Jardines del Pedregal,
01900 México,
D.F. agudelo@mailer.data.net.mx Towards the end of his book, The
God Particle, Leon Lederman bemoans scientific illiteracy in
our days. Only one in three people, he claims, can define a
molecule or name a living scientist. And only two out of 23
randomly chosen Harvard students are able to explain why it
is hotter in summer than in winter. Lederman's reaction,
like the reaction of any educated adult, is quite common.
Everyday, we read new communiqués from pedagogues who
tell us our high school graduates are reading at the level
of fourth graders, and doing worse in their math than the
children of other fourteen or fifteen nations in the globe.
Like all parents, I lament the current state of education.
The crisis in science education and the consequent
scientific illiteracy that concerns policy makers and
scientist alike is not only real, but detrimental to both
society and the self, particularly, when the illiteracy is
in regards to science, the tool by which we understand our
place in the world. Up to the middle ages, people
were aware of the cosmologies that prevailed. These
cosmologies, these explanations of our place here and
awareness of teleology were purely religious. Religion, in
other words, gained its power because of its explicative
capacities. It traced earth and society from its origin to
its end. It explained natural phenomena. The rise of science
as the prevailing mode to explain natural phenomena shook
the religious foundations as far as religious cosmologies
were concerned. All of a sudden, as the Renaissance began,
we were not the center of the universe and within three
centuries; we would find out that God had not necessarily
molded us out of clay. In short, science's discoveries led
us to reassess our role in the universe. We are able to
understand who we are, where we are and what we are, built
of thanks to science. Scientific illiteracy denies its
victims any understanding whatsoever. More important, however,
scientific illiteracy has excluded us from a sense of place
and purpose. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we made
of? The ancient questions cannot be answered without at
least a cursory understanding of evolution, ecology, physics
and chemistry. Yet the fault partly lies in science itself.
Science has been blessed this century. If one were to tally
the intellectual accomplishments of this century, every
artistic achievement one can account for, there is a
scientific one to match. And actually, if one considers the
importance of relativity and quantum alone, the artistic
revolutions of the century seem dwarfed. However, as most
institutions, science has not been wise. Not only have
important theories and discoveries been sleighed, but also
when accepted, they are not used as they
should. The community, instead of
enlarging the scope and the well being of society, has lost
itself in petty arguments and an adamant, narrow academism.
Like Becknesser, the dogmatic versifier who does not care
for poetry but for counting feet and pointing out flawed
forms in Wagner's Die Meistersinger, academic scientists
refuse to project the implication of theories onto a larger
scope. In many ways, it is fair to say that science has
failed to include us. In other words, as an institution
science has not created a discourse where the implications
of theory and discovery can be understood or studied on our
level. Instead, many have run amok chasing a yet smaller
particle, or an even stranger of science. The French philosopher Gilles
Deluze has argued that mathematics has lost its connections
with the empirical world and is, therefore, not a language
but a jargon. One could argue that much of theoretical
physics is just as bad. In other words, just as it would be
useless to teach our children classical physics, ---
tragically many core curriculums still do, ---to present
students at any level with the latest count of the particle
physics break downs would be futile. Students could never
gain interest. And chiefly, their apathy stems from the fact
that modern science has turned into an argot, a jargon. In
other words, despite the relevance of particle physics, its
discoveries, like many of the discoveries in modern science
fail to answer the questions that students and all of us
really ask from science, the questions I posed earlier and
their corollaries. Not just why are we here? But, inasmuch
as we can figure, the reason why we are here, what is our
task here? How in other words, science should not only be
instructive or mere curio or mere argot, it should be
directive. It should tell us how to behave, not towards each
other, but towards our environment. It should be the beacon
by which we plan our future cities, chose our foods and
search new agricultures. In other words, science should be
our paradigm. The caution of scientists to
establish and even argue their ideas as new paradigms stems
of course from the misuses to which science has been put in
our century, when politicians have not just harbored, but
appropriated and misread ideas to justify their own
ideologies, footnote their own propaganda. Eugenics is the
most obvious and most atrocious case in point. What started
as a scientific misreading of evolutionary theory, once
adopted and considerably revised by politicians, ended up as
one of the most atrocious genocides in history. And yet, I
think the most important critique of science is still not
written. Marxist in its implications, when some scholar or
historian writes it, it would argue that the many of the
most creative talents in not modern, but contemporary
science, many of the most creative post-Manhattan project
scientists, are not working out the makings of the universe,
but actually have pawned their lives to the armament race or
the pharmaceutical industry. The upshot of this is that
science is not fulfilling its social purpose. If curious
young men or women go to it to find answers about
themselves, they would be better resorting to more obtuse
disciplines, for if they open the articles in any current
scientific periodical except for the most popular, they'll
encounter a Brooklyn bridge which is all cables and no
span. I am an engineer. In college, I
took an astronomy course. So my interest in astrophysics
pre-dates black holes, string-theory and super-string
theory. In short, my interest and my study of astrophysics
have not only kept pace with every major theory in the last
twenty years, but also has seen many fads come and go. I
never studied physics because for my parents, college was a
practical matter, a way to transcend class barriers. Being
an outsider to the discipline has given me both handicaps
and advantages over its practitioners. Unlike physicists, I
don't have the hands-on experience gained in laboratory and
telescope. Unless an event is relevant on newspapers or
magazines, I get processed information. I also lack the
technical expertise that makes many of our young and old
scientists so astonishing. The capacity to do extremely
difficult calculations and use mathematics to further one's
research might not only be inborn, but it is also gained
through necessity. Scientists get better and better at
complex operations because they come with the
territory. On the other hand, as an
amateur, I am also not bound to the professional courtesies
and obligations that come with the territory. In other
words, I don't have to toe the line with the latest
consensus and don't need to cater to either grant or we make
neutrinos or quarks, black holes and singularities relevant
to grade schoolers, college students or the population at
large? At the end of his book, The God Particle, Leon
Lederman tells us that in search for a conclusion, he went
to read conclusions from many popular science books. He
found two types of conclusion pervaded. One downgrades
humankind, reminding the reader that we are many times
removed from centrality. The other one, an exact
counterpart, restores us to the center of the universe by
invoking God and placing us in the midst of a process. The
reason for these two types of conclusion might be due more
to market forces than to a legitimate philosophical system
behind the writer's work. The by now famous injunction by
Stephen Hawking's editor that every equation halves a book's
sales and every mention of God doubles it looms, large over
all these books. Some might argue a less cynical
approach and claim that behind each of these conclusions
there is a real attempt to make the whole enterprise
relevant to readers. However, as every algebra teacher
knows, it is easier to interest the children on equations
when a real-life problem is posed first and the math is used
as a tool to solve it; otherwise, math seems disembodied,
irrelevant or, to return to Deluge's injunction, a jargon.
Science books urge the formulas first and then, in a few
pages attempt to pose the word problem. This method is often
defended through the very educational fallacy that has
plagued science education: namely, the belief that
scientific knowledge is organized as a stepladder. Yes,
children must know how to add and subtract before
understanding an equation. Yes, without classical physics,
relativity would not exist. However, there are two factors
that should make us consider adopting a new educational
paradigm for science education, one historical and the other
philosophical. The stepladder paradigm, which is used in
science education, is a conventionalized and inaccurate
model. The evolution of scientific concepts depends on two
forces: collaboration and rupture. In other words, there are
crowds, researching, writing and working on the same and
similar problems. But there are also breakthroughs, the kind
Thomas S. Kuhn described in his Structure of Scientific
Revolutions. These breakthroughs revise previous ideas
---or, to use Kuhn's terminology ---revise the previous
paradigms to such extent that whatever precedes them is to
an extent false. Yet, before they even get a glimpse of the
most basic ideas set forth by relativity, students have to
wade through Newton. As Lee Smolin asserts, it isn't that
Newton is not important, beautiful and
fascinating: Physics is useful, even if it is
not true, as an approximation that helps us understand many
different phenomena. But it is completely discredited as an
answer to any fundamental question about what the world is.
It has a great ideal of historical and philosophical
interest, but this is rarely mentioned in beginning courses.
Thus it is not surprising if students find the subject
uninspiring is addressing the very failure of the stepladder
paradigm we have adopted in our classroom. Yet, he does not stop here. He
also traces the consequences of such methods. Physics as it
is taught, fails to address the student's questions, fails,
in short, to provide a way to understand what life is and
why we are here. If science education and science
in general would use that basic question as their
springboard, science would gain the relevance it deserves.
And in a way, that is what I mean when I refer to the
philosophical aspect, which the stepladder paradigm lacks.
Students are given answers for which they don't know the
questions. They are given results for which they don't know
the operations. They are gineuropath. In many ways, the sort of
specialization found in particle physics is symptomatic van
methods for which they cannot conceive wider or creative
applications. So the question that arises is, is it possible
to provide a philosophical backdrop for the teaching of
science? Are the conclusions to which scientists have
arrived throughout the century ready to give us some
definite answers to understand not just our world, but also
our role here? To go back to Lederman's
discussion of conclusions in science books, is science ready
to use this speculative conclusion not as an afterthought,
but as the backbone of its workings? I contend that the
answer to each and every question is an affirmative one. It
might be a pipe dream to think that something as abstruse
and thorny as advanced mathematics could ever be discussed
in the general classroom. Like music, the disciplines seem
restricted to the talented few. However, how many students
will actually explore the subject on their own if instead of
just the rote learning of formulae, they would be introduced
to many of the fascinating philosophical implications the
discipline reveals at advanced levels? I think many more
than the ones that get interested through current classroom
practice. Yet, the pedagogical aspects are only incidental
to the way science is written and practiced. In other words,
there will be no change in the way science is presented in
the classroom, until the science books and the scientists
who write them take as their starting point the tough
questions that plagued people like Einstein and Darwin,
questions without which none of the breakthroughs they had
would have occurred. And is science ready to readopt
the inquisitiveness and daring that characterized great
theories? Or to turn the second question into an answer,
science is ready to begin accounting for our role in the
universe. Many scientists would cringe at the last remark.
And in fact, any cursory understanding of evolution or
astrophysics seems to deny such ambitions. We are one of
many species in a planet which is not, as we believed, for
many centuries, at the center of the solar system. And our
solar system, is not at the center of the galaxy, which is
one out of many galaxies, whit no salient or particularly
astonishing characteristics. More humbling yet, if we take
the latest estimates of the size of the universe and place
ourselves within that scale, we would be smaller than any
particle known to us. With such knowledge in mind,
isn't it conceited to even think we have a role in the
universe? Similarly, we know evolution depends on mutations
or innovative genetic accidents that might help a species
thrive or disappear, depending on how these mutations help a
species survive within its environment. Isn't the arbitrary
nature of mutation a caveat against determinism? Many
prominent scientists believe that, indeed, to ascribe
ourselves a purpose here after such humbling evidence
amounts to crass determinism. Steven Jay Gould for one has
argued against reading any kind of design into the
evolutionary process. Stephen Hawking has also stirred
readers away from any theological or teleological
conclusions. Both, in short, have provided ample argument
against and a vast critique of teleological readings. Yet,
their reluctance to ascribe a role for us here involves a
terrible misreading. While they seem to be revising the
Western tendency towards anthrop-centrism, they are still
trapped in yet another culturally determined tendency, that
of giving priority to content over form. Let me explain since I am a
borrowing terminology mostly used in the arts and seldom by
the sciences. If I do use the terms form and content is not
only because shifting our paradigms and looking at forms
instead of content would allow us to frame our purpose here
according to science, but also because many of the cultural
tendencies which the West has perpetuated have often been
dispelled by and in the language of the arts. In the western tradition form
and content can be seen embodied by Eudoxus and Aristotle
respectively. And the defeat of formalist principles as the
basis or concern of science understood through an
understanding of Aristotle's rise as the master empiricist.
Eudoxus, who first crafted a model of the cosmos in the
west, argued that astral bodies orbit the earth. Aristotle
adopted Euxodus' model; nevertheless, he padded it up, but
turning the orbits into a filled up star. Aristotle turned
the earth and the cosmos into content. Furthermore, his De
Caelo is so plagued with epistemological discussions, that
the beauty of Euxodus' orbits is lost. Of course, we know
both models are wrong. However, it was Euxodus and his
concern for forms that lay the way for more accurate models
by presenting the orbit as a form. In our days similar arguments
continue. Through their writing, Dawkins and Gould seem to
continue the battle of form against content. The Gould
school is super-specialized, observing the panda's thumb for
small deviations. They look for content everywhere and think
that to establish forms is a futile enterprise. In Physics,
Hawking and Penrose have led a similar discussion. And it is
perhaps Penrose, who, in the Emperor's New Mind provides the
best definition of what I am calling forms. Penrose's
definition stems from an attempt to legitimate mathematical
thought as a way to understand the world. He adopts the
Platonist perspective and views math as a sort of pipeline
to the Gods. For him, mathematics is a way to uncover truths
that are already there, truths whose existence are quite
independent from mathematicians' activities. Such truths, he
labels as discoveries, as the cases where much more comes
out of the structure than it was put in the first place. To
illustrate, he resorts to art and
engineering: Categorizations
[discoveries] are not entirely dissimilar from those
one might use in the arts and in engineering. Greater works
of art are indeed "closer to God" than are lesser ones. It
is a feeling not uncommon amongst artists, that in their
greatest works they are revealing eternal truths that have
some kind of ethereal existence, while their lesser works
might be more arbitrary, of the nature of mere mortal
constructions. Likewise, an engineering innovation with a
beautiful economy, where great deal is achieved in the scope
of the application of some simple unexpected idea, might
appropriately be described as a discovery rather than an
invention. As an engineer, I agree with
Penrose a hundred percent. The truss, suspension bridge, the
turbine are more than just contrivances. They are forms,
vessels that contain the germ of a bridge or roof, a dam or
plane. Like their artistic counterparts, the sonnet, the
sestina or the terza rime in poetry or the sonata, the
fugue, the canon in music, they allow a certain degree of
freedom. And yet, they are the basis for the work's emotive
success. The failure of scientists to apply a formalist
perspective at points has had its corollary in their
inability to draw wide conclusions from their work. As
Martin Reed has pointed out in his most recent book, Before
the Beginning, it took Penzias and Wilson to read a
popularized account of their discovery in The New York Times
in order to realize the importance of their discovery. In
fact, Rees, while loyal to the method where scientists focus
on bite-size problems argues that in order that scientists
avoid getting immersed in technicalities, the response of
non-specialists is a necessary antidote to broaden the
perspective. As a non-specialist, I contend
that if we are to put the findings which have taken place in
different sciences in the last century through a formalist
perspective, science would be able to abandon its reluctance
to assign us a place within this vast universe, a role
within creation. But how would a formalist perspective
affect what we know from science? I will take one example
that is commonplace in science. Scientists agree that we are
made of carbon, water, calcium, iron oxide, diglyceride,
etc., in short, of the dust of long dead stars. Depending on
whether the scientist one speaks to is a poet or a cynic,
they might answer then that we are star dust or that we are
nuclear waste. The process, roughly mapped midway would take
us to the formation of the Milky Way 10 billion years
ago. At its inception, the Milky Way
contained the simplest atoms: hydrogen and helium. Then the
first stars were formed and the nuclear fuel that kept those
stars shining converted hydrogen into helium through nuclear
fusion and then converted helium into other atoms: carbon,
oxygen, the rest of the periodic table. When the first stars
ran out of fuel they blew up, threw out their debris into
interstellar space and it eventually condensed into new
stars or curdled into planets. The new stars stabilized and
at least one of the planets around one of the new stars was
able to sustain an evolutionary process with intelligent
life. This simplified process is the agreed upon explanation
of our origin. And yet science sees no
consequence to it. Despite the fact that such a casual chain
clearly places us within the cosmic process, scientists
often argue it as merely physical and chemical accidents
without any predisposition toward evolution or intelligent
life. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming; for
instance, at the atomic level, the two forces that control
the neutrons and protons are balanced in such a way that any
change in the early universe would have either produced no
chemical element stable enough other than hydrogen or, if
the nuclear forces would have been stronger, no hydrogen to
allow stars their evolution. In other words the atomic
structure, despite its apparent randomness, was balanced to
allow the creation of the heavier elements, which make up
planets upon which life subsists. Even within the
constraints and randomness of Heisenberg's uncertainty
principle, there seems to be slight variations. For
instance, the uncertainty that bars us from locating any
particle grows smaller as particles get heavier, allowing
complex molecules a definite shape. This balance itself is
mirrored at the microscopic level within organic structures.
Our DNA maintains its structure due to the fact that the
electron weights so little in comparison to the atomic
nuclei. At the macroscopic level, gravity also plays a
crucial role. Without it, density contrasts would not have
occurred. In other words, without gravity,
no structure could have formed as the universe expanded.
Furthermore, gravity seems to obey a fine-tuning similar to
that of the atomic structures. Except for extreme conditions
like those of pulsars or black holes, the gravitational
force is exceedingly weak and this weakness is conducive to
a large, stable and long-lived universe, which is crucial
for evolution. Even on our earth, the fact that gravity is
neither much stronger, nor much weaker has allowed for the
evolution not only of living creatures, but also of
intelligence. If gravity were stronger, animals would not
have been able to grow larger and consequently would have
probably never developed structure where to fit a nerve stem
or a brain. As an engineer, I tend to watch
such factors not merely as chance events, but as stunningly
successful structures. Yet, physicists and biologists who
observe such data refuse to interpret it in such way,
because, they claim, there is no model wherein to fit it.
This refusal has stemmed out the institution's hopes. For
the last twenty years, physics has focused upon Grand
Unified Theories or GUTs. Such theories aim to reconcile
Einstein's macrophysics with Quantum's microphysics. GUTs
attempt to unify the nuclear and electromagnetic forces with
gravity, since the latter is not applicable to the atom.
Some of these GUTs have been successful at describing
certain phenomena. For instance, the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow
theory argues that all the forces were united in the
high-energy state of the Big Bang. Once the Big Bang
occurred and the universe began to evolve, the symmetry
between the forces broke down. While the Weinberg-Salam-Glashow
theory is insightful and accurate to a great degree, it
leaves one question unanswered and raises a larger problem.
The first one, of course, is what broke down the symmetries?
Particle physicists and Leon Lederman among them have argued
quite a convincing case for the Higgs field. However, such
field has not been detected and the hopes for detection lie
chiefly upon CERN, the largest super collider, being used
now at Geneva. The detection of the Higgs field would be a
great success for physics if it ever happens. However, it
will not necessarily resolve the problem inherent to the
Weinberg-Salam-Glashow theory. As Heisenberg demonstrated by
heating up a magnet so that it would loose its poles, so
that it would become symmetrical, and then letting it cool
so that it would restore its magnetic moment, the symmetry
break-up worked at random. Only chance decides which pole
will become north and which one south. Whichever field or
particle caused the symmetries to break down, the
implications of Weinberg-Salam-Glashow's theory is that if
the forces of nature are a by-product of a broken down
symmetry, then the universe itself is nothing but chance. In
short, the theory fails to explain the mastery of design
that I have mentioned above. I contend that physicists will
not come up with a unified theory, until it adopts a
formalist view. Furthermore, I contend that this formalist
view should be informed not just by the formal
manifestations such as atoms and galaxies which physicist
explore, but by their by-products, solar systems, organic
forms and intelligence itself. To do this, however, a
physics that dwells on forms cannot just uncover patterns
but would need to borrow and inform itself with the
intuitive knowledge from the arts and humanities, as well as
the rational findings from other sciences. As Edward O. Wilson has
suggested in his book Consilience, we need to integrate all
knowledge into a tree whose roots will be physics itself.
For such an endeavor, a new paradigm is necessary, a new
model which would allow physics, biology, ethics, theology,
sociology and chemistry to see beyond their arguments and
contradictions. Yet, such a paradigm will not be possible
unless a theory that reconciles quantum and relativity comes
about. I believe physics has been intimating for a long time
now: namely the existence of a fifth force, a force
independent of nuclear, electromagnetic and gravitational
forces. One of the first scientists to argue the case of
such a force was David Bohm. Indeed, David Bohm, who was
shunned by the scientific establishment and dismissed as a
mystic of sorts, argued before me already against a science
which merely "predict[s] and control[s] the
behavior of large statistical aggregates of particles" but
lacks a world view (Bohm xiii). Bohm focused on quantum
physics, particularly on uncertainty. The uncertainty
principle involves subatomic units and their behavior,
particularly the fact that they can be perceived as either
particles or waves. Bohm's solution is not too distant from
what I will suggest shortly. To solve the uncertainty
principle, Bohm suggested an agency -or what I have called a
fifth force- that manipulates the particles. The quantum potential as he
calls it, is a field whose strength does not decrease with
distance, and controls the behavior of subatomic units.
Bohm's idea of a quantum potential encountered a problem
when he first suggested it. In order for a field to govern
the behavior of particles, it must act simultaneously on
them, which implies that it must travel faster that the
speed of light. In fact, part of the reason why physicists
seem to shun Bohm's postulate is because it places
relativity in a second tier, as a law secondary to that of
quantum potential itself, since relativity postulates that
nothing in the universe can move faster than light. Bohm did
not see some of the latest observational and theoretical
advances of the last twenty years. Unable to argue his case
he knew that if such a thing as quantum potential were
proven, it would signal a new order similar to the one
brought about by Copernicus. Bohm believed science had
reached a stage similar to the one where Galileo stood when
he began his inquiries. Beginning of Part II
I tend to agree with Bohm. In
fact, I do not think his approach was off target. And my
argument will follow very similar lines. However, I will not
focus solely on quantum, despite the fact that quantum is an
integral part of my argument. Consequently, I will supplant
Bohm's label for a concept, which Teillard de Chardin
developed over half a century ago. Teilhard de Chardin, a
paleontologist and Jesuit monk suffered a similar fate to
that of Bohm, being discredited not by one but by two
institutions. His lifetime effort was to reconcile faith
with evolution. The church barred him from publishing his
thought. The Phenomenon of Man and The Divine Milieu, his
most important books, the ones where he laid out his most
important ideas were published only after his death. The
scientific community has dismissed them as crass vitalist
arguments off hand, without ,any attempt to address them
systematically. However, The Phenomenon of Man is not the
book of a specialist venturing to conclusions relating to
branches he is not familiar with. On the contrary, Teilhard
is aware of the missing links that plague each of the
sciences. His discussion of the atom, for instance, takes
into account the fact that, when he was writing in the
1930's, the prevailing atomic model was paltry to say the
least. The Phenomenon of Man is not "nonsense, tricked out
by a variety of metaphysical conceits" as Sir Peter Medwar
has claimed (102). On the contrary, if Teilhard's language
is convoluted and obscure, it is due to the political
pressures of the church authorities. Beyond the language,
however, the book has an intuitive prescience that few
scientists have yet matched. Part of Teilhard's ability to
anticipate many of the ideas and concepts with which
sciences like physics and biology are dealing with, stem
from the fact that he uses evolution as the vehicle and not
the tenor of his argument. Unlike so many biologists of his
time, who argue evolution to prove it, Teilhard took
evolution as an inarguable fact. Consequently, he was able
to fit into a larger context. He didn't just dwell on single
transformations. He provided a description of evolution,
particularly of organic life from unicellular organisms to
the phyla that allowed the development of a nervous system.
This description was framed within the concepts that physics
was dealing with at the beginning of the century: namely,
the atom and energy. By so doing, Teilhard not only provides
a feasible synthesis, but also enlarges evolution's
scope. The Phenomenon of Man sees
evolution as the by-product of the latent energy which
matter contains, a phenomena that Einstein codified in his
famous equation. The Phenomenon of Man was written after
Einstein formulated special and general relativity, after
Plank explained black body radiation, Bohr explained atomic
body and spectra, and Heisenberg postulated his uncertainty
principle. Even though Teilhard was by not means a
specialist in either relativity or quantum, the opening
discussion in The Phenomenon of Man, where he deals with the
atom, shows that he was familiar enough with both relativity
and quantum. Teilhard's was a synthetic mind. Throughout his
writing, one can see him not just understanding or exposing
what he calls overlapping theories but also synthesizing
them, unifying their characteristics toward an ensuing
explanation of the universe. Through his acquaintance with
different branches of science and his synthetic mind he was
able to deduce that if there was a unifying element in what
he calls the plurality of tangible things in their elemental
state, if there was a common denominator, this was energy.
Teilhard understood that energy was the sine qua non of
existence. As we have seen, Teilhard de Chardin's ideas
tread on the heels of Einstein's equation by almost three
decades. Yet, while Einstein was reticent to even think, let
alone apply an evolutionary model to the cosmos, Teilhard
accepted it as a given. When Einstein realized that his
theory implied our universe was not static but a changing
one, he introduced what is known as a cosmological constant,
a repulsive force that countered the expansion. Notated with
the Greek letter Lambda, Einstein called the cosmological
constant the greatest mistake in his career when Hubbell
showed him the evidence that we lived in an expanding
universe. By accepting a constantly
evolving universe, Teilhard in many ways predated the Big
Bang theory, which might be one of the greatest
legitimizations de Teilhard's because it allows energy to
have primacy over matter. In short, it allows the energy
latent in matter to control matter's transformation. By
intuiting that matter was transformed by energy and having
an understanding of evolution, Teilhard concluded that there
were two types of energy. He called them radial and
tangential. He understood that all energy was physical in
nature but cast energy within a duality. Tangential energy is measurable
and detectable energy. It is the energy we still detect from
the background radiation of the big bang as well as the
energy from rapid oxidation we call fire. Radial energy on
the other hand cannot be detected, or at least not by the
same means that we use to detect tangential energy since
that would imply coupling both energies. And while like the
tangential energy, it is present in all forms of matter, it
actually influences its transformations. In other words,
radial energy is an evolutionary energy, the energy that
determines the growing complexity of matter and eventual
development of intelligence. To scientists, Teilhard's idea
at first sounded like a rehashed version of Aristotle's
élan vital. It is not. If it is akin to any concept,
it is the one which it precedes by several decades, the one
scientists call information. Medwar points this fact out in
the same review I have quoted: Teilhard's radial, spiritual,
or physic energy may be equated to information. The equation
is not necessarily a precise one. Yes, radial energy
resembles the concept of information. But this resemblance
is not an exact resemblance. Information is a blanket term
applied by cosmologists, and computer scientists, and
neurophysiologists alike. As a term, it originates with
computer science and it is codified in bits. For
cosmologists, the concept is closely related to the concept
of entropy and has stood at the center of black hole
research. For our purposes, it will suffice to understand
the concept of information as a codification of what we call
knowledge, whether this knowledge is a novel, a symphony, a
blueprint, or a poem. Most people may cringe at the concept
and regard it as reductionist. And indeed, it
is. As Penrose has so eloquently
argued in The Emperor's New Mind, we need a new science of
mind in order to understand information since the
quantifications of Artificial Intelligence, the discipline
where the term holds sway, are not broad enough. Teilhard
would have probably agreed with Penrose. Radial energy,
psychic energy is like information in that it is cumulative.
If you had a computer with infinite memory, you could store
infinite amounts of information. A map of its bank would not
necessarily be more complicated than a map of the memory
bank on a 1 GB hard disk, it would only fit more ones and
zeros. In other words, information, as science defines it,
does not account for complexity only for
accumulation. Radial energy, on the other
hand, tends towards complexity, towards a higher and higher
order. For Teilhard de Chardin, humanity is not the
culmination of evolution, just a rung in a ladder that tends
first towards the noosphere, a cognitive layer, and then
towards a planetization, or the overcoming of the entropy
that is the universe's fate as it keeps
expanding: Will that be the end and the
fulfillment of the spirit of the Earth? The end of the
world: the wholesale internal introversion upon itself of
the noosphere, which has simultaneously reached the
uttermost limit of its complexity and centrality. The end of
the world: the overthrow of equilibrium, detaching mind,
fulfilled at last, from its material matrix, so that it will
henceforth rest with all its weight on
God-Omega. In his Physics of Immortality,
Tippler has argued that Teilhard's vision is more poetic
than scientific and while agreeing with him on philosophical
grounds, goes on to establish more elaborate guidelines for
the planetization Teilhard suggests by filling science's
gaps with imagined technology. Tippler's book ends up as
nice and hopeful science fiction, offering few new insights
as far as cosmology or Teilhard de Chardin go. I believe his
failure stems from his slighting of Teilhard as a scientist.
By embracing Teilhard's philosophy and disregarding the
model he sets out in The Phenomenon of Men, he overlooks the
fact that many of the unanswered questions with which
physicists are struggling at the moment would be solved if
one considered psyche as a force. It isn't necessary to pad
up Teilhard de Chardin's work. On the contrary, we have
merely revaluated it, and realize how many of the things he
argued have been validated in the last few decades. As I
have stated before, Teilhard predates theorists like David
Layzer, who in his book Cosmogenesis has argued quite
convincingly that the universe is a product of a creative
evolution. The question that arises is why,
if some of Teilhard de Chardin's ideas have proved to be
correct, are scientists adamant in their refusal to
integrate his thought within their discourse? Why can they
not consider radial energy a force? I think part of it has
to do with politics. Michael Hawkins, in Hunting Down the
Universe, has portrayed for us a scientific community which
is neither generous nor vital, but rather, deep in political
feuds and greedy for huge grant money. According to him,
money and power have force the community to adopt not ideas,
but dogmas. Dogmatism, of course, has led
science into an impasse. If there is any reason why a great
theory like Newton's gravity could be revised, it was
because scientists like Einstein were willing to question
its flaws. In modern science, one of the dogmas that exist
is relativity's dictum that nothing in the universe can move
faster than light. We have already seen how Bohm's idea of
quantum potential has been rejected because the field he
argues for would have to travel faster than light. To accept
his premise would demote relativity. It would make
relativity a law subordinate to quantum
potential. Similarly, if scientists would
accept radial energy as a force, they would also have to
demote relativity. Yet, I would argue that, like Newtonian
physics before it, relativity would only be revised, not
rejected or demoted. Such revisions are imminent to any
scientific principle and do not imply a failure of any kind.
The fact that Einstein revised Newton's ideas on gravity
does not necessarily means that apples do not fall from
trees, or that the earth does not exert its gravitational
force upon us. Newton's laws are applicable to us here, but
break down when called upon to explain more extreme
conditions. General relativity also breaks down when applied
to the extreme high densities of the early universe.
Relativity's failure to explain the high densities of the
early universe should not be interpreted as the theory's
lack of validity. On the contrary, its failure could be used
as a leeway into establishing the principles of radial
energy. A careful reader would note, however, that in order
to conduct research to establish the principles of radial
energy scientists would need at least an intimation of its
existence. Otherwise, their work would be nothing but a stab
in the dark. Is there any such intimation? Is there any hint
that points towards a fifth force? We have already noted
that if there would be such thing as a fifth force, a force
which governs the behavior of the four other forces, this
force would necessarily act faster than the speed of light.
Is there any intimation that anything has ever traveled or
acted at such speed? Surprisingly, the answer is yes and the
intimation comes not from some obscure theory or idea, but
from one of the most important theories to have emerged en
the last years: namely, inflation. First postulated by Alan Guth,
inflation solved two seminal problems with the big bang
model. It got rid of the flatness and the horizon problems.
At its most basic, the theory argues that between 10-36 and
10-32, the universe doubled its radius over equal intervals
of time. At first glance, the claims of inflation might seem
irrelevant. After all, how much would the universe really
expand within such an unimaginably brief moment? The answer
is astonishing. The universe expanded more then, than it has
in the last 15 thousand million years. Furthermore the
consequences of the theory lead to a radical revision of our
understanding of the universe. If we are to accept that due
to inflation the universe doubled its radius over equal
intervals of time, then we have to accept a much larger
universe than what we accepted previously. It is due to this
astonishing size that the observable universe appears flat.
In other words, as observers, we are deceived in the same
way as the ancients were deceived when they looked out on
the horizon and saw the earth as flat. Inflation also solves another
problem inherent to the big bang model. The observable
universe is homogeneous and isotropic. In other words matter
is distributed evenly and in all directions. When scientists
observe the cosmic microwave background radiation, they
observe energy that was released when universe was 300,000
years old. However, according to the standard big bang
model, the diameter of the universe then was 90 million
light years. This appears to be incoherent, since how would
the universe grow 90 million light-years in only 300,000
years? The reason is subtle. According to relativity, space
is plastic, curved and stretchable. According to the big
bang, space extended as it expanded. Consequently, the
principle that establishes that nothing can surpass the
speed of light is not violated. Notwithstanding the horizon
distance at that moment was about 900,000 light years, and
the ends of the universe come apart in 90 million lights
years. In the standard big bang model, given the age of the
universe, it would follow that this rift of light years
would make it impossible for this radiation to have emerged
from the same source, impossible, in other words, for these
two points of radiation to exchange information if this
can't travel faster than light. As Alan Guth says in his
book The Inflationary Universe: We can imagine, if we wish, that
the universe is populated by little purple creatures, each
equipped with a furnace and a refrigerator, and each
dedicated to the cause of trying to establish a uniform
temperature. Even with the help of these creatures, the
observed uniformity of the cosmic background radiation could
not be established unless the creatures could communicate at
100 times the speed of light. Inflation is simple and elegant.
It gets rid of many of the glitches inherent in the standard
Big Bang theory. However, its main premise, the exponential
expansion of the universe at equal intervals of time
ratifies the possibility that the velocity of light can be
exceeded. If the universe expanded exponentially it had to
exceed the speed of light. Furthermore, through subsequent
revisions, inflation has adopted the idea of scalar fields
as the triggers of inflation. In such models, scalar fields
not only spur inflation, but also control and end it. While
these fields have gone undetected, they are fairly well
established in theory. And though they might be ellipses to
short cut the introduction of a fifth force, their
characteristics are similar to those proposde by radial
energy: Namely, they act as agents and catalysts within a
process and as such, they rein the outcome of the process.
Many argue, however, that while scalar fields are solely
theoretical, and yet to be identified, radial energy is
purely speculative and impossible to observe. Furthermore, particle physicists
would point out that the functions of the scalar fields,
while operating in the early universe to break down the
symmetries and to spur or halt inflation, are much more
limited than the functions I will assign to radial energy.
Finally, they would point out the fact that the supraluminal
velocity of the inflationary universe took place within the
special conditions of the early universe and was possibly
only through vacuum tunneling. To the last argument, I would
answer that tunneling might indeed be our laboratory. Not
necessarily to trace radial energy, but to analyze
supraluminal phenomena. I also agree with the first two
arguments, if only in part. Scalar fields and radial energy
are definitely not the same. Scalar fields, like any fields,
exert their influence only upon a narrow array of particles.
Radial energy, like Bohm's quantum potential, is a force
that governs the behavior of every particle simultaneously.
The easiest way to understand this might be by seeing how
magnetism, the most visible of fields, exerts its influence
only upon negatively or positively charged particles. Radial
energy, on the other hand, works more like DNA, as the
instruction manual that stores the necessary information for
systems to execute their tasks. With this analogy though, I
am getting ahead of my argument, so I will only touch upon
it briefly for now. Like DNA, radial energy carries
necessary information for an organism, in the case of DNA;
or for particles, in the case of radial energy, to perform
its functions. Later I will argue that DNA might be one of
the many manifestations of radial energy. But first, let me
address the argument concerning radial energy's
intractability. Again, for many, to pursue a
force which is immeasurable, a force that cannot be
tabulated, seems chimeric at best, a waste of time and
resources at worst. Yet this easy dismissal is in my opinion
not just proof that the scientific community has reached a
crisis as far as its inquisitiveness and ambition is
concerned, but might enter, if it remains there, a
detrimental phase which will atrophy one of the main
resources of scientific method itself: namely,
deduction. I have already criticized
specialization and its narrow focus. This narrow focus is
due to the fact that specialization works by means of
induction. The field worker gathers evidence piecemeal and
draws a partial conclusion that can be verified or refuted
on further evidence. In other words, truthful when all
possible instances have been examined. Induction has been
fruitful. It has given us anatomy, chemistry, particle
physics, etc. However, it could be argued that only through
deduction has science made its most impressive strides. In
other words, Science's advances have often relied on
accepting premises that were unproved or improvable. Leon
Ledermann has dealt with this in his book The God Particle.
In his lighthearted style, Ledermann shows the importance of
deduction as he attempts to answer a question, he claims
people always asks him: Have you ever seen an atom?
Ledermann argues that he can visualize the atom's internal
structure, its cloudlike bursts of 'electron presence'
surrounding the tiny dot nucleus that draws the misty
electron cloud toward it. But nevertheless, the only
evidence he has of an atom is tens of thousands of sensors
that develop an electrical impulse as the particle passes.
In admitting such fact, Lederman confirms that the atomic
model particle physicists have developed is purely
deductive. Furthermore, he shines a light upon the way in
which the deductive method can be used to map a territory
that at first seems unmapable. We cannot literally see an
atom; we cannot photograph one. However, we have deduced a
feasible model of the atom by observing the behavior of its
particles. We know the atom because of its
effects upon other particles. I would argue that like with
the atom and its particles, we can deduct the principles of
radial energy from its effects. In other words, radial
energy manifests itself through effect. What are the
effects? Here we come round to the core of my formalist
argument. Our "evidence" for radial energy, the way we "see"
radial energy is through the forms we find in the universe,
forms which have functions and have been "discovered," to
use Penrose's word once more, through scientific study: the
orbit, the helix, the Fibonacci sequence, the Mandelbrot
set. These forms, particularly the last one, are not merely
mathematical constructs, but the structures though which
nature has modeled its transformations, from the beginning
of time. These structures are the types of structure that
have allowed evolution by being what John H. Holland, in his
book Emergence, has labeled "emergent. They are structures
where what comes out is more than what goes
in. Fractals and chaos, the helix
and the orbit all have been staples of the scientific
discourse. Some of them have been through centuries, some
for a few decades. So, at first, my argument might not seem
innovative or productive at all. However, scientists, while
using the tools of fractals and chaos to study phenomena,
have not attempted to write a universal history which is
nothing more than a transformation of forms, even though the
evidence is certainly there. At the atomic level, we have
already touched upon the fact that every atom in the
universe was created from the fusion of hydrogen in helium.
What these nuclear reactions did was generate, if not more
complex, heavier atoms that replicated the basic structure
of the initial hydrogen and helium. This structure,
initially postulated by the experimental Physicist Ernest
Rutherford in 1911, though revised, can be roughly pictured
as a solar system where, in place of planets, there are
orbiting electrons and in place of the sun, there is a
nucleus. Inherent to this structure is the capacity for
clustering, the capacity for atoms to form molecules. Grade
school textbooks will often tell students that the world is
full of molecules. To make a minor revision, they should say
they are the world. And they are the world, because the
tile-work of atom upon atom has spiraled towards complexity.
Hence, a molecule of water is much less complex than the DNA
molecule, though both are based on similar
structures. Scientists would agree that,
indeed, these forms replicate themselves throughout the
universe. However, many would argue that while these
phenomena seem indeed to follow certain formal patterns that
allowed for the formation of the universe, the solar system
and life itself, on many occasions, the transformations or
clustering were accidental. They were the work of chance.
Teilhard de Chardin, while attempting to establish the
relationship between tangential and radial energy, argued as
well that many of these phenomena were, indeed, accidental.
He suggested in earnest, and as the good scientist he was,
that the earth was probably born by accident. Yet, despite
his allowance for chance, arbitrariness and accident,
Teilhard also is able to trace the way in which inorganic
chemistry augurs organic chemistry, and, in its turn,
organic chemistry augurs complex life forms. For him, even
when nature runs through accident and indeterminacy, it
immediately [makes] use of [it] and
recast[s] into something naturally directed.
Teilhard de Chardin's use of the verb recast, a verb
commonly associated with sculpture, is telling here:
Whatever chance casts, radial energy recasts or reshapes in
order that its latent germinal powers be used. What Teilhard
de Chardin is suggesting here as he explores the
concatenation of the mineral world to the organic world and
the organic world to complex life forms is what he and other
scientists have referred to as cosmogenesis. Teilhard de
Chardin was way ahead of his time in applying Darwin's
evolutionary scheme to cosmic history. While the big bang
theory confirmed his argument in many ways, scientists like
David Layzer in his book Cosmogenesis and most recently, Lee
Smolin in The Life of the Cosmos have explored the
implications of an evolving universe. Both Smolin and Layzer
have argued that the universe evolved just as life has
evolved, through the laws of conservation, innovation and
selection. One has to be careful when
applying these laws to cosmic history though. Many people
have misread cosmic evolution as a misguided attempt at
determinism. It isn't. As Layzer puts it, the universe is a
world of becoming as well as being, a world in which order
emerged from primordial chaos and begot new forms of order.
The processes that have created and continue to create order
obey universal and unchanging physical laws. Yet, because
they generate information, their outcomes are not implicit
in their initial conditions. Layzer's argument is, like mine
and like Teilhard's, a formalist one. Form is his operative
word. The statement, though, also elaborates on the
consequences of the complexity that Teilhard saw as one of
radial energy's principle: the tendency towards
complexity. This is not really a hard
concept to grapple with. We have seen the casual chain
linking the big bang to the light atoms, light atoms to
heavy ones, atoms to molecules, molecules to organic and
complex forms. Each rung on that ladder presents us with a
more complex form, or rather, since the forms change only
slightly, I should say that the primordial works like a
vessel that allows more information. -------------------------------------------------- Beginning of Part
III As many cosmologists are fond of
pointing out, it is easier to understand a star than to
understand a virus, let alone the neural network. In other
words, given the mass and chemical composition of a star,
most astronomers can predict every stage of its life, trace
its life from protostar and guess a date for its
transformation into a red giant and then a white dwarf. On
the other hand, a virologist cannot sketch the life and
progress of an epidemic. This difficulty in predicting the
behavior of virus or neuron stems from complexity and this
unpredictability of complex systems points towards one of
the upshots of complexity. Namely, as systems become more
complex, they attain greater freedom. As a paleontologist, Teilhard
was of course aware of stagnations and extinctions in the
evolutionary ladder, aware, in other words, that some of the
transformations, the recasting, of one of the forms does not
succeed. In short, like Darwin, he was aware that sometimes
the conservative principle was stronger than the innovative,
curbing any developments. He was also aware that the
selection, Darwin's greatest insight into evolution, erases
the less successful genetic experiments. Darwin's principle of selection
is easily understood if one is dealing with the branching
from phyla to class, class to order, order to genus, genus
to subgenus and subgenus to species. In other words, Darwin
addresses a whole array of eras, but does not account for
the critical moments that might have triggered a stagnation
or extinction. In order to do so Teilhard de Chardin
introduced the will as a fourth principle in evolution.
According to Teilhard de Chardin, if one looks at
extinctions or stagnations in the early universe
biologically, in other words, if one applies biological
principles to cosmology, those "organisms that have become
incurably fixed have chosen a road that closed prematurely
upon themselves. It is difficult to speak of a
highly philosophical and theological concept as will and
apply it to the sciences. In fact, this, more than other
idea, has shut Teilhard off from serious scientific
discourse. After all, science is concerned with statistical
aggregates and not with subjective concepts. Again, we run
into the immeasurable. Yet, even if the will is
immeasurable, since quantum mechanics, it has become a fact
of science. Unlike classical physics, which leaves no room
to will and its corollary, freedom, quantum needs to grapple
with the freedom inherent to a system in order to explain
subatomic phenomena. As Penrose has so eloquently argued,
classical physics has no room for consciousness subjectivity
and if we are to map its origin, it will occur through
quantum: The very existence of solid
bodies, the strengths and physical properties of materials,
the nature of chemistry, the colors of substances, the
phenomena of freezing and boiling, the reliability of
inheritance - these, and many other familiar properties,
require the quantum theory for their explanations. Perhaps,
also, the phenomenon of consciousness is something that
cannot be understood in entirely classical terms. Perhaps
our minds are qualities rooted in some strange and wonderful
feature of those physical laws which actually govern the
world we inhabit, rather than being just features of some
algorithm acted out by the so called "objects" of a
classical physical structure. Perhaps, in some sense, this
is "why" we as sentient beings, must live in a quantum
world, rather than an entirely classical one, despite all
the richness, and indeed mystery, that is already present in
the classical universe. Might a quantum world be required so
that thinking, perceiving creatures such as ourselves can be
constructed from this substance? Such a question seems
appropriate more for a God, intent on building an inhabited
universe, than it is for us! But the question has relevance
for us also. If a classical world is not something that
consciousness could be part of, then our minds must be in
some way dependent upon specific deviations from classical
physics... We must indeed come to terms
with quantum theory -that most exact and mysterious of
physical theories- if we are to delve deeply into some major
question of philosophy: how does our world behave and what
constitutes the minds that are indeed us? The Issue that
Penrose is addressing here concerns the rigidity of the
classical world, its inability to accommodate uncertainty,
duality, non-casual correlations, and of course freedom. All
of the above are concepts that, if discussed a century
earlier, would have been deemed unscientific. There is yet another consequence
to complexity. Not only do systems attain greater freedom as
they become more complex, but their complexity runs counter
to the thermodynamic arrow. The thermodynamic arrow is of
course the arrow which, parallel to time's arrow, marks the
greater disorder within a system, marks the transition from
a state of high order to a state of complete disorder.
Stephen Hawking has argued quite convincingly that our
subjective sense of the direction of time, the psychological
arrow of time, is determined within our brain by the
thermodynamic arrow of time. Yet how, if the universe tends
towards disorder, can complexity run counter to entropy? The
answer, simply stated, is because complexity generates more
stable structures, more successful forms. But the way it
does so is not so simple. One of Hawking's failures in A
Brief History of Time is the introduction of the
psychological arrow of time. The concept is an attempt to
popularize, and by doing so, it introduces the rather
problematic question of psychology, or more simply, the
observer's perception. The psychological arrow of time, or
our perception of time passing, is not necessarily the
fourth dimension Einstein envisioned and which Hawking's
argument addresses. And while indeed, it is this fourth
dimension where entropy increases, this is also the only
dimension that allows for evolution and complexity. Teilhard
de Chardin, who knew he was not an expert on relativity,
understood this: I am not enough of a
mathematician to be able to judge either the well
foundedness or the limits of relativity in physics. But as a
naturalist, I am obliged to recognize [sic] that the
assumption of a dimensional milieu in which space and time
are organically combined is the only way we have found to
explain the distribution around us of animate and inanimate
substances. Indeed the further we advance our knowledge of
the natural history of the world, the more clearly we
realize that the distribution of objects and forms at a
given moment can only be explained by a process whose
duration in time varies directly with the spatial (or
morphological) dispersion of objects in question. Every
distance in space, every morphological deviation,
presupposes and expresses duration. For emphasis sake, Teilhard's
argument is purely formalistic. He addresses evolution as
the distribution of forms and morphological deviation.
Nevertheless, he considers time, the fourth dimension in
classical physics. Unlike Hawking, who sees time as eroding
systems, or as keeping time towards a more disordered state,
Teilhard sees time as the only way in which the radial
energy can manifest itself through its forms. More
important, forms are the only way in which systems fend off
entropy. We can see this most obviously in the way we
inherit things. Objects do not survive for many generations.
But the forms we have inherited from our ancestors, be they
the double helix of their DNA or the syntactical patterns of
their language, are vessels that contain and fend
information from entropy. Many would claim that my
argument here is purely historical and that cosmological
history does not follow the same paths than human history.
However, this conservation through forms is a law of nature
as important as entropy. In our century, German
mathematician Emmy Noether demonstrated that every
conservation law implies the existence of a symmetry. But
the correlation of natural phenomena to forms is ancient. Of
course, many of our calendars and watches come from finding
natural patterns. In the Renaissance, scholars, saw the
efficacy of numbers as proof of God's design. And even
though, in our time, after relativity and quantum, we tend
to think that numbers are a bit more arbitrary, the forms
they represent on paper are not, whether this form is a
planet orbiting the sun, or a galaxy coiling on its own
axis. The physicist Eugene Wigner has stated as much: Laws
of nature could not exist without principles of invariance.
Invariance is of course, the recurrence of form. Symmetries
and fractals abound and they are the backbone of the stuff
we see in nature. Hence, Wigner's statement boils down the
idea that a form runs against the thermodynamic
arrow. The quantum relativists like
Hawking and Hartle would argue that even if forms, if
invariance seems to conserve energy, the ultimate fate of
the universe makes this attempt at conservation irrelevant.
I tend to disagree. Hawking's conclusions are ultimately
based on theory as it applies to the topology of the
universe. And while they do consider energy -after all
Hawking is one of the people responsible for the concept of
the singularity- they fail to isolate it from its products.
Again, they see the contents and not the forms. Furthermore,
their energy is tangential energy. Hence, the fate of the
universe to them is closed and written, or will be once they
fill-in the number for critical mass into their
books. Radial energy, however, has not
only proved that it runs against the thermodynamic arrow,
creating more efficient and capable forms in a universe
whose topology tends towards disorder, but has reached a
critical stage in its evolution. According to Teilhard, as
radial energy evolves it not only assimilates more
complexity, but also accumulates it. Radial energy is
cumulative and convergent. In Teilhard's words, radial
energy, because it contains and engenders consciousness is
of a convergent nature and will become involuted to a point
which we might call Omega: as immense as the sphere of the
world may be, it only exists and is finally perceptible in
the directions in which its radio meet --- even if these
were beyond time and space altogether. Unlike Hawking, Teilhard, as it
is obvious from this sentence, disregards cosmic topology.
He does so, for many reasons. If, as I have argued, his
ideas are purely formalistic, the stuff of this world is
merely a by-product of a process and not the end itself. The
end itself is the refining and elaborating of agency and the
agency is radial energy itself. If the idea that invariance, or
form as I have called it throughout, is the way in which
radial energy staves off entropy, is not radical or new, the
idea that as it counters entropy radial energy converges
upon a center definitely is. In fact, convergence or the
Omega point is one of the most criticized of Teilhard's
ideas. He has been labeled an anthropocentric, an
essentialist, a mystic, atheist, etc. And yet, the evidence
is quite strong. We don't know yet the universe's critical
mass, so it is impossible to tell whether Teilhard's
convergence will be a literal one or not. In other words, we
cannot tell if the universe will keep expanding or whether
it will recoil and shrink back into singularity. If the
latter is true, then we can see Teilhard's Omega Point as a
literal event. But if it doesn't, the Omega Point is not
less true. Let us remember that radial energy is not bound
by the topology of the cosmos, the atomic model or human
anatomy, but rather, that it binds the topology of the
cosmos, the atomic model and the human anatomy. In other
words, the universe, its matter and its inhabitants are
merely vehicles. Many readers will find the last argument
vague and somewhat sophistic. The reason why it strikes one
so is because it has been decontextualized. Even though
topologies, models and anatomies are not the end itself of
radial energy, they are synthesis occurring in time. We have
already seen how Teilhard not only incorporates Einstein's
discovery of time as a fourth dimension into his theory, but
argues it as a sine qua non of radial energy. The Omega point therefore is a
synthesis. Unlike a Hegelian synthesis, which is merely the
outcome of the dialectic between thesis and anti-thesis,
Teilhard's synthesis resembles the Augustinian resolution of
the tenses into eternity. If the Omega point seems
problematic at this point, it is because it stands as the
corollary of Teilhard's system. As such, it is all
inclusive, so to understand it one must understand not only
the outcome of his model, but also has to stray away from
scientific findings, at least current scientific findings
which are merely a stop-gap to more comprehensive
disciplines. To understand the Omega point, we have to
consider not only cosmic history and the concatenation of
forms we have previously seen, or the evolution of organic
life, but also the human history and thought. After all,
what Teilhard espouses is not so dissimilar from what other
current thinkers espouse when they argue for the unification
of knowledge. Therefore, I will summarize the principles of
radial energy and after, when I discuss their consequence,
will try to elaborate on the import of the Omega
point. Energy is a force not wholly
unlike the four other forces in nature. Like gravity,
electromagnetism and the weak and strong nuclear forces it
determines the behavior of structures. However, unlike
gravity, which only sways its power across the
macro-structures, or electromagnetism and the strong and
weak nuclear forces, which seem to rule the atomic
structures, radial energy is the catalyst that orchestrates
the function of each force. Energy is a constant. It does
not decrease with distance and it is not bound by the speed
of light. We have already touched upon the problem that the
latter proposition poses. If an agent is to control the
function of the other four forces, if an agent is to
determine the way in which particles are to behave, then it
has to attain supra-luminal velocities. Such proposition
runs counter to special relativity which rules that nothing
can travel faster than the speed of light. I have suggested that while the
limits relativity sets upon acceleration might apply to
macro structures; they do not necessarily apply at the
sub-atomic level. Let me elaborate a bit farther. We have
already seen how, if inflation took place, it was necessary
for the space to expand at a faster speed that the speed of
light. This was possible not because relativity does not
apply at the subatomic level. In his wonderful Scale
Relativity, Nottale has argued that the limit relativity
sets upon acceleration applies to both atomic and macro
structures. By the same token, matter cannot contract into a
singularity, at least not without an infinite amount of
energy. Much greater than any accelerator can muster
(1.6x10-35), it is at this threshold that radial energy
functions. Here is where universes are born and where the
forms that allows to be here surged. Energy manifests itself
through the forms it creates. We will not build a super
collider in the immediate future which will delve into the
atom deep enough to reveal the radial energy within. As I
have argued, its locus is within the singularity. We would
need infinite energy to crack the atom open and explore its
radial energy. The task would be completely unnecessary,
since we can deduct the principles of radial energy through
forms. The orbital nature of atom and solar system, the
helical structure of galaxy, DNA and momentum state in
quantum mechanics, the Mandelbrot set, which replicates
itself in geology as well as biochemistry, the Fibronacci
series, that approximation to the coiling of the nautilus
and the pattern in sunflower or branch, which surfaces, like
the other forms in our own intellectual endeavors, whether
these be Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, Bartok's String
Quartets, the Parthenon or Boticelli's Birth of
Venus. This latter emergence of nature
forms in our intellectual life is neither accidental or
mimetic, since we have to remember that the radial energy
does not create only forms, but forms which are generative
or as Holland labeled them emergent. The principle of these
forms is, of course symmetry. They are invariant, yet
flexible enough to accommodate new information and
consequently grow more complex. Energy tends towards
complexity. Because it manifests itself through emergent
forms, through forms from which what comes out is more than
what goes in and because this manifestation takes place
within the fourth dimension world of relativity where time
is as important as the other three dimensions, the forms are
allowed transformations. In fact, they seem ruled by the
principles of evolution itself. While they conserve the
form, they also undergo innovation and
selection. As the forms through which
radial energy manifests itself incorporate more complex
systems, the freedom of the systems increases. This is a
radical proposition in many ways. At first it reads like an
anthropomorphic proposition, especially when the systems
under consideration are inorganic. After all, it would be
mind boggling to ask anyone what a rock or a crystal chose
to do. However, through quantum physics we have began
discerning that even at the atomic level there are degrees
of freedom. At the organic level, this freedom, of course
increases, so that with vertebrates we can speak of will,
volition and sentience. The later abstractions are really
shortcuts to encompass the many possibilities that we are
faced with as sentient beings. There is, of course, no
mathematical system that could tabulate these choices,
possibilities and their outcome into statistical aggregates,
as there is now one for the atom. The Temporal arrow of radial
energy runs counter to the thermodynamic arrow. In other
words, unlike all the systems in the universe, including our
bodies and the universe itself, radial energy does not tend
toward higher disorder, but towards higher order. Radial
energy is able to circumvent the ultimate fate which entropy
seems to have determined for the universe because its agents
are forms. These forms, as we have seen, all forms really,
are in variances through which energy is preserved. Energy
is not only cumulative, not only does its muster more
complex manifestations, it is also convergent. Teilhard de
Chardin understood that radial energy function within a
space-time continuum. The forms of radial energy are spatial
phenomena. The way in which forms incorporate more
information, becoming more complex, relates to the temporal
continuum. The growth of complexity, however, eventually
converges. The point of convergence is referred to as Omega
point and can be understood as a singularity, a mathematical
point where an infinite amount of energy
resides. In the preceding pages, I
betrayed much of what I had been preaching before. Even
though I argued that science should attempt to contextualize
its findings so that they have relevance in our day to day
lives, I went on and attempted to parallel Teilhard's ideas
with many of the current ideas and findings of physics and
other sciences. Readers who have disagreed with my parallel
and who think that modern physics is not finding order but
disorder would probably want me to elaborate further.
Readers who agreed with the first part of the essay and
waded through the exposition on Teilhard will probably take
me by my word and ask me to cast some relevance in my
previous parallel. I will try to please the latter and in
doing so, hope to convince the former while attempting to
answer the following question: If it is true and modern
physics as well as other sciences are currently confirming
many of the ideas which Teilhard espoused 40 or so years
ago, how does that affect us as individuals, as a society,
as a culture? To answer the question, I would like to drift
a little bit away from science to provide myself with a
scheme, an outline. Throughout his work, Kierkegard
explored three subjects that, through latter scholarship,
have been known as the Kierkegardian trinity. The subjects
are theology, aesthetics and ethics. Unlike any other
psychological or philosophical system that has attempted to
divide human psyche, Kierkegard seems accurate to me. As
humans we are still preoccupied by aesthetics, theological
and ethical questions. There is no real hierarchy to these
categories. People, even when they do not frequent concerts
or read poems, even when a painting is irrelevant to them
still worry about beauty. I am the first to argue that mass
media and its favorite child, advertisement, have debased
our aesthetic values. This debasement does not necessarily
entail the disappearance of such values. On the contrary, if
mass media and advertisements have been successful, this is
due to the fact that they play upon and utilize people's
need for an aesthetic. And even if it is a debased version
of the original, the model selling some obscenely baptize
perfume fulfills the same function that Boticelli's Venus
did centuries ago. A similar thing could be said
about theology. Every person still asks question about
his/her origin and destiny. And even though, as the question
goes unanswered most people patch the hole the enigma leaves
by trusting charlatans or buying into quick and easy
philosophies or religions, the need for both redemption and
transcendence is universal. Out of context, the picture that
has emerged of the universe in the last century has been
that of a cold, forbidding place where we are alienated. I
would venture to speculate and say that many of this
century's discontents have stemmed from that alienation and
so have all the profits that many charlatans have
culled. Like aesthetics and theology,
ethics is still a central aspect of our life. Though in the
public discourse, or at least in the public discourse that
mass media broadcasts, ethics has been delegated to
jurisprudence and religion, if people refer to either, it is
to reaffirm a sense of right and wrong, to acquire a guide
of how we treat each other. This need is so acute that most
of the contemporary popular narratives take place in a
courtroom and one John Grisham, one of the best selling
authors of the decade has made a fortune dramatizing
situations where conflicts are resolved through law, despite
the corruption and sleight of hand that goes hand in hand
with his plots. By the same token, the only any
advance in science that makes the general news is in regard
to genetic engineering. Genetic engineering does not make
into the front page because people are particularly
interested in chromosomes or microbiology, it does so
because it raises ethical and moral questions, which often
than not are answered, not by the scientists who are doing
the work, but by religious or political
figures. So let me rephrase my question:
If it is true that modern physics as well as other sciences
are currently confirming many of the ideas which Teilhard
espouse 40 or so years ago, how should that affect our
ethic, theological and aesthetic worlds? Let me start by
addressing the ethical pictures. For centuries, ethics has
concerned itself with the regulation of social life. Whether
its precepts emerged from the Ten Commandments or the code
of law, its premise was to provide a guide that we could use
to interact with others. As many thinkers, starting with
Nietzsche, pointed out, such moral or ethical codes were
written by hegemonical groups who were mainly attempting to
control the behavior of their subjects. As we have seen
Teilhard and the new physics which seem to be confirming his
ideas seem to place us at the top rung of the evolutionary
ladder. The latter seems commonplace. Nevertheless, we have
to place it in context in order to understand its
importance. Throughout the centuries,
whether supported by religion or by science, humans have
understood their "superiority." As a matter of fact, this
claim to superiority has proved atrocious. It has given us
license to abuse all that is around us including other
humans. The West is a paradigm of this ideology. We
conquered people and leveled forests as we assigned
ourselves the role of the chosen and the superior. The city
where I live is one of the most devastating results of this
ideology. I am part of the last generation that was able to
appreciate Mexico City as a valley. When I grew up, there were still
lakes and rivers and the surrounding mountains were still
visible. In fact, I have been in many valleys around the
world and I would venture the assertion that the valley
where I grew up was the most beautiful, if not the most
successful as an ecosystem. However, around the 1950's, when
Mexico jumped in the bandwagon of progress, city planners
decided to tube the rivers and dry the lakes. My sons and
daughters now drive in congested highways that were once
rivers. The lake basin became low-income housing and its
inhabitants suffer, with the entire city, from unbearable
dust storms that no one has been able to remedy. The growth
and progress which politicians sold us in the fifties are
paying high interests indeed. The city, as any reader would
know, makes more environmental headlines than any other city
in the world. The irreparable damage done to
this city stems from an ideology of progress not too
different from that which razed the hardwood forests of
American Midwest. Its protagonists saw themselves as men who
had missions because they were in some way superior. Since
we are living the atrocious consequences of such ideology,
many remarkable thinkers in our days have attempted to
question our hierarchical position in the evolutionary
ladder. People like Stephen Jay Gould have argued not only
that there is no discernible plan in evolution but that our
intelligence, that quality which has allowed us to assume
our superiority is merely an adaptation that does not
warrant primacy. Gould has been instrumental in undoing the
scaffold that throughout the years supported an evolutionary
hierarchy. As I have pointed out, his reasons are
ideological, and though his ideology is well meaning; his
anti-hierarchical argument might be just as detrimental as
the hierarchical one he is trying to deflate. Like all such
attempts, it not only robs us of our humanity, it also robs
us of our wonder and awe at nature. It plunges us in a
nihilistic machine where there is no consequence because
there is neither plan nor purpose, just chance and accident.
I repeat. If we see the progress from inorganic molecule to
organic molecule to complex organisms like us, it is
impossible to do away with hierarchies
completely. We are part of a chain. However,
through science we have not only gained a fairly accurate
understanding of how this chain progressed but more
importantly, how being at the end of it, does not mean our
link does not depend on the previous links. Science has
shown that we function within ecosystems, that we depend on
the rivers we tube, the lakes we dry, the forest we raze.
And despite such knowledge our ethical codes are still
regimenting the well being of a social order so that few
benefit from the tilling and building. We not only need an
ethical code that will attempt to equalize class difference,
we need an ecological ethics, an ethics that will extend not
just to a courtroom where judges decide what is appropriate
behaviors and what is not. Ethics is truly about
consequence. The Ten Commandments or the laws, whichever
code one adopts, forbids certain kinds of behavior or acts
because they carry consequences. Just as the old ethics defined
the responsibilities we have towards other people, the new
ethics should place us in a larger context, a context that
regulates, not only our social behavior, but also our
behavior towards our resources. This is becoming eminently
clear as the sway of the mass media has kept us informed,
albeit badly, about the causality in our decisions. Let me
use a simple explanation. I am writing this at the end of a
disastrous week at the world markets. Today, every editorial
mentions recessions and depression. The crisis started
several months ago, as the Asian markets collapsed. Though
economists knew that this collapse would affect western
economies, when the Russian economy started doing the same
thing last week, they were strangely cool, claiming that the
Russian market had no effect as far as the domestic marked
is concerned. This assertion proved to be largely
inaccurate. In our days, it does not matter how small a
market a country represents, its rises and falls affect the
global economy. For decades now, economists have
adopted chaos mathematics to predict the market's behaviors;
chaos predicts the behaviors of systems by studying them as
long-term phenomena. In other words, instead of isolating a
system, whether this system is the market or a
meteorological phenomenon it is largely irrelevant, in time,
chaos sees a larger chain of causality. In this way it is
useful to gauge ecosystems, whether patterns and markets. We
have grown largely accustumed to these far-reaching effects
when we read about the behavior of the stock market;
however, we have failed completely to understand it at an
ethical level. The mantra of chaos mathematics, the way it
has been mocked and understood, is by the phrase "When a
butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, a lady sneezes in
Michigan." Though rather humorous, the phrase rings true to
the chaos' premises. Our acts carry long-term
consequences, we believe, so as far as our jurisprudence is
concerned. We have not applied the same principles to our
ecological behavior. Ultimately, we should come to
understand that the linked pyramid that Teilhard argued for,
though it places us at the pinnacle, is an interdependent
pyramid. Its hierarchy, unlike the hierarchy espoused by the
great chain of being, might grant us greater freedom and
higher conscience, but not that unfettered imperialistic
ideology to subdue nature and others, that greed for which
the older model was but a rationalization. No, Teilhard's
pyramid, if rightly understood, grants us freedom in the
same proportion as it gives us responsibility, higher
consciousness in the same proportion as it grants our deeds
more consequence. That is why we have reached a critical
level. Our actions have greater consequence as consciousness
has increased. So if we do not channel this consciousness
within an ethical system that considers, not just our
behavior towards others, but also toward the planet, the
consequences will be fatal. We have ample evidence of these
consequences already. Some have entered mainstream culture.
Everybody is aware that the ozone layer and the rain forests
have ravaged out weather systems. This week the Chinese
government admitted that the disastrous floods of the season
were due to ecological misdoings. Yet, some of these
consequences are still microscopic. They are showing in the
skin tissue of whales, which means, the chemical by-products
of our culture have made it the bottom of the ocean where
the largest mammal feeds. Is it possible to revise our
ethical code? Pessimists will, of course, say no. If they
are right, it is not because we do not know how to reform
this ethical code, but because there are too many interests
groups impeding this reform. The poison showing up in the
skin cells of whales, the hole we have burrowed in the ozone
layer, the acres we have tilled off hardwood forests are all
symptomatic of a culture of consumption. Nothing in this
culture is sacred. Heads of state and religious figures take
the same blows as any other public figure from both the
media and society. The only two things that everybody
respects are greed and profit. The largest industry in the
world is not an industry that manufactures anything. It is
the advertisement industry. William Leach, in Land of
Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American
Culture, one of the best history books of the last decade,
has argued that the consumer culture as we know it is a
rather recent phenomena, and dates it to the post-civil-war.
During those years, the founders of retail conglomerates did
all in their power to change the more austere values that
the society held since its puritan inception. It is not
shocking to see how John Wannamaker, the largest retailer of
all at the time, presciently dressed up his store every
Easter Sunday to look like a church. For that is what stores
have become. Whereas in the past we went to
church or temple for solace, today we drive to the mall and
find a quick fix to our depression by buying a new gadget.
So merchants not only managed to influence fundamentally the
shape of urban space which makes them responsible for the
kind of urban ecological disaster I have related above, but
also co-opted the strategies of religion in order to erase
its principal values, to such an extent that in our days new
religions emerge espousing the principles of commercial
culture and not those of older religion. Instead of the tragic sense of
life which the old religions espoused and which geared so
many great minds towards a life of the intellect and spirit,
a life of justice, mercy and peace, we get religions that
are wish oriented, optimistic, sunny. Religions that like
consumerism have erased the word consequence from their
lexicons. I have slipped from ethics into theology. The slip
is quite natural. Our ethical codes, as they are embodied by
legal codes, hark back to religious principles. I will not
however attempt a theological treatise here. My attempt is
much more humble. I want to argue if we take scientific
progress throughout this century and see it in a formalistic
scheme as Teilhard saw it, it is not too difficult to see
that we are at the top of a hierarchy to which we not only
owe our existence, but on which we still depend. If I am
right, we need a new ethical code that regulates our
behavior towards every being that mortars that pyramid. This
will not happen however, as long as the only sacred thing in
our culture is profit and consummation. Many thinkers have argued on
behalf of the consumer culture, claiming it grants freedom,
it fosters democracy, calling it anarchical or epicurean. I
believe they are wrong. Philosophers like Marcuse and Adorno
have showed how the market is totalitarian and undemocratic.
If consumerism has done anything it is certainly not
anarchical or epicurean. On the contrary, it has turned us
solipsists. Every product severs our links to others and to
nature. Music is a case in point. A century ago, the family
was centered around the parlor room and the parlor room
around a musical instrument, commonly a piano. Families made
music together and their social life revolved around music
making. With the invention of the gramophone the ubiquitous
piano lost its position and was replaced by a machine that
made the music. Music making, a skill that in recent years
has been proven to hone other intellectual skills got lost.
Within less than a century the gramophone lost its place and
listening to music has become a solitary activity, an
activity whose epitome is the Walkman. We lost, in other
words, one of the highest forms of communal intellectual
activity, the public and private concert. The Walkman is, of course, the
least pernicious of our products. It shields us from the
world, but it does not shield us as much as the TV and the
computer. I do not mean to be a Luddite. I love my CD's as
much as anyone. I write, plan and calculate in a computer.
What I am criticizing is the way in which the gadget not
only shuts us from the world around us, but also impedes
thought. As pianist Russell Sherman in his wonderful book
Piano Pieces has argued: Imaginative life has been
expropriated by two different but complementary forces: The
Grand Guignol of contemporary culture and the laboratory of
market research. Fact, if there is a common
denominator to consumer culture, it is its anti-
intellectualism. Its products foster an anti-imaginative
anti-intellectual life; its propaganda does too. So that the
higher form of consciousness which puts us at the top of the
evolutionary hierarchy is being atrophied. By swapping the
principles of the mind and the spirit which ruled many in
other ages for principles of immediate satisfaction inherent
to consumer culture, we are might not just be striding from
our natural role, but also wasting the primary model which
our intellect has developed from nature
itself. Let me explain. Peter Stevens,
in his book Patterns of Nature contends that meandering is
one of the elemental patterns replicated in the natural
world. By meandering, Stevens means that nature, in its
progress toward more efficient systems, convolutes its
initial models, makes them, to use the terminology I have
been used here, more complex. As products of nature, our
minds follow the same convolutions in order to achieve their
goal. Our highest intellectual achievements themselves mimic
nature's and the intellect's convolutions. We can hear them
in Bach's fugues, read them in Dante's terza rima and
Shakespeare's blank verse, observe them in a Turner
landscape, enter them as we step into the vault of Chartres.
And it is no accident that this short-list of intellectual
achievements represents the one thing merchants and
publicists have not been able to package and co-opt. They
might severe the first bars of Beethoven's fifth, and turn
it into a piece of cultural junk in order to sell products,
but they still have to build an audience which will pack the
house during a concert season. In fact concert halls are
deserted; book sales are down; museums are constantly
running out of funds and there is a projected shortage of
thousands of scientists in America by the year 2000. Why?
Because the works of the intellect, those crystallizations
of our higher consciousness work, in principle, against the
values which consumerism espouses, partly because of their
content, partly also because unlike the consumer culture and
like the products of nature, they take place, not in the
virtual world that mass media inhabits, but in the time and
space. So if we are to revise our ethics, we have to regain
the values of mind and spirit and discard our hunger for
immediate satisfaction, which is the anti-thesis of such
values. This is not a theology perhaps.
But it will be an antidote so that future generations do not
live through the constrictions of a deformed and alienated
reality where processed information, garish imagery,
received ideas, jellied maxims, and fugitive trash are the
main impediment in establishing and understanding our role
in society and nature. I have attempted to pinpoint this
role, attempted to place humans in a continuum whose main
thrust is the attainment of a higher consciousness. I
believe the end of this evolutionary thrust is a purified
radial energy, or to use a more common term, a higher form
of spirit. It is still impossible to prove the future of
this evolution. But very important evidence is there and I
hope I have touched upon it. A complete shift of values will
not take place until we try to remedy the alienation from
nature that as Alexis Carrel has argued, stems from the fact
that the environment in which our mind and spirit bloomed
has been substituted. This substitution can be most easily
understood by the last aspect of the Kierkegardian trinity,
aesthetics. During a lecture, the Victorian
critic John Ruskin took a reproduction of a Constable
painting and began smearing it with charcoal. This ---he
said --- is what the industrial revolution has done to our
landscapes. His demonstration fulfilled two purposes. First,
he was able to show the aesthetic dilemma with which the
industrial arts would have to live with. If nature, our main
source of aesthetic nourishment is ravaged, where do we go
for inspiration? Second and most important, he was able to
show how the ethical misdoings of industrialism were undoing
what might be the greatest accomplishment we have attained
as humans in attempting to unify the intellect with the
spirit, art. In fact, if there is a source of
alienation from nature in our days, its most blatant
manifestation might be aesthetic. As R. Murray Schaffer has
demonstrated in his book, The Tuning of the World, our
senses, the means by which we connect with the world, have
been atrophied by a new soundscape that is the by-product of
emerging commercial and industrial landscapes. The reason
why Schaffer's book is so instructive, is that by isolating
the particularities of a soundscape, he not only shows how
removed we have become from our natural surroundings, from
the natural chain we belong to, but also pin-points the
psychological and intellectual aftermath of this alienation.
According to Schaffer, the pre-urban, pre-industrial
landscape was dominated by sounds that were important
because of their individuality. The soundscape of the
ancients was the soundscape of nature. In the pre-industrial
era one heard the caress of waters, the vocal variations of
the wind: Natural soundscapes have their
own unique tones and often these are so original as to
constitute sound marks. The most striking geographical sound
mark I have ever heard is in New Zealand. At Tikitere,
Rotorua, great fields of boiling sulfur, spread over acres
of ground, are accompanied by strange underground rumblings
and gurgling. The place is a pustular sore on the skin of
the earth with infernal sound effects boiling up through
vents. Of Schaffer's chief arguments is
that with urbanization, we have not only lost soundscapes
like the one he describes, but also a great deal of our
mythos ---a great deal of the imaginative world that such
soundscapes foster. In the urban, industrialized soundscape,
instead of sounds that are distinguished by their
numerousness and domination, individual acoustic signals are
obscured in an over dense population of
sounds. Lo-fi soundscape was introduced
by the industrial revolution and was extended by the
electric revolution that followed it. The lo-fi soundscape
originates with sound congestion. The industrial revolution
introduced a multitude of new sounds with unhappy
consequences for many of the natural and human sounds which
they tended to obscure; and this development was extended
into a second phase, when the electric revolution added new
effects of its own and introduced devises for packing sounds
and transmitting them schizophonically across time and space
to live amplified or multiplied existences. Today the world
suffers from an overpopulation of sounds; there is so much
acoustic information that little can emerge with clarity. In
the ultimate lo-fi soundscape, the signal-to noise ratio is
one-to-one and it is no longer possible to know what, if
anything, is to be listened to. There will be some that think
this revolution in our soundscape is an isolated incident
that has not scared our psyches. There will be others that
will argue that a change in the soundscape is merely a
cosmetic change. If our nerves are not shattered after
driving down any of our cities highways, then, at least, in
our houses, where the low frequencies of air conditioner and
refrigerator, and the high frequencies of air conditioner
and refrigerator, and the high frequencies of other
appliances are constantly going, thought becomes, if not
impossible, at least non-continuous. Ultimately, what we have trained
ourselves to do is to shut the aural world off. And the
greatest consequence of this automatic response is that our
sense of hearing, one of our main connections to the world,
has lost its ability as one of the sources of thought. The
destruction of the soundscape is, of course, only one of the
ways in which the distortion of one of our aesthetic sources
becomes evident. I would contend that every sense, and by
every sense we should understand every way in which we
connect to the world around us, sight, smell, hearing, touch
and taste, has been atrophied. The consequences of this
atrophy are not merely cosmetic, they are stunting our
development. After all, evolution is the
adaptation of an organism to outside stimuli and it is
through the senses that we respond to the outside stimuli
and adapt. In humans, part of this adaptation has emerged
through culture, through the processing and documenting of
the perception we have of our world. A great deal of this
documenting has occurred thanks to an aesthetic impulse.
After all, we know ancient humans through their pottery and
their Lascaux. We know Greek culture from The Iliad and The
Odyssey. The senses have been vital to this documentation.
As anthropologist Clifford Geertz has argued in the essay
"The Impact of the Concept of Culture and the Concept of
Man", collected in his book The Interpretation of
Cultures: Culture was not added on to our
species. It is not a cosmetic element to our being, added
on, so to speak, to a finished or virtually finished
animal…(culture) was an ingredient, and the central
ingredient, in the production of that animal itself. The
slow, steady, almost glacial growth of culture through the
Ice Age altered the balance of selection pressures for the
evolving Homo in such a way as to play a major directive
role in his evolution. The perfection of tools, the adoption
of organized hunting and gathering practices, the beginning
of true family organization, the discovery of fire, and,
most critically, though is yet extremely difficult to trace
it our in detail, the increasing reliance upon systems of
significant symbols (language, art, myth, ritual) for
orientation, communication and self-control, all created for
man a new environment to which he was then obliged to adapt.
As culture, step by infinitesimal step, accumulated and
developed, a selective advantage was given to those
individuals in the population most able to take advantage of
it ---the effective hunter, the persistent gatherer, the
adept toolmaker, the resourceful leader --- until what had
been a small brain protohuman Australopithecus became the
large brained, fully human, Homo sapiens. Between cultural patterns, the
body and the brain, a positive feedback system was created
in which each shaped the progress of the other, a system in
which the interaction among increasing tool use, the
changing of anatomy of the hand, and the expanding
representation of the thumb on the cortex, are only one part
of the more graphic examples. By submitting himself to
governance of symbolically mediated programs for producing
artifacts, organizing social life, or expressing emotions,
man determined, if unwittingly, the culminating stages of
his own biological destiny. Quite literally, though quite
inadvertently, he created himself. I quote Geertz at large because,
in this paragraph, he is able to show how aesthetics, or any
branch of knowledge which is codified through language,
numbers, facial expressions or any symbolic and intellectual
systems for that matter, have been crucial to our evolution.
These symbolic systems have determined our biological paths
and are the greatest proof that as a complex system we have
greater freedom. We are at this moment in our
history, because the sciences are so reified from the rest
of the culture, and because our culture has been reduced to
the ephemeral babble of mass media, at a critical point. Can
we continue our evolution or will we stagnate as a
species? Teilhard de Chardin and other
thinkers like Christian de Duve have understood that
evolution is not just a fact in our lives, but the main
purpose of the cosmos. Whether we evolve or not, life
will continue on. To use an image which the American poet
Rodney Jones used in one of his poems: How the planet would turn as
well without us, As when a finger is lifted
from the glass And the water regains its
shape Evolution will not stop with the
death or extinction of Homo Sapiens. However, it will
definitely take a setback, an irreparable setback for both
nature and us. And if we want to prevent this set-back, our
only tool is a development of culture, not in the
specialized way in which culture has developed since the
Renaissance, but in an integrated way, so that consciousness
becomes not only unified, but attains the higher complexity
it is meant to attain. ___________________________________________________________________________ This article, reviewed and
corrected by Janice
Paulsen, is also
online at Dr. Agudelo's site, as indicated below.
Guillermo Agudelo is a Civil
Engineer, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, Director General and researcher at the
Research Institute on Human Evolution, author of the books
The Sentient Universe and Evolution: A new paradigm, and
several articles. Visit his home page at:
<http://www.humanevol.com/doc/doc200205190001.html>. Janice's
note: I have corrected
several typos, misspellings, and grammatical errors evident
also in the original document, available online at Dr.
Agudelo's site. I thank very deeply Mrs Janice
Paulsen for having done that work. (J.S.
Abbatucci)
And think now
Acknowledgement