@grandmotherfish
Active 7 years, 3 months agoForum Replies Created
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Hi Duane,
Several commenters have said that if the universe is a “living, conscious” system, it’s not “living” or “conscious” in the scientific sense. I’d agree with them. My comment, however, is more about the poetry or spiritual meaning of this idea. As a great big fan of evolution, I am amazed at the bewilderingly complex things that evolved through natural selection, especially in comparison to the mind-numbingly empty and simple vastness that is the bulk of our universe. To me, life and evolution are miraculous, and to attribute the qualities of life and evolution to the universe is unfair. To some people, I’m sure it feels elevating to think of the universe as alive and conscious, but to me it feels like denying how special life is in our vast universe. Luckily there’s room for different ideas in this world.
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Hi Duane,
Jon is doing a better job of asking the hard questions than I ever could, so please allow me to offer a parallel suggestion.- We humans make our decisions primarily by emotions and intuition. It’s hard to make people change their minds. Even scientists are notorious for refusing to acknowledge evidence that contradicts their personal views.
- The most powerful “proof” that humans respond to is social proof. “Do the people I admire do XYZ? Then I want to do XYZ.”
- So if you want to get the “living universe” accepted at IBHA, then the best way might be to get it accepted by similar organizations first. Let the people at IBHA see what they’re missing when other organizations embrace the “living universe” and leave the IBHA behind.
Duane, you can see for yourself how hard it is to win Jon over to your side, so you can extrapolate to how hard it will be to overcome the IBHA’s rejection. If you try a “direct assault” and try to get the IBHA to reverse itself, you’re going to run into this much resistance and more. Does it really matter whether you’re right? Realistically, being right is probably not enough to overcome this level of entrenched resistance.
So what if you tried getting your material accepted in other organizations, conferences, etc? Victories in these other arenas would bolster your case and give you valuable experience in learning what approaches work best and which approaches don’t work as well as one might think they would. The alternative—trying to force the IBHA to admit they were wrong—seems doomed to failure no matter how good your case might be.
Personally, I must admit that I have a negative reaction to an attempt to describe the universe as conscious. I see consciousness as a precious gift that our ancestors have bequeathed to us, something that our ancestors evolved bit by bit over hundreds of millions of years. It’s a miraculous result of Darwinian evolution, something for us all to marvel at. To ascribe this wondrous capacity to the universe at large, in my view, does a disservice to us and to all our sentient relatives on the planet. But I’m a shameless fan of evolution, so that really colors my perception of this matter.
As for my background, my parents tried to raise me as a liberal Lutheran, but I was a liberal atheist instead. As a young man, I spent a few years persuaded that New Age mysticism was true, and I’m glad that I spent that time in mysticism because I think it softened me. But now I’m a natural materialist through and through.
-Jonathan -
Thanks for the context, Syneva. Maybe Montessori was right and maybe evolution is too abstract a concept for preschoolers. Grandmother Fish will be out in a couple months, and I’ll keep an ear open for feedback along those lines. If a bunch of parents get back to me that their preschoolers couldn’t handle the concept, then I’ll have learned something important from this experiment. I tried to make the story play out like a preschool-level story, but my years of game design experience tell me that you can never be sure how the target audience is going to react to a creative product. Thanks again for your comments.
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Duane, OK, I think I see where you’re coming from, and I hope I’ve been clear. As for the terms “spiritual” and “mystical,” as an atheist I use those terms in perhaps a more scientific sense than lots of people do. Neil deGrasse Tyson says that affirming our kinship with all living things is a soaring spiritual experience. It sounds like you’re advocating our kinship with the universe at large, so that sounds spiritual in the same sense. Mysticism is our profound sense of connection to the greater order, especially beyond the boundaries of the ego.
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The way I see it, the science people at the IBHA are going to accept spiritual contributions only if they’re clearly distinguished from the science. I’m happy to see mystics at an IBHA conference, but scientists will want a clear demarcation between their work and nature mysticism. If you can convince them of your case scientifically, you’re in. If your argument is by analogy, that the universe is like a living system, then I wouldn’t expect them to treat that as science. What’s the difference between the universe being an organism and the universe being like an organism? Why do you insist that it is alive rather than us all agreeing that it’s like a living thing? Maybe I’m missing something, but I can see why science types would not look favorably on your argument by analogy. I wish it were as easy as saying, “Duane is right so he should be able to give his talk his way,” but in science it’s not about being right. It’s about having scientific evidence. Get the scientific evidence, and you’ll be welcome. If the scientific evidence isn’t sufficient, then the ideas are art instead of science. And I love art!
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That’s quite an interesting conundrum that the IBHA is facing. It doesn’t surprise me that a number of scientific people want to create a bright line between themselves and people who interpret Big History spiritually. A lot of what science does is challenge our intuitive expectations, so I can see them not wanting to open the door to BH ideas that are intuitively appealing but lack scientific rigor. As for “living systems,” that’s the sort of intuitively appealing idea that scientists are often on guard against. Personally, I get all misty-eyed thinking of how natural selection has created systems of living organisms. Systems that weren’t created by natural selection shouldn’t be expected to be “alive” the way organisms are alive. Natural selection is unique because it creates meaning. Poetically, I can think of the universe as being alive, but literally living things got they way they are through natural selection, and there’s no natural selection driving the universe at large to do what living things do. I believe in science and poetry, so I can say scientifically that only evolving things are alive, and I can say poetically that the whole earth is alive. It’s easy to imagine scientists not wanting people to take poetic talk literally. To me, saying that the earth is literally alive the way an animal is alive, that robs natural selection of its unique power. I’d like to see the IBHA embrace spiritual perspectives. Maybe the distinction could be between science and art. Spiritual interpretations are artistic. Art moves the soul. I’d like to think that the IBHA would be open to people using the concepts of Big History to inspire people as well as inform them.
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Hi Jennifer, I have a lot of respect for Montessori education and didn’t mean to dismiss it, but I sure hope there’s more than one right way to teach kids. In particular, my Grandmother Fish book teaches evolution to preschoolers, and by Montessori standards evolution is a theory that shouldn’t be taught until grade school. Maybe I’m over-optimistic about preschoolers’ ability to learn this concept. I guess I’ll find out as I get more feedback on the book. Time will tell, and if I’m all wrong, I’ll be sure to come back here and let everyone know.
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These guidelines are really beautiful and poetic. I like how the material of each stage builds on what’s come before. I’m something of a rebel, however, and my approach would probably be a little different. My background as an educator is only as a Sunday school teacher (Unitarian), so take what I say with a grain of salt. The way these three planes move from sensation to intellect to purpose reminds me of popular psychological ideas, in which a child is a fresh mind that develops morality and other higher cognition later. In my way of looking at it, even very young children engage the world on a moral level thanks to their social instincts. Their minds, as I see it, are fresh but also ancient. So I’d try introducing intellectual instruction (stories) and life purposes (society) a little earlier. But I do love how school “subjects” are styled as “stories” or “lessons.” That’s a great way to think about them.
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The report says the nuns are “partaking of this bitter fruit.” Man, I wish I could write press releases like that.
I don’t have any special knowledge of the case, but it looks like Pope Francis is combining a campaign of economic-minded reform with a parallel campaign of enforcing tradition and church authority. Politically speaking, he needs to buckle down in some areas so that conservatives won’t balk at his liberal reforms.
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Ed,
“Scientists are great at crafting theories and gathering evidence. But they are not generally very good storytellers.”
Exactly. We have our work cut out for us in crafting inspiring stories that align with science. Jennifer has done it with her universe books, and I’m giving it a shot with Grandmother Fish.
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Duane, I read the bit about core points and came away with a different take from you. They said that the core points are not open to discussion, but that spirituality is not core. That means it’s open to discussion. No one can force spirituality down someone else’s worldview at IBHA because spirituality is not part of the core. Still, it’s legitimate, as the report says. If spirituality were part of the core with no room for dissent, then the non-spiritual people would have to bail out of the IBHA. The core is for what everyone holds in common, and spirituality is only for one segment of the participants, so it can’t be core. I don’t think atheism is core, either, but I bet there are some atheists at IBHA.
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