Science Meets Spirit
Science doesn't meet spirit by collapsing different registers of human understanding and expression. It doesn't need to. Science is already perfectly capable of meeting spirit without register collapse. When science meets spirit science is still science, and spirit is still spirit. It doesn't involve consciousness particles or universes that evolve to know themselves.
Science is done by human beings but science is not human beings, and human beings are not science. And scientists are not by definition individuals who have no spirituality, and who "just don't get it". On the contrary, it is collapsing registers - the scientific and the spiritual - that is a symptom of lack of understanding. Any meeting between science and spirit will happen in human beings, not in science. It is already happening in human beings when the human being understands that understanding everything through scientific facts is only one kind of understanding. And that understanding what the scientific facts are and how they fit together is only to see part of the picture if you don't understand why scientific facts come to be what they are, and how they come to be stable facts in the first place.
Science is already meeting spirit when any scientist understands that all scientific understanding, no matter how abstract, rests on sense perception. Because the symbolic intelligence we use in science didn't evolve by itself, it is part of the evolution of our whole sensory being. And because of the nature of the evolution of our intelligence the world we sense perceive is arranged in such a way that everything is an icon of the experience it represents. Even a mathematical symbol is an icon of the experience of the cognitive understanding of it. But the experience represented by any icon is never an idempotent-like property of the icon. The experience represented by the icon is in the experiencer. That is such a fundamental principle of nature, but at present, it is not one widely grasped in scientific understanding.
Science doesn't meet spirit by trying to spiritualise science. Nor does it happen by trying to personalise science, or by trying to "explain consciousness" through novel structures and dynamics understood in symbolic intelligence. To approach consciousness it is necessary to understand that there are principles in nature beneath the current network of facts on which science is based. And one of those principles, the first one to be tackled and understood in science itself, is the relationship between evolutionary sentient intelligence and its environment. How the intelligence becomes sentient or the embodiment of consciousness can never be understood by understanding evolution in a way that doesn't first understand why there is a partition or separation between an organism and its environment in the first place. Just as quantum decoherence cannot be fully understood without properly understanding WHY the partition between the quantum system and its environment emerges.
A first collapse of registers that science will never accept anyway, is the attempt to spiritualise science itself or make it into a new kind of mysticism. This is where "consciousness particles" and universes that become conscious come in, this is where quantum entanglement of a kind that doesn't exist in science rears its head, where science is misrepresented, and where exotic theories live, that cannot be tested.
A second collapse of registers that stands in the way of the meeting of spirit with science comes from overreach in the estimation of the power of scientific explanation itself. This happens especially when the psychological and emotional investment in scientific knowledge and enquiry is so great that it closes off enquiry of any other kind. The position taken is then that everything and all knowledge ultimately collapses into the scientific register, creating blindness to the other registers.
Science meets spirit wherever it is able to connect registers without collapsing them. And we are already doing this, in modern psychology and neuroscience generally. It is just that in that meeting, the scientific register dominates the activity of understanding. As it should. As phenomenological intelligence increases, that situation will change.
Science is done by human beings but science is not human beings, and human beings are not science. And scientists are not by definition individuals who have no spirituality, and who "just don't get it". On the contrary, it is collapsing registers - the scientific and the spiritual - that is a symptom of lack of understanding. Any meeting between science and spirit will happen in human beings, not in science. It is already happening in human beings when the human being understands that understanding everything through scientific facts is only one kind of understanding. And that understanding what the scientific facts are and how they fit together is only to see part of the picture if you don't understand why scientific facts come to be what they are, and how they come to be stable facts in the first place.
Science is already meeting spirit when any scientist understands that all scientific understanding, no matter how abstract, rests on sense perception. Because the symbolic intelligence we use in science didn't evolve by itself, it is part of the evolution of our whole sensory being. And because of the nature of the evolution of our intelligence the world we sense perceive is arranged in such a way that everything is an icon of the experience it represents. Even a mathematical symbol is an icon of the experience of the cognitive understanding of it. But the experience represented by any icon is never an idempotent-like property of the icon. The experience represented by the icon is in the experiencer. That is such a fundamental principle of nature, but at present, it is not one widely grasped in scientific understanding.
Science doesn't meet spirit by trying to spiritualise science. Nor does it happen by trying to personalise science, or by trying to "explain consciousness" through novel structures and dynamics understood in symbolic intelligence. To approach consciousness it is necessary to understand that there are principles in nature beneath the current network of facts on which science is based. And one of those principles, the first one to be tackled and understood in science itself, is the relationship between evolutionary sentient intelligence and its environment. How the intelligence becomes sentient or the embodiment of consciousness can never be understood by understanding evolution in a way that doesn't first understand why there is a partition or separation between an organism and its environment in the first place. Just as quantum decoherence cannot be fully understood without properly understanding WHY the partition between the quantum system and its environment emerges.
A first collapse of registers that science will never accept anyway, is the attempt to spiritualise science itself or make it into a new kind of mysticism. This is where "consciousness particles" and universes that become conscious come in, this is where quantum entanglement of a kind that doesn't exist in science rears its head, where science is misrepresented, and where exotic theories live, that cannot be tested.
A second collapse of registers that stands in the way of the meeting of spirit with science comes from overreach in the estimation of the power of scientific explanation itself. This happens especially when the psychological and emotional investment in scientific knowledge and enquiry is so great that it closes off enquiry of any other kind. The position taken is then that everything and all knowledge ultimately collapses into the scientific register, creating blindness to the other registers.
Science meets spirit wherever it is able to connect registers without collapsing them. And we are already doing this, in modern psychology and neuroscience generally. It is just that in that meeting, the scientific register dominates the activity of understanding. As it should. As phenomenological intelligence increases, that situation will change.