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How to survive the coming food shortage.

73 Responses to “My gGlobe(tm): Intelligent Design in a Nutshell”

Pages: [2] 1 » Show All

1. 
   73
   Mike LaSalle Says:
   January 27th, 2008 at 7:35 pm

   My sincere apologies to Amfortas that his previous comments were not carried over from the old server. Amfortas please repost them if you will. I do think you are correct, and I agree that my own explications are too abstract to be of much meaning or use to anyone but myself.

   Drew here was my neighbor in Guerneville while I was writing up the Bicameral Universe idea in 2006. He took a look at this image of the model and saw the hour glass shape. He took the greyscale printout to his house and marked up the outline of the model. I still have that drawing. I talked with Drew about the whole concept on a number of occasions. I think Drew really “gets” the concept because he is a naturally gifted mathematician — and a sound engineer. Waves are his stock and trade.

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   72
   drewmcginness Says:
   January 23rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm

   I still like the Picture of the Bicamerel Universe, someone REALLY cool must have drawn that……
   drew~
   wheres the credit, when credits due?…. I dont know,I maxed my visa out~

3. 
   71
   spectre Says:
   December 16th, 2007 at 10:10 pm

   AMfortas in post #54 wrote in response to a question I posited to Mike:

   “Spectre asks in #26, “… Are you proposing that spacetime had a preexisting existence prior to the big bang?”

   David Bohm would have said ‘Yes’.”

   Here lies the problem: the qualities of space, time, spacetime, are only useful in describing the geometry of our universe that we exist in. Space and time are absolutely meaningless concepts in a total vacuum … they can only be used to describe the geometry within our existing universe. Much like the penalty of “clipping” has no meaning outside of the game of football.

   To posit that spacetime had an existence prior to the big bang is absolutely inapposite to the theory itself. Furthermore, even in our own universe space and time are phenomena relative to the observer. Not merely to the measurement thereof, but its actual intrinsic reality. Where an event occurs or when it occurs is dependent upon the observer making the observation. There is no such thing as absolute simultaniety or an absolute point in spacetime.

   Intrinsic in the big bang is that that event created spacetime … period.

   Why?

   Because the concepts of “where” or “when” had no meaning until we had a universe where they were relevant properties.

   To speak of time and space outside of our present universe is an exercise in futility, as the properties of “where” and “when” are meaningless expressions when used to attempt to describe anything outside our universe.

   One can argue only very loosely that our universe is not the only universe … to say that another universe existed before or exists concurrently with our own strains credulity. Because one cannot make any reference to “where” or “when” beyond the bounds of our own universe.

   I hope I’m not too confusing with this post … I’m merely trying to highlight the inherent problem in trying to posit the existence of things using measurements and properties that are only meant and that are only meaningful in the context of our universe.

   I like Mike’s work, but to speak of alternate universes or spacetime prior to the big bang in terms and measurements meaningful to our own universe is futile because the concepts of where and when are meaningless beyond the scope of our universe.

   That’s the problem I have with Mike’s thesis. It’s eloquent, but it attempts to describe a framework using the laws of physics where they do not apply.

   Perhaps another universe does exist theoritically, but where it exists or when it exists are meaningless questions. It’s not the the measurement of where or when is difficult … it’s that where or when are meaningless concepts in any description of an alternate universe … or any state of reality prior to the big bang.

   I like my “clipping” analogy. It has no reality, no meaning, outside of the game of football.

4. 
   70
   anti armchair generals Says:
   November 7th, 2007 at 12:02 am

   Wikipedia has 1800 century depiction of Lilith. She seems beautiful and seductive. The previlous link indicated that a “Lilith” nagazine is written by feminist and articles about her elsewhere. Somehow the picture is a condradiction of feminist ideal since women are not supposed to admired by their appearance but by their talent and what their do. Historically Lilitht deeds were semi-demonic.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith

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   69
   anti armchair generals Says:
   November 2nd, 2007 at 10:58 pm

   Mike La Salle
   This is the first time I located a site that seems to vaildate your observation. Ironically the article describes Lilith that has methamorphed into a feminist icon,
   I realy don’t know how authentic the article is since anyone can post their views on the Internet

   http://www.myjewishlearning.com/ideas_belief/god/Overview_About_God/Angels/Demons/Lilith.htm#

6. 
   68
   amfortas Says:
   November 2nd, 2007 at 9:19 pm

   I doubt any could argue with that Mike. That elemental is the urge to explode one’s seed upon the world, active even as we sleep. The succubus lurks in the depths – or rather the hormones. For woman it is the incubus, that horny little devil that takes them to orgasm in the night too. But as far as temptations go, and natural at that, lustiness is a great gift by the Prime Mover.

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   67
   Mike LaSalle Says:
   November 2nd, 2007 at 6:32 pm

   Even though most of the Lilith legend is derived from Jewish folklore, descriptions of the Lilith demon appear in Iranian, Babylonian, Mexican, Greek, Arab, English, German, Oriental and Native American legends. Also, she sometimes has been associated with legendary and mythological characters such as the Queen of Sheba and Helen of Troy. In medieval Europe she was proclaimed to be the wife, concubine or grandmother of Satan.

   If true that “Lilith” mythology appears across so many cultures — some of them separated by continents — then I would say that it must represent some elemental aspect of human nature.

   Very interesting stuff.

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   anti armchair generals Says:
   November 2nd, 2007 at 5:32 pm

   Mike La Salle,
   Thank you for resources for understanding the “La Salle Code (53) Since theology is not my area of expertise either, I did not read “Da Vinci Code” but saw the Hollywood version.
   Recently I saw somewhere that Lilith, not Eve was Adam’s first wife. Because she disobeyed the Creator Lilith became a she-demon who seduced men in their sleep,causing nocturnal emission.
   According this article on Mythology, medival monks would sleep with their hands over their genitals, clutching a crusifix to ward off Lilith. What do you know about her
   http://www.pantheon.org/articles/l/lilith.html

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   Roger Knight Says:
   November 1st, 2007 at 10:54 pm

   When we are taught arithmetic as children (before the crazy fuzzy math got into our school curriculae) some of us liked it because we like the idea that there is but one correct answer and every other answer is wrong.

   Then we are introduced to algebra, where we learn the frustration of solving for x when we don’t know what a b and c are. Or even if we have the equation set up right.

   Then in the shop, science, and engineering classes, we learn that EVERY measurement is an estimate. For shop and mechanical engineering, there is the concept of allowances and tolerances. The hole has to be a little bigger than the thing that goes into it, or it don’t go into it. A loose tolerance such as + or – 1/8 inch is cheaper to manufacture than a tight tolerance such as + or – .001 inch.

   Even the definition of the meter and the kilogram are estimates! As our customary units such as the inch and the pound are defined in terms of the meter and kilogram, then every unit of measure is itself an estimate. The meter is presently defined as the distance a photon of light traveling in a vacuum will cover in 1/299,792,458 second. A perfectly reasonable definition of a unit of length as long as we all agree as to what precisely is a second of time! The speed of light in a vacuum does not seem to vary. The reason this definition is accepted is that it matches, within a slight variance, the Meter of the Archives, first determined by a pair of Frenchmen who measured the distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona in pieds de roy, the Royal Foot of Paris. A wee bit longer than the English foot we are accustomed to using. They extrapolated from this measurement an estimate of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator and took 1/1,000,000 of that distance as the meter. They were a bit off.

   Then of course, from the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle we learn we might as well accept that we can never measure anything precisely and accurately.

   Which is what we experience in real life every day!

   But I still insist that the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound regardless of whether anyone is around to hear it! Any mechanical engineer must presume that such mechanical physics occur without the need to be observed.

   Such as the metal fatigue in a certain Minnisota bridge. It was not observed, until the bridge collapsed. But it was there, nevertheless.

10. 
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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    November 1st, 2007 at 7:10 pm

    Reference post #62 above. This, from Colin Wilson’s The Occult, p.159, The Evolution of Man:

    In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey mentions an example that seems to me a conclusive argument against total, uncompromising Darwinism: the flattid bug. He was standing with the anthropologist L.B.S. Leakey, looking at a coral-coloured blossom like lilac. Leakey touched the twig, and the flower dissolved into a swarm of tiny insects. A few minutes later the insects resettled on the twig., crawled over one another’s backs, and once again became a coral-coloured blossom, a flower which does not exist in nature. Some of the insects were green; some were half-green and half-pink; others were deep coral; they arranged themselves so as to look like a flower with a green tip.

    Absolutely fascinating stuff by the wonderful British writer and thinker, Colin Wilson.

    (Note also this interesting article from creationism.org. It appears I am not the first person to suggest that 2 + 2 might in fact = 4.)

11. 
    63
    amfortas Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 7:26 pm

    Further, Mike, further. ! “we might conclude that man’s “personality” is a reflection of the “Personality” of God. ”

    What vistas this opens to.

    What does this tell us of God? Or of man, for that matter. We are wedded to the idea of rationality as the high point of mind. It is very useful, without a doubt. Like hands. It has grown and ‘flowered’. Evolved, with places to go yet. But even the blooms have patterns and variety, some quite extraordinary, most beyond the visual limitation of the eye. Is God an obsessive-compulsive; a Being so intense that were He a man we’d think Him quite mad?

    Look at Gaudi’s architectural work in Spain. The most brilliant, ‘natural’ projections of mind in his field come from, like his, a very strange mind, one ‘driven’. Is God ‘driven’? Only God, surely, could design that Cathedral in Barcelona. Is it in His nature to be phenominally complex and eschew the simple? Just listen to Beethoven or Motzart. If what their inner ears heard was ‘true’ then they must have caught God whistling. Or maybe they were simply instruments in His orchestra. Rationality never alighted the swaying branches and twigs of these men’s minds. They soared in clouds through which the everyday man looks, listens and flops back in wonder.

    I am always just that ‘edge’ confused by scientist’s talk of ‘elegance and simplicity’. They are definitly conceptual frameworks easier to grasp but everywhere we look and to whatever depth we peer, we find the hugely complex and convoluted. At each turn another particle pops up, a fraction of that one we thought the most basic. Every person we look at, listen to, get to know, is far from the simpleton, far from the easy to grasp. Even individually. I’ll lay a bet that the DSM is an invention of Lucifer who must, like us, get a headache trying to figure out people and pin them down, like butterflies in a collection.

    But, back to Big G and His drive. The catechism may well be near to the mark. “Who made you?’. ‘God made me”. Why did God make you”. ‘God made me to know Him and Love Him”. We are an early bloom of the Universe. We are the ‘knowing’ bit that enables the Universe to find God. We are a ‘part’, a ‘quality’, containing an ‘essence’. There is a long journey ahead and Tipler may see through the glass darkly. Not that we are destined to build a computer the size of Andromeda, but we are the computer, each person, each generation being the wires and points of solder, the layers of silicon, the splashes of exotic material. And our thoughts are the impulses flashing hither and thither, ons and offs, reationals and loonies.

12. 
    62
    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 10:56 am

    “I think (!!) that it is entirely reasonable to think that God has brought everything into existence, evolving away under his direction, in order for it to become Him, or at least find its way to Him and understand Him.”

    This does appear to be the only viable conclusion left — much to the discomfiture of those defending the old paradigm.

    You have also made a good point in citing the trouble with using the word “Anthropic” in this discussion.

    For instance, if the organic molecules of the primordial froth “Willed” themselves toward life, in what way is this an “Anthropic” process?

    Well, the Bible says that God created man in His own image. If we “reverse engineer” this literary concept, we might conclude that man’s “personality” is a reflection of the “Personality” of God.

    In this case, if the Anthropic Principle is to be accepted as a critical constituent of a new Theory of Evolution, the next step would be to introduce God’s Divine Will as the underlying force that impels life itself.

    Shocking.

    …. Here is an extraordinary recording of a lecture given by author and futurist George Gilder.

    Let me quote a few lines…

    No philosophy of our time can succeed if it doesn’t come to terms with the distinction between Ideas and Information, and the material embodiment of it. They are different things and can’t be merged into some muddle of what I call a “Materialist Superstition”. All science is based on this distinction: The independence of Mind separate from the physical substrate is critical to lending authority to any finding of science. If the mind is just a flux of material indistinguishable from the objects it is scrutinizing, there is no reason to trust its analysis of these objects. The mind has to be an independent phenomenon.

    Badda bing, George.

13. 
    61
    amfortas Says:
    October 24th, 2007 at 4:21 am

    To be fair to Lamark -hard though it may be for some to swallow – a lot has been attributed to him. The details seems to have come after him, generally. The gist though is that there is more to ‘changes to genes’ than meets the eye. It is fashionably up to date to go all the way with Darwin but even he only really otlined ’survival of the fittest’ and only posited mechanisms – random mutations. Lamarkian ‘will’ isn’t a necessary mechanism , in the sense of the organism ‘willing’ a change to itself, physically – although we humans seem to do a reasonable pro-tem job. Alterations to genes in situ (via mutations or behaviour) and their then having an affect on the gamete has always been poohoo’d. But it isn’t inconceiveable.

    But, to the ants. Funny lot, ants. Was it Colin Wilson? He got into some strange ideas once he’d knocked Existentialism on its arse. he even wrote a book about a group of suddenly ‘advanced’ folk who turned the Moon, by sheer willpower, to show the world’s leaders that they were serious contenders for having their own way!! Maybe his ants were just showing off, too. Can’t say that I have seen these ants, even from a distance.

    But, bouncing back up from the shrubery to the heavens, I think (!!) that it is entirely reasonable to think that God has brought everything into existence, evolving away under his direction, in order for it to become Him, or at least find its way to Him and understand Him. It must be a bit lonely being God. That ‘urge to develop’ would have been set in place within the most basic froth of the beginning. So ‘Anthropic’ might be a tad parochial. Maybe the ants are signaling to Him!

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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 9:46 pm

    Amfortas – I know you’ve read Colin Wilson. Somewhere he mentions a colony insect in Africa — I can’t recall the name of the species. Apparently different members of the colony have differently colored integuments. And when the colony assembled itself, it would appear — when viewed from a distance — to have the characteristics of a particular flower. In other words, the colony evolved for the purpose of mimicking a contemporaneous flowering plant where by doing so, some survival advantage was bestowed upon the colony.

    Now, one might rightly argue that the colony insect and this flowering plant evolved together over time, and that the colony was thus able to change via natural selection to its now highly developed and specialized state.

    But Wilson thought otherwise. He invoked Lamarck, and it was this that made me wince. I understood, of course, that LaMarck was really quite wrong — almost laughably so — to assert that giraffes — over generations — exercised a “will” to have long necks!

    Even now, I find the idea hard to swallow. But if the Anthropic Principle helps explain the evolution of life on earth, then we must believe that “Will” does indeed play a part in evolution.

15. 
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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 9:26 pm

    Here’s a quote from Leonard Susskind, the inventor of “String Theory”:

    …the biggest news is that in our pocket the notorious cosmological constant is not quite zero, as it was thought to be. This is a cataclysm and the only way that we know how to make any sense of it is through the reviled and despised anthropic principle.

    Interview with Susskind available here.

    The Anthropic Principle must be an essential component in any comprehensible Theory of Everything — just as Deutsch proposed in his Four Strands that make up the Final TOE:

    1. Quantum Mechanics
    2. Computational Theory
    3. Epistemology
    4. Omega Point Theory

    Excerpt from chapter 14 of Deutsch’s book:

    “the omega-point theory is an excellent example of a theory which is… about the fabric of reality as a whole. It is not framed within any one strand, but belongs irreducibly to all four.”

    While Deutsch does not like Tipler’s conclusion that God is the final solution to the Anthropic Principle, he cannot deny the importance of Tipler’s Omega Point Theory.

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    amfortas Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 7:32 pm

    Paul Davis’s ‘The Fifth Miracle’ is an excellent primer for the probabilities issue, Mike. We make an assumption, inherent in Darwinism, that evolutionary principle – the survival of the fittest – is inherent across time. It may be a phase. There is evidence that way back nearer the beginning of that 4 billion year Earth history, genetic exchange was not solely a verticle process but was horizontal. But that is just a small part of the issue.

    The urge to ‘life’, perhaps even intelligence and spiritual extension, is inherent in the very fabric of the space/time continuum. Just how, we don’t know. The ‘laws’ of evolution are clearly built into the system, and must be inherent even in the ‘particle’. Teleological drive has never been ruled out, just the mechanisms not known or hinted at as yet.

17. 
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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 23rd, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    I think it’s important to state that the discussion here should not be dismissed as merely “academic”. In fact, I would say that our discussion is on the leading edge of a folk-movement (and yes, an academic movement) popularly known as “Intelligent Design”.

    I have been listening to the podcast archive over at IDtheFuture.com.

    While much of the developed arguments there have to do with biochemistry (and not physical cosmology), I am beginning to get the idea that the anti-Darwinists may have a point that dovetails with our discussion here.

    Honestly, I have never considered this before. In fact, readers may know already I have always been satisfied with the general process of Evolution to explain the history of life on earth, and that I have always been skeptical of “Darwin skeptics”.

    But in listening to the Podcast interviews of credentialed scientists who propound “ID”, I am struck by the astronomic odds required to evolve colonies of simple single celled organisms into a complex biosphere within the allotted 3.5 billion years of life on Earth.

    The argument goes something like this: The sheer mathematical complexity inherent in the bio-mechanical operations of certain organic molecules is so great that universal statistical methods can show that 3.5 billion years is simply not enough time to evolve a biosphere such as the one we encounter today. In fact, the odds are so great against such an outcome as to be probabilistically insignificant.

    I wonder to what extent the Anthropic Principle could be applied to the “evolution of life on earth”?

    And if the Anthropic Principle applies to a macrosystem such as “evolution”, just when does it stop effecting what we humans perceive phenomenologically?

    Now… finally… I begin to understand why Academic scientists and their pet Jornos are so fearful of this concept.

    ID proponents would argue that scientists who accept the Theory of Evolution as a sound explanation for the arrival of life on Earth — and who have thus ignored an insurmountable Wall of Improbabilities — do so because they are “Philosophically” at odds with the Intelligent Design explanation.

    In other words, ID proponents have accused pro-atheist Scientists of practicing bad Science because they show willful contempt for the statistical evidence against using Natural Selection as a satisfactory explanation for how the biosphere — with us included — emerged on this planet at this time.

    And so the paradigm turns.

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    amfortas Says:
    October 22nd, 2007 at 7:39 am

    Thanks Mike. An encapsulation which picks up on part of Bohm. It is impossible to capture the whole of a man’s essence but here we are looking at conceptions of the Universe and ‘Everything’, and Bohm may have some useful insights. I just wish I had the mind for the maths.

    Never mind. There are other issues that might have a bearing on your fine model.

    For instance: These Implicate Orders of Bohm’s fancy could be another way of looking at Dimensions. The Model, indeed we and our daily perception, is three dimensional. A forth, Time, is bolted on almost as the bolted on understanding that guides our forward looking and moving life. The model also assumes ‘imaginary time’. Another dimension. (We won’t even go into any second Time dimension, as posited recently). All very fine mathematically. But is it cherry-picking?

    The Model needs to integrate ‘n’ dimensions or at least allow for them. How many ‘n’ I can’t say, but the allowance has to be made for development that includes ‘n’.

    We live in three spacial dimensions, but there is a stong suspicion – since Einstein – that what we percieve is just the three dimensional surface of a four dimensional hyperspace. Or even more dimensional than that.

    As conceptions of Universal origin, development and end goes, it is advanced, but…. limited to known ‘everyday’ dimensions. Or have I hurried past something you have included that says otherwise?

    Or maybe I – and you – have to develop hyperthickness to compensate for the everyday thickness we suffer from!

    We think in the three dimensions we are familiar with and try to represent them in one less. We are trying to get to think in four but it is ‘unatural’ in our evolution. We are like flatlanders trying to concieve of a solid world instead of a planar one.

    Maybe God, up there in the ‘n’th dimensional world can take pity and throw us a hint.

19. 
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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 17th, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    Here’s a wiki rundown on David Bohm for the benefit of our readers…

    David Joseph Bohm (b. December 20, 1917, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania – d. October 27, 1992, London) was an American-born quantum physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and neuropsychology, and to the Manhattan Project.

    Youth and college

    Bohm was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania to a Hungarian Jewish immigrant father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother. He was raised mainly by his father, a furniture store owner and assistant of the local rabbi. Bohm attended Pennsylvania State College, graduating in 1939, and then headed west to the California Institute of Technology for a year, and then transferred to the theoretical physics group under Robert Oppenheimer at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was to obtain his doctorate degree.

    Bohm lived in the same neighborhood as some of Oppenheimer’s other graduate students (Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Joseph Weinberg, and Max Friedman) and with them became increasingly involved not only with physics, but with radical politics. Bohm gravitated to alternative models of society and became active in organizations like the Young Communist League, the Campus Committee to Fight Conscription, and the Committee for Peace Mobilization all later branded as Communist organizations by the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover.

    Manhattan Project Contributions

    During World War II, the Manhattan Project mobilized much of Berkeley’s physics research in the effort to produce the first atomic bomb. Though Oppenheimer had asked Bohm to work with him at Los Alamos, the top-secret laboratory established in 1942 to design the bomb, the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves, would not approve Bohm’s security clearance, after tip-offs about his politics (Bohm’s friend, Joseph Weinberg, had also come under suspicion for espionage).

    Bohm remained in Berkeley, teaching physics, until he completed his Ph.D. in 1943, under an unusually ironic circumstance. According to Peat(see reference below, p.64), “the scattering calculations (of collisions of protons and deuterons) that he had completed proved useful to the Manhattan Project and were immediately classified. Without security clearance, Bohm was denied access to his own work; not only would he be barred from defending his thesis, he was not even allowed to write his own thesis in the first place!” To satisfy the university, Oppenheimer certified that Bohm had successfully completed the research. He later performed theoretical calculations for the Calutrons at the Y-12 facility in Oak Ridge, used to electromagnetically enrich uranium for use in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.

    McCarthyism leads to Bohm leaving the United States

    After the war, Bohm became an assistant professor at Princeton University, where he worked closely with Albert Einstein. In May, 1949, at the beginning of the McCarthyism period, the House Un-American Activities Committee called upon Bohm to testify before it— because of his previous ties to suspected Communists. Bohm, however, pleaded the Fifth amendment right to decline to testify, and refused to give evidence against his colleagues.

    In 1950, Bohm was charged for refusing to answer questions before the Committee and arrested. He was acquitted in May, 1951, but Princeton had already suspended him. After the acquittal, Bohm’s colleagues sought to have his position at Princeton re-instated, and Einstein reportedly wanted Bohm to serve as his assistant. The university, however, did not renew his contract. Bohm then left for Brazil to take up a Chair in Physics at the University of São Paulo.

    Quantum theory and Bohm-diffusion

    During this early period, Bohm made a number of significant contributions to physics, particularly in the area of quantum mechanics and relativity theory. While still a post-graduate at Berkeley, he developed a theory of plasmas, discovering the electron phenomenon now known as Bohm-diffusion. His first book, Quantum Theory published in 1951, was well-received by Einstein, among others. However, Bohm became dissatisfied with the orthodox approach to quantum theory, which he had written about in that book, and began to develop his own approach (Bohm interpretation)— a non-local hidden variable deterministic theory whose predictions agree perfectly with the nondeterministic quantum theory. His work and the EPR argument became the major factor motivating John Bell’s inequality, whose consequences are still being investigated.

    The Aharonov-Bohm effect

    In 1955 Bohm moved to Israel, where he spent two years at the Technion at Haifa. Here he met his wife Saral, who became an important figure in the development of his ideas. In 1957, Bohm moved to the UK as a research fellow at the University of Bristol. In 1959, with his student Yakir Aharonov, he discovered the Aharonov-Bohm effect, showing how an electro-magnetic field could affect a region of space in which the field had been shielded, although its vector potential did exist there. This showed for the first time that the vector potential, hitherto a mathematical convenience, could have real physical (quantum) effects. In 1961, Bohm was made Professor of Theoretical Physics at Birkbeck College London, where his collected papers are kept.

    Bridging science, philosophy, and cognition

    Bohm’s scientific and philosophical views seemed inseparable. In 1959, his wife Saral recommended to him a book by the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurti that she had seen in a library. He found himself impressed by the way his own ideas on quantum mechanics meshed with the philosophical ideas of Krishnamurti. Bohm’s approach to philosophy and physics receive expression in his 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, and in his 1987 book Science, Order and Creativity. Bohm and Krishnamurti went on to become close friends for over 25 years, with a deep mutual interest in philosophy and the state of humanity.

    The holonomic model of the brain

    Bohm also made significant theoretical contributions to neuropsychology and the development of the holonomic model of the functioning of the brain.[1] In collaboration with Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram, Bohm helped establish the foundation for Pribram’s theory that the brain operates in a manner similar to a hologram, in accordance with quantum mathematical principles and the characteristics of wave patterns. These wave forms may compose hologram-like organizations, Bohm suggested, basing this concept on his application of Fourier analysis, a mathematical method for decomposing complex waves into component sine waves. The holonomic brain model developed by Pribram and Bohm posits a lens defined world view— much like the textured prismatic effect of sunlight refracted by the churning mists of a rainbow— a view which is quite different from the more conventional “objective” approach. Pribram held that if psychology means to understand the conditions that produce the world of appearances, it must look to the thinking of physicists like Bohm.[2]

    Thought as a System

    Bohm was alarmed by what he considered an increasing imbalance of not only ‘man’ and nature, but among peoples, as well as people, themselves. Bohm: “So one begins to wonder what is going to happen to the human race. Technology keeps on advancing with greater and greater power, either for good or for destruction.” He goes on to ask:

    What is the source of all this trouble? I’m saying that the source is basically in thought. Many people would think that such a statement is crazy, because thought is the one thing we have with which to solve our problems. That’s part of our tradition. Yet it looks as if the thing we use to solve our problems with is the source of our problems. It’s like going to the doctor and having him make you ill. In fact, in 20% of medical cases we do apparently have that going on. But in the case of thought, it’s far over 20%.

    In Bohm’s view:

    …the general tacit assumption in thought is that it’s just telling you the way things are and that it’s not doing anything – that ‘you’ are inside there, deciding what to do with the info. But you don’t decide what to do with the info. Thought runs you. Thought, however, gives false info that you are running it, that you are the one who controls thought. Whereas actually thought is the one which controls each one of us.

    Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally. This is another major feature of thought: Thought doesn’t know it is doing something and then it struggles against what it is doing. It doesn’t want to know that it is doing it. And thought struggles against the results, trying to avoid those unpleasant results while keeping on with that way of thinking. That is what I call “sustained incoherence”.

    Bohm thus proposes in his book, Thought as a System, a pervasive, systematic nature of thought:

    What I mean by “thought” is the whole thing – thought, felt, the body, the whole society sharing thoughts – it’s all one process. It is essential for me not to break that up, because it’s all one process; somebody else’s thoughts becomes my thoughts, and vice versa. Therefore it would be wrong and misleading to break it up into my thoughts, your thoughts, my feelings, these feelings, those feelings… I would say that thought makes what is often called in modern language a system. A system means a set of connected things or parts. But the way people commonly use the word nowadays it means something all of whose parts are mutually interdependent – not only for their mutual action, but for their meaning and for their existence. A corporation is organized as a system – it has this department, that department, that department. They don’t have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

    Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, “felts” and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times. A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes…although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure…. Thought has been constantly evolving and we can’t say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal. It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before.

    Now, I say that this system has a fault in it – a “systematic fault”. It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere. You may say “I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem”. But “my” thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I’m trying to look at, or a similar fault.

    Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it’s creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)

    Bohm Dialogue

    To address societal problems in his later years, Bohm wrote a proposal for a solution that has become known as “Bohm Dialogue”, in which equal status and “free space” form the most important prerequisites of communication and the appreciation of differing personal beliefs. He suggested that if these Dialogue groups were experienced on a sufficiently wide scale, they could help overcome the isolation and fragmentation Bohm observed was inherent in the society.

    Later years

    Bohm continued his work in quantum physics past his retirement in 1987. His final work, the posthumously published The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory (1993), resulted from a decades-long collaboration with his colleague Basil Hiley. He also spoke to audiences across Europe and North America on the importance of dialogue as a form of sociotherapy, a concept he borrowed from London psychiatrist and practitioner of Group Analysis Patrick De Mare, and had a series of meetings with the Dalai Lama. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1990.

    David Bohm died of a heart attack in London on October 27, 1992, aged 74.

    GNU Free Documentation License.

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    amfortas Says:
    October 16th, 2007 at 12:01 am

    Spectre asks in #26, “… Are you proposing that spacetime had a preexisting existence prior to the big bang?”

    David Bohm would have said ‘Yes’.

    He would also say that all matter and even space-Time itself, the entire Universe, is the Explicate Order subtended by an Implicate Order (the supernatural? , or maybe the Undernatural). That is to say, what we are and see and exist in and of, is an *expression* of an underlying order of existence that ‘pre-dates and post dates’ (as it underlies time too) all material existence. The ‘Big Bang’ and the original singularity too are an expression, an Explicate’, of that Implicate order.

    Now Bohm was no mystic but a quantum mechanic physicist. He did the math, though don’t ask me to explain it!

    Bohm posited that there were an unknown (as yet) number of sub orders in the implicate realm, perhaps going down? to a single fundemental *God* Order that all things and all nonthings depend upon, derive their existence from, and the vast majority of which are non-physical, including that ‘God’.

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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 15th, 2007 at 10:34 pm

    Please allow me to quote myself from the article above, published on April 26, 2007:

    Two generations may pass before practical science could catch up with such a Theory were it to be announced today. (It was nearly half a century between Einstein’s theory and the creation of the first atomic bomb.) But career scientists in the here-and-now may be unwilling to advance the simplest solution for the TOE because – in the here-and-now – any reputable scientist who asserted a TOE that strongly implied the Existence of God would likely suffer a catastrophic end to an otherwise promising career. (Sure – vindication is sweet, but often time consuming.)

    Now, here’s a quote from Dr. Tipler’s new book, The Physics of Christianity:

    …everyone has an image of “God”, but to really understand what God really is and how He could interact with the universe, one must use a theory beyond everyday commonsense physics. Contrary to what many physicists have claimed in the popular press, we have had a Theory of Everything for about thirty years. Most physicists dislike this Theory of Everything because it requires the universe to begin in a singularity. That is, they dislike it because the theory is consistent only if God exists, and most contemporary scientists are atheists. They don’t want God to exist, and if keeping God out of science requires rejecting physical laws, well, so be it.

    That’s from The Physics of Christianity by Frank Tipler, page 2.

    Ah, yup. The cat’s out of the bag. Barrow and Tipler cracked it with the Anthropic Cosmological Principle — following up on Brandon Carter’s work in the 1970s. But for over a generation modern career physicists and their prop hands in the “Science Journalism” profession have acted in prejudice to keep the lid on the fact that “God” is a mathematically predictable outcome of the Universe.

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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 14th, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    Here’s some good reference links:

    Theophysics: God is the Ultimate Physicist

    Omega Point Theory

    Here’s an audio interview of Frank Tipler from Australia’s The Sci Phi Show wherein Tipler outlines the basic Omega Point Theory in easy to understand language.

    http://thesciphishow.com/audio/tspsoc45.mp3

    Also, this video of Frank Tipler:

    http://mfile3.akamai.com/12032/mov/kurzweil.download.akamai.com/12032/terasem/Tiplerdsl.mov

    and this powerpoint presentation on the Omega Point Theory

    http://www.terasemfoundation.org/webcast/ppt/Tipler.ppt

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    Mike LaSalle Says:
    October 14th, 2007 at 12:28 pm

    AAG – I put up a series of books on the home page of MND called “A Primer in Intelligent Design”. If you can read these books…. and understand them, I think my bicameral universe model — what I now call “Stereo Cosmology” — will become clear.

    For the crash course, read “The Fabric of Reality” by David Deutsch, “The Universe in a Nutshell” by Stephen Hawking, and “The Physics of Immortality” by Frank Tipler. For extra credit you should also read “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle” by Barrow and Tipler.

    I have not yet read Tipler’s “The Physics of Christianity”, but I expect he addresses many of the same points he raised in his article, “The Omega Point and Christianity”, available online here.

    Now, should you believe that an ordinary fellow like me could have discovered the Theory of Everything just by cobbling the pieces of the puzzle together in a logical fashion? Under the circumstances, I think it’s entirely possible.

    Why? For the same reason I mentioned in the article above: “…career scientists in the here-and-now may be unwilling to advance the simplest solution for the TOE because – in the here-and-now – any reputable scientist who asserted a TOE that strongly implied the Existence of God would likely suffer a catastrophic end to an otherwise promising career.”

    Since I have no scientific reputation or academic career to protect, I can say whatever I want without fear of repercussion. That’s the real “LaSalle Code” in a nutshell.

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