Science meets Spirituality in Consciousness
From the monthly archives:
I was inspired to write this article by an exchange of comments on a science blog that I got involved with a while back. It reminded me of how similar people are regardless of their education and point of view, and how fundamentalist behavior can be found just about anywhere. The discussion was started by [...]
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Wes Hopper
We are at a very interesting tipping point in history, one that humanity has not seen for 300 or so years. That point is a substantial shift in world view from one of solely deterministic mechanical processes that create an external reality independent of ourselves, to a world view in which we realize that we are creative beings living in a participatory universe.
This tipping point has arisen because advances in science over the last 100 years, and especially recently, have made it impossible for any open minded investigator to ignore the incompleteness of the materialist model that has dominated science since Copernicus.
Monistic Idealism is designed to explore the intersection of hard science, consciousness studies and spirituality by discussing new research, publications and commentary on these issues. As in any emerging discipline there are more questions than answers, but it is encouraging that there are more and more very smart people addressing them.
I'm not a research scientist myself, I'm an electronics engineer with a deep interest in these ideas, and an active skepticism about the wild leaps taken by many New Age writers who like to attach "quantum" to everything to make it sound scientific. There is plenty of real science to be excited about without going off the deep end. Your comments are encouraged.
Here is a PDF of a paper I presented in October, 2009 at a conference on Science and Religion. I maintain that the unifying factor between those two areas is consciousness, and that there are numerous science problems that cannot be solved without somehow incorporating consciousness as a causal element.
The Emerging Importance of Consciousness in Physics
Please note that just because it was a Science and Religion conference doesn't mean that I think that materialist, deterministic science, and literalistic ancient religion can agree. I'm an optimist, not a magician. The conference attracted the open minded from both camps.
