Creative Evolution by Amit Goswami PhD
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A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism And Intelligent Design
I've added some youtube videos that illustrate the spiritual perspective from which Goswami speaks. The book is much closer to science than the videos.
(Dit zelfde boekverslag in het Nederlands: Creatieve Evolutie, Amit Goswami)
Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism And Intelligent Design
Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design
Amazon Price: $16.23 (as of 02/13/2012)
Scientific materialism is a metaphysical assumption
(page 13) "Any organizing principle that is nonmaterial is automatically excluded from science by definition. However, mainstream scientists themselves, biologists included, have a fundamental but unproven metaphysical assumption behind their work called scientific materialism."
An analysis of the limitations of Darwinian Evolution
A critique of conventional biology
- Why has evolution proceeded in jumps and starts? Darwin himself predicted a gradual evolution.
- Recent discoveries make it clear that not all inherited traits are genetic in source.
That is: gene expression is regulated by something other than genes. - How can consciousness emerge out of matter?
The basic illustration of this question is the computer: it can do all kinds of things, but it cannot process meaning - and that's a fundamental property, not something that merely requires more calculating power. So where does our sense of meaning come from?
The last point is the one that is most fundamental, but the other ones can't be easily explained away either. The basic charge against mainstream biology that Amit Goswami levels is: Darwinian evolution is not a scientific theory because it cannot be falsified as used at present. For this reason he reformulates the theory in various ways throughout the book. Some variations are clearly true, some can be proven wrong. Either way - logic demands more than biology gives.
In other words: is the creativity of nature an 'emergent property' or the result of some inherent consciousness in the universe? Amit Goswami answers that consciousness is primary and matter secondary. I'm not sure where I stand on this - but I can't believe that matter itself is creative.
“Difficult, profound, imaginative and probably true”
Amit Goswami biography from wikipedia (oct. 2010)
Amit Goswami is a theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968, teaching physics for 32 years. After a period of distress and frustration in his private and professional life starting at the age 38, his research interests shifted to quantum cosmology, quantum measurement theory, and applications of quantum mechanics to the mind-body problem. He became best known as one of the interviewed scientists featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?. Goswami is also featured in the recent documentary about the Dalai Lama entitled Dalai Lama Renaissance, and stars in the newly released documentary "The Quantum Activist"Professional life
Originally from India, Goswami received his Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta in physics in 1964, from where he moved to the United States early in his career. Fully retired as a faculty member since 2003, he is now engaged in far-reaching national and international speaking engagements. He teaches fairly regularly at the Ernest Holmes Institute, the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles; Pacifica, California; and UNIPAZ in Portugal, and is a member of the advisory board of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where he was a senior scholar in residence during 1998 to 2000.
Science and spirituality
In the late 1980s Goswami developed an idealist interpretation of quantum mechanics, inspired in part by philosophical ideas drawn from Advaita Vedanta and theosophy. Calling his theory "monistic idealism", he claims it is not only "the basis of all religions worldwide" but also the correct philosophy for modern science. In contrast to materialistic conventional science, he claims that universal consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all existence, in congruence with mystic sages. Consciousness, deemed as the precursor of physicality, arises from conscious observation through a process intimately connected to wavefunction collapse in a quantum measurement. Once the assumption that there is an objective reality independent of consciousness is put aside, the paradoxes of quantum physics are explainable, according to Goswami.
As a pioneer of a self-styled multidisciplinary scientific paradigm, he refers to himself as a "quantum activist" engaging in research on the "Science within consciousness", which comprises and explains the "downward causation" and the upwards drift in the fields of physics, biology, and psychology and more recently the healing arts, thus resulting in varied theories of integral medicine based on five interchanging levels of existence: the physical, the vital, the mental, the supra-mental intellect and the limitless bliss state.
Musings
Goswami is in favor of lucid dreaming, which simultaneously allows adoption of the equipotency of the waking and the dreaming state and precipitates creativity. He claims that this skill has provided him instantaneous insights regarding superconductivity in regard to the structure of the atomic nuclei. Following this he discovered the self-owned illusion that mind and brain are identical. Topics like death, reincarnation and immortality drew Goswami's interest of research.
source
Image from wikipedia, see www.alinssite.info and amitgoswami.org
What do you think of Amit Goswami's version of creationism?
Do you buy this version of Intelligent Design?
The fundamental point
If matter cannot even process meaning or organize consciousness, how then can matter produce meaning and consciousness as adaptive epiphenomena from which nature may select? (p. 19)
Amit Goswami, Quantum Physics & Consciousness 1 of 3
Biology is an incomplete science
(page 8) "Every biologist must be painfully aware that biology is an incomplete science. It needs new organizing principles, ones that are nonphysical and nonmaterial, to explain three perennial mysteries: the difference between life and nonlife, the development of an embryo into an adult biological form, and, as emphasized here and by Eldredge and Gould, the discontinuous epochs of evolution. Unfortunately, it is not politically correct for biologist to admit these shortcomings in public."
My blogposts about Quantum Spirituality
Goswami's version of Intelligent Design explored
- Limits to quantum mechanics and spiritual freedom
- I've been reading Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design, by Amit Goswami. I'm impressed, the chemist in me (I was taught some quantum physics in college) doesn't find fault. Nor does the biologist or the philosopher (I took biology and philosophy of religion classes in college too).
But I do have some reservations with the implications of Amit Goswami's quantum spirituality for our every day lives. And I have quantum physical reasons to back them up too. I hope you all don't mind a little chemistry lesson today. - What makes us human? about evolution and religion
- Just summing up what biology has to say about this - purely from a genetic standpoint.
- Creating the universe: consciousness choosing to observe
- Quantum spirituality explained and questioned from the perspective of classic quantum physics.
- Tangled hierarchies and the creative evolution of consciousness
- The core of Amit Goswami's argument in his 'Creative Evolution' is that consciousness is an active force in 'creation'. And at the heart of that argument is the argument of tangled hierarchies.
- Upward, downward and pluralistic causation
- Does consciousness cause everything (Goswami)? Or matter (classic scientism)? Or something else?
- Unity in diversity - about a holistic approach
- The traditional spiritual approach - in East AND West - is that there is unity behind all that diversity. Christians and Muslims call that unity God, in Vedanta it's called Mulaprakriti. So I went walking just now to clear my head and come up with a new way of writing about this. I'm afraid though, that even the beauty of the sound of the wind in the leaves of the trees did not help me with this. So bear with me as I repeat what to many of you may already be obvious:
Humans have total freedom, in God Consciousness
(page 33) "In God-consciousness, we have total freedom to choose among the possibilities that quantum dynamics offers for the states of quantum objects. Conditioning limits this freedom of choice in favor of past responses to stimuli (learning). Eventually, we become conditioned to identify with a particular pattern of habits for responding to stimuli; this identification is the ego."
Amit Goswami, Quantum Physics & Consciousness 2 of 3
Why do I feel seperate from you?
Consciousness chooses among the possible choices
(pages 203-203) "In quantum thinking, genetic determinism gives only part of the answer - the possible variations. However, natural selection in Darwinian form cannot collapse these possibilities into an actual change; that requires consciousness. But if we reinterpret `natural selection' as choice by nature in the form of Gaia-consciousness according to the creative requirements of the situation, this selection can collapse the possibilities into actually."
Amit Goswami, Quantum Physics & Consciousness 3 of 3
Ultimately it's about BOTH God consciousness, AND individual consciousness. The place from which I create - there we are ONE. The individual, the I, the ego has to prepare. It then has to use the insight in this world.
Spiritual traditions sometimes denigrate the individual. It's both the meaning of the individual and the movement of the whole. It can not be otherwise.
Unitive consciousness is God-consciousness
(page 32) "We choose not from ordinary ego-consciousness, but from a nonordinary state of unitive consciousness - call it quantum consciousness. You can easily recognize, though, if you are familiar with esoteric spiritual traditions, that this unitive character of consciousness is widely recognized as God-consciousness. Quantum physics is introducing God-consciousness as the agent of downward causation."
Fossil Gaps - about the speed of evolution
(page 15) "According to theoretical predictions of Darwinism and its later versions, there should have been thousand upon thousands of reported cases of intermediates filling up most of the fossil gaps. That hasn't happened, and therefore the question of the fossil gaps cannot be refuted simply because a few cases of transitional fossils have been found."
Amit Goswami's best selling books
The biological arrow of time
(page 77) "With an understanding of the evolution toward complexity, the biological arrow of time is no longer a mystery. As organisms get more sophisticated as a result of evolution, they represent within themselves more and more sophistication. Over the course of this change, the organism become more sophisticated in processing feeling. And all this creation of complexity, this increasing order and sophistication, requires the involvement of creativity from consciousness."
People mentioned in this book
What does this mean to you?
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jonnie
Mar 1, 2011 @ 8:50 pm | delete
- Don't you think that you should mention Henri bersgon and his book Creative Evolution, in which he talks of elan vital, the power of time as durational change and the invisible hand behind matter as it pulls towards life and consciousness.
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JoDeeVale
Jun 25, 2009 @ 1:23 pm | delete
- I am a HUGE fan of Amit Goswami! He makes the unfathomable understandable to those of us that merely dabble in quantum physics! It is truly remarkable that science and spirituality are meeting in the same place!
I am featuring this lens here: http://www.squidoo.com/evolution_consciousness
Thank you for creating this! Blessings!
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Jun 19, 2009 @ 1:28 pm | delete
- For those who take the time to read and study the new and advanced science discoveries that are being made, without prejudice, are in for a glorious journey of self understanding, as well as understanding the earth and the universe, the cycles, the mathematics, and the history.
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CleanerLife
Jun 15, 2009 @ 11:18 am | delete
- Very interesting. I've believed for a long time that belief in Evolution takes just as much faith as belief in Creationism. It is interesting how some people who claim to be skeptics, and bash Creationism, simply put their skepticism aside when it comes to Evolution. I'll have to check this book out for myself, I haven't heard of Amit Goswami before, but he sounds fascinating.
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