walking with science
The study of Goethean science at Schumacher College shows there is a great opportunity to integrate experience into science that deserves much greater attention. In fact the understanding that one needs to explore the step of seeing before one can have a science of things seems to be cropping up more and more, often quite independently to Goethe. This is why we at Earthlinks set up Process and Pilgrimage as a quite independent platform that could pay attention to wholeness accessed through the step of seeing.
Our first event at Birkbeck certainly underlined the need for such a forum, where the debate proceded free from the academic confusion of knowledge as a replacement for a living engagement. David Bohm and the continuing work on process by Basil Hiley formed a main thread to the exploration. Our second event followed the River Dart in Devon in a five day pilgrimage with Satish Kumar, Peter and Alice Oswald and others.
Our new event, Wholeness in Three Panels gives the opportunities for the ripples of the first events to work their way outward in exploring the areas of science, experience and wholeness (with reference to language) in a panel discussion. (See http://www.earthlinksall.com/processandpilgrimage for photos, papers, details )
Please do book early .
To learn more of previous events, read article : A Monologue with Wholeness by Philip Franses : http://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/learning-resources/a-monologue-with-wholeness
The pilgrim bases an experience only on the leaving of an old, in the faith of discovering a new land. Such a pilgrim was David Bohm. While others around him tried to hold on to the old thing-ness of particles that lived in the quantum world, David Bohm struck for new shores. He made up words as he went along for wholeness (the implicate order), harmonisation of possibility (quantum potential field) and process at a fundamental level (holomovement). The path of the photon guided by the quantum potential under the influence of active information (in Basil Hiley's mathematics of process) joins with the basic nature of experience in pilgrimage when one leaves behind the familiar order, (informed by Satish Kumar's pilgrim journey). The forum seeks a common unity in our feeling for and living of process.
Origin of event
Brian: ‘Dear Basil: Philip Franses and I would love to visit you some time before Christmas to talk about your views on morphogenesis and quantum mechanics from the perspective of superposition or ambiguity or multiple possibilities that get resolved appropriately in context.’
Philip: 'Brian Goodwin and myself take ambiguity as a starting point for understanding biological processes, taking as a metaphor language, where meaning resolves ambiguity according to the context of the sentence in which the words appear.'
Basil: 'It looks as if there is an essential ambiguity in nature and this provides the freedom for creativity to enter. I should add that the ambiguity is a space-time ambiguity, not a process ambiguity. It is in the process domain that information with meaning becomes active. I think this is essentially what we need to generalise physics so that it includes biological systems.'
Philp: 'Brian and I would both like to continue the discussion we had at Birkbeck and extend process into agency, taking advantage of the opportunity given by the presence of Chris at Schumacher College'
Chris: 'For me the excitement comes from the opening up of context-dependent truth and a role for meaning and non-locality, with a correspondingly greater place for creativity in evolution.'
What is your experience of process?