Cosmos to Kosmos Episode 3 and Pattern Recognition.mp3
Recorded 7.3.2014
Download link (right click to save to your computer)
About one hundred people called in to our first Integral Living Room community call last week, excited to take an integral view of the popular Cosmos series featuring Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We open the conversation with Episode 3: When Knowledge Conquered Fear, exploring the topic of the human capacity for pattern recognition.
In a twenty-seven minute clip, Ken describes the human tendency to believe almost exclusively in the most current set of patterns we see, in this case the modern scientific view, while disregarding all earlier versions as false.
What we call truth today will be called false pattern recognition, or not really true, 500 or 1000 years from now. He points out that the celebration of Newton’s view is already over one hundred years out of date. “It would appear from the TV show that Newton got it right, while everybody else throughout all of human history got it wrong.”
He explains that from one perspective it is understandable that scientific materialism is the favorable worldview and that Cosmos is as popular as it is.
During the Renaissance this new, extraordinary capacity to take a third person perspective came into play and the human capacity for pattern recognition hit a new level. For the first time, a universal, objective view could be taken and a whole new level of collective awareness becomes available. As the crown jewel of this emerging scientific consciousness, Newton wrote the Principia Mathematica, the first statement of universal, third person scientific reality. What a breakthrough!
But other things have happened since Newton displayed such genius, Ken says. Teal-holistic consciousness has come online and with it a unified quark theory. As Turquoise has begun to emerge, something called string theory, eventually M-theory, has started to form as well. These are much more sophisticated and complex views coming from more complex levels of cognition. These new theories are so extraordinarily abstract as to be beyond empiric testing. In other words, the current, prevailing scientific method actually starts to break down with these new ways of seeing.
Evolution keeps drawing us towards greater wholeness, greater inclusivity and greater comprehensiveness. And even though we have a tendency to want to throw earlier versions of truth out, this greater inclusivity is a hallmark of the “more and more adequate” nature of evolution. New levels mean more truth, more wholeness, and greater integrative capacity.
As Ken says, “the universe isn’t winding down — not at all — it is winding up!”
Cosmos to Kosmos Episode 3 and Pattern Recognition.mp3
Recorded 7.3.2014
Just downloaded, eager to listen! My wife Mary and I are jazzed by this topic, we are enthusiastic students of Teilhard deChardin, Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, Joanna Macy, Michael Dowd, Drew Dellinger, et al. The first Cosmos series was highly influential for me, this one is flashier, and yes, a bit shrill on the pro-materialist advocacy, imho. I’m puzzled by how it comes to us via FOX, which seems a bastion of disinformation and/or distraction. Please kick THAT around some.
Namaste’
JED