Thoughts

“Watching the history of the field of complexity theory has made it particularly clear to me that without a major new intellectual structure complexity cannot realistically be studied in a meaningful scientific way. But it is now just such a structure that I believe I have finally been able to set up in this book.”
- Stephen Wolfram, NKS, page 863

‘“Functional consciousness” is a way of knowing reality from the inside. Schwaller believed ancient Egypt was based on this inner knowing, very unlike our own outer-oriented one. The ancient Egyptians, he argued, were aware of the limitations of purely cerebral consciousness, the Set mind that “granulates” experience into fragments of time and space and is behind our increasing abuse of nature and of each other. Granulated experience produces our familiar world of disconnected things, each a kind of “island reality.” From this perspective, when I look at the world, I see a foreign, alien landscape, which I can know only by taking it apart and analyzing it. As the poet Wordsworth wrote, “We murder to dissect.”

But as Schwaller wrote in Nature Word (134), “The Universe is wholly activity.” There is another way of knowing, one very similar to Taoist forms of perception, which can heal the ruptures of cerebral consciousness, without recourse to dubious ideas of elites or theocracies…’
- Gary Lachman ( Source )

“Cosmology has always been - and will by definition always remain - a borderland between science and philosophy - some would say religion.”
— Cosmic Plasma, Hannes Alfvén, 1981.

“In the limit Alfvén may be right. But cosmologists have lost touch with science and philosophy and wandered into a borderland of pseudoscience. Humanity was never more in need of a new science of Life in the Universe. Our hope-less, detached cosmology permeates our lives. We thrash about in ignorance, nonsense and illogicality, seeking real meaning to our existence. All we are offered is a quasi-religious creation from nothing in a mysterious, unscientific event—the “big bang”—followed by random and unexplained miracles to arrive at the present. And our future? We are to fizzle out in eventual darkness or incineration. How uninspired. How unintelligent!

A real cosmology must reunite the sciences, humanities and the arts. It cannot be limited to astronomy. It must give real meaning to Life. It is becoming clear to more and more scholars and the questioning public from around the world that the Electric Universe offers such a broad vista of future science. It is time to get started in 2008. We have no time to lose.”
- Wallace Thornhill, 2008—Year of the Electric Universe, 10 January 2008