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Routledge eBooks

The Whole is Greater than the Parts

Kit Pedler

Published Oct 4, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Current physics has progressed beyond the idea that there is an outside world lying somewhere entirely separate from ourselves. It has shown very clearly instead that there are real and functional connections between our minds and the world around us and that our human senses do not and cannot appreciate this more variable world of space-time, interaction and exchange as an objective and real place. Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen were worrying about a part of physics called quantum theory which others like Bohr and Heisenberg were regarding as a complete theory. One new part of physics is suggesting that matter and the universe itself may have connections and correlations in an enfolded universe where there seem to be no clear causes and effects, but only connections.

DOI
10.4324/9781032630533-13

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The capacity to acquire and use fully complex language systems made the members of our species fully conscious and self-aware beings in the vast cosmos. But this enormous privilege came with a price. After our ancestors began to live storied lives in a linguistically based symbolic universe, the world that previous generations experienced as an integrated and undivided whole split into two worlds—an inner world where the self that is aware of its own awareness exists and an outer world in which this self seeks to gratify its needs and establish a meaningful sense of connection with other selves. And this explains why the most fundamental impulse in the storied lives of fully modern humans has always been to close the gap between these inner and outer worlds by integrating all seemingly discordant parts of a symbolic universe into a meaningful and coherent whole. The narrative that has consistently served this function is religion. But during the first scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, another narrative emerged called Newtonian or classical physics that also promised to bridge the gap between self and world by integrating all of the seemingly discordant parts of the physical universe into a coherent and meaningful whole. In this physics, one universal force, gravity, governs the motion, interaction, and blending of indestructible atoms or mass points. And since the laws of gravity were completely deterministic, it was assumed that all events in the cosmos are predetermined by the forces associated with these laws and that the future of any physical system could be predicted with absolute certainty if initial conditions are known. In the worldview of classical physics, human beings were cogs in a giant machine and linked to other parts of this machine in only the most mundane material terms. The knowing self was separate, discrete, and isolated from the physical world, and all the creativity of the cosmos was exhausted in the first instant of creation. As physicist Henry Stapp points out, “Classical physics not only fails to demand the mental, it fails to even provide a rational place for the mental.