These models will help you to better understand the world, to be a clearer thinker, to better use data, and to make better decisions.

The synthesist is inherently a softer person; he is happy with enough knowledge to take the next step, probe the world and then loop back to correct if necessary. It is inherently organic, uncertain knowledge. As embodied, finite beings, synthesis is a better way of knowing than the God’s eye view that forms the tacit (and Monotheistic) view of modern science.

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Does the study of living systems require a new physics? Not if new physics requires the discovery of yet to be known particles or forces or strange quantum mechanical effects. Organisms are not different from other types of matter as far as their atomic properties are concerned. However, the term organism itself points to where we will be needing new physics. Organism is related to organization; in other words, what we need to be looking for are laws of organization that are relatively new.

There is nothing new about the search for laws of organization. D’Arcy Thompson was looking for them more than a hundred years ago. More recently Stuart Kauffman and others have also called for laws of organization. I think we need to go one step further: we need to think about organization as a distinct entity from substances, whether they be atoms, quarks or strings. In Aristotle’s physics there were four causes: the material, the formal, the efficient and the final. Organization is a combination of the material and the formal cause and much of what is new in cognitive science – like embodied cognition- is coming from emerging intuitions about organization and organisms. What we are groping towards is a synthetic mode of knowledge (is it a science?) that is neither so particular that it only applies to certain carbon based life-forms and not so abstract that it is reducible to atoms. Neither embodied cognition (too particular) nor current physics (too universal) fits the bill but we are getting there, I think.

Related articles

• The Organities
• M-Theories

In a world of infinite objects, I am the only subject.

A complementary phenomenon happened in classical Indian philosophy and contemplation where the self was decentred leading to a very different critique of anthropocentrism. Descartes maxim of extreme subjectivity says “I think therefore I am.” The Buddha removes the ‘I’ in both halves of that phrase. Neither knowledge nor existence is predicated on me. This earlier attack on  anthropocentrism doesn’t reveal us as one object in an infinite array of objects, but rather as one subject in an infinite array of subjects.

It’s no surprise that in this discovery of an infinite array of subjectivity, the contemplative traditions lost interest in exploring the objective sphere, just as modern science kept consciousness at bay for centuries.

In a world of infinite subjects, the world is the only object.

The contemplative traditions -as much as science- were victims of their own success; the more they explored subjectivity the less interesting and unimportant the world of objects became.  Each side reveals the blind spots of the other. It is now time to bring the two together in a new anthropocentrism and then start the de-centering process all over again, except that this time we need to liberate both the subject and the object.

1. Me → Earth → Solar System → Galaxy → Universe.
2. Strings → Particles → Atoms → Cells → Me.

When it comes to subjectivity, the same logic leads us in the exactly the opposite direction. As Descartes pointed out a while ago, the push towards objectivity is mirrored by a push towards certainty which leads us inexorably towards cogito ergo sum. In other words, the totally objective universe is mirrored and represented in my completely isolated and subjective consciousness. There is a dialectical relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. The more we dethrone anthropocentrism in the name of objectivity, the more we introduce subjectivity through the back door via consciousness and first person experience.

I think it is time to reintroduce a common-sense anthropocentrism. For one, it is obvious that I view the world through my eyes, not someone else’s.  The best we can obtain in terms of objectivity is positional objectivity; i.e., the maximally objective position from where I am. Secondly, our embodied knowledge systems – as opposed to the abstract Cartesian one – are designed to know the world here and now.  From this perspectives, there is a genuine sense in which we can reverse the arrows in 1 and 2 above to read:

1. Universe → Galaxy → Solar System → Earth → Me.
2. Me → Cells → Atoms → Particles → Strings.

1. Theories of Mind (also see here).
2. Theoretical Metaphysics.
3. Theories of Mathematics.
4. Theories of Morals.
5. Theories of Meaning.

What binds these M-theories together is a common concern with the everyday world, or what I have called samsara elsewhere.  Of these five, only mathematics might be about esoteric realities rather than the world of experience, but I will try to convince you that mathematical experience is a part of samsara. In these pages, you will find speculations about the links between the various M-theories and to use these M-theories to understand samsara itself.