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Creative Evolution: A Physicist's Resolution Between Darwinism and Intelligent Design
By denying evolution altogether, says quantum physicist Amit Goswami, intelligent design believers fly in the face of scientific data. But the idea of intelligent design does contain substance that neo-Darwinists cannot ignore. Goswami posits that consciousness, not matter, is the primary force in the universe. Biology must come to terms with feeling, meaning, and the purposefulness of life, as well as with the idea of a designer. What's more, reconciling the question of life's purposefulness and the existence of the designer with neo-Darwinism also answers many other difficult questions. The result is a paradigm shift for biology and the vision of a coherent whole that Goswami calls "science within consciousness." In this timely, important book, the author offers clear arguments supported by the findings of quantum physics that represent a major step in resolving controversies between science and religion.
- GenresScience
344 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2008
21 people are currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Amit Goswami
70 books227 followersAmit Goswami is a nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics since 1968. Dr. Goswami is a revolutionary in a growing body of renegade scientists who in recent years have ventured into the domain of the spiritual in an attempt both to interpret the seemingly inexplicable findings of their experiments and to validate their intuitions about the existence of a spiritual dimension of life.
He became best known as one of the interviewed scientists featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? , the recent documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance , and stars in the 2009 documentary The Quantum Activist .
Please visit www.AmitGoswami.org for the latest events and information.
He became best known as one of the interviewed scientists featured in the 2004 film What the Bleep Do We Know!? , the recent documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance , and stars in the 2009 documentary The Quantum Activist .
Please visit www.AmitGoswami.org for the latest events and information.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 19, 2023
This was an interesting read, no doubt, and Dr. Goswami synthesizes clearly and efficiently the basic idea of Creative Evolution. This book answered a lot of questions I've had for years about things I've heard folks say, but that I've been unable to really follow. I also appreciate his calling into question some fundamental assumptions of popular Darwinism, and asking biologists to face up to the hard question.
How did humans gets here? There are, as Goswami's book lays it out, three basic points of view: 1) The evolutionary materialists--that is, Darwinists--say all comes from survival of the fittest and natural selection. On this view, all things, from a long tails on a rat to a mother's affection for her babies, can be explained (explained away) by the long and slow process of evolution. 2) The creationists say that an Intelligent Designer made things the way they are. It was He who gave the rats their tails and put love in the hearts of mothers. 3) This third way, a sort of middle road, is the one Goswami is selling. In the creative evolution view, things do evolve, but they also are guided, after a fashion, by an "objective organizing principle." That is, a sort of collective consciousness that, in a quantum moment of collapse, brings all the potentialities in a given moment to a singular, realized point. This consciousness, he argues, is what mankind has been calling "God" all along. He says, openly and plainly, that there really is no difference between the two.
There is more to it than this, of course, but those three camps are the basic picture. Goswami carries on to things like reincarnation and ego and meditation and so forth. These points are sidebar details, though. The real divide between myself and Goswami is his assertion that what I call "God" is no different than the "Consciousness" he deduces from quantum theory. I just can't see the logic behind calling them synonyms. The one, to me, seems uncreated and eternal and--perhaps of greatest distinction--purposeful. That is, my God is a personality. The other, the Objective Observer of Goswami, seems none of these things. He (or "it") doesn't precede, but rather rolls out of the created universe, even the quantum-equipped universe with all its unrealized potentialities, and grows in strength along with it. (Isn't this what Owen Barfield and the theosophists argued, that human language and the cosmic consciousness evolved together? Forgoing the question of whether they were right or wrong, can we at least agree that this is hardly synonymous with "In the beginning, God..."?)
Perhaps look at it this way: If a creative evolutionist died today and faced this Collective Consciousness (Goswami's "God"), would he be surprised to find this "God" asking things of him? Demanding things of him? Enacting judgement, or mercy, on him? Making decisions about him? Loving him? ...I very much think so. These sorts of activities are what the Living God does. They would be, I think, shocking to find in Goswami's "God."
Now that I think of it, Jesus is the easiest way to see the divide, for He is still "causing not peace but division." He is still "the stone that causes men to stumble." For it is when we get to Jesus--God choosing to enter His creation; God doing things and making decisions; God in the manger and God on the cross--that all this nonsense of "Your God is just another name for the Collective Consciousness" becomes illogical. Surely a Collective Consciousness couldn't do that!
Again, maybe I'm right or maybe Goswami is right. Either way, let's not pretend (as his book does) that we are both talking about the same thing.
How did humans gets here? There are, as Goswami's book lays it out, three basic points of view: 1) The evolutionary materialists--that is, Darwinists--say all comes from survival of the fittest and natural selection. On this view, all things, from a long tails on a rat to a mother's affection for her babies, can be explained (explained away) by the long and slow process of evolution. 2) The creationists say that an Intelligent Designer made things the way they are. It was He who gave the rats their tails and put love in the hearts of mothers. 3) This third way, a sort of middle road, is the one Goswami is selling. In the creative evolution view, things do evolve, but they also are guided, after a fashion, by an "objective organizing principle." That is, a sort of collective consciousness that, in a quantum moment of collapse, brings all the potentialities in a given moment to a singular, realized point. This consciousness, he argues, is what mankind has been calling "God" all along. He says, openly and plainly, that there really is no difference between the two.
There is more to it than this, of course, but those three camps are the basic picture. Goswami carries on to things like reincarnation and ego and meditation and so forth. These points are sidebar details, though. The real divide between myself and Goswami is his assertion that what I call "God" is no different than the "Consciousness" he deduces from quantum theory. I just can't see the logic behind calling them synonyms. The one, to me, seems uncreated and eternal and--perhaps of greatest distinction--purposeful. That is, my God is a personality. The other, the Objective Observer of Goswami, seems none of these things. He (or "it") doesn't precede, but rather rolls out of the created universe, even the quantum-equipped universe with all its unrealized potentialities, and grows in strength along with it. (Isn't this what Owen Barfield and the theosophists argued, that human language and the cosmic consciousness evolved together? Forgoing the question of whether they were right or wrong, can we at least agree that this is hardly synonymous with "In the beginning, God..."?)
Perhaps look at it this way: If a creative evolutionist died today and faced this Collective Consciousness (Goswami's "God"), would he be surprised to find this "God" asking things of him? Demanding things of him? Enacting judgement, or mercy, on him? Making decisions about him? Loving him? ...I very much think so. These sorts of activities are what the Living God does. They would be, I think, shocking to find in Goswami's "God."
Now that I think of it, Jesus is the easiest way to see the divide, for He is still "causing not peace but division." He is still "the stone that causes men to stumble." For it is when we get to Jesus--God choosing to enter His creation; God doing things and making decisions; God in the manger and God on the cross--that all this nonsense of "Your God is just another name for the Collective Consciousness" becomes illogical. Surely a Collective Consciousness couldn't do that!
Again, maybe I'm right or maybe Goswami is right. Either way, let's not pretend (as his book does) that we are both talking about the same thing.
June 17, 2024
In this 2008 book, Amit Goswami applies his theoretical framework of science within consciousness to biological evolution and the origins of life. His hope is to reconcile creationism with evolution, in accord with his greater goal of reconciling science with spirituality. For the first time in this body of work, he repeatedly uses the term "God" (this book was published in the same year as another of his books, "God Is Not Dead"). He defines God as "objective cosmic consciousness" - unitive consciousness as the ground of all being.
He frames the problem of creationism vs. Darwinism as one of conflicting worldviews, both of which are ultimately untenable. The simplistic model of creationism is clearly contradicted by real world data, but the Darwinist model of random mutation and natural selection is also unable to explain much of what is observable about life. For example, it cannot explain life's purposiveness, or the biological arrow of time with its progression from simpler to more complex life forms. Nor can it explain the subjective feeling of being alive.
The problem is basing science on a reductionist materialist ontology; this makes it impossible to explain subjective qualia of experience without running into paradoxes. In addition, with Darwinism, everything must arise from chance and necessity, so the theory runs afoul of huge improbabilities. How can organic molecules arrange themselves into complex life forms by chance alone? The doctrine of natural selection is inadequate because it too is paradoxical - it declares "survival of the fittest" but then defines "fittest" as that which survives. This is circular reasoning which fails to address the fundamental question - why survive at all?
Something is lacking in the materialist worldview on which Darwinism is based, and Goswami’s proposition is that what is missing is the idea of the universe arising within consciousness as a consequence of self-referential quantum measurement. Such a measurement can arise when there is a “tangled hierarchy,” where cause and effect are intertwined. This is a key concept in Goswami’s theory, an idea you may have already encountered in the work of Douglas Hofstadter. An example from biology is how DNA encodes for proteins but proteins are used to replicate DNA. Which comes first, if each depends on the other? Clearly the whole living system must arise as one.
In Goswami's model this happens because consciousness itself - the ground of all being - actualizes the living system in manifest reality out of the myriad quantum possibilities available at the microscopic level. In other words, the biological complexity evolves in the uncollapsed wave function, unrestricted by the laws of entropy which make its manifestation via material interactions alone so unlikely. When the gestalt of a functioning living system is available in possibility, consciousness collapses the wave function into that state in a self-referential measurement, actualizing the living entity and identifying with it in the process. Thus arises a sense of self, an experience of being separate from the world. This explains the subjective feeling of being alive, and why life forms have a drive to survive.
Quantum measurement alone is not enough to explain how a life form can exist; somehow consciousness must be able to recognize the proper arrangement of biological matter to represent a living function. This is where Goswami reintroduces his idea of subtle bodies and psychophysical parallelism - consciousness simultaneously collapses correlated physical and vital bodies, with the vital body acting as a blueprint so that consciousness can recognize the possibilities of life available to be represented in material form. Our experience of feeling is the manifestation of this vital body.
Similarly, as evolution progresses up the Great Chain of Being, a mental body, correlated with our biological brain, gives us our experience of thought. Goswami explains how perception manifests from mental image representation in the brain. He presents an intriguing road map of the evolution of mind which is similar to that espoused by Ken Wilber, whom Goswami has referenced in earlier works. He suggests some tantalizing possibilities for future evolution, and also speculates that as a species humanity is stuck evolutionarily because we have not integrated our emotional and rational minds. He offers some ideas of how we could overcome this blocker.
Goswami's thinking is unconventional, but it does connect physics and biology with spirituality using a consciousness-based resolution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. He postulates an objective cosmic consciousness as the equivalent of what religions call "God," which fosters creativity in the manifest physical world with the aid of archetypes of form. He also postulates subtle bodies which exist in parallel with our material body, which give us our inner experience of being alive, of having feelings and a mind. This is what religions call our "soul." This is an idealist as oppososed to a materialist science, akin to the idealism of Plato, and it does indeed reconcile the idea of a creator God with the nitty gritty of the physical sciences.
I've written a super long review here, the longest of mine yet for any of Amit Goswami's books. Goswami's ideas make sense to me, and I find his philosophy satisfying. I hope I have summarized his arguments here accurately and in a way that motivates the reader to check out this book, or any of his others. I recommend starting with "The Self Aware Universe".
He frames the problem of creationism vs. Darwinism as one of conflicting worldviews, both of which are ultimately untenable. The simplistic model of creationism is clearly contradicted by real world data, but the Darwinist model of random mutation and natural selection is also unable to explain much of what is observable about life. For example, it cannot explain life's purposiveness, or the biological arrow of time with its progression from simpler to more complex life forms. Nor can it explain the subjective feeling of being alive.
The problem is basing science on a reductionist materialist ontology; this makes it impossible to explain subjective qualia of experience without running into paradoxes. In addition, with Darwinism, everything must arise from chance and necessity, so the theory runs afoul of huge improbabilities. How can organic molecules arrange themselves into complex life forms by chance alone? The doctrine of natural selection is inadequate because it too is paradoxical - it declares "survival of the fittest" but then defines "fittest" as that which survives. This is circular reasoning which fails to address the fundamental question - why survive at all?
Something is lacking in the materialist worldview on which Darwinism is based, and Goswami’s proposition is that what is missing is the idea of the universe arising within consciousness as a consequence of self-referential quantum measurement. Such a measurement can arise when there is a “tangled hierarchy,” where cause and effect are intertwined. This is a key concept in Goswami’s theory, an idea you may have already encountered in the work of Douglas Hofstadter. An example from biology is how DNA encodes for proteins but proteins are used to replicate DNA. Which comes first, if each depends on the other? Clearly the whole living system must arise as one.
In Goswami's model this happens because consciousness itself - the ground of all being - actualizes the living system in manifest reality out of the myriad quantum possibilities available at the microscopic level. In other words, the biological complexity evolves in the uncollapsed wave function, unrestricted by the laws of entropy which make its manifestation via material interactions alone so unlikely. When the gestalt of a functioning living system is available in possibility, consciousness collapses the wave function into that state in a self-referential measurement, actualizing the living entity and identifying with it in the process. Thus arises a sense of self, an experience of being separate from the world. This explains the subjective feeling of being alive, and why life forms have a drive to survive.
Quantum measurement alone is not enough to explain how a life form can exist; somehow consciousness must be able to recognize the proper arrangement of biological matter to represent a living function. This is where Goswami reintroduces his idea of subtle bodies and psychophysical parallelism - consciousness simultaneously collapses correlated physical and vital bodies, with the vital body acting as a blueprint so that consciousness can recognize the possibilities of life available to be represented in material form. Our experience of feeling is the manifestation of this vital body.
Similarly, as evolution progresses up the Great Chain of Being, a mental body, correlated with our biological brain, gives us our experience of thought. Goswami explains how perception manifests from mental image representation in the brain. He presents an intriguing road map of the evolution of mind which is similar to that espoused by Ken Wilber, whom Goswami has referenced in earlier works. He suggests some tantalizing possibilities for future evolution, and also speculates that as a species humanity is stuck evolutionarily because we have not integrated our emotional and rational minds. He offers some ideas of how we could overcome this blocker.
Goswami's thinking is unconventional, but it does connect physics and biology with spirituality using a consciousness-based resolution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. He postulates an objective cosmic consciousness as the equivalent of what religions call "God," which fosters creativity in the manifest physical world with the aid of archetypes of form. He also postulates subtle bodies which exist in parallel with our material body, which give us our inner experience of being alive, of having feelings and a mind. This is what religions call our "soul." This is an idealist as oppososed to a materialist science, akin to the idealism of Plato, and it does indeed reconcile the idea of a creator God with the nitty gritty of the physical sciences.
I've written a super long review here, the longest of mine yet for any of Amit Goswami's books. Goswami's ideas make sense to me, and I find his philosophy satisfying. I hope I have summarized his arguments here accurately and in a way that motivates the reader to check out this book, or any of his others. I recommend starting with "The Self Aware Universe".
January 1, 2018
This book has some good descriptions on how evolution and creationism can go hand in hand. Science and religion are not enemies. However, I don't agree with all of his ideas - particularly reincarnation.
April 12, 2014
I had the question going into this book of if we are required to create the material world, how to we come to be in order to create it. Goswami answers this with the delayed choice experiment to show that conscious selection can collapse a quantum possibility backwards in time. Physics allows for this in its laws. In classical physics time does not have a direction. [return]Then there is Wigner's friend. Who does the choosing? Goswami: "Observers choose from the vantage point of a cosmic nonlocal consciousness; that's how consistency is maintained. . . . . The universe is participatory via the downward causation of nonlocal consciousness." Participatory is interesting, but I don't see in this case what either Wigner or his friend had to do with the choice. They observed, but the choice was made for them. Goswami often invokes tangled hierarchy when it gets confusing. Which doesn't help.[return]While still attracted to Goswami's explanations of consciousness and its role in quantum physics, he goes to far in invoking god. At certain points he even says reality is too mind boggling for there not to be a god involved. Disappointing.
March 12, 2011
"Amit has offered greater insight into the limitations of materiality and matter, as a scientific researcher and expert in quantum physics, he suggests that the potential for intelligent design in innovative evolution can lead to integrative possibilities for humanity, focused upon the limitless. The unique element in this theory of Evolution that Dr. Goswami posits is that all humans can begin to focus upon creativity versus the outmoded theme of competition. A powerful opportunity for humanity to embrace that consciousness, choice and creative potential can be merged to create a new paradigm, a new world, and allow humans to consciously experience their innate biological expressions in an intelligent way, that is fully supported by a Higher design, with a purposeful intent." ~Dulcinea Contreras, April 2009
January 16, 2009
My plan is to read this, then some Dawkins, then "The Origin of the Species." The order may be backwards, but that's what I'm going to do. Have been feeling the perennial urge to understand what we are here for.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews