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Evolutionary Theory The Reconstructive Post-Modern Worldview
Throughout both of his lectures Griffin addressed what he feels are five "hard-core common sense" notions that our current scientific paradigm has had a hard time explaining:
Griffin also attempted to address what he feels are some of the important questions of this conference. How is increasing complexity possible? Is there a directionality to evolution? How are ESP and PK (psychokinesis) possible? Griffin began his first lecture by turning to the wisdom of the Buddha and the Four Noble Truths. Paraphrased loosely, the Buddha said, if you are suffering, then you need to figure out how you got there (what is the cause of the suffering?). Griffin believes that much of the cause of our contemporary suffering originates in the out-dated worldview of modernism. According to Griffin, there are four central assumptions at work in this worldview: 1) a sensationist view of perception; 2) a mechanistic view of nature; 3) a lack of divine presence in the world; and 4) a bifurcation between theory and practice. To explain how these four assumptions became central to our current modern worldview, Griffin gave a brief historical overview starting back in 17th century Europe. It was in this crucial century that the foundation was laid for the modern worldview. During his presentation Griffin emphasized that the rise of the modern worldview was neither an accident nor an unbiased choice, but rather an event that had specific social and historical causes related to the political and cultural climate of the 17th century. At this time European culture was in transition. The moribund medieval worldview that was centered upon Aristotelian philosophy and Ptolemaic cosmology was no longing working, and the Catholic church's once unified Christendom had just been splintered into various factions by the Protestant Reformation. In the wake of these changes, two new worldviews were vying for ascendancy: mechanism, whose advocates included the famous Rene Descartes and Galileo Galilei as well as the lesser known Marin Mersenne, and Hermeticism, one of whose best-known advocates was Robert Fludd. Griffin asserted that the biggest debate of the early 1600s was between these two camps of thought. Building upon Galileo's revival of the ancient Greek atomism of Democritus, the French mechanists argued vociferously against Fludd and the Heremeticists. At issue was the subject of action at a distance. Could things influence each other from far apart? Or did such behavior constitute a miracle? Fludd's position was that action at a distance was possible and was not miraculous. This view, however, threatened the church's authority as the official dispenser of miracles. Partly as a result of the savvy diplomatic work of the pious French friar, Marin Mersenne, who was a good friend of Descartes', the Catholic church chose to support the fledging worldview of mechanism over Fludd's Hermeticism. What made this choice even more appealing to the church was the fact that Descartes and the mechanists also were postulating a strict separation of the soul from the body. This view appealed to the church because it was congruent with the belief that the soul survives bodily death. Reciprocally, this view also helped Descartes and the mechanists, because they wanted to practice modern medicine by dissecting cadavers with spiritual and moral impunity. Although these and other factors, such as the witch-craze, helped ensure the victory of the supernaturalistic-dualistic-mechanistic worldview, the supernaturalism soon transmuted into desim (due to the problem of evil and the growing distaste for supernatural miracles), and then into atheism, and the dualism turned to materialism (due to the abscence of a supernatural deity to explain how mind and matter could interact). Griffin often summarizes the resulting modern, scientific worldview as naturalism sam, with "sam" standing for: a sensationist view of perception, an atheistic view of religion, and a materialistic view of reality. Before concluding the first half of his presentation, Griffin turned to the new cosmology that grew out of the scientific, mechanistic worldview. He noted that this worldview excluded all religious and aesthetic experience from making a contribution to its cosmological orientation. Thus, in the late 1880s John Tyndall summarized the situation when he said in his famous Belfast address, "we claim and we shall wrest from religion the entire domain of cosmological theory." Griffin indicated that the new modern cosmology, therefore, was based on a very limited set of data. It excluded most of the vast variety of human experience from its theory of the universe. In the second part of his presentation Griffin shifted to a description of his proposal for a new worldview, called constructive post-modernism, by drawing upon the work of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. In the early twentieth century Whitehead offered a rigorous critique of the mechanistic worldview in his books, Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. Coming out of the Whiteheadian tradition, Griffin's new worldview replaces naturalism sam with naturalism ppp with "ppp" standing for: prehensive perception, pan-experiential ontology, and pan-entheistic spirituality. While enumerating these features of the constructive post-modern worldview, Griffin also tried to explain how our contemporary views of time, freedom, causation, and consciousness could be shifted to be more responsive to the data of psychical research and more encompassing of our human experience overall. Starting with an explanation of prehensive perception, Griffin echoed some of Peter Russell's comments about the West's tendency to have a false view of perception. Although we tend to think of our sensory percepts as our most direct contact with the external world, the sense data are very indirect products of a very complex process. Our experience itself is the best clue to the nature of reality. Given this, Whitehead attempted in his work to formulate a more encompassing and accurate metaphysical framework for the post-modern world. His philosophy started not with the data of sense-perception, but rather with human experience as such. Whitehead coined the term prehension to describe what he felt was a more accurate portrayal of human perception. In coming to his understanding of this term in the early twentieth century, Whitehead drew upon Buddhism, quantum physics, and William James' phenomenology of perception. Using these as his cornerstones, he proposed that perception can actually be internal to the perceiver. That is, other things actually enter into our experience. Furthermore, in drawing on the Buddhist theory of momentary events, Whitehead also proposed that all "things" are actually "processes" composed of momentary events, which he called actual occasions. When we perceive a solid "thing," such as a table, we seem to see a static substance, but the real table is comprised of billions of processes. According to Whitehead, then, how we perceive is by incorporating aspects of the subjective processes composing the table into our awareness. Whitehead called this a positive prehension. We perceive by an internal allowing of the subjective world into our awareness, not just by sensing the external world. Our sensory perception is a derivative process, growing out of this. Griffin then turned to the second "p" of the constructive post-modern worldview, pan-experientialism. Within the framework of modernism the world is essentially considered a collection of dead, lifeless objects, but according to Griffin's new worldview the world is actually pan-experiential. By this term, Griffin means that all events in the universe have some degree of subjective experience-some interiority and sentience. Evolution, from this perspective, is the development of higher and higher levels of experience that correspond to higher and higher levels of material complexity. Thus, Griffin's view is that human consciousness emerged not from dead matter and non-conscious life, but rather from living matter with sentient experience. Importantly, Griffin was quick to point out that this view is not synonymous with vitalism, because vitalism proposes that mechanism works at the lowest levels, such as with atoms. Instead, pan-experientialism proposes that all events, even atoms and subatomic particles, have some degree of sentient experience. Griffin noted that, after all, if the universe is mechanistic at its core, then how could genuine evolution emerge from dead, mechanical processes? One topic that Griffin touched briefly that relates to the subject of pan-experientialism was the difference between the mind and the brain. His main point was to stress that from a Whiteheadian perspective the brain is composed of many actual occasions (individual events), while the mind is one unified event. In contrast to Descartes, Griffin emphasized that there is a numerical distinction between the mind and the brain and not an ontological dualism. In response to a question, Griffin attempted to clarify his position by stating that the brain is a complex organization of cells, while the mind is a series of dominant occasions of experience that arise from the brain and act back on it in each moment. In Whiteheadian terms, the brain is a society of cells, and the mind at any moment is a single actual occasion. Griffin noted that it is easy to explain freedom within Whitehead's framework, but it may seem harder why something like a rock never seems to change or demonstrate any creativity. Whitehead responded to this with two points. First, although every individual event has some degree of spontaneity, it is minimal in the low-grade events constituting the rock. Second, such units can be organized so as to produce a higher-level series of events, such as the soul of a squirrel or human being, or they can be mere aggregations, with no dominant member to coordinate the spontaneities of the lower ones. That is the case in a rock. Griffin believes that within Whitehead's system it is easier to explain the behavior of inert rocks, than it is to explain the rise of true human freedom within the mechanistic and deterministic worldview of modern science. Moving to another topic, Griffin felt that our attitudes towards PK and ESP can be reframed within a constructive post-modern worldview. According to the Whiteheadian outlook Griffin described, everything is connected internally through the power of prehension (Whitehead sometimes calls this prehensive unity). Thus, there is no inherent reason in this orientation that our minds cannot receive information and influence events non-locally. It is only within a mechanistic worldview of external relations that there is a strong presumption that things cannot influence each other in this way. Whitehead's metaphysical system implies that all events are capable of prehending into their experience aspects of the entire past of the universe. Our conscious minds are filters of in-streaming experiences, which was an idea that Whitehead borrowed from William James. Griffin noted that when viewed from this perspective, it is much easier to explain the results of data from the dream telepathy research presented by Marilyn Schlitz. If we use sensory deprivation to block out these normally powerful data, then that creates room in our conscious awareness for us to prehend data that are more subtle in nature. Griffin's Whiteheadian worldview postulates that the information of the universe is always coming to us, and we filter out most of it, at least from conscious awareness. ESP and PK are thus abilities that take a much fuller account of our ability of prehensive perception. The last aspect of the constructive post-modern worldview that Griffin discussed was its spiritual cosmology, which he calls panentheism. This term is different from the more commonly used pantheism, because it proposes that divinity is distinct from, as well as intimately related to, the world. According to Whitehead, the primary mistake that modern cosmology makes is that it draws upon a limited range of experience to form its outlook. Incorporating religious and aesthetic experience as well as the knowledge of modern science, Whitehead's own cosmology is one that perceives the world as a place of value realization. The order that we see in the world is understood as order for the sake of value. Importantly, Whitehead postulates that it is divinity itself that is driving the emergence of order and novelty in the universe. Thus, Griffin summarized his own theological cosmology as one of divine persuasion towards creative emergence. But importantly, Griffin stressed that he views divinity as a persuasive force, not a coercive one. To summarize, Griffin's presentation attempted to show that the worldview of modernism and its inveterate assumptions of "SAM," sensationist perception, atheism, and materialism, are the source for not only much of the suffering in our world but also the cause for the dismissal of so much of the data that has been collected by cutting-edge researchers. Because it forbids so much of human experience from its framework, the worldview of late-modernism is narrow-minded and incomplete. Like many others at this conference, Griffin hopes that a new and more comprehensive worldview will succeed it sooner rather than later.
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