I was reading a book the other day by Ken Wilber, titled "No Boundaries". His thesis appears to be that we set up boundaries when we make distinctions and discriminations (my words, not his). In other words, when we think of something that we call 'black' we immediately conceive of some other thing which we call 'white'. Now perhaps there is a boudary or rather that a barrier is created when these two complementary opposites are considered. As any student of high school physics knows, black is the absence of color and white contains all of the colors of the spectrum or rainbow as the case may be. And there is no apparent barrier between the two but rather a continuum as one proceeds from one end to the other. But Wilber is not talking about color as such, he is talking about consciousness. He is talking about removing those distinctions in conscious thought and achieving what he calls unity consciousness where the individual consciousness can be aware from one end to the other perhaps even simultaneously with no boundaries or barriers. And this would be like the Buddhist nirvana free of restrictions, free of pain and suffering. But the best part for me was his description of the development of philosophical thought from the beginning of time perhaps til the current thinking of today with its quantum influence on modern science.
Wilber mentioned that in Genesis God told Adam to go forth and name the beasts of the field, the fish in the ocean, the birds in the sky etc. etc. etc. and he did. And that set up the boundaries, the barriers that caused the distinctions as the first bastion of philosophical thought. What is it? And what is it not? Today we still say... "it's a bird, it's a plane, no it's Superman."
The next in the development of philosophy I got from my mentor Marc Edmund Jones. He told his students that the next step in evolution came when we realized the difference between "how many and how much". We can see this next step, again in the Bible, where the tribes of Israel had to number themselves in order to divide up the promised land. From that point on, we can see the great contributions, of the Sumerians, the Greeks from Pythagoras to Aristotle, the Arabs including Al Gibara(sic) et al and the like, to mathematics and the process of measurement. And now we can indeed say 'how many'.
At this point, the torch was passed on to the likes of Gallileo, Kepler and Newton. Since many believed that we came from the stars and would pass back to them when death closed our eyes, these pioneers used our ability to count to bear on the stars of the cosmos. And they were able to determine how much of things did our universe contain. Of course there were developments like the telescope and the calculus that Newton himself developed, but it was the organization of things and the development of the laws of physics that shaped the age of determinism. By naming and counting and measuring we could determine everything in our universe absolutely and even predict the future perhaps. Or could we? The Church seemed to think so but reserved that right for God. Then along came Einstein.
Einstein's contributions were huge. Not only did he show how time was combined with space to give us the four dimensions of our world but he gave a new vision to gravity as well as an awareness of the relativity of reality. In other words, our perceptions are dependent on our point of view, our reference point. So an observer looking at an object from the northeast for example will see that object differently than another observer looking at it from the south for example.
Einstein also laid the ground for the newest outpost in philosophical thought. Curiously enough, with the contributions to cosmology and philosophy and the like, Einstein's Nobel Prize resulted in his research on the effect of light on metal surfaces. For instance, when a beam of light of sufficient intensity is shined on the surface of a metal, an electron is ejected from its place in the lattice of atoms of that metal surface. This lead to a demonstration of the new science of Quantum mechanics which is now known as Quantum Physics. The torch is now handed over to the likes of Bohr and Heisenberg.
The classical experiment in Quantum Physics was to use Einstein's technique but to eject two electrons from a metal surface and levitate each of them at a distance apart. Electrons in this state spin on their axis much like our earth spins on its axis. And they spin in the same direction since that is what they did when they were in the atoms of the metal lattice. But when the experimenter changes the direction of spin on one electron, the spin of the other electron immediately also changes direction in like manner. This is called 'entanglement' and it served to show the validity of the Quantum laws. So now the Experimentor is not the observer anymore as he was in the Deterministic age of Newton but he is the participant. He is the creator of his own reality and we have passed from pre-destiny to free-will in our philosophical thought.
So what is our evolution? Where do we go from here? Only God can predict the future. But the Quantum world requires that I am God. Thou art God. We all use the same process of creation but since we have free-will we do it differently but we get to the same place eventually. So collectively we all together are God.
The next step according to the String Theory boys is the discovery of many worlds, many dimensions and the possibility of simultaneous existences in these worlds. How exciting that could be as the matter of my body turns to energy at death and I would visit these other existences to see the effects of different choices and their different outcomes.
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