Life is Fundamental, Not Matter: A LifeVIEW

Life is Fundamental, Not Matter: A LifeVIEW

My Thoughts on my 8oth Birthday 3/8/2012

The question should be how does matter arise from life? Life is creative, but everything in flux would simply be chaos. As a ground for building order, life takes on habit - over-powering habit. The result is matter, entities that no longer are capable of self-acting. There is more to reality than we knew. Could there be living patterns of energy? Is there a biofield in pre-space creating matter?

..biology of the past is more like physics. That biology has led to the study of structure where we wind up with nothing but misleading guesses as to what processes are going on. Now, electronic biology has been discovered. The living energy structure in our bodies is electronic and biophoton energy flows.

Szent Gyorgi: said "If Nature wants to do something she will find a way to do it if there is no contradiction to basic rules of Nature. She has time to do so. (Living Nature also often works with more complex systems than the physicist uses for testing his theories.)[6]"

"From the organizing principles of life we can learn better choices for acting, both individually and for social policy." ~ Quote from Life As Creative Organisms by Norm Hirst

Life is sui generis, that is, life is unique and in a class by itself. It cannot be compared to or explained by physics.

Life is primordial activity, which Bohm called the implicate order.

Life means the organizing principles that are creating all forms of life.

An organism is not calculating, and second of all, it is connected to the requirements of its environment. Living organisms must live in an organismic environment to function. Organisms function to conform to coherence conditions imposed by their environment while co-creating coherent acts through internal processes that individuate and add their uniqueness to the whole. Thus organisms have a Janus character. Janus was a Roman God with a double-faced head, each looking in opposite directions at the same time. An organism is looking both to its own unique experiences while sensing what also can be unique contextual conditions of the moment. Thus to develop their unique contributions, organisms must harmonize this reality and that is accomplished through the use of inherent value intelligence. I have found that this requires values as guiding force, as opposed to cause and effect.

My Reflections of 80 years

I began at MIT delving into the foundations of knowledge from physics and mathematics to metaphysics, logics, biology and theology—and then into new findings in biophysics and quantum physics.

..Instead, I would discover through a lifetime of inquiry that physics and it's foundations in substance metaphysics and accompanying logics is totally inappropriate for applications to understanding life. Way down deep human knowledge developed in a way that became committed to errors that destroy life.

Recent experiments of the past 20 years in physics and biophysics are producing results that cannot be explained with the traditional scientific materialism and substance philosophy. A new worldview is required. Not only is a new view of reality required, we also need to change protocols of inquiry to cope with it.

Following my tour of duty in the Korean War— I became deeply concerned about the causes and destructiveness of war and when I met Robert Hartman, the founder of the first formalism of values, I was inspired by Hartman and dedicated my life to more fully develop Hartman's science of values.

The current reality change is making a transition from a rigid, mechanistic, and materialistic worldview to one that is built on a foundation of interconnectedness, cooperation, and the intersection of science and spirituality.

Living entities can initiate acts. In acting they add an uncontrollable quality that cannot be calculated through any physical laws of force. Living entities do not passively await an external force to do something. For life there is no cause and effect. No determinism. Life is wholistic from bottom to top. Using reductionism destroys knowledge of our living organization and how best to work with it; the very aspect we should be trying to understand. In structure, an organism may appear to have many parts, but in process and function organism consists of societies of actors, acting on the basis of communication and coordination with all that organism’s societies and actors. Thus organisms function as a single holism.

Unfortunately, given a materialistic meta-physics, scientific explorers have been limited to a minor territory, the domain of the physical/non-living. Can all those deterministic forces possibly account for our experience? Is there any way to combine them all together in such a way as to produce what we experience? Simply, no. There is no way. So biologists explain that it’s “random processes” and survival of the fittest. There is no chance in hell that random processes can produce what we have in our experience; nor produce us for that matter. Life charged with creating novelty under conditions of great co-intelligence can create life and evolution. We must quickly create a philosophy and science for the 21st Century.

But scientific materialism has provided technology by which the internal workings of living organisms can be observed as they live. But -- how living organisms work is unlike anything ever imagined! As we learn how living entities function, it turns out that it is nothing like we thought. Living entities are not machines, nor machine-like. Their workings are not subject to cause and effect, and they are not carrying out calculations. Living entities are capable of initiating their own acts based on values. They live in societies that give them maximum freedom within coherence conditions required by life. That is true even in the cells in our bodies. It is true of the molecules in cells, and, in nature. It is true of us on the living earth. Reality is not just rocks with accidental creation of life as epiphenomena here on earth.

Life itself is fundamental.

Matter isn’t fundamental, energy is. Physicists have discovered the Dirac Sea; zero point energy that fills all of what we thought was empty space. The physicist, P. A. M. Dirac, made a change to Schrödinger’s quantum equations that lead to discovery of this pervasive energy; thus it is named the Dirac Sea. Much of fundamental reality occurs in the Dirac Sea from which it becomes manifest in our space-time of material. Rather than matter being fundamental, energy flows in the Sea of Dirac are fundamental. The reality underlying quantum theory is a living organism. That is why quantum theory is so difficult to interpret. The dynamics of those energy flows are, I believe, the dynamics of life. The energy flows manifest matter and living entities. All life is one, a living organism. Due to its connectedness we have primary unmediated experience.

To be alive is to be able to act. There is nothing in our history of ideas, whether philosophical or scientific, that deals with living self-acting entities. Everything in our philosophy and science is an attempt to imitate life with non-living entities not capable of action. We will talk about life as energies within the electronics nature of living organisms; mysteries - such as how can bodies of so many parts be holistic? The answer is: the living processes within it are holistic. The living processes within it are “metastable” and constantly have to be maintained by energy. If the living processes are gone, all that's left is hardware. What is coming out in today's research requires understanding how living processes are free to act and combine in societal unities.

It is life itself that produces evolution, not random processes or survival of the fittest. Life evolves based on values, which requires an awareness of the holism. At all the levels mentioned above, living entities are choosing acts based on values characteristic of their level. That the molecules in cells are living is contrary to what biologists have traditionally thought. Now laboratory evidence shows signals and behavior indicating that they are living and acting. In life, valuation processes are pervasive.

We have lived with materialism too long to remember the qualities of life. It seems to me that many are trying to live as if they are machines; we are not well suited to being robots. It is the adventure of living fully that gives life meaning. A LifeVIEW gives us new assumptions about reality and that's where we re-discover love and value dynamics by which all of us find our way.