The Impact of Our Philosophical Assumptions on How We Treat the Environment

The very Western ideas of linear progress and the assumption that consciousness arises from matter only after matter becomes sufficiently biologically complex underpin the current environmental and moral quandaries we face on Earth. What if we gave some consideration to a new idea from an ancient sage from India? The great Kanada, whose masterwork "Matter and Mind," has been recently translated into English, promotes a different construct to help humans understand the nature of reality.

Kanada's system of physics says that matter evolved from consciousness. Isn't it obvious, when you stop to reflect for a moment, that an electron already knows how to be an electron? In David Levy's Tools for Critical Thinking, Chapter 2, we are introduced to the idea that complex ideas that are constructed within the human mind must be evaluated by their effects on our lives. Logic alone is limited in it's ability to prove.

So, how might human engineers, by embracing the idea that matter evolved from consciousness, evolve a new way to do engineering work that respects the necessary equilibrium of the natural world?

Kanada's system of physics includes

1) all the phases of matter described by Western science

2) the perceiver of the qualities of the objects of the physical world, and

3) the mind of the perceiver.

Among other great names of early scientists, the great astronomer Johannes Kepler routinely included stories about human life in his publications, explaining how the ideas that grounded his great scientific discoveries arose. Yet Western science was later advanced by removing the mind of the observer from the description of reality, thereby developing the ideal of objectivity.

Is it time to return the conscious observer to science and engineering?

This is a 40 minute presentation.