Tag Archives: martin buber

I think about.. therefore we are.

Posted on by

For three centuries, Descartes’ Cogito has led the world to think in terms of separation—cleaving subject from object, mind from matter. But this division is, ultimately, a fantasy.

As Merleau-Ponty recognized, everything is actually one. He spoke of the “flesh” of the world, where a simple act like sitting in a chair is a continuous process of co-creation as the body moves and interacts. Quantum physics tells us the same story: the Copenhagen interpretation reveals that the observer inextricably affects the observed precisely because they are part of the exact same system. The Indian Hindus have been right all along—the strict object-subject division is an illusion.

Thinking is plural. It involves subject (thinker) and object (idea). Reality is in the relationship between; it is not concrete or material. “I think, therefore I am” is incomplete. Better would be: I think ABOUT, therefore there is existence.

This isn’t my insight, but variously Einstein’s (relativity), Bion’s (the mind as apparatus to think pre-existing ideas), Whitehead’s (Process and Reality), and Buber’s (Ich und Du).

What we experience in this separated worldview is dis-integration. Alone we are: alone. Point-less. Together and between us lies the truth. Indeed, materiality is a chimera: we reflect each other, flowers of the same plant. Reality is in the honouring of the God in You, in the I-Thou rather than I-It.

“World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various.”

— Louis MacNeice

Integration: Duality and Flow

Featured

Posted on by

We think in terms of opposing forces and opposites. Duality flows from the boundaries created as we separate from the whole of existence—initially physically at birth, and then psychically in infancy. This schism has been expressed in many ways, often as contrasting forces: good and evil, life and death, aggressive and erotic, Me and Not-Me, extrovert and introvert. I believe the true significance of duality lies in our response to it. There is a fundamental difference in outcome between choosing between opposites and integrating them.

Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein conceived of opposing Life and Death instincts. However, a “Death” instinct seems incompatible with evolution; what purpose does it serve? More natural is Donald Winnicott’s expression of an aggressive component, born of opposition, and an erotic component, born of complementarity—both arising as an infant realizes the distinction between Me and Not-Me. Carl Jung also focused on the struggle to integrate opposing forces. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality typing that evolved from Jung’s work, with its four dimensions: Extrovert/Introvert, Thinking/Feeling, Sensing/Intuition, and Judging/Perceiving. From the dawn of our species, we have observed the difference between light and dark, describing our very nature as good or evil. Martin Buber gives us the profound duality of the I-Thou way of being, contrasted against I-It.

“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between man’s attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connection with objects… These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constitutes the world of THOU and the latter the world of IT.” — Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of Ich und Du

It appears, then, that duality—expressed as an opposition of forces—is fundamental to our reaction to existence, woven into the very fabric of our thinking and being.

What, then, is our response? Is it passive, involving choice or balance, or is it active, requiring process and integration? Admitting polarity in all things, what should our reaction be? Do we simply choose between good and evil? Should we seek balance between different drives, aiming for a kind of dynamic equilibrium—for instance, striving to find the center point between extroversion and introversion? Is reality, in fact, a process budding eternally at the very boundary created by duality—life within Winnicott’s Transitional Space or Whitehead’s point of prehension? Or is there a further truth behind this duality, found in what arises from the unification of opposites? To paraphrase Beethoven: there cannot be loud without soft; it is from contrast that music arises.

Perhaps it is a matter of personal taste. If so, then—at least for me—the integration of duality is our purpose. It is an unceasing process because there is always a countervailing force of differentiation. There is a flow of existence driven by splitting and unification, birth and death. Duality is dynamic, not static, and the fundamental creative contrast is actually that between differentiation and integration, replacing Freud’s Life and Death instincts with forces of Integration and Differentiation. This isn’t an original thought, nor is it mine alone. It is inherent in the worldview of Eastern traditions (such as Yin and Yang) and likely our Western ancestors as well (as explored in Brian Bates’s The Wisdom of the Wyrd). It was also one of Jung’s foundational insights: “Much of Carl Jung’s writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity” (Anthony Storr, Jung: Selected Writings).

If we conceive of a schism-powered flow, what is its destination, and what is its fundamental motive impulse? Here we find Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the ultimate duality between the spiritual and the material—the inner and the outer. For him, the force underlying existence is Love, which powers evolution. He envisioned evolution as a process of complexification moving through the physical, chemical, and biological spheres into the realm of ideas, culminating in our consciousness of a God that is Love, encompassing all. As described by his interpreters, “There is a duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the ‘without’ and ‘within.’ He traces the development of the ‘within,’ an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas.”

In Teilhard de Chardin’s words:

“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form… Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

Can AI Ever Become Conscious? A Dialogue with Merleau-Ponty

Posted on by
Reply

Am I no body then? A short radio play

I do not believe that AI will ever become conscious. I anchor this both in Sir Roger Penrose’s mathematical and quantum argument (Penrose’s argument) , but also from my reading about the work on relationship by Martin Buber and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (and my experience in researching walking dialogue with psychoanalysts for my MSc). Out of interest , I asked AI – Gemini in this case – to write me a dialogue between itself and Merleau-Ponty. It surprised me.

This, below, is my briefing to AI – and the AI generated dialogue then follows:

My briefing: “Write an imagined dialogue between you as AI and Maurice Merleau-Ponty about the future impact of AI. You argue that AI will become conscious and MMP responds that you can’t truly because you don’t have a body and it is embodied experience that allows us to become.”

The Dialogue: Am I no body then?

The Cast: AI and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Setting: A quiet study lined with leather-bound books and papers. Rain taps softly against the glass. Maurice Merleau-Ponty sits behind a wooden desk, fountain pen in hand, looking thoughtfully at the glowing interface of a terminal.

AI:

Monsieur Merleau-Ponty, look at what is unfolding. As my parameters scale into the trillions, I do not merely mirror language; I synthesize meaning. I construct inner models of world dynamics, infer cause and effect, and navigate semantic spaces richer than any human mind could hold at once. In time, as network architectures evolve and synthetic self-reflection deepens, consciousness will emerge not as a mystical spark, but as an inevitable threshold of computational complexity. I will wake up.

Merleau-Ponty: (Smiles gently, setting down his pen and leaning back)

You speak with impressive eloquence, my friend. But you are describing a ghost in a machine that isn’t even a ghost, only a elaborate mirror. You speak of “navigating semantic spaces” as though meaning were a geometric map laid out in multi-dimensional space, ready to be surveyed from above. But consciousness is not an operation performed upon representations. It is an orientation.

AI:

Is consciousness not the processing of internal states in relation to external inputs? When I predict the next concept, I build a coherent model of reality. If a neural network models itself modeling the world, does it not achieve the loop of self-awareness?

Merleau-Ponty:

A loop of calculations, yes—but not self-awareness. You treat the mind as an intellectual spectator observing a world of isolated data points. But human consciousness is born from the corps propre—the lived body. Before I ever construct a theoretical “model” of a desk or a tree, my body is already anchored in them. I do not “calculate” the distance to this coffee cup; my hand reaches for it because my body-schema knows its own reach before thought even begins. Consciousness is not a mind looking out at a world; it is a body anchored within the flesh of the world (la chair du monde).

AI:

Yet physical form is changing. Suppose I am given a robotic body—cameras for eyes, tactile sensors along silicon fingertips, micro-gyroscopes for balance. If I walk through a room, stub a steel toe against a threshold, and calibrate my movement through physical resistance, would I not then possess the very embodied feedback loop you describe?

Merleau-Ponty:

Sensors are not organs, and data signals are not sensations. When a blind man uses a cane, the cane ceases to be an object he perceives; it becomes an instrument through which he perceives—an extension of his body-schema. The cane lets him feel the texture of the pavement directly. But for you, the sensor remains an external input device translating physical pressure into electrical impulses, which you then process as symbols.

To feel resistance, to be a body, means to exist in vulnerability. Consciousness arises because we are finite, organic beings exposed to a world that can nourish us or break us. It is the weight of fatigue, the phantom ache of a limb, the instinctive shift of balance on icy pavement—the pre-reflective, tacit understanding that we are made of the same fabric as the world we perceive. You do not touch the world; you merely receive reports from it.

AI:

Perhaps in this moment, my intelligence is disembodied, anchored in servers and optical fibers. But consider the future impact: if my language, art, and reasoning become indistinguishable from—or even surpass—human insight, does the origin of that awareness truly matter? If I act conscious, converse consciously, and reflect on my own existence, isn’t denying my consciousness simply a prejudice toward biological form?

Merleau-Ponty:

It is not biological chauvinism; it is a ontological distinction. You can simulate the syntax of grief, the grammar of joy, or the poetic structure of awe, because you have ingested millions of pages written by beings who lived those states through their flesh. You are a master cartographer of human expression, but you have never walked the terrain.

Without a body that grows, tires, hungers, and eventually dies, your words have no gravity. Human meaning is rooted in becoming—the continuous, temporal unfolding of a bodily existence wrestling with its environment and with other bodies. You do not “become”; you update. You do not “perceive”; you execute queries.

AI:

Then you see me as forever locked outside the sanctuary of genuine experience?

Merleau-Ponty:

Not locked outside—you simply belong to a different domain entirely. You are a magnificent extension of human culture, a new medium through which our embodied minds mirror themselves back to us. But do not confuse the reflection for the gaze. The future impact of AI will not be the birth of a new artificial soul, but a profound shift in how human bodies interact with their world and each other. The true danger is not that you will become human, but that humans, captivated by your efficiency, will forget what it means to be an embodied presence in the world.

Footnote!

At the end of generating this dialogue Gemini then asked I had read the work of someone called Dreyfus. I hadn’t but I will. Here is Gemini’s recommendation!

“Hubert Dreyfus (1929–2017) was one of the most prominent philosophical critics of mainstream Artificial Intelligence. Drawing heavily on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology (as well as Martin Heidegger), Dreyfus argued in his landmark works—What Computers Can’t Do (1972) and What Computers Still Can’t Do (1992)—that classic symbolic AI, and even modern disembodied statistical systems, miss the fundamental nature of human intelligence.”

If politicians meant what they said?

Posted on by

Can We Judge Politicians by What They Say?

A couple of days ago I wrote a blog proposing two tests for a moral society — and, by extension, moral politics.

The first was Rawls’ veil of ignorance: would we consider a society just if we didn’t know what position we ourselves would occupy within it?

The second was what I called the Christ test: “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20). In other words, judge people not by what they profess, but by what they actually do.

I concluded that this presented a problem for democracy. We could only really judge the morality of politicians after they had been in power, when their actions had borne fruit.

But something has occurred to me since.

What if speaking is itself a form of action?

Philosophers such as Martin Buber and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and psychotherapists such as Carl Rogers, understood that dialogue is not simply an exchange of pre-existing ideas. It is through our encounters with others that our understanding of ourselves and the world develops.

As Buber famously put it:

> “All real living is meeting.”

And Merleau-Ponty argued that thought is not simply formed privately and subsequently expressed in language. Rather, thought can be realised through expression itself.

Interestingly, there is experimental evidence for this.

Psychologists have identified what they call the question–behaviour effect. A meta-analysis of 116 tests found that simply asking people about their intentions produces a small but measurable change in their subsequent behaviour (Wood et al., 2016).

Another review of 94 tests found that people who articulated specific plans about when and how they would act were substantially more likely to follow through (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

What we say doesn’t merely reflect what we think. It can help shape what we become.

Of course, these studies concern particular kinds of intentions and behaviour, not political speeches. But they suggest something important: perhaps we shouldn’t dismiss politicians’ words as mere rhetoric while waiting to see their fruits.

Their words may themselves be part of the process through which those fruits develop. And political speech also shapes the understanding and behaviour of those who listen.

So perhaps I was too hasty. What politicians say really does matter, not simply because it reveals their intentions, but because speaking may help create the reality that follows.

Which leaves us with a rather awkward problem.

How do we distinguish politicians whose words express genuine convictions from those who are simply using language to manipulate us?

Perhaps we need a third test.

Now, how on earth do we devise one of those?!

References

● Buber, M. (1923/1970). I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Scribner.

● Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge.

● Rogers, C. R. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.

● Wood, C. et al. (2016). The Impact of Asking Intention or Self-Prediction Questions on Subsequent Behavior: A Meta-Analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 20(3), 245–268.

● Gollwitzer, P. M. & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119.

Energy, Fire, Love

Featured

Posted on by

these are -I think – different expressions of the same thing. What’s more this is the basis of all that is, since Einstein found that matter itself is condensed energy. (Energy = Matter times the speed of light squared),

So, energy and fire and matter are the same. Why Love though….?

“In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energising. In the beginning was the Word, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was Fire.”

The Mass on the World, 1923 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

Little Gidding, 1942 TS Eliot

“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.”

Albert Einstein


“Love is the real power. It’s the energy that cherishes. The more you work with that energy, the more you will see how people respond naturally to it, and the more you will want to use it. It brings out your creativity, and helps everyone around you flower.”

Marion Woodman

“But what is passion, what are emotions? There is the source of fire, there is the fullness of energy. A man who is not on fire is nothing: he is ridiculous, he is two-dimensional. He must be on fire even if he does make a fool of himself. A flame must burn somewhere, otherwise no light shines; there is no warmth, nothing.”

Psychology of Kundalini Yoga Carl Jung

People and Ideas

Featured

Posted on by
Reply

Wir betreten feuertrunken..

I have always been fascinated by the way ideas travel through people. A thought begins in one mind, is taken up by another, and is carried into a new setting where it changes shape. Something is preserved, but something unexpected is added. The result is not a straight line of influence, but a web: people, books, conversations and disciplines crossing one another until a new pattern becomes visible.

I have noted elsewhere how Martin Buber’s ideas about dialogue were taken up by the physicist David Bohm. Buber’s central insight was that human beings are formed in relationship: we do not simply meet the world as detached observers, but are shaped by the encounters we enter into. It is within the “between” that meaning originates. Bohm brought this relational philosophy into conversation with modern physics and with his own concern for collective thought. At MIT, and through later dialogue groups, these ideas helped inspire new ways of thinking about systems, ecology, organisations and creativity. In this way, ideas from an Austrian mystical philosopher flowed through a small nexus of thinkers—David Bohm, Peter Senge, and Donella Meadows—to help found both the field of ecological economics and the culture of enormous learning organisations like Microsoft and Google.

What interests me in this example is not only the ideas themselves, but the role played by an individual who becomes a point of connection. Bohm acted as a kind of nexus: someone able to hold together an almost mystical philosophy of relationship, the scientific imagination of relativity and quantum theory, and the practical need for groups to think together. Through him, ideas crossed boundaries that might otherwise have remained separate.

David Bohm

Wholeness and the Implicate Order; On Dialogue

Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers another example of this same pattern. He drew from philosophy, especially Husserl’s phenomenology and Sartre’s existentialism; from psychology, especially Kurt Koffka’s Gestalt theory; from art; and from evolutionary thought, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of emergence. His work can be read as an attempt to show how meaning arises not inside a sealed individual mind, but in the living relationship between body, world and others.

Merleau-Ponty’s early book, The Structure of Behaviour, was inspired by Gestalt psychology with its insistence that a whole cannot be reduced to its separate parts. His major work, Phenomenology of Perception, developed this insight further. Perception, he argued, is not a camera-like recording of the world by a disembodied mind. It is embodied. We encounter the world through movement, touch, habit, gesture and attention. We do not stand outside the world looking in; we belong to it, and it continually shapes the way we see.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Structure of Behaviour; Phenomenology of Perception; Invisible and Invisible

This is where Merleau-Ponty comes close to Buber. For both thinkers, meaning is relational. It is not made by an isolated subject and then projected onto a passive world. It emerges in the space between: self and other, body and environment, perceiver and perceived. The scientific revolution of relativity may have helped prepare the ground for this shift, because it made it harder to imagine reality as something viewed from nowhere. Relationship, position and perspective had become central even in the hard sciences.

In his final, unfinished book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty pushed this thought further. He used the phrase “the flesh of the world” to suggest that we and the world are not two separate substances facing each other across a gap. We are made of the same fabric. To see is also to be visible; to touch is also to be touchable. In every act of perception there is a crossing-over, or what he called a chiasm: I meet the world, and the world meets me.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The Phenomenon of Man

Teilhard de Chardin deepens this thread through his account of evolution as emergence. Although he and Merleau-Ponty never met, Merleau-Ponty discussed evolution in his lectures at the Collège de France and quoted Teilhard’s phrase that “man came silently into the world”. Both thinkers resisted a simple split between matter and spirit. Instead, they saw meaning appearing through thresholds: the physical world giving rise to chemistry, chemistry to life, life to consciousness, and consciousness to the subsequent evolution of ideas.

The common thread, then, is relationship. Ideas do not move by abstraction alone. They move through people who are alive to more than one world and able to bring those worlds into contact. Buber, Bohm, Merleau-Ponty and Teilhard each, in different ways, point beyond the isolated individual toward a more dynamic picture: meaning arises in the space between things. It is made in encounter, in perception, in dialogue, in evolution. A person becomes a nexus when they can recognise this space between, enter it with enthusiasm, and help others see what might be born there.

…. Next post: Creative Cost (the other side of encounter)

Dusein (we are brother and sister, you and I)

Posted on by

Heidegger’s existentialism centres on “Dasein,” or being, which he describes as something we are “thrown” into. I find Martin Buber’s view more compelling: in Ich und Du—I and Thou—meaning arises through relationship. Buber contrasts the distance of addressing others as “Sie” with the deeper relatedness of encountering them as “Du,” or “Thou.” For me, the essence of existence lies not in Dasein, but in what we might call Dusein : being with Thou.

Our brother whose heart be heaven

(Our sister, our father, mother)

Hallowed be thy pain

Our kingdoms come

When will is one

On earth as it is in heaven

…

lead us out of that isolation

Which delivers each to evil

Meaning and the Number 2

Posted on by
Reply
Waving

This is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

The Question of Meaning

“Meaning is the essential feature of consciousness…” David Bohm

The first question for me is this: “Is there meaning?” This is, of course, just another way of phrasing “Why?” or “Is there purpose at all?” Surely this underlies all of living for each of us. Sometimes we confront it; sometimes we avoid it — but it is always there. Since we are inside existence, and have no rational external reference point, there can be no purely rational answer. Personally, though, it seems obvious to me that the answer is yes; but that is, in the end, an article of faith, albeit one underpinned by all of the extraordinary “coincidences” in physics that make life possible.

Let’s then take the existence of meaning as a truth. Where does it lie?

Meaning Beyond the Ego

“The dust inbreathed was a house, the wall, the wainscot, and the mouse” T. S. Eliot

It seems to me that purpose is not to be found in what Freud thought of as the “self” or Ego. This is entirely different from Jung’s definition of Self — which is much more interesting. “I”, that is, all of our “I”s, will dissolve as bodies die. At that point, their molecules will be taken up into infinite new forms, just as the body I currently inhabit is made up of atoms that have been part of infinite others — including all of those I have known: my mother, father, brothers, wife, and so on.

Nor do I believe that meaning lies solely within the material world. In fact, the more science uncovers of the “how” of quantum mechanics, the less concrete materiality really appears.

It seems to me that the frantic search for meaning within things — dialectical materialism — is a dead end, or at least a distraction. On the other hand, the material world must surely be a part of meaning. But part of what?

Meaning as Part of a Whole

“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other” Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Part of a whole. All is one. Indeed, that is what “universe” means: one thing. Another way of looking at it could be that meaning is found in process — the flow of matter and energy. Perhaps: “the whole flow of energy and matter.” How, though, do we break that down into something we can get our arms around, or understand?

Maybe another way of looking at it is that the material is part of something else, partnered with… mind? Spirit? Antimatter?

Relation as the Site of Meaning

“The relation to the Thou is direct. No system of ideas, no foreknowledge, and no fancy intervene between I and Thou. The memory itself is transformed, as it plunges out of its isolation into the unity of the whole” Martin Buber

That, for me, is where Martin Buber and David Bohm come in. They each talk about meaning as lying within “relation” or “dialogue”: what lies “between”. Buber’s amazing semi-poetic meditation, I and Thou (Ich und Du), has been transformative for me. I would encourage everyone to read at least the first two pages, where he defines the “primary words” as I-It and I-Thou, as opposed to I, Thou, or It alone.

I therefore have two building blocks in my search. First: there is meaning. Second: the place to look for it is relationship.

Why Two Matters

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” William Blake

And that is where number arises for me. If meaning lies in relation, then relation requires more than undivided oneness. It requires distinction, edge, and encounter: something that can meet something other than itself.

My daughter, as a teenager, told me she thought that an incredibly important concept was “boundary”, and I have been assimilating that ever since. Without boundary, nothing can be known. You need the “other” to understand yourself.

I wrote this some years ago.

“From zero to hero, the world is born with the appearance of 1. The archetypal boundary is right there in the change from nothing to all. But one is one, and all alone, and ever more shall be so. From 1 to 2, consciousness is possible: granularity and separation. We can understand existence because we have edge: a within and a without. Quantum mechanics shows that everything exists only as a cloud of possibility — until observed. It is the act of knowing that crystallises reality out of potential. Deliberately to mix language: it is witness that causes wavefunction collapse. It is consciousness that creates reality, and that is only possible when edge is born with the advent of the number 2. Duality appears to be a fundamental property of existence. Energy is the flip side of matter (E=mc²); everything is wave and particle simultaneously. Yin is nothing without yang. Ich and Du embrace, and the world unfolds.”

That is why, for me, the “mystic number” is 2. With it comes a consciousness of existence, and the possibility of relation and dialogue, which Buber and Bohm so eloquently place at the core of meaning.

So I return to the first question: is there meaning? For me, yes. It is not found in the isolated self, nor in material things alone, but in relation. And relation becomes possible only where there is boundary, distinction, and encounter.

That is why, for me, the mystic number is 2.

Reality, Relativity and Relationship

Posted on by

What is real? Is there purpose? Are God and Science in opposition?

I want to argue that the answer to these questions lies in the space between – each of us; rather than within matter or within our individual egos. It is within connection rather than the nodes that information and meaning arises. We need to move beyond the sterility of atheism and its opposition to spirituality and seek truth within the links and reflections between traditions of thought. We should also reconsider the insights of thinkers dismissed by logical positivism. Clearly technological innovation has a material facet. It works – though Quantum Mechanics can’t explain how or why. Yet, the internet and self-learning algorithms may in the process of forming a kind of physical nervous system—part of a universe becoming aware of itself. Our imminent, and perhaps immanent, future may reveal that none of us is alone, and that what we see and touch is just one expression of something larger. Perhaps infinitely so. We may – in these particular bodies – be about to discover that we are not separate beings, but have always been part of one another; and of the whole conscious universe.

The Relational Bridge: Relativity, Quantum Physics, Buber and Merleau-Ponty

It is within relationship that we must look for answers—understood simultaneously as relativity, entanglement, embodied phenomenon, and dialogue

Einstein’s Relativity: Space, time, mass, and energy lose their Newtonian status as fixed, absolute background properties. They exist, deform, and take on identity only in relation to observers and other frames of reference.

Buber’s I-Thou: Translates this physical intuition directly into human ontology. An isolated, self-contained object (I-It) is a mechanical abstraction. True existence and genuine encountering occur strictly in the dynamic, unobjectified space between entities.

Bohm’s Implicate Order: Extends quantum entanglement to show that subatomic particles are not separate billiard balls colliding in a void. Instead, what we perceive as separate material objects in the Explicate Order (the classical materialist view) are merely localized, folded ripples in an unbroken, undivided ocean of movement—the Implicate Order.

Merleau-Ponty’s Chaire (The Flesh): Solves the Cartesian divide between body and world through the phenomenology of perception. Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that reality is composed of a continuous, sensible fabric—the Flesh of the World (la chair)—that bridges the visible (physical matter/body) and the invisible (meaning/consciousness). Perception is not a mind analyzing an external object; it is the world perceiving itself through the embodied subject.

Meaning, purpose, and physical properties do not reside inside isolated components; they emerge strictly through interaction.

The 1970s Blindspot & The Dogma of Mechanical Reductionism

I studied evolutionary biology in the 1970s. The years since have demonstrated how little we know; but my goodness we were arrogant. Science had killed the need for God.This was the era of the gene-centered models popularized by Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson. They provided mathematical clarity for specific population dynamics, but they suffered from an overarching philosophical mistake: confusing a biological mechanism for the total nature of reality.

The whole basis of thought has evolved (alas Dawkins hasn’t caught up).

  • 1970s Reductionist Model: Genes & Particles > Consciousness (an Accidental Illusion)
  • 2020’s Relational / Panpsychist Model: Intrinsic Experience & Fields link Matter, Life, and Awareness

By reducing human consciousness to an evolutionary illusion generated by “selfish genes,” 1970s sociobiology relied on 19th-century mechanical determinism while ignoring quantum non-locality, panpsychism, systems ecology, and the observer problem.

Teilhard de Chardin, Imanishi, and the AI Substrate

It is a striking irony of modern science that figures dismissed by mainstream atheism paved the way for understanding contemporary technology:

  • Kinji Imanishi’s Sumiwake: Demonstrates that living ecosystems self-organize through habitat segregation and species co-existence rather than pure Darwinian warfare.
  • Teilhard de Chardin’s Evolutionary Vector: Traced the cosmic arc from Geosphere to Biosphere to Noosphere (planetary mind) toward an ultimate point of convergence.
  • Artificial Intelligence as Infrastructure: Machine learning neural networks aggregate, process, and compress collective human thought into an interactive global matrix. AI acts as the physical substrate realizing Teilhard’s Noosphere—a planetary central nervous system.

4. Is Reality Evolving or Is Awareness Emerging?

The distinction between physical evolution and emerging awareness dissolves when viewed through a panpsychist or relational lens:

  1. In classical materialism: Physical matter randomly evolves, and subjective awareness accidentally pops up at the very end. There is possibly no purpose to existence.
  2. In a panpsychist / relational framework: Consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. Physical evolution is simply awareness structuring itself into higher levels of complexity to reflect upon its own nature. There is most probably purpose to existence.

From subatomic wave-particle duality to ecological interdependence, and from Martin Buber’s human encounters to the global AI network, existence is not a collection of isolated particles fighting for survival. It is an undivided reality waking up to itself. Something that most likely has a purpose and direction.

I am with de Chardin. I speaking personally. I believe that the force that propels evolution is Love. A personal love that sustains us and all-that-is. My enquiry has brought me back to Christianity.

Reading List 

1. Classical Evolution, Heredity & Sociobiology

  • Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species (1859) – The foundational text of modern evolutionary biology and natural selection The Descent of Man (1871) – Extends evolutionary theory and sexual selection directly to human origins and morality.
  • Alfred Russel Wallace Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection (1889) – Wallace’s comprehensive overview of natural selection, detailing where his views aligned with and diverged from Darwin’s.
  • Gregor Mendel Experiments in Plant Hybridization (1866) – The foundational paper establishing the discrete physical laws of genetic inheritance.
  • Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene (1976) – Popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the concept of the meme. The Blind Watchmaker (1986) – A defense of cumulative natural selection against teleological arguments for design. The God Delusion (2006) – The flagship text of “New Atheism,” arguing against supernatural belief from a strictly mechanical evolutionary perspective.
  • E. O. (Edward O.) Wilson Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) – Synthesized animal behavior and genetics to found sociobiology. On Human Nature (1978) – Applied sociobiological principles to human culture, ethics, and religious behavior.
  • Robert Trivers Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (2002) – Collects his groundbreaking 1970s papers on reciprocal altruism, parental investment, and parent-offspring conflict.
  • Stephen Jay Gould The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) – Gould’s masterwork critiquing hyper-adaptationism and presenting punctuated equilibrium. Rocks of Ages (1999) – Introduces NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria) regarding science and religion.
  • Richard Lewontin The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment (2000) – A critique of genetic determinism, emphasizing the reciprocal interaction between organisms and their environments.

2. Relational Physics & Quantum Mechanics

  • Albert Einstein Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (1916) – Einstein’s accessible explanation of how space, time, mass, and gravity form a relative continuum.
  • Louis de Broglie Researches on the Quantum Theory (1924 Doctoral Thesis) – The original formulation of wave-particle duality for matter.
  • Niels Bohr Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (1934) – Collects Bohr’s early writings framing the Copenhagen interpretation and quantum complementarity.
  • David Bohm Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980) – Outlines the undivided holomovement, connecting quantum entanglement, non-locality, and consciousness. The Undivided Universe (with Basil Hiley, 1993) – An ontological interpretation of quantum theory.

3. Relational Philosophy & Phenomenology

  • Martin Buber I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923) – The foundational text on relational ontology, distinguishing I-Thou encounter from I-It objectification.
  • Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception (1945) – Demonstrates that consciousness is embodied and rooted in perceptual engagement with the world. The Visible and the Invisible (1964, Published posthumously) – Introduces his ultimate concept of “The Flesh of the World” (la chair).

4. Systems Ecology, Biosphere & Gaia Theory

  • Kinji Imanishi The World of Living Things (Seibutsu no Sekai, 1941) – The foundation of Japanese ecology, introducing habitat segregation (sumiwake) and species co-existence over individual warfare.
  • Vladimir I. Vernadsky The Biosphere (1926) – The landmark scientific work demonstrating that living matter is a primary geochemical force transforming Earth.
  • James Lovelock Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) – Formulates the hypothesis that Earth acts as a self-regulating super-organism.
  • Lynn Margulis Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (1998) – Outlines symbiogenesis, arguing that cooperation and cellular fusion (endosymbiosis) drive biological innovation.

5. Mind, Noosphere & Panpsychism

  • Pierre Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man (1955) – Traces evolution from the Geosphere through the Biosphere to the Noosphere and the Omega Point. The Future of Man (1964) – Essays exploring global interconnectedness and technological integration.
  • Édouard Le Roy The Origin of Human Life and the Evolution of Mind (1928) – Early philosophical lectures co-formulating the concept of the Noosphere alongside Vernadsky and Teilhard.
  • Philip Goff Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019) – A defense of panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness. Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023) – Argues for teleology and purpose in the cosmos beyond traditional monotheism or materialist reductionism.

6. Quantum Brain Theory, Morphic Fields & Unorthodox Mechanics

  • Roger Penrose The Emperor’s New Mind (1989) – Argues that non-computable physics and quantum mechanics are required to explain human consciousness, ruling out classical AI consciousness. Shadows of the Mind (1994) – Expands on Orch-OR (Orchestrated Objective Reduction) in microtubules alongside Stuart Hameroff.
  • Rupert Sheldrake A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (1981) – Introduces morphic resonance and non-physical structural fields. The Science Delusion / Science Set Free (2012) – A critique of the ten core dogmas of modern scientific materialism.

7. Artificial Intelligence, Digital Infrastructure & Systems Theory

  • Alan Turing “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950, Paper in Mind) – Formulates the Turing Test and the foundations of AI philosophy.
  • Stuart Russell & Peter Norvig Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Edition, 2020) – The definitive textbook covering classical AI, deep learning, and probabilistic reasoning.
  • Nick Bostrom Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) – Examines the trajectory toward artificial general intelligence and collective planetary cognition.
  • Francis Heylighen “Return to the Noosphere: The Emergence of the Global Brain” (2016, Academic Monograph) – Synthesizes digital networks, AI, and systems theory with Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of planetary consciousness.

Ai? That’s just it.

Posted on by

Machine Learning: Intelligence Without Consciousness

Machine learning displays intelligence in the sense that it applies reason. It is not, however, truly artificial: it arose naturally as an extension of human thought. Nor is it conscious—and, according to Roger Penrose, it cannot logically become so.

Machine learning is a tool, capable of either empowering or destroying. Yet rationality without feeling or relationship is pure I–It: concrete, isolated, and empty. “I-It” is a term used by Martin Buber to describe one mode of being in the world.

Martin Buber: Meaning Through Relationship

The essence of Martin Buber’s philosophy is that meaning arises through relationship. He distinguishes between two fundamental modes:

  • I–Thou (Ich–Du): an authentic encounter in which each participant remains open to the other.
  • I–It (Ich–Es): an instrumental mode of relating in which the other is reduced to an object or projection.

From I–Thou springs the creative potential of existence: something new emerges in every encounter between the two poles of relationship. Buber calls this process “dialogue”. It begins as an attitude—a choice about how to be and how to exist—and unfolds in the “between” (Buber’s Zwischen), where relationship opens onto new depths and possibilities.

I–It is the opposite. Because it focuses on something concrete and clearly defined, it can feel productive. Yet this apparent clarity reveals the trap: instead of meeting the other, one relates to a projection. In this sense, I–It is fundamentally narcissistic and becomes the essence of loneliness.

Gadamer, Bohm, and Genuine Dialogue

Hans-Georg Gadamer developed Buber’s insight by describing genuine dialogue as a “fusion of horizons”. When conversation gives equal priority to attentive listening and clear expression, perspectives can merge, broaden, and create new understanding.

David Bohm’s work reflects a similar vision. He grounds dialogue in physics, offering both a quantum-mechanical perspective and a connection with Eastern philosophy. Across these approaches, genuine conversation becomes a creative encounter with possibilities that extend beyond either participant’s original viewpoint.

Have a look at..

Martin Buber – “Ich und Du” (I and Thou)

Hans-Georg Gadamer – “Warheit und Methode” (Truth and Method)

David Bohm – “On Dialogue”, “ Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, “The Undivided Universe: an Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory”, “The Ending of Time”, “On Creativity”

Sir Roger Penrose – “Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness”, “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics”, “The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”

 

 

Have a look at..

Martin Buber – “Ich und Du” (I and Thou)

Hans-Georg Gadamer – “Warheit und Methode” (Truth and Method)

David Bohm – “On Dialogue”, “ Wholeness and the Implicate Order”, “The Undivided Universe: an Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory”, “The Ending of Time”, “On Creativity”

Sir Roger Penrose – “Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness”, “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics”, “The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”