to throw stones, bows to fire arrows. To feed and clothe ourselves we formed flat and hollow stones for grinding and pounding food, spindles and simple looms for making cloth. All these are machines, as distinguished from tools, in that they have parts which move in relation to one another.

As our civilizations developed, we invented winding mechanisms and wheels, nuts and bolts, pulleys, and other ingenious devices for improving our machinery. We built mills and carriages and great machines of war to hurl missiles at enemies and climb their walls. But the real explosion of human technology came much later with inventions such as the printing press and the spinning jenny, which made useful things in larger quantities and less time than ever before; with inventions such as steamships and locomotives, which moved people about in larger numbers at greater speed than ever before; with inventions such as the radio and the telephone, which let more people communicate farther and faster than ever before.

Machines are made of parts that move to do something humans wish to do. In the first machines, the parts were moved by people themselves or by domesticated animals, so it is easy to see them as extensions of people. But as water power, steam power, fossil fuels, electricity, and finally atomic power were harnessed to machines, they seemed to take on a life of their own and we forgot that machines are still now, as they always were, a part of humanity invented by humans to extend human powers, rather than something independent of us.

Mechanisms come into being and function only through human design, manufacture, and use. They extend our power to build, to make things, to go places, to fight wars, to measure time and space, to perceive much more of our world and our whole cosmos in its tiniest and vastest reaches than can our senses alone. Machines extend our power to amuse, teach, and talk to one another, to show ourselves to one another around our whole planet. They even extend our power to remember, to think, to predict and plan our future.

In all these ways and more, machines extend the powers of their designers and users. No machine would ever have existed without a designer and builder — not even the automatic machines that seem most independent of us. Science fiction writers may imagine worlds run by self-designed and self-reproducing machines, but machines will never exist without their creators and users somewhere in the background.

The idea that computer-run robots could come alive on their own is part of the misunderstanding even scientists have of mechanisms. Those who believe that life evolved by accident in a mechanical universe, on a nonliving planet, can also believe in accidents that will make robots come alive. But the fundamental distinctions between living organisms and machines show us why this will never be so.

Let us review those distinctions. Living organisms or systems remain functional only by continual change, whereas mechanisms remain functional only if they do not change, except as programmed. (Note that changes in natural systems can progress in only one direction, as they cannot undo their aging, while machines can run, in principle at least, both forward and backwards.) Living organisms are autopoietic and autonomous — that is, self-produced and self-ruled. Mechanisms, on the other hand, are allopoietic and allonomous — other-produced and other-ruled. The `others’ are humans, or human-programmed robots, which make other robots. A robot making itself by its own rules is a logical impossibility.

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If we understand machines as extensions of ourselves and then think back to the mechanical worldview of Descartes, we can see that it was at least logical. Descartes understood natural mechanisms as God’s creations — as engineered extensions of God’s power, in the terms we used to describe mechanisms. It was later, when scientists decided to explain nature as self-evolving mechanics, without any creator, that a contradiction arose. Scientists were identifying non-created `natural mechanisms’ — which they believed to exist without purpose or design — with man-made mechanisms that exist only on purpose and by design.

Take, for instance, the human brain. When scientists took God out of their worldview, they also had to take out the idea of the human mind as a copy of God’s. That left mind as a mechanism itself, or as the product of the brain mechanism. But just what kind of a mechanism could the brain-mind be? At first, scientists saw it as a kind of plumbing system — nerves were pipes and valves through which thoughts, feelings, and instincts flowed like water or got shut off and built up pressures that caused problems. When telephones were invented, the brain seemed more like a telephone exchange of messages along nerve-wires. No sooner were computers invented than the brain seemed to be a computer. More recently, some scientists have chosen to see it as a holographic camera and projector or as a parallel processor, which are among their newest inventions.

Now, in some ways, all these ideas were and are useful, for each of these man-made mechanisms — the plumbing system, the telephone exchange, the computer, the holographic camera and projector, the parallel processor — could be taken as a model of some aspect of the brain-mind in a way that would help us understand something about it. There is nothing wrong with using our mechanisms as metaphors for or models of nature — as long as we remember that they are only models and that they can only model certain measurable aspects of things found in nature.

The contradiction arises when scientists confuse the model or metaphor with the thing they are studying — when they believe, for example, that brains are complicated computers just a bit more sophisticated than present man-made ones, rather than seeing that computers are simply useful models of certain limited things brains do. Computers do these things in entirely different ways from brains, yet the model of the function can be valid in its limited way.

The confusion of models with reality comes from a failure to understand that scientists create abstractions the same way that artists do. If they did understand their models of nature as abstractions, they would no more confuse those models with reality than artists confuse their paintings or sculptures with the real subjects they portray.

But just what is an abstraction? To abstract means `to lift out or away from.’ An artist lifts out certain perceptions of something and makes them into a painting, while a scientist lifts out certain measurements of something and makes them into a scientific model. In both cases, the painting and the model are abstractions that stand for the whole thing. A mechanical bird can be considered an abstraction of a live bird into an assemblage of metal parts, just as Picasso’s Guernica is an abstraction of human warfare into an assemblage of brushstrokes on canvas. Similarly, a scientific computer model of a biological or economic situation is an abstraction of certain measurable elements from the actual biological or economic situation. And, as an aside, many problems in our world today stem from what is not included in our economic models — such as the effects and costs of using up natural resources and polluting the environment.

Going back to the mechanical worldview of Descartes as an abstract world model, we see that he abstracted just those measurable features of nature that men were able to copy in mechanisms. Wind-up birds and church-tower puppets represented a few abstractable mechanical aspects of nature, but were then taken to stand for the natural creatures they represented. Still, Descartes recognized that theses mechanisms had to have a Creator — that they could not `happen’ or evolve on their own. Instead of seeing nature as autopoietic, that is, he saw it as God’s allopoietic creation. Whether we think that a good description of nature or not, it was at least a logically complete system.

Now we can see that the danger of confusing scientific models with nature itself is that aspects of nature which we cannot measure, and therefore cannot abstract, may be the most essential aspects there are. Descartes’ worldview, or world model, was logical because he understood that mechanical nature could not exist without an Engineer. But later scientists who dropped God from their explanations of nature failed to see that they were dropping the very essence of life from their world model. Much as they have tried to explain life in mechanical terms, their explanations have never been satisfying.

Scientists who do not mistake their models for nature readily admit they are only models. But they may still consider nature entirely mechanical by arguing that it is far more complex than, though in essence the same as, present mechanisms. More and more scientists, however, are dissatisfied with the mechanical worldview, recognizing that it is the self-creative aspect of nature that none of our mechanical models can account for. They are coming to realize that nature must be far more than mere mechanism, that it has a creative aspect no machinery can have.

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Some ancient Greek philosophers, such as Pythagoras, had seen sacred geometry not as a human invention, but as the human mind’s recognition of nature’s underlying, designing intelligence. The mechanical worldview originated with a secular geometry that was pure mathematics, a human invention with no inherent consciousness. Such geometry, in and of itself is like mechanics in and of itself — it cannot spring to life any more than can a set of building blocks. Nor can secular geometry account entirely for such movements as those of the Sun, Moon, Earth, and other planets. Every calendar devised by humans has been plagued by the irregularities of nature. How much more difficult to explain the growth of an invisibly small egg into an entire human being by geometry.

The revival of ancient Greek sacred geometry today is proving valuable in explaining the fundamental physics of nature. Most physicists and mathematicians showing interest in it are those who understand consciousness as the source of creation and ever inherent in creation. This is a true revival of sacred geometry. Cosmic consciousness, in this scenario, assumes geometric forms to build a physical world in which they become an infinite variety of consciously self-assembling patterns — the improvisational dance described earlier, which repeats workable patterns in ever new configurations. Nature, we might say, is more an artist than an engineer, using the same recycled materials and the same schemes again and again, but endlessly creating something new from them and never machine-copying anything.

When we humans express ourselves through our technology, we usually copy some part of nature that we can abstract and translate from nature’s evolutionary artistry into our relatively crude and lifeless engineering. But we must remember that our human ability to copy some aspects of nature in mechanical form does not in any way prove that nature itself is mechanical.

Let us go back to our earlier discussion of thermostats. The thermostat we install in a house so it will keep itself at the same temperature is a mechanical device designed to simulate what every warm-blooded creature does, and what we saw that our whole living planet does. But the `thermostats’ of our bodies and of the Earth are vastly more complex. Such natural thermostats cannot be removed from their living bodies, reduced to their parts, and rebuilt. They exist only in place as a feature of the whole body, and we can only search the intact body for evidence of their function, such as vasodilation and sweating.

We have copied the spinning and weaving of spiders, the termites’ building of very tall structures, the trees’ pumping of water against the pull of gravity, the tunneling of creatures into the Earth and their flying into the sky. We have copied the ability to see through darkness and detect things by sonar, to produce chemicals, solar power, and by now almost countless other natural wonders including the ability of our brains to solve problems. But though we can make mechanisms to copy things creatures do, we cannot even come close to building a working mechanical copy of the simplest single-celled creature as a whole. Our mechanics are limited in ways that nature’s organics are not.

Does this mean that we must abandon mechanical models in science in order to understand nature? Not at all. We said earlier that the only way we can ever understand anything is by comparing things we don’t yet understand with things we do — things that are familiar to us. And what can be more familiar to us than the things we ourselves have designed and created? If we had not invented the mechanical worldview along with our other mechanical inventions, we might not have made so much progress in understanding our world. But we must keep our minds open and recognize that nature is far more than mechanism, that we will hold up further scientific progress if we mistake our present models of nature for nature itself.

Descartes and the great physicist Newton built their worldview into a frame of space and time. Space and time were believed to have existed before the universe came into being, as a kind of stage on which atoms and the larger bodies they formed had been created and moved about lawfully. Each atom had a very definite location in space at any given time, in this model, and moved to new locations as time passed, according to fixed laws of motion. As the French astronomer-mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace put it, an intellect that knew the positions of all the atoms in the universe at any given time could predict the entire future of the universe.

During the nineteenth century this simplistic model was shaken by the discovery of electromagnetism and the new science of heat — thermodynamics — which later came to be called the science of complexity. But perhaps the greatest blow to the mechanism analogy came when physicists were finally able to study the atom itself.

All atoms, remember, were supposed to be exactly alike, though they formed all the different things found in nature by being arranged in different patterns. Far too small to be seen, they were believed to be so hard they could never be broken or destroyed — they were thought to be not only invisible, that is, but also indivisible.

Even if non-material electromagnetism had to be added to material nature, and even if heat made things behave erratically, it was assumed that our ability to study the atom itself would surely confirm the mechanical worldview. Atoms, the smallest parts or building blocks of natural mechanism, must be moving lawfully in time and space. Scientists were at last ready to work out just how things were built from the bottom up.

But were they? We already mentioned the first shocking surprise they got — the realization that atoms were not all alike and were not tiny hard bits at all. Each atom seemed to be more like a tiny solar system, though its shape had to be guessed at from how it acted together with other atoms in forming molecules and their chemicals. Scientists often have to work this way to figure out the shape of things they cannot see with their own eyes. Think about our solar system — instead of being too small to see, as atoms are, it is much too large for anyone to see all at once. Its shape had to be figured out from the way the parts we can see act in relation to one another.

Anyway, just as the Sun is at the center of our solar system, something was at the center of the atom, with smaller things apparently whirling about it like planets. Physicists called the center of the atom the nucleus, and the things whirling around it electrons. Apparently, different kinds of atoms had different numbers of these electrons in orbit at various distances away from the nucleus.

The next surprise was that the atom’s nucleus was itself made of parts, more tiny bits held together by forces so unbelievably strong that splitting the nucleus into its separate parts made an explosion. We all know what that discovery led to.

Every atom, no matter how tightly it is locked into its place — as, for example, in a crystal — turned out to be a tiny mass of jiggling, whirling parts. All the parts, around the nucleus and inside it, are nowadays called particles. But these particles soon proved not to be solid things either.

Deep in the very heart of matter, we now know, there is nothing solid at all. Particles are like tiny whirling winds in a storm of energy, or like waves dancing on a sea of energy. When physicists try to catch hold of them they rush off, leaving pretty curved trails. They disappear, divide, merge into one another, and reappear out of nothing — in fact they do anything but hold still to be studied. All the physicists can describe — or try to describe — is the pattern of their energetic whirlwind dance with one another — a dance that is, in fact, made of pure energy.

Such discoveries truly confused physicists, whose view of neatly ordered mechanical reality was shattered by them. Particles were neither solid nor reliable; they could pop in and out of existence with alarming speed and mystery. Einstein, furthermore, showed that time and space did not exist by themselves, as a stage for natural mechanisms, but were two aspects of the same concept and were really relationships created continuously as the universe created itself. Space did not even obey the laws of Euclid’s geometry as had been believed, nor did time tick away in one great perfect clock rhythm. Instead, it seemed that cosmic spacetime curved like the dances of its tiniest particles, and one man could travel through this time-space without aging while his twin stayed home and became an old man.

The world seemed to dissolve at its very foundation. Yet it didn’t dissolve into nothing, for the moving pattern of the energy dance is always there giving matter its form. It’s just that separating the dancers from their dance — to study a particle as an object in itself — is quite impossible. As impossible as trying to take winds out of the air and waves out of the sea in order to study and understand a storm. If you try, you will find you have nothing at all in your hand — even though you know the storm is made of wind and waves.

Quantum physicists, such as Hal Puthoff, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, research the zero-point energy field — a background of random, fluctuating energy that is everywhere, even in so-called empty space, even at absolute zero (whence its name) where no thermodynamics remain. It is now estimated that every point in spacetime, no matter where it is, contains — or is the source of — an infinite amount of such energy. If we remember Einstein’s formula for converting energy to matter — E = mc2 — that means each point in our universe has far more than enough energy to create entire universes!

Puthoff found something extraordinary about atoms — that atoms themselves, always considered the most stable things in the universe, actually lose energy continually and must replace it from the zero-point energy source. This discovery means that our universe creates itself continually, not simply from a single Big Bang.

The atom itself seems more and more like the vortex or whirlpool we used earlier as a model of the simplest form an autopoietic entity could take — continually self-creating by taking in and spitting out matter/energy while holding its form. Rather like the giant protogalactic clouds that evolve into galaxies — the largest and smallest things dancing in concert to create our world and universe. Physicists such as Puthoff are now working to harness free zero-point energy as an alternative to fossil fuels.

The universe, after all is said and done, cannot be separated into parts as can a machine. Physicists have to be ever more inventive to learn about their strange new universe. They study particles, for example, in cyclotrons — the largest machines ever made, designed to allow scientists to study the tiniest things. But to see even traces of the particle dance, they must disturb it and try to work out what the real dance is like from traces of this disturbance. What matters, it turns out, is the pattern of the steps in the dance, for certain patterns of energy are what we call matter. Dancers not dancing are no dance — and the dance, it turns out, is all there is!

Though we can never see the natural particle dance undisturbed, we can be sure it is there — forming and connecting the stars and their reflections in the sea, the Earth and all its creatures, ourselves and all the things we make and use. Everything is made of countless invisible dancers’ movements in one single dance forming endlessly new patterns — a dance far too small to see and yet so large that it is the whole universe.

These discoveries, together with physicists’ discoveries of larger dance-like patterns — patterns of wave mechanics in gases, liquids, and solids; of thermodynamics in heated matter; of electromagnetism — called for new ways of modeling nature, new kinds of mathematics that are less mechanical, more flexible, more like living nature.

All mathematics, up to the present, has been built on a foundation of mechanics devised at about the same time by Aristotle for logic and by Euclid for geometry. Yet, until the last century of the second millennium, the connection between logic and mathematics was not obvious even to mathematicians. Now that it is, mathematicians recognize logic — rules of orderly classification and combination of elements — as the true foundation of mathematics. And what this means is that mathematics can be changed as much as worldviews, because its logical rules can be changed.

By fiddling with Aristotle’s logical mechanics, for example, mathematicians have created new and more dynamic systems of mathematics built on these changed foundations. Computers with their vast capacity for performing calculations have greatly increased possibilities for modeling self-organizing systems. Chaos theory, dynamics, complexity, fractals, sacred geometries sprout like mushrooms after a rain. In time, new kinds of logic, new ways of ordering human thought about a dynamically alive universe — an organic rather than a mechanical universe — will lead to a whole new kind of mathematics that will be useful in modeling such a universe. Science and mathematics are now working hand in hand on their exciting co-evolution.

Many of the new studies of self-organizing systems have been inspired by the work of Nobel Prize-winning chemist-physicist Ilya Prigogine, who revived the ancient concept of nature’s creation of order from chaos, showing how self-maintaining systems even at a chemical level can re-create new order when they reach chaotic states. Prigogine’s work extends the physics of equilibrium thermodynamics — which was invented to describe non-living systems — into non-equilibrium thermodynamics, which he used to model living systems. But let us keep in mind that his is still an attempt to describe living systems evolving in a non-conscious and non-intelligent universe.

We cannot repeat often enough that our scientific stories are changing more rapidly now than ever before. One particularly interesting thing to consider, is this: If the eastern philosophers were right in saying the world is illusion — that each of us creates our world from our beliefs — then what does it mean to measure a `physical’ universe with physical instruments? Are we measuring an illusion with parts of that very illusion? — creating ever smaller particles by believing in them? Our searches are leading us to fascinating puzzles and it is wise to keep very open minds in the process.

Σ    Σ    Σ

New theories and questions are part of our rapidly evolving scientific worldview. Yet we first encountered the organic worldview in the works of the earliest Greek philosophers, before the concept of natural self-creation was suppressed and God’s perfect order became such an obsession that the whole Western worldview was changed to fit it.

Today’s scientists are discovering things that many human cultures have understood — in their essence, if not in scientific detail — for millennia. Indigenous people who have not seen themselves as separate from the rest of nature consciously engage in its co-creation as one living system, using ritual, dance and myth as tools of their trade. Most important now is that western scientists — with their own ritual experimentation and theoretical stories — are coming back to this understanding of the universe as a conscious, alive and ever-creative dance of life. We ourselves are acting out its creative edge!

The ancient Greek myth told of Gaia’s dance; the Indian myth told of Shiva and his wife Shakti, who forever dance the universe and our world into being. Of all creation myths, none tells of a world assembling itself mechanically as tiny parts come together to form the larger parts, which then come together as a whole world — none but that of our mechanical science, now passing into history. Rather, most creation myths begin with a whole — an undisturbed ocean generating individual waves, or a single being that divides into, or gives birth to, the different parts of the world. These parts may later rejoin as new wholes, or holons, within the great dance holarchy, in the repeating cycle described earlier of unity-> individuation-> conflict-> negotiation-> cooperation-> new level of unity.

We have seen that living systems are in many ways the antithesis of machinery; we have seen that images of dance fit many aspects of our new understanding of nature better than mechanical images do. To review, dance is a living, self-creative process as is nature in evolution. We may begin to create a dance spontaneously, as a natural expression of our energy that is not planned or designed in advance — as an improvisation. It may then evolve as new variations on the same basic steps create ever more intricate and meaningful patterns, just as in natural evolution.

Some of the patterns in a human dance may even be quite mechanical, as we express our mechanical ability through them, though we see and feel that the more mechanically perfect they are, the less lifelike they are. Classical ballet was an intentional effort to make dance as perfect as possible, and it developed at the same time our machine age developed. At the height of our infatuation with our machinery, while Chaplin was spoofing that, we developed ballets with long rows of dancers performing as nearly identical movements as possible — impressive, but never considered real art. The real art of dance seems to depend on human variation, on personal style, on imperfections, on surprise, to give it life and interest.

Classical ballet has become less popular than dances with freer patterns, and this may well be because our human search for perfection in the world and in ourselves no longer fascinates us as it did during the mechanical age. We seem to have satisfied our longing for perfection in building close-to perfect machines. We want such machines to free us from our own boring, mechanical tasks, but we are rebelling against being treated as machines or machine parts ourselves — on the job, in schools, in government bureaucracies or wherever. We are tired of being told to be in perfect shape, in perfect control of our lives, because we begin to see now just how unnatural that kind of perfection is.

Nature is orderly without being perfect, as we have seen again and again. Nature’s most useful patterns are never outdated but are kept for endless re-use, and the overall scheme of evolution is very stable and resilient. But mechanical perfection would be death to nature as it would be to us as part of nature. Nature is a live, self-creating process forever making order from chaos, forever free to do something new — to reorganize itself when necessary, even if only to stay the same; to create new forms when old ones no longer work. Perfection would be the end of evolution, the end of freedom, the end of creativity. We have learned that nature is far less than perfect for a very good reason — for the same reason that nature is far more than mechanism.

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Reposted from: LifeWeb

It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce this second essay by new contributing editor Don Steehler. He happened on to the SynEARTH.network in early April and has quickly identified with the worldview of synergic science. Since then, he has read Korzybski’s Manhood of Humanity and quickly understood the power of the metaphors “space-binding” and “time-binding“.

In this morning’s essay, he integrates his new knowledge of Korzybski’s work with his own knowlege base. Enjoy!

Thinking Out Loud with Korzybski, Fox and Bronowski

Don Steehler

In the Introduction to The Manhood of Humanity, Korzybski uses the distinction between an arithmetical progression and a geometrical progression as a means for distinguishing space binding from time binding.  Korzybski’s graphical representation of arithmetical progression:

reminded me of something I had read earlier – Chapter 9 (“Consciousness Out of Context“) in Robin Fox ‘s The Search for Society. Here is an excerpt from Fox’s discussion which reminds me of Korzybski:

pp. 215-218, The Search for Society

…  So, I return to my point that these `progressive’ changes are illusory: they are merely oscillations about a point-swings of the pendulum further and further away from that naggingly persistent, irrational, but totally human central condition or basic state that is the community fitted to our environment of evolutionary adaptation. THE DECLINE OF THE WEST  Where, in time, is this basic state to be found? The answer is straightforward: in the Late Paleolithic, some fifteen to forty thousand years ago. It is really that simple. We were fully formed modern Homo sapiens sapiens ; we had reached the top of the food chain—we were doing quite a bit better than the other carnivores. Then, with a frightening rapidity, it all began to go wrong—or to go ‘too far,’ as Bell would have it. Population was squeezed into the Middle East and southwestern Europe by the ice, and the unprecedented social density thus created led to a burst of self-conscious activity evidenced by the fantastic art of the period (Bell’s ‘search for order in art’?). Hot on the heels of this came the warm interglacial in which we are still living (and which has almost run its course), and the first of the violent oscillations happened—the domestication of plants and animals. After that, the swings of the pendulum went on, sometimes at a leisurely pace, sometimes wildly. At the points between the wildest swings,we get the most terrible upheavals and carnage; and each huge swing has the effect of sending the pendulum wildly off in another direction. The only progress’ in this view is the cumulative ability to indulge in even wilder and more rapid swings, aided by technology and rationality.  These swings are roughly illustrated in the accompanying diagram. The `upward’ movement is merely chronological and does not imply progress, except as cumulative technological change. Also, the extremes of the swings are simply my own highly condensed judgements; other observers will stress different ways in which the swings went (or will go) too far. For example, under blanket headings like Feudalism and Industrialism all the effects of these new systems of production have to be included. Thus, I have not included Industrial Capitalism or Socialism or Welfare Liberalism, and so forth under Industrialism, since these are all effects of the industrial revolution. Nor have I added refinements like Monopoly Capitalism or Multinational Corporations or Imperialism since these again are subdivisions of the more general headings. Again, the major wars I have indicated are those that have reflected or led to features of the major shifts. Thus the Fall of Rome and the Barbarian Invasions led to Feudalism; the Franco-Prussian War (see Michael Howard’s excellent description of it) and the American Civil War reflect the impact of Steam Power which led to railways, and the `nation in arms’: universal conscription in France; the dominance of Ideology in America. These were the first great modern wars.  It should also be remembered that many cultures did not participate in these shifts, at least until the Western powers forced the results onto them. It can be argued that the picture is Euro-centered. True. We are not here presenting a scheme of world history, but a map of the major swings of the `progressive’ pendulum, and these mostly took place in Europe after the Middle Ages; a fact that has obsessed modern social science. We cannot help but be centered on the West, and in consequence on the decline of the West, for this is where the pendulum did its latest and most damaging swinging. Bell is only pointing the way to another such swing, and at the same time realizing that something human is here being denied. I guess that all I want to do is keep calling attention to this humanity and to plead against its denial. If we can’t go back to the `Paleoterrific’ then perhaps we can at least drop the nonsense about progress and rationality and start thinking about how we can serve that stubborn human core within the context of the inhuman super society. Perhaps it is only marginally possible. But it certainly won’t be possible at all if we don’t recognize the problems.

Fox’s account of the “pendulum swings” appears to capture the same thought that Korzybski expresses as the arithmetical progression of society. Fox is a well-informed, capable social scientist; he also seems to have arrived at a pessimistic conclusion about human society. Here is an excerpt of the concluding section of his essay:

pp. 239-241, The Search for Society

Although Fox acknowledges that technological change is a form of progress, he also notes than none of the historic social philosophies and ethical codes have really worked (or even been tried). Fox has focused his attention on one aspect of Korzybski’s distinction (space binding), observing that human society has displaced human consciousness from its original evolutionary context. To me, it appears to be a valid observation.

What, then, do we make of the other aspect of Korzybski’s distinction – time binding? I think it’d be worthwhile to consider one of the “well-meaning comentators” who has “proudly and earnestly proclaimed” that man is “unique” – Jacob Bronowski . The following quotation is from Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man:

pp. 20-24, The Ascent of Man

Bronowski, I believe, nicely epitomizes Korzybski’s time binding: “Man is distinguished from other animals by his imaginative gifts.” In Chapter 3 (Knowledge as Algorithm and as Metaphor) of The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Bronowski lucidly elaborates:

pp. 44-60, The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination

Let me write for you two symbolic expressions. The first is one which occurs in the work of Newton; it says that “the gravitational attraction between two massive bodies is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between some point in each mass.” If any single utterance by a scientist has reshaped history, it is this, the law of inverse squares. Ludwig Boltzmann’s gravestone was inscribed with the symbol for entropy, S = klogW, and I suppose if Newton had had any control over what was to be put on his gravestone, he would have chosen . Now we all understand that as a symbolic expression which describes in some way the structure of our experience. Let me now write for you another symbolic expression which I take from “The Auguries of Innocence” by William Blake. I take a couplet almost at random; this one says,  A Robin Red breast in a Cage  Puts all Heaven in a Rage. Now the extraordinary thing about that verse is that it appears to have none of the formal structure of Newton’s formula. Yet it is a highly general statement and everybody in this room knows exactly what it means, and I mean exactly. My “exactly” may not be your “exactly,” but in some way we all know with an immediacy which we derive from language and experience what A Robin Red breast in a Cage  Puts all Heaven in a Rage. means. I would say that everybody understands this, whereas there must be a good many people in the audience who, in fact, are taking  on trust.  Well now, I wish I could lecture on generalizations of the form of “a Robin Red breast in a Cage,” but I can only do so much on one occasion. There are two things, however, I want to say about both of those statements. One is that they are both general statements; let no one tell you that this quotation is only a particular statement. It derives its general appeal to us all from its high specificity, and that is the miracle of this kind of remark; but it is a statement which says something about the human situation and not just about a robin or a cage. Secondly, neither statement has the form of a syllogism; neither says all As are Bs or any of those things that occur in the textbooks on logic in which sentences are always written as if they described classes. It is my view that that is very foreign to human language, that no scientific statement and no poetic statement is of the form, “all As are Bs.” This is what these two have in common. This kind of symbolism is a highly active kind. Do not be deceived by the equals sign. It says something which describes what happens when you do something. In discussing statements of this sort, scientific statements, I am going to treat science as a language. I am going to say that this formula is a sentence in the language, that all such statements are sentences in the language, and that the way we construct this language mirrors the way human language evolved. However, I should make one preliminary about it and explain to you that science is a rather peculiar language because it only contains statements that are, in the context of a particular theory, true. We do not, for instance, say, “Well,  is a sentence in this language. And another sentence in this language is  .” In the language that we are discussing,  is not a sentence. There are statements in the language of science which have a simple and fairly descriptive form. For instance, when Kepler said in 1609 that the planets run on ellipses round the sun as focus and sweep out equal areas in equal time, that is a fairly descriptive sentence. The sentence which Newton wrote about the gravitational attraction is a more abstract sentence and in fact summarizes the description of what Kepler said. For the purpose of the discussion today that is not an important difference, and I will not labor it.  We are always looking for a language in science which mimics or mirrors the structure of reality. And the problem is, How does it do that? My claim is that it does it in exactly the same way in which human language evolved from animal language, by analyzing the sentence into constituents which represent separable entities in the outside world-things or actions. So science constantly seeks in the descriptive sentences for separable entities which can either be perceived in the outside world or, more of ten, have to be inferred speculatively in the outside world. The structure of reality is not self-evident, and the structure of the scientific language is not self-evident. When Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus during the First World War, he thought that you could make a language out of ordinary discourse, more or less, which could somehow give you the structure of reality. He said that the very fact that “I love you” and “I hate you” have the same kind of structure tells you something about the relations, that the relations are built into the grammar. Now, it is true that the relations are built into the grammar, but we have to get a very specialized grammar, the grammar of science, as Karl Pearson rightly called it, in order to demonstrate the structure.  During the Second World War Craik tried to show that the nervous system actually mimics these structures within our brain, and that was an equally unsuccessful attempt.1 No, we have to tease out the structure from the observational sentences when we make them into abstract sentences. How do we do that? Well, we do it essentially by treating nature as, in Leibnitz’s phrase, a gigantic cryptogram, a gigantic series of coded messages. And we seek to decode it in such a way that entities emerge which are conserved under various changes and transformations. Mass is such an entity. Newton was not able to define mass; nobody in a sense can define mass. Indeed, you could say that the great step from Newton to Einstein was that Einstein was the first person who gave a reason for what had already puzzled Newton, namely, why gravitational mass and inertial mass are the same mass. Of course, you and I think we know what a mass is; we know it in the sense that we know what we think we are saying when we ask for a pound of butter. But that is a knowledge which itself comes late in the development of language. Incidentally, it also comes late in the development of children. Remember that children before the age of four are always very puzzled when you pour liquid out of a tall beaker into a broad beaker and say to them, “Is it the same amount of liquid? Which would you rather have?” Without exception, children say they would rather have the orange juice in the tall narrow beaker. And if you say to them, “Why?” they say, “Well, there is more.” And then if you say, “But there is not more; I can pour it into here and I can pour it back,” they are not in the least persuaded. Why should they be? Why should they regard it as a law of nature that orange juice remains invariant in mass when you pour it from a narrow thin beaker into a small flat beaker? That is a real theorem.  And I mention that theorem only to remind you that all our prejudices about the external world tend to be built into the language of science. Then, when somebody shows that the whole thing was nonsense, that we put our prejudices into it, we are always taken aback. I mean, in 1900 if you had said to somebody, “Could my watch run faster if I were standing at the equator than at the north pole?” everybody would have said, “But that is rubbish! Only children think that kind of thing.” When in 1905 Einstein wrote a paper in which he said just that, everybody said, “But that is marvelous. What a child’s vision he has.” Which is true. Let me give you one more example. What about r , the distance between these two masses? Well, I suppose in theory you could say that you could take a foot rule, lay it down something of the order of 109 times, and say, “We have proved it, that is the distance between the earth and the moon.” But, of course, you cannot do astronomy with that kind of distance. And it is very interesting to see how these concepts again have to be teased out of the cryptogram of nature.  Let me tell you one of the most beautiful and simplest experiments on this that was ever conceived. It was conceived by a man called Olbers; it is called Olbers’s paradox and is more than a hundred years old.2 Olbers said, “The sky is full of stars, and they are obviously pumping energy into space. Now we can assume that the universe is reasonably old, and that therefore it has settled down to some kind of state of equilibrium. If that is so, then every object in the universe has reached a stage at which the amount of energy that is being radiated to it from the star must be exactly the same amount which it is radiating back.” And so Olbers said, “It is very clear that if we go out into the night sky, it should be as bright as daylight because there is all the energy in a state of equilibrium, and there should be no local disturbances. How can we avoid this?” And, indeed, there was no way of avoiding it at the time. The only possible way of avoiding it that could be suggested was that the universe was rather young and was only just settling down, which seemed slightly improbable.  How do we avoid this? Why do we now say that it is really quite understandable? We can say this because Bondi made the following beautiful argument: “The stars are pumping energy into space, and it ought all to be coming back. It ought all now to be well mixed up, like the hot and the cold water in the bath. If it is not coming back, where is it going? It must be going into a volume of space which is greater than that from which it originated.” And so Bondi says, “We can do a very simple experiment. We can say that there are three possible states for the universe: it might be contracting, it might be of stationary size, or it might be expanding. If it is contracting, then night ought to be brighter than day because there ought to be more energy coming in simply from the background than the sun is actually supplying. If it is stationary, then night and day ought to be equally bright. And if the universe is expanding, then night ought to be dark.” I invite you to perform that experiment tonight. Go out and look, and when you observe that it is dark, you will have made the fundamental observation which shows that the universe is expanding.  We had that information a hundred years ago at least, but until people did terribly expensive experiments with analysis of red shifts and so on, nobody was willing to believe this explanation. But let me invite your attention to the word “expanding.” What does it mean? It means that our measure of distance in this universe between us and any other galaxy must be growing larger. Do we have any way of actually measuring this? Of course we do not. We can only do it because the whole language in which we are writing “mass” and “radiation” and “distance” defines things like distance in such a way that all these things come out to make a consistent language. The thing about nature is that when you challenge her with questions as we have just done with Olbers’s paradox, you rely on the fact that she does not cheat, that she gives back consistent answers.  If we treat our knowledge of the external world in this way, then we are constructing a language of science which has three features. There are, first of all, symbols which stand for concepts or inferred entities which have the character of the words in these sentences. Then there is a grammar which tells us how these things are to be put together, so that for instance  is a grammatical sentence. If you did not put r 2 down but r 3, that would be ungrammatical and the sentence would not be allowed in the language. And finally there is a dictionary of translation which relates a sentence like this to specific problems like determining the period of the moon. After all, when Newton thought of that, the first thing he did was to calculate the period of the moon. And then he said modestly, when he told this story to his housekeeper, “I found it to answer pretty nearly.” He made the period of the moon twenty-eight days so he felt that r2 was right. These are the three characters of the language of science. The grammar is essentially the rules of operation specified by the axioms; the dictionary of translation is essentially the way we apply the sentences to our common experience; and the symbols or concepts are the solutions of the cryptogram.  Let me give you a different kind of sentence.  2NaCl + H2SO4 = Na2SO4 + 2HCl In the seventeenth century Mr. Glauber made Glauber’s salts. And after about another hundred years we learned to write his reaction in the form that if you mix salt with sulphuric acid you get Glauber’s salts and hydrochloric acid. Now if you actually were to read Glauber’s description, which is full of words like “muriatic acid” and other splendid phrases that I am afraid I have forgotten, you would not, of course, recognize it as the same reaction. Why not? Because you have all been brought up with a code in which NaCI is what you say for salt and H2SO. is what you say for sulphuric acid. But, of course, the whole thing has been translated into a kind of Morse code. And what has been elucidated by the Morse code is that this sodium atom here is an element and that this hydrochloric acid is not an element—a fact which was much in dispute in the time, say, of Humphrey Davy. So that the code teases out the elementary symbols. We solve the cryptogram by doing this. And I do not have to tell you that if you were now to write this in terms of its valences and in terms of the free electrons and so on, you would be breaking down the code step by step into the codes that we now have for nuclear processes. This is why I say that we are making the language. We are making the symbols by the challenge of question and answer, which gives us real statements about the world that we then break down.  I want to come back to this because it reminds you that the grammar has to do with explanation, the dictionary has to do with description, and the symbols have to do with those concepts with which the whole of our consciousness is now full but for which the only evidence for most of us is that somebody told us in a lecture or that it says so in the textbook. Words like hydrogen and helium, nuclear processes, inhibition in biology, inhibition in psychology have become new words in our vocabulary. But they owe their existence to being decoded out of statements of this kind.  I have been giving you a highly personal account of how we practice science. And the obvious question is “Are we inventing the whole thing?” You may say to me, “Aren’t you just a thoroughgoing idealist? Do you really think that there are not any atoms?” I spoke of Boltzmann and the inscription on his gravestone a little while ago. Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide in a fit of depression. Why? Because he could not persuade his colleagues that atoms were real. It may not seem to you something to take your life over, but it was to him. The irony, of course, was that had he only held his hand for another year or two, all his colleagues would have been persuaded.  Now, are the atoms real or are they not? And if the atoms are real, are the electrons real or are they not? When we do this decoding, are we discovering something which is in nature, or are we not? Are we creating the concepts out of which we make science, or are they there hidden all the time? Now this is a tremendous intellectual bifurcation. And also a fairly emotional one. For example, the world is pretty well divided into people who are proud of being machines and people who are outraged at the thought of being machines. And the world is, therefore, pretty well divided into people who would like to think that our analysis of nature is a personal and highly imaginative creation and those who would like to think that we are simply discovering what is there.  I wrote the chapter on twentieth-century science for the UNESCO history.3 If you read it, you will find that it carries behind it a streamer as long as a comet’s tail of violent phrases of dissent by young Russian scientists saying: “This is all a terribly idealistic picture. This man does not believe that atoms are real,” and so on and so on. Now these questions are not idle ones. Picture yourself for the moment in 1867, a hundred years ago. Supposing you had then asked yourself, “Well, is it real? Is Newton’s gravitation a real thing?” Everybody would have said, “Well, of course.” Shortly after Newton published the Principia in 1687-88 Richard Bentley, the great classical scholar of Trinity College, asked his permission to give some sermons on Divine Providence.4 And the force of these sermons was that we now understood what Divine Providence was because it was really gravitation. I am simplifying Bentley’s sermons somewhat, of course. But the point is that Bentley was enormously impressed with the fact that we now understood in some way how God worked, how nature worked. And from the time of Newton until well into the last century everybody was persuaded that this was so. Everybody was persuaded that we understood the great truths of science, had understood them since the time of Newton, and that what we were now doing was filling in the details. At the end of the last century there were physicists who were perfectly willing to say that there was no need to produce another Newton because there was nothing as fundamental as gravitation for another Newton to discover. And after all, they had the excellent evidence of Adams’s and Leverrier’s discovery of a planet that no one had observed, one whose existence they had predicted entirely because the perturbations that they observed could only be explained by the presence of another planet, and there it was. Since then, the world has fallen about our ears. There is almost no scientific theory which was held to be fundamental in 1867 which is thought to be true in that form today. We have lived through a century of the most amazing firework display of new discoveries. Not discoveries of a superficial nature, but ones which have radically altered our whole picture of nature. In 1899 when Max Planck could not make the continuous equations work to match the experiments of his colleagues on black body radiation, he finally made up his mind that radiation came in discontinuous lumps. And that afternoon, when he took his little boy for their usual walk, he said to him, “I have today made a discovery as profound as Newton’s.” Those were very prophetic words. And the only sad thing about them is to say that the little boy whom he took for a walk was, in fact, murdered by the Nazis because he took part in the plot against Hitler’s life in 1944.  From the moment that Max Planck made that statement, we have had a constant upset of the accepted notions.  is no longer regarded as a picture of the ultimate reality in nature. In 1905 Einstein published the first paper on relativity, which made it clear overnight that there was something wrong with this concept. And then in 1915-16 he published the great paper on general relativity, which substituted an essentially geometrical view of space-time in its place. If I may translate into geometrical terms, this really said, roughly speaking, that these two masses attract one another because they form depressions in space-time; and those depressions tend to make them run together just as if you put two lead balls into a bowl of jelly. Well, that is a fundamentally different conception of the world. It is a fundamentally different decoding of virtually the same sentences. No one would have thrown Newton out of the window if there had not been sentences which went wrong. If the perihelion of Mercury had remained where it was supposed to be, nobody would have been very troubled.  The new theory, of course, always subsumes more effects than the old. But the remarkable thing is that when it is discovered, it also wholly changes our conception of how the world works. Well then, was the decoding all a fiction? Is gravitational force a complete fiction? Is Einstein’s view of relativity now a fiction since it is by no means in as good order as it was in 1915-16? I regard this as a very important question. I regard it as a particularly important question in an audience like this which is not wholly composed of professional scientists.  Now I believe that everybody in this room is real. I really believe that you are all there. Moreover, I believe that your blood is circulating just the way that Harvey said, and not the way that Galen said. In other words, I believe that all the kind of scientific descriptions that we can make about one another are perfectly real. And yet, I believe that any theory that we as human beings make at any point in time is full of provisional decodings which to some extent are as fictitious as the notion of force in Newton. How can this be?  In my view, the answer is as follows. I believe that the world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. I regard this to some extent as a metaphysical statement, although you will see, as I develop it in the next lecture, it has a much more down-to-earth content than that. But I will repeat it: I believe that every event in the world is connected to every other event. But you cannot carry on science on the supposition that you are going to be able to connect every event with every other event. Even when you set a computer such a simple problem as playing a good game of chess on the hypothesis that the computer is really going to think out every consequence, it breaks down hopelessly. It is, therefore, an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into what we regard as relevant and what we regard, for purposes of that experiment, as irrelevant.  We make a cut. We put the experiment, if you like, into a box. Now the moment we do that, we do violence to the connections in the world. We may have the best cause in the world. I may say, “Well, come on, I am not really going to think that the light from Sirius is going to affect the reading of this micrometer!” And I say this although I can see Sirius clear with the naked eye, and I have the impertinence to say that though the light of Sirius affects my rods and cones it is not going to affect the experiment. Therefore we have always, if I may use another Talmudic phrase, to put a fence round the law, to put a fence round the law of nature that we are trying to tease out. And we have to say, “For purposes of this experiment everything outside here is regarded as irrelevant, and everything inside here is regarded as relevant.”  Now I get a set of answers which I try to decode in this context. And I am certainly not going to get the world right, because the basic assumption that I have made about dividing the world into the relevant and the irrelevant is in fact a lie. In the nature of things it is bound to give me only an approximation to what goes inside the fence. And whether I treat that as a statistical approximation, or whether I get out some other concept, I am doing so in less than the total context of the world. Therefore, when we practice science ( and this is true of all our experience ) , we are always decoding a part of nature which is not complete. We simply cannot get out of our own finiteness. Now such decoding can certainly lead to good laws. If what we judge to be irrelevant is not very relevant, they will be good laws. But it does not follow that they give you the conceptual picture of what is in the world at all. And essentially the reason why we have made such enormous changes in our conceptual picture of the world in the last seventy years is because we have had to push out the boundaries of the relevant further and further. Every time we do so, we have to revise the picture totally. Now there is nothing to help us in the decoding. We have to do it in the same way that we invent any word in the human language—by an act of pure imagination.  1 K. J. W. Craik, The Nature of Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943).  2 Wilhelm Olbers, “Uber die Durchsichtigkeit des Weltraums,” Bodes Astronomisches Jahrbuch ( 1826), pp. 110-21.  3 J. Bronowski, “The New Scientific Thought and Its Impact,” in History of Mankind: Cultural and Scientific Development, vol. 1, pt. 1, edited under the auspices of UNESCO by K. M. Panikkar and J. M. Romkin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), pp. 121-65.  4 Richard Bentley, Sermons Preached at Boyle’s . . . ( 1692) (London: Frances Macpherson, 1838).

Bronowski’s narrative indicates how members of our species (can) change our conceptual picture of the world by acts of “pure imagination.” Bronowski’s account helps (I believe) to elucide Korzybski’s reference to “extensional” use of language. Fox and Bronowski exemplify the contrasting orientations which reflect Korzybski’s distinction between arithemetical and geometrical progression.

Now, I’ll offer a suggestion. First, consider the following table:

The first three columns of the table correspond to Korzybski’s distinctions of space/time binding, arithmetical/geometrical progression, and intensional/extensional use of language. The third column designates Fox’s and Bronowski’s respective orientations. The fourth column lists Hitler and and Einstein as examples of the dichotomy. The fifth column distinguishes between Machiavellian and ? intelligence. My motivation for constructing the table is to suggest a locution denoting the form of intelligence that corresponds to Korzybski’s “time binding” distinction: “Archimedian intelligence.”

Having noted “Archimedian intelligence,” I believe that it can be defined extensionally by examples. Two examples are Archimedes and Einstein. Other examples: Newton, Faraday, Kepler, Gauss, Buckiminster Fuller, Carl Sagan.

Pythagoras? Darwin? Arthur Young? Aristotle? Galileo? Korzybski? Leonardo Da Vinci? William Blake? Voltaire?

A book that (I believe) nicely exemplifies Korzybski’s conception of the geometrical progression (thus, Archimedian intelligence) is the Universe of the Mind by George Owen. It’s a history of scientific ideas, and it’s filled with interesting illustrations (rendered by the author). A book that suggests how human intelligence may have developed multiple modes (Machiavellian/Archimedian) is The Prehistory of the Mind.

Synergetically,

Don Steehler

The emergence of what Don Steehler calls Archimedian intelligence is of critical importance to the survival of our species. It is also the focus of N.Arthur Coulter’s “Modes of Thinking” from his classic Human Synergetics. He would explain that what Don has called Machiavellian intelligence is the Multiordinal mode of thinking and Archimedian intelligence is the Synergic mode of thinking. Both modes demonstrate the human behavior “genius”, however multiordinal genius may act adversarily while synergic genius will not.

It is the emergence of synergic genius that offers humanity a ray of hope in transending our Overpopulation-FossilFuelDepletion-GlobalWarming crisis.

This is why I am more optimistic than Fox. There is an old Hopi Indian quote you may have heard.  “We are the people we have been waiting for.” It is up to our generation to solve this crisis. It our turn to leap into the fray and make the world better.

Don has also introduced Korzybski’s concepts of intensional and extensional which were the focus of Korzyski’s great work “General Semantics” as revealed in his classic Science and Sanity. These are enormously important concepts for which I have created the metaphor — The world of “Is” and the World of “Ought to Be” — to make them more easily understandable.

Thanks Don, nicely done, 

Timothy Wilken  

Visit Don Steehler’s Website

Yesterday, Elisabet Sahtouris explained: The old philosophy of nature as alive and creative in its imperfection was replaced by belief in the perfect and rather mechanical creation of a single, though yet unknown, God. Perhaps this new worldview was comforting to the Athenians at a time when they were having so much trouble working out democratic order. At least they could believe in a perfect world just beyond the mess they were stuck in. Today, she continues from EarthDance.  

Also see: Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

Eventually, through an itinerant preacher — or storyteller, in Greek tradition — named Paul, a new religion came to Greece from the East. It was a religion that fit Plato’s worldview very well. Not only did it explain the creation of the world by a perfect God; it also explained the disorderly ways of humans as disobedience to God, their Father. This gave people a new hope — that they could make themselves and their society more perfect by obeying God’s law.

According to this Hebrew-Christian worldview, God had created the world only a few thousand years before, with all its different kinds of plants and animals, just as it is now and right at the center of the universe. This view was very much in keeping with Plato’s brilliant student Aristotle’s static view of nature, Anaximander never having been taken seriously on the subject of evolution.

The scenario is familiar — God created the world as a paradise for humans, setting the first two people into its perfection. They were expelled after Eve disobeyed God’s law by tempting Adam to join her in the sin of eating fruit from the tree of knowledge, thus bringing disorder and strife into the world forever after. Still, paradise could be regained after death, in a heavenly world, if people became perfect in God’s eyes again, and this perfection could be accomplished by seeking forgiveness and obeying God’s law.

In the ever expanding thrust of empires, Rome conquered Greece. Though Jesus himself had preached equality for all, including women, and had been opposed to any kind of dominance, the holy texts were rewritten to suit the priesthood of the new church, after the earliest Roman Christians had been tortured and killed. By the time the Byzantine empire split off from the Roman empire, the church’s revised Christian worldview, adapted by priests to their hierarchical societies, had been officially adopted by both empires, with slight differences.

The rich heritage of ancient Greek scientific discoveries — that the Earth moved around the Sun, that nature was alive and evolving, that humans were descended from simpler creatures, that many of their ills were curable by medicines and surgery — was destroyed, forgotten, or denied as the new worldview took over. The great library at Alexandria was repeatedly sacked and burned by Romans, Christians, and Muslims; nearly a million book-scrolls of human knowledge and culture were lost.

In Europe, for well over a thousand years, all ideas — scientific and other — that did not reflect the Christian worldview were considered heresies and outlawed wherever possible. Brutal Crusades marched outside of Europe to attack Muslims as non-believer infidels; women were burned to death in droves as witches all over Europe — for practicing the older nature religions persisting among ordinary people and healing with natural medicines. Christian priests, who explained God’s law to people and enforced it, were the rulers of all Europe. Even kings bowed down to the highest priest of all, the pope of the Holy Roman Empire. Waves of plagues were seen as God’s wrath released against his disobedient children, and the church grew ever stronger for its presumed power to grant salvation.

Many of Plato’s ideas about education and politics in a perfect society were put into practice during the Christian era. Plato had written, for example, that a perfect society should be ruled by the most educated of citizens, people from all walks of life who lived simply, without personal possessions. Though Plato had not advocated the exclusion of women from education and rule, the Christian monks and priests, who wielded so much influence in Europe, otherwise met Plato’s requirements. The highest-ranking clerics did indulge themselves, however, in affluent comforts and fine robes. The idea of heaven and hell as places where people would go after death to be rewarded or punished for their Earthly behavior also came from Plato’s writings. And the works of Aristotle taught Christian Europe formal logic and the pursuit of virtue — originally meaning excellence, but later coming to mean obedience.

For more than a thousand years the Christian Europeans educated only boys and men, teaching them the invented mechanical languages of mathematics and logic in the dead language of Latin. A dead language is one no longer in common use, no longer imbibed by children at their mother’s knee, no longer changing, but frozen in time. This education is important to remember when, in the next chapter, we consider how the differences between natural living languages and artificial nonliving languages affect worldviews.

For now, let us note that the perfected mechanical languages of mathematics and logic played a central role in the rebirth of science in Europe. This rebirth was of course part of the larger rebirth — or Renaissance — of human curiosity and culture that began about five hundred years ago.

Through trade with the East, opened up by Crusades, some Europeans, such as the Medici family in Italy, became very wealthy and very worldly. To have beautiful and interesting things around them, they hired architects, artists, and scientists to create splendid new works and to seek new knowledge. Of note, this expansion of urban life and culture also led to vast deforestation all over Europe, as ancient Rome had deforested northern Africa to build its ships and cities, as well as to open land for growing its grain.

Traders and refugees brought copies of surviving ancient scientific writings from Constantinople, from Arab lands, from Moorish Spain, from wherever they had been preserved, studied, and further developed, as they were especially in Muslim mathematics, astronomy, alchemy, and medicine. These manuscripts, including many Greek works salvaged from Alexandria and preserved by Muslims, reawakened interest in questions of planetary movement through the skies and of the location and nature of the Earth, with all its living plants and animals.

Giordano Bruno, the first philosopher-scientist to revive the ancient notion that the Earth moves around the Sun, was burned at the stake in the year 1600 by the Christian priests of the Holy Inquisition. But only ten years later Galileo Galilei built the first telescope and with its help showed that the Earth does revolve around the Sun and so cannot be at the center of the universe. Neither Bruno nor Galileo ever meant to disprove the religious worldview, but only to improve it. Yet Galileo, too, was punished by the church. Narrowly escaping the stake, he was imprisoned and forbidden to teach.

It is important to remember that all the founding fathers of modern science were religious men eager to show the glory of God by giving people a better understanding of His wonderful creations. They imagined God very much as Plato had — as a geometer. Mathematics, Galileo said, was the language in which all nature was written. And so the most important task of reborn science was to discover the mathematical laws by which God had created the world.

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Throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and even later during the Age of Enlightenment, as Carolyn Merchant documented in The Death of Nature, a belief in nature as alive, personal, and mysterious, persisted among ordinary people as well as in the tradition of alchemy. Yet as modern science evolved, it weeded out these ideas in favor of a belief in nature as an impersonal mechanism that had to be brought under human dominance by rational understanding and mathematical description. Let’s see how this dramatic change in worldview occurred.

The ancient Greeks, especially Archimedes, had already begun to make mechanical models of how things in nature work. In fact, the words mechanism and machine come from the ancient Greek words for these models. Archimedes built actual machines that were very ingenious and successful — especially some rather amazing machines for fighting wars, such as huge cranes equipped with claws that could life ships out of water and smash them on ground. But he was so ashamed of these crude imitations of sacred geometrical designs built for practical mundane purposes that he never even wrote about them himself. Greek philosophers felt that physical machines were poor imitations of God-the-geometer’s sacred works — such sacrilege that ancient Greece did not develop its technology.

The Renaissance, however, gave rebirth not only to art and science but to mechanical engineering as well. Scientists themselves began building mechanical models to help work out the geometric patterns of the heavens wheeling around the Earth. Later models showed the Earth and other planets wheeling around the Sun while Moons wheeled around planets, all against the greater background of wheeling stars. Each heavenly body they knew about was attached, in these models, to its own ring of metal in the great sphere of the universe. Some of the most elaborate models with the greatest number of rings looked a bit like huge sculptured balls of metallic yarn. All these rings wheeling about within one another suggested that the universe must be something like other Renaissance machinery — something like the clockworks in church towers, with various wheels turning other wheels in their mechanisms.

Rene Descartes — another founding father of modern science — invented a new mathematics along with a whole new framework for the religious-scientific worldview. In this view, God was not only a geometer, but a Grand Engineer. Using mathematical laws, God had not only created a cosmic clockworks, but had put into it endless smaller mechanical inventions such as plants and animals and people. Descartes insisted there was no essential difference between man-made machines such as clocks, grain mills, or jeweled golden wind-up birds that sang and the living mechanisms God had created. God’s were more complex, but man could learn that complexity. This became the dominant worldview of all science.

As men were God’s favorite mechanisms, Descartes explained, He attached to them inventive minds that worked quite like His own. Women, like animals, had no such minds, and were to be controlled by men along with the rest of mechanical nature. Since men’s minds had been made to work like God’s own, it was no surprise that men, too, were inventive engineers, putting their own mechanical robots into their own mechanical clocks high upon the church towers in honor of the Grand Engineer.

None of the scientists who accepted this worldview ever seemed to wonder if man had not projected his own mind, talents, and achievements into his image of God, rather than the other way around. They were convinced that, except for their own male minds, everything in nature was God’s mechanical creation, made to be understood by men. Surely this was as strange a worldview as humans had ever held, yet it wove the religious worldview and the scientific worldview into one and gave scientists new visions of understanding and controlling all nature, as they were convinced God intended.

Imagine the excitement they felt — if everything in the whole world, even in the whole universe — was mechanical, then men who understood mechanics could understand how all nature worked by taking everything apart to see what made it tick! And sooner or later, surely, they would be able to make their mechanical birds as good as God’s feathered ones.

Another founding father, Francis Bacon, who is credited with having developed the scientific method, wrote much about the coming Golden Age of Science, when man would understand and control all nature, creating his own mechanically perfect societies, which would be free of all human problems. Wasn’t that what God intended for his favorite creatures? Bacon was a lawyer who attended many witch trials. He, like many men, identified mysterious nature with woman. Science, he said, would flourish when men grew up and stopped expecting her to unveil herself at their request, but instead hounded nature and tortured her secrets from her.

It is interesting to contrast Bacon’s vision of a future Golden Age with ancient Hesiod’s lament for the times of a past Golden Race — to reflect on what seems utopian in the context of different worldviews. For Hesiod, peace and bounty seemed to pour from nature itself, whereas for Bacon all good things were to be wrested from nature at any cost by dominating and controlling it.

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The mechanical worldview suited the next few centuries very well, for nothing mattered more to the Europeans and their offspring Americans than the machinery that was changing the whole human way of life. Scientists, living in a society that was becoming ever more mechanized, saw more and more mechanisms wherever they looked in nature. Geologists described geological mechanisms — how the Earth was put together, how the cycles of weather ground up rocks, and so on. Biologists spoke of the mechanisms of living things — how the parts of plants and animals and people were put together and how they worked. In time, doctors spoke of heart and lung pumps, of bone and muscle mechanisms; still later psychologists studied the machinery of the brain and social planners worked on the mechanisms of society.

Scientific discoveries of `natural mechanisms’ depended on the invention of new man-made mechanisms such as telescopes, compasses, thermometers, barometers, scales, clocks, and later more sophisticated devices, all of which made it possible for the scientists to detect and measure ever more parts of the natural world. Science also depended on the invention of new mathematics for modeling relationships among these measured parts of the world, for only measurable parts of the world could be studied by scientists with a mechanical worldview.

Let’s look for just a moment at this role played by mathematics in science. Mathematics itself is not a science — it is the art of making complicated and beautifully balanced patterns from very simple basic symbols and rules for combining them. Mathematicians can keep finding new patterns to make from the basic symbols and rules they have adopted, or they can change those symbols and rules to develop a wholly different set of patterns.

In pure mathematics, the symbols have no real-world meaning — no one has ever found a 2 or a + or a > in nature. But scientists have found that when they assign a real-world meaning to the symbols, some mathematical patterns turn out to be very useful as models of the measurable aspects of nature they study. Many mathematical models are designed to be translated into physical mechanisms, as they were in the Renaissance models of the cosmos.

Consider that whenever we want to describe something previously unknown to us — when we want to understand it — we must find something familiar to us with which we can compare it. The known thing becomes a metaphor — literally a carrier — for understanding the unknown thing. This is because the brain can use new incoming patterns of information only in the context of its existing patterns.

Every day we use metaphors such as “This material is as soft as a baby’s skin and as blue as the sea,” or “That man is watching me like a hawk,” or “The boss wants everything to run like clockwork.” But how often do we reflect on the fact that all new understanding, even scientific understanding, comes about in this way? The patterns or forms of machines and mathematics are human inventions, and thus they are very familiar to their inventors. So, when scientists use them as models — saying, for example, that hearts pump blood and plants pump water — we should be clear that these are simply metaphors that help us understand something about hearts, plants and their energy use.

The idea that reality is made up of only measurable things, and that their description is the only possible knowledge of reality, is called positivism. The tasks of positivist science have been seen as twofold — to discover what the parts of natural mechanisms are, and to see how the mechanisms work through the movement of these parts. In other words, scientists took things apart in order to see of what they were constructed as well as how they `ticked.’ This method of reducing things to their parts came to be known as the reductionist method of science.

In so reducing things to their parts, scientists showed us a fascinating inner world of things. Live bodies, for instance, were made of bones, skin, blood vessels, nerves, and other organs; each organ was made of tissues, each tissue of cells, each cell of chemicals. In fact, everything turned out to be made of chemicals, which in turn were made of molecules.

Molecules that were fixed in tight patterns so they could not move formed solid things, such as rock or wood. If they slipped and slid around each other, they formed liquids. If they floated about loosely, they formed gases. And molecules, it turned out, were made of atoms. At last scientists had the instruments and the mathematics to show that all natural mechanisms were really made of those tiniest and most indestructible building blocks called atoms — just as the ancient Greeks had said more than two thousand years before!

Only one problem — things did not prove to be quite so simple. Atoms turned out to be made of parts themselves, and their parts turned out to be anything but solid machine parts. Atomic physicists, just when they reached the very foundation of mechanical nature, discovered that nature is not so mechanical after all. But before we go on with this story, let’s go back to look at the other part of what scientists were doing — seeing what the movement of parts was all about in natural mechanisms.

From their measurements and models scientists worked out mathematical laws of motion among the parts of nature’s mechanisms. The more they studied motion in the universe, the more the universe seemed to move and change. Not only did the Earth no longer stand still at the center of perfect heavenly spheres, but it turned on its own wobbling axis and wheeled around its Sun in spirals, because the Sun itself wandered through space, dragging its planets with it as part of a galaxy moving on its own, and so on.

Geologists, digging into rock and studying landscapes, discovered that the Earth itself has changed a great deal over time. Biologists meanwhile grew curious about the fossils geologists uncovered. Earth seemed to contain her own record of plants and animals that had lived long ago, and the record indicated that they had changed a great deal, too.

How could the Earth be only a few thousand years old, as measured from the generations of people listed in the Bible from the creation of Adam to historically known kings? The geological record was proving it to be very much older, with different kinds of plants and animals at different times in its history. Had God created these different kinds of plants and animals at different times, rather than creating them all at once? Did He keep making them more complicated with each wave of creation? Or had they somehow changed by themselves?

Once the idea of evolution, buried since Anaximander’s time, emerged again, it quickly made a great deal of sense, and the whole scientific-religious worldview was turned upside down to fit it. Creation had been seen as a kind of ladder with God at the top. On the next rung down were the angels, then people, then the large animals, then the smaller ones, and on down to lowly worms and even smaller things, all Earth creatures having been created at once by God. In the new evolutionary view, the ladder began at the bottom with the most ancient, tiniest creatures, which changed over time, forming new rungs of ever larger creatures, climbing the ladder up to the rung of humans, who seemed to be at the very top — for scientists were beginning to doubt the existence of angels and God. Eventually, scientists gave up the whole concept of God and declared their separation from religion, a matter we will go into further later on.

When Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection of the fittest in a great competition for limited resources became popular, the industrial age was well under way. In fact, the industrialists of Darwin’s England were in just such competition for survival with one another, so they readily adopted the new evolutionary theory as part of their worldview. These ever wealthier industrialists were not so ready to believe the news that they were cousins to the apes, but the idea that they were the fittest creatures in all nature seemed to make up for it. They did not need to lose sleep over the poverty and toil they were forcing on their workers in factories and colonies, for their own riches and comforts were simply proof of their natural fitness. In fact, they took Darwin’s theory as evidence that their way of life — industrial competition — was the most natural and the surest way of human progress. Did it not follow that a competitive capitalist society was the best possible social mechanism for producing the fittest humans through natural selection?

Not long after the theory of evolution became known, the Russian Revolution produced a new `social mechanism’ known as communism, which was meant to be based on cooperation rather than on competition. Russian scientists rewrote the theory of evolution accordingly, to show that cooperation in nature produced more fit natural creatures than did competition!

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Moving away from religion, science came closer to the politics of industrial man, who had wrested social and political power from the church. In both the capitalist and communist worlds, scientists were awarded the status of a secular priesthood with the mission of forming the cultural worldview — the story of how things came to be. In turn, they were supported by governments and rewarded for shaping worldviews consistent with the politics of their societies. Yet much as they argued the natural advantages of competition on one side and cooperation on the other, industrialism itself evolved and dictated a similar way of life on both sides for those who owned the means of production and those who worked for them. Industrialism, that is, shaped human habits to its needs — which have now shown themselves as greeds — making society itself into the great mechanism so wonderfully spoofed by Charlie Chaplin.

City transportation systems were built to get workers to and from factories, and education systems were designed to produce the workers. Schools trained children to be on time and to sit still for long hours without talking to their neighbors, doing what they were told even if it was boring, as they would have to in factories when they got older. It was as if children were raw materials put into the school machine and turned out as workers. The clocks and schedules of industrial workers replaced the Sun and the weather in telling people when to do what. Government systems got more complicated, more centralized, more organized, to manage society in ways that made industry and the trade of industrial products work smoothly.

Thus, families, schools, hospitals, governments, and other social institutions were run as efficiently as factory machines. The whole way of life became as mechanical as the scientific worldview, and new branches of science — economic science, political science, sociology — were created to design and build the machinery of society, to keep it well oiled and in good repair.

The idea of perfecting humanity, first stated in Plato’s worldview, was held throughout the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and that same idea fired the imaginations of the founding fathers of modern science and industry. Now it was put to its greatest test — the modern industrial age was to bring the solution to all problems at last; it was to create perfect order in the lives of individuals and in all society.

The later Greek philosophers and the Christians had sought perfection in the practice of ethics — the human pursuit of what is right and good for one and all. But modern science did not concern itself with ethics or with any other human values. Scientists were not interested in what they saw as vague and apparently religious ideas of what is right or wrong, good or bad, which could be argued forever and would only muddle the task of science. This they saw as the purely positivist task of describing natural mechanisms and passing their knowledge on to the engineers who would bring both nature and human society under control with perfectly designed and managed technology.

But neither personal nor social nor economic nor political problems were brought under such control. Science and its applications in linear cause and effect engineering made great advances in industrial production, in transportation and communications, in medical technology, in weaponry, and finally even in the exploration of space, but industrial nations were at one another’s throats in the biggest wars ever fought and the environment was steadily razed to feed the machines. Enormous wealth, moreover, had been gained at the expense of vast numbers of the world’s people, once self-sufficient, now poor, hungry, ill, uneducated, and without opportunity for anything better. The promised Golden Age of humanity seemed farther away than ever.

Meanwhile, scientists were extending ideas about the mechanisms of evolutionary change to the cosmos as a whole. Astronomers traced the universe back to a Big Bang — an original event explosion that was assumed to have created all the cosmos we know as its super-hot energy expanded. Stars and galaxies evolved, but moved ever farther apart, so that the universe as a whole was apparently spreading out and cooling off. Thus the great cosmic machine, the astronomers said, was running down — moving ever closer to its finish, when all order would be dissipated in the ultimate cold where no energy moved.

However far off this `heat death’ end might be, it was a depressing vision, and scientists offered no salvation from it, no comfort of values or ethics to give life meaning. People began seeing themselves as helplessly trapped inside a cosmic mechanism that would run down no matter what they did. Life simply had no meaning in this coldly scientific worldview, but who could oppose scientific knowledge? Modern philosophies such as existentialism and some schools of modern art reflected the scientists’ view of a mechanical universe running down, humans caught in it like cogs in wheels, without meaning or hope.

Many scientists today still believe firmly in just such a mechanical worldview, but many others now see nature as alive and intelligent. Those who believe that life is self-creating in a dynamically alive universe, rather than winding down in a mechanical one, also believe that life can create its own meaning and purpose.

In Chapter 5, The Dance of Life, we spoke of the differences between mechanisms and organisms in connection with the autopoietic definition of life, and of entropy as the catabolic side of a metabolic cycle which builds up as it breaks down. But to really understand the present scientific debate on whether nature is or is not mechanical, we must go back once again to look at just what we mean by the concept and physical reality of mechanism, and at what role it has played in human history.

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Visit Elisabet Sahtouris’ Website

Reposted from: LifeWeb

On Monday, Elisabet Sahtouris explained: Keeping in mind this perspective on our still-evolving scientific and cultural worldview — our continuing effort to understand what the play of life is all about — let’s now look at its historical roots, its evolution within the cultural traditions of our species. Let’s look, in other words, at the scripts people have written for themselves as they played out the historical steps leading us to our present conception of the play. Today, she continues from EarthDance.  

Also see: What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13

Elisabet Sahtouris, Ph.D.

The earliest worldviews we know anything about date back to the Pleistocene epoch of ice ages — to what we call the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age. In Europe and Asia, these sometimes cave-dwelling cultures were artistic and commonly symbolized nature as a great mother, a fruitful goddess who gave them life and all that was needed to sustain them. Seeing nature as the great Mother Goddess would have made sense of human experience by explaining nature’s gifts of food and the birth of creatures, bright sunny days, like the goddess’s good moods, and angry storms or droughts, like her bad moods. Nature seemed to love and to rage at her human children, giving them reason to celebrate her life-giving and nurturing, as well as to love, fear, and respect her.

We can safely assume that paleolithic peoples took all nature to be as alive as they themselves were, and that they felt themselves to be part of, or the children of, this great mother. Even today, peoples who live in natural settings without changing them significantly tend not to divide nature into living and nonliving parts as our dominant culture does. Their only concept of non-living is of something dead that has been alive.

Later Stone Age and Bronze Age peoples must have called the Mother Goddess by many names in many places — only the later names, surviving into written language, were recorded. Just a few that were recorded are Nammu, Utu, Inanna, Ishtar, Iahu, Astarte, Ma, Kali, Isis, Gaia and Matrona. Iahu, meaning exalted dove, was the Great Goddess’ name in Sumeria — the first great urban human culture — and was apparently later turned into the masculine Je-ho-vah. In ancient Greece they called her Gaia, as well as Eurynome and Demeter and Pandora, meaning `giver of all gifts.’

The Mother Goddess of these ancient religions was surely not conceived of as outside of nature. She was not the external creator of nature but the creative force of nature itself. In modern religious terms, Mother God immanent. Nature was felt as the creative-destructive dance of life and death. Various components or forces of nature — Sun and Moon, winds and seas, mountains and rivers, animals important to people — were assigned to members of the goddess’s `holy family’ or seen in other supportive deity roles.

The image of nature as a providing mother and the worship of this Great Goddess very likely influenced the development of Stone Age societies as agricultural `households.’ Archaeologists James Mellaart and Marija Gimbutas, as well as the archaeological scholars Merlin Stone and Riane Eisler, have given us an image of such early civilizations, as exemplified by the well-preserved Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk in Turkey. People of such societies provided for themselves and one another by raising crops and keeping tamed animals.

Most striking in such well-planned and managed agricultural societies, with their large towns, agricultural technology, beautiful wall paintings, decorated pottery, sculpture and metal arts, is that unlike later cultures they show no evidence of fortification, warfare, conquest, slavery, or significant social inequality, judging by house size, burial customs, and so forth. This is taken to mean that men and women worked in partnership, and there is evidence at Catal Huyuk that those in need were provided for from public stores of food or from the goddess’s temple gardens.

Such ancient societies seem to have practiced the kind of peaceful life with all people’s needs met that our modern societies are still far from bringing about. The remains of cultures throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, including pre-Minoan and Minoan Crete, show highly advanced societies, in which, as historian Riane Eisler puts it, “linking, not ranking” predominated.

The extent to which these societies were designed and managed by women will probably be debated among archaeologists for some time, but there are indications that women’s roles were at least as important as men’s. Mellaart found the `holy family’ at Catal Huyuk represented in order of importance as mother, daughter, son, and father, and a similar order was suggested in households by the sleeping platforms, that of the woman being more fixed and prominent than that of the man. There is no intrinsic reason to doubt that women, as the human representatives of the goddess, were accorded the social status that men gained later as human representatives of the god, but these early societies show no indication that men were oppressed by women; on the contrary, they indicate partnership.

If women did have the authority to make social rules, we might expect those rules to have been based on partnership for the simple reason that women give birth to and raise both girl and boy babies without considering the one better than the other, if the mothers are permitted to act on their natural feelings. The preferential treatment of boy children in some later cultures came about when men made the rules and set the cultural patterns. Creation stories of ancient societies often told of man and woman having been created together, as they were in the original Hebrew-Christian Genesis before it was rewritten to have Eve created from Adam’s rib.

On the contrary, the hunter or nomadic Father God worshipers who invaded and conquered these societies were apparently not so peaceful and egalitarian. They were apparently headed by men who were experienced in the use of weapons. Perhaps they were driven to violent competition by their harsh environment and had come to worship lightning-bolt-wielding and thundering sky-gods in fear. After all, they were relatively unsheltered in open spaces, vulnerable to storms as well as to the marauding attacks of other, similar tribes.

When these conquerors invaded and stayed to rule a settled society where they found life good, they changed not only the social structure and rule but the society’s worldview as well. Often they turned the Mother Goddess into the wife or daughter of their chief god and joined lesser gods and goddesses from both religions into a single pantheon, meaning `all gods’ religion.

Sometimes they got rid of the goddess altogether by making up stories in which the god was great and the goddess was only a disobedient mortal woman who was forever making trouble. Pandora was so demoted. Her name still means `giver of all gifts,’ but in the story we hear about her she brings only troubles into the world by disobeying the Father God. Similarly, the Hebrews, whose difficult wandering existence in the desert had somehow led them to believe in a stern Father God, turned the Mother Goddess, along with her symbols — the serpent of wisdom and the tree of knowledge — into Eve, another mortal woman who brought trouble into the world by questioning male authority and disobeying God.

Later, when Christianity replaced the pagan religions, old male deities were also contemptuously dethroned. The Celtic Sun god Lugh, for example, first became Lucifer, angel of light, and then was cast from heaven in medieval times to become Lucifer, or Satan, the symbol of evil.

All in all, the historical record tells us that when some men acquired the kind of power that accrues to those who have weapons and wealth, they formed a worldview based on a belief in their own superiority. They projected their self-image into an authoritarian and violent male god, thus justifying the domination of women, who came to be seen as the property of males, to be safeguarded and bartered. Nowhere is this more graphically recorded than in the Hebrew-Christian Old Testament Bible, and even the fabled Golden Age is tarnished by a similar treatment of women. Such male rulers extended the idea of superiority and the practice of violence into their affairs with one another as well-making war upon each other, dethroning the deities of the conquered, making warriors their heroes, taking slaves and building class-structured societies.

Another important aspect of the shift from a worldview based on partnership to one based on domination, as god-worship replaced goddess-worship all over the civilized world, was the idea that nature was separate from both gods and people — that it had been created and was ruled over by one God who was external to nature. Nature, as God’s creation, was then seen as a gift given to His people to use and exploit for their own ends — as in the biblical “to have dominion over.” The Old Testament testifies to a jealous and unmerciful God who urges man to make war on and destroy all non-believers and other enemies, and to subjugate women. His story became history.

And so, at the same time — a few thousand years before the Christian era — humanity seems to have undergone the two greatest changes in history since the advent of agriculture. One was the shift from the worldview and culture of partnership to that of domination — from the worship of life — giving to the worship of life — taking, as Eisler puts it. The other change was the shift from a worldview in which people and their deities were part of nature’s own improvised dance, continually self-creating from within, to a worldview in which men and their gods stood outside and above nature, in which men claimed the god-given right to exploit women and all the rest of the natural world.

All this, of course, is a sweeping simplification of history for the sake of seeing broad patterns. The role of women as the glue that holds society together cannot be doubted even today, but the partnership status, the equal valuation of their work and their arts, has never been regained to this day.

One of the latest goddess cultures to survive was that of Crete, known to the ancient Egyptians as the Keftiu, to us as Minoan. A peaceful agricultural people we mentioned earlier, the Minoans left us exquisite art in admiration and praise of nature. Nature goddess worship was evident in other parts of Greece, too, and lasted in some form until classical times — even Plato being initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter. But the sequence of Greek myth, as Robert Graves pointed out, shows the gradual destruction of equality and goddess-worship in favor of patriarchal rule and god-worship.

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Only the earliest known Greek philosophers were deeply influenced by ancient ideas of nature’s self-creation, as were early philosophers in other lands. By the sixth century before Christ, most of the civilized world had been organized into large kingdoms or empires with generally patriarchal religious worldviews and strict laws for keeping order.

And yet, sixth century BC thinkers such as Lao-tse and Confucius in China, Vedist Hindus and Gautama Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, and Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus in Milesian Greece (now Turkey) all came to very much the same idea about how nature works. In carefully observing and thinking about nature, they all saw it as alive and forever changing from within, whether or not it was symbolized by a pantheon of gods and goddesses. They saw nature as striving to create its own balance and order through an endless dance of opposing forces or principles such as male and female, light and dark, hot and cold, inward and outward, storm and calm, creation and destruction. In this dance, opposites clashed or simply got out of balance so that things grew, say, too cold or too stormy or otherwise disorderly. Yet somehow new forms and patterns created themselves to bring about new balance and harmony.

Even though they could not talk to one another, these great thinkers all over the civilized world of the sixth century B.C. somehow agreed that nature’s constant movement was away from disorder and toward balanced order — what we now call “order out of chaos.” This balance, or harmony, they believed, must ever be re-created from imbalance or discord, very much as it is in human affairs. This did not surprise them, because they all saw humans as part of nature.

In Greece such thinkers formed the first scientific worldviews by trying to understand and explain the world in terms of what they could see in nature. Poets, meanwhile, continued to spread the Greek worldview of Gaian creation and the Olympian pantheon of gods and goddesses who ruled the world, as did Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey, which had, by then, been written down.

The new scientific thinkers came to be called physicists — as the Greek word for nature was physis — or philosophers — from the Greek words philos, meaning lover or friend, and sophia, meaning wisdom. The wisdom they loved and sought after was an understanding of how nature works, because they believed that by understanding the natural order they would come to understand how to order human life, both personal and social, more wisely.

In the myth of Gaia, recall, the goddess comes out of chaos to transform her body into the Earth by her dance. Originally, chaos meant nothingness; later it came to mean anything that seemed to have no pattern, that was completely lawless or disorderly. The opposite of chaos was order, which was called cosmos, still today the Greek word for world. The world, in other words, is the pattern of things.

The eastern Greek Milesian philosophers agreed that the natural world is orderly — that it has a pattern that can be discovered, described, and understood by human beings. As scientists, they saw orderly rhythms, balance and harmony in the patterns of stars and planets, the cycles of seasons, the beautiful forms of plants and animals. This order was disturbed by disorder, or chaos, but it seemed that wherever disorder arose, order was quickly restored. Birds and worms ate up dead animals; old leaves disappeared into rich new soil; rain made droopy plants grow healthy and flower; new forests grew from burned ones. Nature kept making orderly patterns out of chaotic disorder. And what was so interesting about all this was that everything in nature played its part without being told what to do. This observation came to play a very important role in Greek politics before long.

Plants took form, growing from seeds, then rotted back into soil, losing their form. Older animals died as young were born in an endless chain of life. One creature ate another to live itself. Nature was one great intertwined pattern in which, as the philosopher Anaximander said, “Everything taking form in nature incurs a debt which must be paid by dissolving again so that other things may form.” He saw this as a kind of justice — each thing, or creature, in nature borrowing from nature’s supplies, then paying them back. Rivers dried up while new rivers formed elsewhere. Clouds formed, dissolved in rain, and left clear skies, which later formed new clouds. Fires and storms created chaos, yet from the chaos of destruction new life and new order always arose. Everything that took on its own form later gave way to other newer forms.

Anaximander’s teacher, Thales, thought all things in nature had formed from water, and had water as their essence. Anaximander himself, seeing the fossils of sea creatures on land, thought about the great changes in geology and in life forms that must have happened over time. He came to believe that living creatures first formed in the seas, later came out onto dry land and shed their shells. Humans, he reasoned, must have been born from earlier animals, since the first human babies could not have taken care of themselves. As far as we know, he was the first scientist to see a pattern of evolution by actually observing nature. The way in which nature was understood by Anaximander, his teacher Thales, and his pupil Heraclitus — all Milesian Greeks — was very much the way scientists are beginning to understand it again now — as a great dance of life in which all natural things are connected and constantly improvise their steps as they move toward balance and harmony.

These philosophic ideas seem to have echoed a distant time when people actually lived in democratic balance and harmony within the larger context of nature. Some memory of these times was recalled by the poet Hesiod, around the same time as Homer, when he wrote (as quoted in Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade) of a former goddess culture he called the Golden Race: “All good things were theirs. The fruitful Earth poured forth her fruits unbidden in boundless plenty. In peaceful ease they kept their lands with good abundance, rich in flocks and dear to the immortals.” This race, Hesiod continues to tell, was later conquered by a lesser race of silver and then by “a race of bronze, dreadful and mighty, sprung from shafts of ash,” bringing war. “The all lamented sinful works of Ares [God of war] were their chief care.”

It is interesting to note that in the original myth of Gaian creation, the Olympic gods were born of the giant Titans, who were the first children of Gaia and Ouranos, the sky whom she created. Were the Titans perhaps a symbolic memory of the powerful patriarchal tribes — the Achaeans who destroyed the goddess’s rule at Delphi and put Apollo in her place, the Aeolians and Ionians who overran Greece in later waves?

In the sixth century B.C., the ruler of Athens, Solon, put into practice philosophical ideas of natural balance and perhaps also the mythologic-historic memories of greater equality. Trying to create some semblance of democracy, he divided land more equally among people and made laws to ensure greater justice and to give citizens more say in the decisions of their society.

The playwright Aeschylus, whom we mentioned earlier, also used these ideas in his dramas, giving his heroes and heroines the task of balancing the scales of justice in working out their personal lives within the larger framework of family, society, and all nature. But we also see in Aeschylus how this process of justice was undermined in the shift from a goddess culture to a god culture by the devaluing of women.

At the beginning of Aeschylus’ famous trilogy about the Mycenian house of Atreus, Queen Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband Agamemnon is personally justified by his previous sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia, and socially justified by the queen’s status as head of her clan, with the responsibility for avenging bloodshed. At the end of the trilogy, her son Orestes is tried by the new court of Athens for murdering his mother in revenge and acquitted on the grounds that he has not shed kindred blood. Athena, no longer the ancient nature goddess, but the warrior child of Zeus, sprung to life from his ear, presides over the trial and casts the deciding vote. As Apollo explains, “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child,” but “only nurse of the new planted seed that grows.”

This, then, was the beginning of the Golden Age of Greece, which all the world remembers for its beautifully harmonious temples and theaters, for its sculptures and Olympic Games, and for its experiment in male political democracy.

It is important to understand that when this limited democracy was formed, the Greeks had no concept of perfection in their worldview. Their traditional gods and goddesses were seen, like people themselves, as part of nature — imperfect, moody, and mischievous, often intentionally creating disorder, from which they then made order under the higher law of justice. Nor did the Milesian philosophers, the first scientists, see nature as perfect. They knew well that nature was never perfectly balanced or harmonious, but always struggling toward balance and harmony. Wherever it was won, it was soon followed by new imbalance that drove the dance forward in search of harmony.

If nature reached perfection, its evolution would come to a stop. If things fell back into complete chaos, creation would also cease. Nature’s dynamic balance is always achieved somewhere between chaos and perfect harmonious order. There was certainly no reason in this Greek worldview to expect men or their society to be perfect. On the other hand, there was hope that neither men nor the society they were trying to balance would fall into complete disorder.

The experiment of the Greeks in trying to make order out of chaos by ruling themselves democratically instead of letting rulers tell them what to do was not an easy one. Would men be able to agree on how to balance their society and live harmoniously? Balance in society would mean allowing all male citizens to take equal part and responsibility in how things were run. Harmony would mean a love of the good life not only for oneself but for everyone else, too. Men would have to make choices that were good for themselves and, at the same time, good for all society.

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While the Athenians struggled toward democracy for imperfect men in an imperfect world, the western Eleatic philosophers on the other side of Greece from the Milesians were forming a new kind of worldview. They had become fascinated with the human mind itself, and with a kind of perfect order it had created, a perfect order they had found not in nature but in the man-made language of mathematics.

The Greeks had used mathematics to measure the size and distance of things, to map the heavens and the Earth, to make calendars, and to predict events such as eclipses, as had other ancient peoples such as the Egyptians and Babylonians. These were practical uses of mathematics. But mathematics was a wonderful invention by itself because of its perfect order.

Arithmetic and geometry were languages of number and form built on rules of balance and harmony — but not the kind of natural harmony that falls into disorder and has to rebalance itself by creating new forms. Mathematical rules kept things in perfectly balanced order. Geometric figures — such as circles, spheres, cubes pyramids, octahedrons and others — were the most perfect things that humans had ever created. Furthermore, their perfection never changed, never fell into disorder.

The ancient Eleatic Greek philosophers, who lived in what is now southern Italy and Sicily, with Pythagoras as their first mentor, sought these perfect forms and harmonies in sacred geometry. They decided the Milesians must be wrong about a natural cosmos evolving through the ever changing, or dynamic, balance between chaos and order. The Eleatic worldview was of a cosmos created in the mathematical perfection of unchanging balance and harmony. They held that nature only appeared to be imperfect because people were blind to its underlying perfection.

In this worldview, the stars and planets were held on perfect invisible spheres that turned around the Earth, which was at their center. Stars were the effect of cosmic fire shining through holes in these spheres. Pythagoras’ discovery that musical harmony obeys mathematical laws gave birth to the idea that the heavenly spheres created music in their turning.

This worldview permitted no evolutionary change — only a perfect turning around and around, a perfect repetition of the same cycles in the heavens, and of the same cycles of birth and death among the creatures of Earth. Some Hindu traditions maintain worldviews of ever-repeating cycles even today. For the Eleatics, everything had been just as it was now from the very beginning of the cosmos. In place of the uncountable opposites unbalancing and rebalancing themselves in the Milesian worldview, Empedocles proposed four unchanging elements that mixed in different proportions to form things. Parmenides even arrived at the idea that nothing in the cosmos or world moved at all — that the whole appearance of motion in the world was an illusion, a strange trick of human perception. And Zeno, whose mathematical puzzles still fascinate mathematicians today, `proved’ that the world had neither motion nor parts.

Parmenides and Zeno formed these ideas by using their minds to think about how things must be beyond their appearance. There cannot be anything that does not exist, Parmenides reasoned, so all the cosmos must be filled with things that do exist. And if it is completely filled with existing things, there can be nowhere for them to move. His pupil Zeno was even better at showing logically that nothing is as it seems to be. In using pure thought to map their world, these philosophers abandoned scientific observation of nature.

Other philosophers, even if they did not agree that there was no motion at all, did come to feel strongly that the human mind could understand nature better just by thinking about it than by observing it through their own senses. Democritus, for example, came to the idea that everything in nature is made of invisible tiny hard bits he called atoms — from atoma meaning individual — and that the motion of atoms combined them into the things we see. These atoms were eternal and perfect, as they never changed and could not be destroyed.

More and more the philosophers felt that senses such as sight, hearing, and touch, through which we get our everyday experience of the world, were less trustworthy than the reasoning mind. The reasoning mind, which had invented arithmetic and geometry — rules for ordering numbers and shapes — now invented logical rules for ordering human thought, for making it as much like the perfection of mathematics as possible. Thoughts and ideas ordered by logic could be written down, compared with other philosophies, polished, and perfected. Such a philosophy could exist, like arithmetic or geometry, as a thing to be known in itself and passed on to future generations.

Of all the amazing Greek philosophers exploring these various worldviews, the one who was most fascinated by the way the human mind formed its ideas was the Athenian Socrates. For all we know about Socrates, it is not often mentioned that he acknowledged the priestess Diotema as his teacher, nor that Pythagoras had acknowledged Themistoclea in the same way. Socrates was much less interested in what the natural world was and how it worked than in what the human mind was and how it could be made to work better than it did in most people. If ordinary people, not only philosophers, could get clear on just what they meant by the good life and good government, for instance, he felt they might figure out how to improve their lives and their government.

The limited democracy of Athens had become a kind of shouting match in which the cleverest speaker won the day, whether he really knew what he was talking about or not. Some men were simply looking out for themselves and seeking ways to gain power. If they argued loudly and well, others too lazy to think for themselves would vote their way. Many citizens balked at having to listen to one another’s harangues and vote on them. Squabbles continued and men complained about their responsibilities as citizens; others took advantage of the confusion to try to bring back dictators. The playwright Aristophanes wrote some very funny plays about solving social problems in spite of the lying, cheating, lazy, yet clever Athenians. He also resorted, in several of his plays — Lysistrata and Women in Parliament — to the idea that women might solve the social problems of government and war better than men could.

Socrates — immortalized by his star pupil in Plato’s Dialogues — was meanwhile spending all his time cornering people and pressing them with questions to help them think more clearly, and he was much loved and admired for this by his followers. But his criticism of the muddle democratic government had gotten into finally led to his trial and execution.

Socrates saw people as throwing their ideas together from anything at all that came into their heads — like builders trying to make a building without a plan, throwing together any materials they happened to find lying around. So he tried to teach them to decide just what they wanted to think about, how to recognize and throw out useless ideas, how to make muddled ones clear, and how to build the clear and useful ones into the understanding they sought — in other words, he taught them to think in orderly ways, to reason logically.

Plato was influenced by the Eleatic search for perfection and fascinated by the beautifully clear ideas or definitions Socrates was able to arrive at by reasoning. Thus he concluded that perfect ideas must really exist somewhere behind the muddled world we normally see. Not only, he reasoned, was the material world beyond the senses perfect — with ideal forms of chairs and trees and everything else in our sensory world — but so also was there a world of perfect ideas, such as justice, love, truth, and beauty. Our senses shackle us, said Plato, showing us merely the flickering shadows of a perfect world beyond — a world of light we can reach only with our minds. It is interesting to compare these ideas with those of eastern philosophers teaching meditation to reach a perfect state of merger in the source reality of loving oneness.

Plato’s ideal world fit in with other philosophers’ ideas of the cosmos as a construction of perfect spheres, a world built from perfect atoms. All the older worldviews seemed childish in comparison with this elegant new one `discovered’ by reasoning minds. What could a perfect world, or cosmos, have to do with an unpredictable, moody goddess or with disorderly gods and goddesses who lied and tricked one another to get out of the messes they made? Poets began making fun of the old religion while philosophers began thinking of a new one.

A perfect world had to be the work of one perfect creator, Plato reasoned, a God, who existed apart from this shadow world, who created a perfect and unchanging world, a God who was always doing geometry!

The old philosophy of nature as alive and creative in its imperfection was replaced by belief in the perfect and rather mechanical creation of a single, though yet unknown, God. Perhaps this new worldview was comforting to the Athenians at a time when they were having so much trouble working out democratic order. At least they could believe in a perfect world just beyond the mess they were stuck in.

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Reposted from: LifeWeb

This morning’s article describes some mechanisms designed to release and increase your effective human intelligence. This article is excerpted from the Revised Internet Edition of Human Synergetics.

The Human Potential

N. Arthur Coulter, Jr, MD

Every human being is unique. We are not mass-produced according to some blueprint or master plan, each identical with the other. Each of us emerges from a different design, a different set of genes. But more than this, each of us has a unique history—a unique sequence of events that happened to us, together with our responses to those events and our reflections on the experience. Even identical twins, having duplicate genes, are distinguished from each other by their unique histories. In short, you are one of a kind. There is no other person in the world quite like you, there never has been, and there never will be.

In addition to being unique, every human being is precious. It took a billion or more years of evolution to make you what you are-an evolutionary process that is itself unique. Moreover, you are a being of incredible complexity — the design of the human ear or the human eye, for example, is simply magnificent. As for the human brain, it is a supercomputer whose intricacies and powers are far, far in advance of any of the artificial computers, which simply imitate and expand the simplest of those powers. The fact that a computer can do arithmetic much faster than a human brain may be of interest, but the really remarkable fact is that human brains invented arithmetic and designed computers to do it.

All this implies that each human being has a unique potential and that it is simply outrageous that everything possible is not done to permit that potential to develop. Yet every society on this planet not only does not do this, but is full of barriers and pressures to prevent it!

There are, for example, the twig-benders. These are groups that consider children to be a form of plant life and seek to capture them at an early age, hoping to bend the twigs in a direction that will force them to grow the way the twig-benders want them to. And so they indoctrinate them with their TRUTHS and inculcate them with their VALUES and above all instill in them habits and attitudes to ensure their obedience and conformity.

Of course, it doesn’t work. Children aren’t twigs. They are selfdetermined beings with a sense of their own individuality and worth, and they naturally rebel. But they are also small and dependent and, to the degree necessary, they submit to the twig-benders. The result is not only a messed-up world with a lot of messed-up people; far worse than that, it is a tragic waste of human potential. To paraphrase the poet, we all end up strangers and afraid, in a world we never made. And the tremendous potentials of our unique minds remain undeveloped. Comparatively speaking, we are mental dwarfs when we could have been giants.

Individual Synergetics starts with the heurism that we are unique, self-determined beings. Unlike some schools, its goal is not to eliminate “aberrations” or “neuroses” that cause people to deviate from “normality” (whatever that is), but to provide ideas and tools to enable the individual to eliminate the impedances blocking his uniq e development and to activate the unique synergies of his own mind. That is why we insist that the individual is always in charge of his own case. That is why we insist that coaching is not a form of psychotherapy, which implies that the coach is an Authority who Knows Best. No other person, no matter how wise or clever he may be, no matter how many books he has written or degrees he has earned or patients he has treated, can possibly know your mind as well as you do. True, he may see things that you have blocked from your awareness; but his vision is always partial and incomplete and superficial, from the outside. You are the only one who can see your mind from the inside; you are the only one who has access to all the data; you are the only one who can fit all the pieces together into a synergic whole.

It is this uniqueness that we respectfully and lovingly address; and all the ideas and tools of synergetics — no matter how pedantically they may be expressed-are designed from this perspective. Try them out if you wish; use them if they work; but never hesitate to adapt the tool to your needs or to change it to fit your own knowledge and experience.

The first step in Individual Synergetics — and the foundation of all that follows-is to focus on your uniqueness and to take charge of your own development. From this perspective, let us now examine the human potential, bearing in mind that everything that is said needs to be modified and tailored to fit that wonderful uniqueness.

The idea that the human mind is “an instrument of fantastic power and subtlety” whose “powers are barely tapped” has occurred to many human minds at various times and places. It is an appealing idea. Everyone would like to be supersmart, have total recall, and be irresistible to the opposite sex. The very appeal of the idea leads us to be defensive about it. At the same time, charlatans constantly exploit this appeal for their own enrichment, making matters more difficult for serious workers in this field. Despite these handicaps, there has been growing interest recently in the development of the human potential.

No attempt will be made, in this chapter to present a detailed chart of the potential abilities of the human mind. Instead, I will simply outline some domains of experience and action that are available to humans but do not appear to be fully used. These domains are used extensively in synergetics.

The average person appears to function largely on what we call the mind band of experience-he identifies with his ordinary consciousness and will. There is, however, potentially available an expanded consciousness, which we will call the broad band. Just as the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum made possible a host of new inventions such as radio, television, x-rays, infrared lamps and cameras, so may the exploration and use of the broad band make available new abilities to the individual.

It is convenient to describe the broad band in terms of the following domains:

1. The tempos
2. The tracks
3. The holistic level
4. Synergic team functions
 

The Tempos

Whatever the ego is aware of, at any given moment, we call the contents of consciousness. A content may be a sensation-the sight of a tree, the sound of a passing car, the smell of a rose, the taste of orange juice. Or it may be an idea-the idea of justice or conformity or happiness. It may be a mental image-the face of a loved one or a barber pole or a prune. It may be an emotional feeling of sadness or excitement or fear. It may be the recollection of a past incident or the anticipation of a future event. At any given moment, a large number of contents present themselves to awareness. The ego can selectively focus attention on some contents while ignoring others; but the focus is ordinarily on contents.

These contents are usually not fixed or static, however. As time goes on, they may change-in location, in intensity, in the features they present, in their relations to other contents. They may disappear from awareness while new contents appear. The continuous shifting, changing, emergence and disappearance of contents was described by William James in a famous metaphor as the stream of consciousness.

The stream of consciousness may be regarded as composed of a number of processes involving the various contents. Now, just as physical objects in motion have different velocities, so do the processes of the stream of consciousness have different tempos. Some occur very rapidly, others slowly, some so slowly they appear to be stationary. It is convenient to select one process whose characteristic tempo is familiar to all as a basis for comparison-the process of ordinary speech. We refer to processes having the tempo of speech as  orthoprocesses. Those that occur much more rapidly, we call microprocesses, those that occur much more slowly, macroprocesses.

We could, of course, devise a spectrum of process tempos, analogous to the electromagnetic spectrum. But it is unnecessary to be I so precise for our purposes. Just as visible light is used as a reference band in the electromagnetic spectrum, with infrared on one side and ultraviolet on the other, so can we roughly identify whether a process is an ortho, micro, or macroprocess.

It is at once evident that in ordinary’ consciousness, attention is focused almost entirely on orthoprocesses. Yet we can, if we choose, examine micro and macroprocesses. Indeed, this is one way consciousness may be expanded. We are not here referring, it should be noted, to the alteration of time sense that occurs under the influence of certain drugs, or in the state of hypnosis. What we refer to is a different kind of consciousness-expansion, one which opens the way to the development of a number of “new” abilities.

The microprocesses are particularly interesting. Usually we are unaware of their existence, but under special conditions we realize that an extraordinary number of very fast processes go on in company with the slower orthoprocesses.

A man driving a car with casual control suddenly observes the cars ahead abruptly stopping. In a flash he (a) evaluates his own speed, (b) predicts he cannot brake in time to avoid a collision, (c) evaluates the left lane to be unsafe, (d) decides to swerve to the right onto the shoulder, and (e) does so. All these processes occur in a fraction of a second. The driver may not be fully aware of them at the time, but they are recorded in memory and he can readily recall them. They occur in a rapid-fire sequence of flashes. In this case, they are simp y processes that ordinarily occur at ortho tempo, but have been speeded up under stress. (They are not “instinctive” because another person might panic under the same circumstances, and each process is one previously learned by the driver.) Not all microprocesses are of this type, however (i.e., speeding up of orthoprocesses).

Microprocesses occur frequently when the synergic mode is turned on, and indeed are one of the delights of the synergic mode. The experience of thoughts racing along several tracks simultaneously can be highly exhilarating. The expansion of consciousness to include microprocesses in addition to orthoprocesses is well worth the effort, in our opinion.

On the other side of the orthoprocesses are the macroprocesses — processes that go on so slowly that they usually escape notice, except for the vague realization that things have somehow changed. But they are there, and they are every bit as interesting as the microprocesses.

The mind-dweller characteristically is occupied with the present. He bases his judgments on the perspective of the moment and shifts with the tide as it turns without being aware that the tide is there. He interprets the past purely in terms of the values of “now,” and anticipates the future in the same terms.

Yet macroprocesses do occur; and most of us use them and are aware of them, to a degree. The flexible, patient pursuit of a longrange goal; the consistent application of a policy; the follow-through on a decision-these are examples of processes that occur at slow tempo that are familiar. However, there are others that go on that escape our notice, for which we have no names. We may look at a problem today and feel there is no way to solve it; the next day, looking at the same problem, we suddenly see how easy it is. The problem did not change, we did; yet we are unaware of the process by which this change occurred. This is another example of a macroprocess. We can expand our consciousness so as to become aware of these processes and to develop new abilities that use them.

To see each present moment in itself, in all the boundless variety and richness there to be found is, of course, important. But one can, do this without being stuck in present time. The domain of macroprocesses can also be lived in; it enables one, so to speak, to function as a four-dimensional being, to whom each “now” is but a phase of a process flowing on, and in terms of a perspective from which all “nows” are “present.”

It is in this domain that an individual evolves. These are the processes by which we may effect lasting changes in our being. They provide the means for achieving temporal organization of our experience. It is a domain well worth knowing better and using more.

The Tracks

As mind-dwellers, we not only confine ourselves to the tempo of orthoprocesses; we also limit our orientation to the contents of consciousness-the sights, the sounds, the images, the feelings, the desires, the memories, and so on.

But these contents do not just happen; they are produced by an activity that we refer to as operations. Thus, we associate one idea  with another; we compare these ideas, noting similarities and differences; we recall a memory of a previous incident; we search for a felt idea; we express or sublimate or repress an emotion. Each of these acts is an operation, and, of course, we have always known of their existence. But our characteristic orientation is toward contents, not operations.

We may make the distinction between content and operation clearer by comparing what goes on in our minds with what goes on in a movie. The contents of awareness are like the moving picture on the screen; our attention is focused on the screen. The operations of awareness are like the processes going on in the movie projector. We rarely pay any attention to the projector.

Yet there is a simple act by which we can shift our orientation from content to operation. Curiously, this act apparently has no name. Borrowing a term from electrical engineering, we refer to this act as phase shift, because it is a shift in the phase of orientation. Phase shift goes counter to the “natural tendency of the mind”; but it is a simple act and one that is readily learned. With practice, it is possible not only to perform phase shift easily and habitually, but also to maintain it as an orientation without losing contact with contents. When this is done, another new domain of experience becomes available.

It is convenient to give this new domain a name. We therefore introduce the term main track to denote the domain of experience occurring as a result of the orientation to contents that we ordinarily use, and hypertrack to denote the domain of experience occurring as a result of sustained orientation to operations.

As with any new skill, learning to orient to hypertrack is awkward at first. (Remember your first effort to ride a bicycle?) But gradually we learn to use it and soon become fascinated with the new perspective it gives us and the potentialities for development it affords. An immediate advantage is a greatly heightened ability to understand other human beings. Operations produce contents. Hypertrack orients us to the causal level of human thought, feeling and action.

There are other advantages that will become apparent as we proceed. One point soon emerges, however, Our language is adapted for use on the “mind band” — main track and orthoprocesses. It does not lend itself readily to communication about the domain of hypertrack (or the other domains of the broad band). There are many operations and processes of the broad band for which words do not yet exist. Hence, it has been necessary to introduce a number of new technical terms to describe these operations and processes. “Hypertrack” is an example of such a term. We refer to the evolving collection of such terms, affectionately, as “synergese.” When syngeneers speak in synergese, it can be rather annoying to someone who is unfamiliar with the language. But every field has its technical jargon, including sports like baseball or football.

There is another sense in which language is inadequate. As noted, language is designed for the mind band of main track and orthoprocesses. It is not well-suited for managing the events of hypertrack or other domains of the broad band. Here, an analogy with computer science is helpful. The “language” that computers use is the language of numbers, actually a special kind of number composed of binary digits (zero and one). This is called machine language. It is very tedious and difficult to program a computer in machine language. Consequently, a number of special languages, called programming languages, have been invented. These are close enough to ordinary language (like English) that they are relatively easy to learn and to use. Programs to control computers are written in one of these programming languages (such as FORTRAN, which stands for FORmula TRANslator). The computer then translates these programs into machine language automatically.

In the case of the broad band available to the human mind, we are confronted with a more difficult problem, the opposite of that which computer programmers had to solve. Computers were designed by humans, and the language they use, machine language, is known. We still know very little, however, about the broad band. Nevertheless, by trial and error, we are gradually developing a special language for controlling the broad band more effectively. It is called SYNTALK 1. It is still not very well-defined, and a definitive version has not yet been presented. We won’t do so here. However, portions of SYNTALK I will be included in later sections of this book. This is a promising area for research by creative workers in synergetics especially computer programmers.

One further remark about hypertrack: the ability to use hypertrack is basic to tracking, a powerful technique for controlling thought processes. This will be described later.

Phase shift, as we have noted, is the mental operation of focusing attention upon operations rather than contents. The inverse operation, moving from operations back to contents, is relatively easy to use. But there is another operation that is possible, a shift from main track to a more elemental and primordial domain. We refer to this operation as prime shift, and the domain “below” main track as prime track.

Prime track is the march of events as sensed before their organization into contents of the mind. It is the series of black marks on a white background from which you are now forming words with meaning. It is the set of processes actually going on when you are SICK and have MEASLES or a COLD. It is the “real world” out there and not the SIGHT or SOUND that gives you knowledge of it. It is your friend as he actually is, not the GOOD OLD PAL you think of him as. It is yourself in a strange place without your bearings, not the “I” that is somehow LOST.

In dealing with prime track, we sometimes adopt the convention of capitalizing all words describing what is perceived on main track. This permits the individual to perform a prime shift if he so desires.
Prime shift evokes the realization that, in ordinary consciousness, our attention is focused, not on the actual present, but on the immediate past. By the time the raw data of sense have organized themselves into contents, time has already moved on. We are always one step behind in our perception of events. It is a very short step — a fraction of a second-but during that brief moment a variety of processes go on. This is another part of the domain of the fabulous microprocesses. In this fleeting moment many exciting and important things happen, of which we are ordinarily oblivious. Prime shift enables us to develop an awareness of these processes. We also learn that, once a content has been created, it tends to persist even when it no longer adequately represents what is currently happening. This is a major source of illusion.

One of the subtle fallacies to which the human mind is subject is the tendency to regard the sum total of its perceptions at any given moment as a complete representation of the world at that moment, When we reflect on this, we realize that this is not so; but the tendency persists anyhow. Several workers such as Arbib (5) and Fischer (6), have pointed out that perception is not just a passive process of highfidelity mapping of the environment, but an active process of continuously constructing and reconstructing a map on the basis of sensory input cues, with selective emphasis on those referents that are relevant to the goals and interests of the individual. Furthermore, the perceptual systems on which the human mind depend for information endow its maps of reality with a particular quality that is by no means necessarily universal. An animal with a well-developed sense of smell, such as a dog, probably has a different quality for its maps; and one can conceive of organisms sensitive to ultraviolet or infrared radiation, or to ultrasonic sounds, or to magnetic fields or other forms of energy, also having a quality for their maps that might be quite different from those of human beings.

Prime shift enables the individual, to some extent at least, to free himself from exclusive linkage to main track contents. It brings to attention events and processes at the subgestalt level, processes that are filtered out by exclusive focus on main track. It also brings to awareness cognizance of what is left out-the realization, not just at an intellectual level, but at a concrete, action-influencing level, that far more is going on at a given moment than a person can possibly be conscious of.

Korzybski was fond of insisting “whatever you say a thing is, it is not.” This paradoxical statement could be irritating, but its intent was to focus cognizance upon what is left out of any verbal representation no matter how precisely and thoroughly it is expressed. He also adopted the convention of frequent use of “etc.” to remind the reader or listener of the necessarily partial and incomplete character of his statements. It is a wise convention.

Prime shift is also useful in breaking up identifications-the unconscious linkages (and blockages) of the Identic Mode. When combined with phase shift, it provides a powerful tool for clearing impedances, those “irrational” patterns of perception, thought, emotion, body control, and action that slow down and interfere with the effectiveness of mental function. This is discussed in more detail later.

Prime track, main track, and hypertrack thus comprise three levels of the broad band, just as microprocesses, orthoprocesses, and macroprocesses comprise three different characteristic tempos of events. It should be noted that hypertrack or prime track processes can also move at any of the three tempos. There are thus three times three, or nine, different “narrow bands” of the broad band as thus far described.

But this is not all. Effective function in the broad band requires the development of synergies among the various tracks and tempos. Thus, there is main track-hypertrack synergy, consisting of interactions that promote processes at both levels. Similarly, there is macroprocess-orthoprocess synergy. And so on. Etc.

As these synergies occur (as well as other synergies discussed later), there emerges a synergic whole that is greater than the mere sum of its parts. For lack of a better term, we sometimes refer to it as the “holistic” or whole being level. This emphasizes one of its aspects. But in another aspect, it is an old friend-the synergic mode.

A characteristic of the whole being level is that the individual no longer identifies with his consciousness and will. These become merely particular functions associated with main track and orthoprocesses the “mind band” of experience. They are the command functions of the ordinary ego.

As a working hypothesis, we propose the view that the human mind is still evolving, and that the ordinary ego is a “transitional control center” which, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, will some day expand into a new control center, the Director, competent to the management of the broad band.

Be this as it may, there is another aspect of the whole being level that needs to be described, an aspect that is actually another domain of experience of the broad band. If, from the orientation of hypertrack, the individual performs another phase shift, an operation that concomitantly embraces all tracks and tempos, this new domain emerges into awareness. We refer to this domain as ultratrack
It is extremely difficult, at first, to sustain an ultratrack orientation. What seems to be necessary is for a relatively high degree of synergy among the various tracks and tempos to be first established.
It is very difficult to describe in words the view from ultratrack or the processes that occur at this level. At this point, it seems wiser merely to define it as we have, as the level from which all tracks and tempos are viewed and managed, and to rely on the experience of the reader to fill in details.

Synergic Team Functions

A relatively stable orientation to the broad band is difficult to achieve at present. The operations of prime shift and phase shift are relatively easy to learn, however, as are the operations of selective focus upon microprocesses and macroprocesses. With practice and the use of exercises and techniques described later, one finds the broad band becoming increasingly accessible. Even here, however, this is best achieved in an environment in which the individual is relatively free from pressures and distractions. In ordinary social discourse and interactions, there are very strong constraints that force the individual to function almost entirely on the mind band. It is possible to resist these constraints to a certain degree, but the effort and struggle involved are considerable. It seems wiser, at first, simply to accept these constraints as “forces of nature” like the force of gravity, and to reserve efforts to expand into the broad band for synergetic sessions.

One of these constraints is the simple act of verbal communication, which plays so dominant a role in social discourse and interaction. This act, almost by definition, constrains the individual to orthoprocesses and main track. And it is curiously difficult to be silent in the presence of another without feeling uncomfortable about it. The maxim that “silence is golden” seems to apply to another era.

Nevertheless, there are a few simple techniques that promote function on the broad band in the presence of another, which we have found useful. This is especially so when the other person knows something about synergetics and is interested in applying it. Indeed, use of these techniques while interacting with another syngeneer may quickly lead to a synergic relationship in which each helps the other to operate on the broad band. For this reason, these techniques are described here, although they properly belong in the field of Group Synergetics.

These techniques are not new-they have always been available to you, and no doubt you have used them on occasion. They do, however, promote synergy. And their habitual use, as part of a life-style, helps the individual function regularly in the synergic mode, using the broad band.

1. Affinity make. In the course of relations with another human being, aspects of his action or being periodically emerge for which one feels affinity. This is true of most of the people one encounters. Each of us has so many facets that some are bound to be “likeable.”

When such affinity is felt, express it. This action is an affinity make. When it is done, both parties feel better and a surge of synergy occurs.

Two important qualifications should be noted:

a. An affinity make is primarily expressed by action, not words. It can be by a look or a gesture. Of course, a verbal statement is a form of action and is often the simplest way to do it, but it is more the way it is said than the explicit content that makes the flow of affinity. An example: “I hate you,” said in an affectionately jocular manner.

b. It must be genuine. Most people are aware of the power of flattery and are pretty good at detecting it. Whether detected or not, flattery does not promote synergy. This is not stated as an ethical judgment, but as an observation of human beings in action.

Opportunities for affinity makes are constantly occurring. But there is so much dysergy in the world that these opportunities are often overlooked. Yet an affinity make is a powerful synergy generator.

2. Empathy make. This consists essentially of the operation: “Put yourself in the other fellow’s shoes.” This does not mean doing so from your viewpoint and values, but from his viewpoint and values. It is not necessary to accept his viewpoint and values, merely to understand them and to see how events and situations look from his perspective.

An empathy make has several values:

a. Each human being is like a walking, talking library, with years of experience, data, and know-how different from yours. It is always possible to learn from another human being, no matter how humble, no matter how great. An empathy make enables one to take advantage of this opportunity.
b. An empathy make promotes affinity, mutual understanding, and effectiveness of communication.

c. An empathy make develops the ability to see things from a variety of perspectives simultaneously. It turns on the multiordinal mode. From this, it is a small additional step to the synergic mode.

3. Semantic telepathy. Affinity and empathy makes help one to communicate with others in a synergic team with remarkable effectiveness. We refer to such
communications as “semantic telepathy.” (The word “telepathy” is used here not in the usual sense of “direct thought transference” but in the sense of nonverbal communication of meaning.)

Consider two individuals, Mr. A and Ms. B. Mr. A has an idea that he wishes to communicate. He first of all encodes the idea into words and speaks the words. Ms. B hears the words and decodes the message. If all goes well, the idea she gets will be the same as Mr. A’s. When this happens, we say that semantic communion has been achieved. Semantic communion does not necessarily mean agreement, merely understanding.

Semantic communion is the primary goal of communication, and one can use a variety of means other than the verbal message to achieve it. The set of these other means constitutes semantic telepathy. The receiver, for example, may make a deliberate effort to predict the message. One way to do this is to follow the rule: “Focus on what he means, not what he says.” As soon as she gets the message, she calls out “clear,” and Mr. A immediately ends the verbal message.

The sender, in framing the verbal message, uses empathy makes in order to state the idea in terms that fit the perspective of the receiver. He is continuously aware that the same word may have different meanings to different people or even to the same person at different times. Since semantic communion is the goal he does not insist on the “correctness” of his meaning, but accepts hers.
If the idea is abstract, such differences of word meaning may be considerable. So he follows the natural movement of the mind, in which a concrete perceptual experience usually precedes an abstraction from that experience, and begins with a concrete presentation that readily evokes semantic communion, and then moves to the abstraction, rather than first stating the abstraction.

One very useful technique is called bridging The sender evaluates areas of agreement he has with the receiver, and separates these from areas of difference of outlook, disagreement, or conflict. He then uses the area of agreement as a bridge through which to transmit his message, A good rule here is: “Pick an agreement with her.”

A frequent obstacle to semantic communion is the existence of a distinction made by the sender but not by the receiver (or vice versa). This is a source of confusion. The idea of empathy, for example, may imply or include the concept of sympathy to the receiver, whereas for the sender these are two somewhat similar but distinct ideas. Whoever makes the distinction is best able to communicate it.

Another obstacle is an apparent agreement that obscures the fact that semantic communion has not really been achieved. The receiver may nod agreement because the verbal message evokes a clear picture in her mind, not realizing that the picture is not the same as that of the sender. This can be minimized by a policy of not taking semantic communion for granted, a policy adopted by both sender and receiver. Semantic communion can be checked by the sender using a concrete illustration of the message he has sent, or by the receiver repeating the message in her own words. The mere cognizance of the possibility of this source of confusion minimizes the probability of its occurring.

There are other purposes of communication besides semantic communion such as achieving agreement, persuading the receiver to accept an idea or to do something, or simply to convey affinity (or rejection or some other state of relationship). But, for most of these, semantic communion is prerequisite. It is indeed remarkable that despite the tremendous expansion of the physical means for communication — telephone, mimeograph or other forms of replication, radio and TV, etc. — semantic communion is so often not achieved. Misunderstanding piles upon misunderstanding, and affinity and empathy go down, with a concomitant rise in mistrust, hostility, and conflict. While such failure to achieve semantic communion is by no means the only cause of human problems, it is a major cause of many and a contributing cause of most.

4. Synapse. Affinity makes and empathy makes can be used with anyone. So can semantic telepathy, but it is much more effective when done by two syngeneers. When each party knowingly focuses on semantic communion as the goal of communication, the interchange of information and the degree of trust and rapport can reach remarkable heights. And as this occurs, a step beyond semantic telepathy becomes feasible.

Any message tells far more than it says. Surrounding the explicit statement-what the message says-there is a network of plausible inferences and connotations, the implicative residue. When semantic communion is rapidly and easily achieved, communication can be expanded by focusing on the implicative residue.

The basic rule of semantic telepathy is: “Focus on what he means, not what he says.”

The basic rule of synapse is: “Focus on the implications of what he means. ” It is a step beyond and much fun.

5. Franktalk refers to presentation without rancor of ideas or evaluations critical of the actions or viewpoints of another. An implicit convention governs franktalk. If this convention is broken, franktalk is ineffective and often counterproductive. It is therefore recommended that franktalk not be used unless one is sure that the convention holds. The convention is usually easy to establish by use of affinity makes or bridging (or both) beforehand.

The convention is simply neither to take offense nor to give it. If the sender “talks down” to the receiver, displays or feels hostility, shows an unwillingness to receive franktalk in return, etc., the convention is broken. If the receiver feels hurt, imputes unfriendly motives, or feels called upon to defend or justify, the convention is broken. The sender does not try to persuade; he simply presents for consideration. Similarly, the receiver accepts for consideration. That is all.

Franktalk gets behind the veneer of politeness we so often use to hide from one another. Among syngeneers, it can be highly effective and useful.

6. Totaltalk. This is an advanced mode of communication that emerges when the previously described synergic team functions are used so regularly that they form a synergic whole and when a broad band orientation has become characteristic. We can distinguish four channels:

 a. Mind-to-mind.
 b. Mind-to-whole.
 c. Whole-to-mind.
 d. Whole-to-whole.

In totaltalk, all four channels are used concomitantly. For example, one reads the mind band and uses it. Simultaneously, one reads

implicative residue, as much as one wishes. This can be done as a mind, consciously. It can also be done as a whole being, “knowingly.” By “knowingly” is meant the whole being analog of consciousness. But one should not be bound by this analogy. To “know” in this sense is “to-be-able-to-be-conscious-of-if-the-need-arises.” It is this, and more, but words fail. Get the feel?

It is possible to describe in greater detail the enormous variety of processes that go on in totaltalk. But a verbal description would take a whole book in itself and would still be inadequate. Instead, let us merely regard the four available channels, focus on the implicative residue, and let out minds go where they will.

One final word: ETC.

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Human Synergetics