The Self-Aware Universe Author: Amit Goswami | Language: English | ISBN:
B001QWDS1Y | Format: PDF
The Self-Aware Universe Description
Consciousness, not matter, is the ground of all existence, declares University of Oregon physicist Goswami, echoing the mystic sages of his native India. He holds that the universe is self-aware, and that consciousness creates the physical world.
- File Size: 2119 KB
- Print Length: 338 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0874777984
- Publisher: Tarcher (March 21, 1995)
- Sold by: Penguin Group (USA) LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001QWDS1Y
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #39,634 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Professional Science > Physics > Quantum Theory - #9
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Social Sciences > Philosophy > Religious
I've recently returned from a journey to the rain country of western Oregon where I discovered "monistic idealism." It's about to become a philosophy of choice in the consciousness revolution.
I gathered this intelligence at the Eugene home of Amit Goswami, Professor of Physics at the Institute of Theoretical Studies at the University of Oregon. I arranged this special interview because of Goswami's new book, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. (Tarcher/Putnam). I wanted to meet the person who authored such a book and to make sure I was correctly understanding its many profundities.
At first glance, the book appears to be one of those "new science" books that have become so popular. It does describe quite well the basic experiments of quantum physics, the ones that produce such paradoxes as the dual identity (wave and particle) of electrons and their ability to communicate at a distance with each other instantaneously (non-locality). But rather than simply leaving us with a "Gee, whiz, isn't this incredible?" impression that the real world isn't as we assumed, Goswami boldly, yet very thoughtfully, introduces us to monistic idealism and suggests we accept it as a foundation for a new, and quite compelling, worldview.
Monistic idealism is the academically correct name given to a philosophical position that once was considered pre-scientific. It existed before the advent of what philosophers today label as materialistic dualism,. or what we might call the current official scientific world view. Materialistic dualism is the assumption that physical matter is the primary reality and that mind is separate from, but dependent upon, matter.
It has been said that philosophers never answer any questions, they simply pose them. Amit Goswami does both. Armed with a keen understanding of philosophy and an academic background in theoretical sciences, Goswami is able to both succinctly state the essence of a problem and logically hypothesize an answer, while fending off the criticisms offered by others in his field.
Goswami tackles what I consider the most important question of our time: What are the implications of quantum physics for our everyday reality? Numerous attempts have been made to make sense of the oddities and paradoxes of quantum physics, and there have been as many as a dozen proposals to explain these paradoxes. Among the propositions have been Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation, Everett's many-worlds interpretation, and what some have called the most naive explanation--Consciousness Created Reality. The advocates of this Idealist philosophy, which includes John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Fred Alan Wolf, and the author of this book, unashamedly insist that objects such as the moon don't exist until they are observed.
Goswami doesn't reject other interpretations of reality outright, but rather, he incorporates, and clarifies some of the best points into his strong anthropocentric philosophy of Monist Idealism, which posits that the universe exists in a transcendental domain of potentiality, and it is we, the observer, who collapse this potential into the corporal world.
The fact that observers have not been here during a majority of the universe's existence is no problem for Goswami, as he explains that a myriad of universes have existed in a transcendental realm outside of space/time, and an observation "now" can go "back-in-time" to create the universe we know today.
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