Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

truth introduced in Chapter 2.

Soul, Spirit, and the other terms used in mysterianism might seem to contrast unfavourably with straight-forward science. But both science and religion would seem to agree that something (chaos, disorder, formlessness?) gives birth to order. Both even agree that there could be a cycle, so that the iron grip of entropy is somehow overcome (or, it might be said, chaos will always somehow be able to give birth to new form). Religion’s names for things (spirit, soul and so on) may be off-putting but perhaps there are processes going on out there in the universe that seem supernatural but that might one day be verified as empirical knowledge. If, at some future time, there was some field or wave-function discovered that forms a connection between all sentient beings in the universe then perhaps the distinctions we currently make between science and religion would start to give way. So there remains the possibility that all of the terms we’ve explored that are associated with mysterianism — formlessness, spirit, world soul, soul, daimon, consciousness — will eventually be explained in some strictly scientific way. And then science and religion’s descriptions could align. (See, in particular, Ken Wilbur, especially his, A Theory of Everything, and reference his ‘four quadrants’.)

I think that what was said in Chapter 11 about emergence is one possible route to a more integral understanding. Larger and larger agglomerations of mind and matter, via eco-systems, the bio-sphere and beyond, yield stronger and stronger forms of emergence — of

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