In order for evolution to be fully conscious of itself in us humans—as intelligent beings—we need to answer the most critical unanswered question in science: What is causing scientists and technologists, aided and abetted by computer technology, to drive the pace of scientific discovery and technological development at unprecedented exponential rates of acceleration?
To answer this question, we need to look at the business world through the meaningful modelling methods of information systems architects rather than the quantitative financial models of accountants, bankers, and economists, enabling us to create a comprehensive model of the psychodynamics of society.
To explain what I mean by this as succinctly as possible, I have written the first chapter on ‘Business Modelling’ in my final book titled Unifying Mysticism and Mathematics: To Reveal the Cosmic Foundation and Framework for All Knowledge, now with a new subtitle: To Realize Love, Peace, Wholeness, and the Truth.
The central idea in this chapter is very simple but not easy to assimilate into consciousness by those who deny the existence of Life bubbling up from the Divine Origin of the Universe, like a fountain.
Such a radical change in the way that we view causality is absolutely essential if we are to become free of the mechanistic cause-and-effect paradigm that has governed Western thought for millennia.
As this first chapter describes, I began to question the traditional causality paradigm when developing a pioneering marketing programme for decision support systems in the late 1970s for IBM in London.
For IBM’s principal management information tool at the time was able to dynamically create functions, execute them, and then erase them as if they had never existed, known as metaprogramming today.
Such a possibility arises because in stored-program computers, programs and the data they process are stored together in memory as strings of zeros and ones. So could a computer program itself without human intervention? As every program has come into existence through the execution of a previous program in a long cause-and-effect chain, where did the first program come from?
Aristotle’s answer to a similar question is that an Unmoved Mover acts as the Primary Cause of all change in the Universe, which Thomas Aquinas used to prove the existence of God in five different ways in Summa Theologiæ. Today, this first cause is sometimes regarded as a big bang, which supposedly brought the universe—as mass, space, and time—into existence around 13.8 billion years ago.
But such a notion does not explain how humans are able to create programs and other theories and artefacts that have never existed before in the manifest world of form. To understand what is happening to humanity at the present time, it is essential that we let Life into science in the Eternal Now, beyond past and future.
The urgency of such a total transformation of consciousness became crystal clear in two articles published in The Guardian yesterday.
First, under the rubric Man 1, machine 1: landmark debate between AI and humans ends in draw, Olivia Solon reported on a debate between humans and a machine at IBM’s San Francisco office on two topics: “we should subsidize space exploration” and “we should increase the use of telemedicine”.
The machine is called Project Debater, a development of IBM’s Watson supercomputer, which beat humans in the TV quiz game Jeopardy! in 2011. Project Debater is intended to show that computers with so called artificial intelligence could mine vast quantities of data, thereby finding patterns that could aid human decision-making.
The consensus of this demonstration was that the machine was better in terms of the amount of information it conveyed, but worse at delivering its arguments in full flowing spoken prose. One reason for this is that science, medicine, and economics are still stuck in their mechanistic, materialistic, and monetary worldview, not realizing that Consciousness—as Ultimate Reality—is all there is.
The confusion about the nature of Consciousness was highlighted in a ‘long-read’ article in The Guardian titled Out of their minds: wild ideas at the ‘Coachella of consciousness’ on the 2018 Science of Consciousness conference by Tom Bartlett, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education.
This annual conference—put on by the University of Arizona under the aegis of its Center for Consciousness Studies—began in 1994 under the more modest title ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’. Its intention was to provide a forum to debate what David Chalmers called the Hard Problem of Consciousness Studies: how is it that consciousness arises from the brain?
Of course, this question cannot be answered within science as it has been practised since the first scientific revolution, introduced by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton in the 1600s, because as mystics well know, the physical universe, including the brain, emerges from Consciousness.
This is essentially the Eastern worldview, at the heart of the ancient wisdom, known to Gottfried Leibniz as philosophia perennis and Newton as prisca sapientia.
However, the new-age guru Deepak Chopra, who spoke at the conference, rather muddied the waters, as he has been doing for some years. It seems that he still wants to perpetuate the conflict of opposites, as exemplified by a book that he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow, titled War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality.
For myself, the only way I know how to resolve this dilemma—completing the final revolution in science—is to engage in self-inquiry with a thought experiment that starts afresh at the very beginning, like a computer switching itself off and on again, so that it has no programs within it, not even a bootstrap program to load the operating system.
Having described the business modelling problem that I was wrestling with during the winter of 1980 before I abandoned my innovative business career with IBM, this summer I plan to write Chapter 2 of my new book on ‘Integral Relational Logic’, the commonsensical science of thought and consciousness that we all use to form concepts and organize our ideas in tables and networks.
As Integral Relational Logic is the rational science that lies beneath the foundations of mathematics, it can be used to organize all knowledge in all cultures and disciplines at all times into a coherent whole. This second chapter will be a little longer than a 22-page article that I wrote in 2013 and a summary of the definitive exposition of Integral Relational Logic, which forms Volume I of a trilogy on Wholeness: The Union of All Opposites.
My several books, essays, and articles, outlined in a bibliographic essay, show how this universal system of thought can be used to map any discipline whatsoever, including mathematics, enabling us to realize Love, Peace, Stillness, and Presence at the heart of the Cosmos.
So to tidy up my various writings on mapping mathematics, during the autumn and winter of 2018 and 2019, I plan to write three chapters on how mathematics can be viewed as a generative science of patterns and relationships emerging directly from the Divine Origin of the Universe, rather than viewing it as an axiomatic, deductive, and mechanistic proof system, which eschews self-contradictions.
I’ll announce the availability of these chapters on this website when they are available. Thank you so much for listening.