Theise belittles the human in 'we are the planet'

Life holds so much more than what science can unfold. That's why some scientists turn to poetry to express what they have learnt, but which isn't limited to a set of mere material findings. An example is physicist Richard Feynman, who famously declared "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantam mechanics", a statement that continues to ring true.

It's not that science hasn't opened our eyes to what would otherwise be incredible information about our world, from particles preceding atoms, to busy ants, to the immensity of the universe. 

A book out this year on complexity, on how everything that makes this planet liveable is interconnected, is forthright in stating that what is being presented is a theory: Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by pathologist and stem cell biologist Neil Theise. He is a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

The Washington Post review states this about the book as part of the ongoing human quest to understand ourselves:

It’s a theory that attempts to provide rigorous scientific underpinnings to timeless questions of consciousness, being and self — as well as our place not just in the world but in the universe.

The reviewer, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, places this work in the company of multitudes:

Searching for “consciousness books” online yields tens of thousands of titles, ranging from old classics by Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung to a much more recent bestseller with an outrageously ambitious subtitle: Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, by Annaka Harris. And this doesn’t even touch on the innumerable works about neuroscience, mysticism, meditation, self-help — clearly, once one starts trying to learn about consciousness, the possibilities are, appropriately, limitless.

But she finds Theise's work on interconnectedness is convincing in that it demonstrates that:

...many of the boundaries we take for granted are not just scientifically artificial but intellectually, spiritually and even psychologically suffocating.

The problem in appreciating our situation "is those of us who are products of the thoroughly atomized, self-involved Western world" have eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear.

Theise turns to the poetic mode in trying to encapsulate his insights:

Complexity comforts us, revealing, unequivocally, unavoidably, that however separate and alone we might feel, each one of us is — in each and every single moment — a pure expression of the entire living, conscious universe. Nothing separate, nothing left out, but true, pure, and complete, just as we are.

The reviewer, too, posits a spiritual stance in concluding her reading of the rich vein of Theise's scientific exploration: 

But even if Theise concludes that the end state of all this complexity is, inevitably, chaos, the constantly regenerative nature of complexity still offers something like hope.

Maria Popova, likewise, finds Theise's work to her taste as he delves into the mysteries of life:

The mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. [...] Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced.

Popova:  

The Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.” 

Zooming out to the planetary scale, he argues that all living beings on Earth are a single organism animated by a single consciousness that permeates the universe. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile this view with our overwhelming subjective experience as autonomous selves, distinct in space and time — an experience magnified by the vanity of free will, which keeps on keeping us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a self-organizing whole.

A doubt arises, here in particular, about Theise's project. Neither Szegedy-Maszak nor Popova clarify the theorist's stance in regard to the source of the consciousness that keeps the "system" functioning. Further, though Popova indulges in a reference to free will as being an illusion, Theise himself uses "can" and "creativity" in speaking of the human endeavour — are we truly creative or not? Theise:

Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.

To keep that complexity in order, a key element of quantum theory, complementarity, comes into play. Popova quotes Theise:

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

It would seem that as a Buddhist, Theise preaches a gospel akin to Sam Harris's "mindfulness", part of the multitude of self-help programs referred to above, tapping into rich concepts but lacking the ability to apply them in their original transcendental context. He is also a run-of-the-mill pantheist, costumed in scientific data but metaphysically unable or philosophically unwilling to understand what he sees.

His shallowness appears in the following quote, which is hardly "redemptive" (Popova's term), since it suggests little to elevate the human above the ant. Morality, virtue, the nobility of compassion relate only remotely to the human person in search for the common good:

While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.

Theise is obviously enthusiastic about what is otherwise called quantum physicalism, a form of materialism, but it would preclude the human person living "according to the fullness of their nature, dignity, and destiny" (Spitzer 2015*). This author goes on:

Reducing ourselves to mere atoms, molecules, or quantum systems — or to a mere dimension of a universal consciousness embedded in physical processes — causes us to "underlive" our lives, undervalue our dignity, and underestimate our nature and destiny, which is a completely avoidable self-imposed waste and travesty.

Spitzer dwells on the nature of that travesty in this excerpt:

Spitzer devotes his  efforts in his text to provide recent evidence from physics and cosmology to highlight the "creation of physical reality by an intelligent transcendent cause": "For in him we live and move and have our being", as Paul told the elders in Athens, quoting the 6th Century BC poet Epimenides.

Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale 2013; accessible online), makes plain the direction Theise should go to advance our understanding of human existence:

God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance with rational laws upon which he is dependent. Rather, he is himself the logical order of all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being, the transcendent and indwelling Reason or Wisdom by which mind and matter are both informed and in which both participate (BS emphasis).

If indeed to exist is to be manifest—to be intelligible and perceptible—and if to exist fully is to be consciously known, then God, as infinite being, is also an act of infinite knowledge. He is in himself the absolute unity of consciousness and being, and so in the realm of contingent things is the source of the fittedness of consciousness and being each to the other, the one ontological reality of reason as it exists both in thought and in the structure of the universe (BS).

At least, according to almost all the classical metaphysical schools, East and West, the marvelous coincidence between, on the one hand, our powers of reason and, on the other, the capacity of being to be understood points to an ultimate identity between them, in the depths of their transcendent origin. God’s being—esse, on, sat, wujud—is also consciousness—ratio, logos, chit, wijdan.

As Ramanuja would have it, Brahman, as the fullness of all being, must possess immediate knowledge of all reality within himself, and so be the fullness of all consciousness as well, the “personal” source in whom being achieves total manifestation, total actuality.

Or, in the language of Plotinus, the One ceaselessly generates the eternal reflective consciousness of the divine mind, nous, from which emanates all the rationally coherent diversity of the cosmos (BS). Or, in the terms of Philo of Alexandria or the Gospel of John, God is never without his Logos, the divine Wisdom, in and through whom the world is created, ordered, and sustained (BS).

So all of creation is rationally ordered and sustained by God who made the human person in the image of himself as a being who has a personal will and the capacity to be creative, a human quality Theise lauds but fails to acknowledge as a mark of independence above everything else in creation.

Evidently, much of the knowledge—and wisdom—of ages past has been lost among practitioners in the fields of science and philosophy. Though Theise probably employs a fuzzy Buddhism-lite spirituality in his "we are the planet" metaphysics, Spitzer could be writing to him, urging him to harken to his Jewish heritage:

If we do not try to help our culture overcome [its] self-limiting, self-deprecating, and self-destructive belief in "mere materialism", we consign ourselves to be a part of it...."

In conclusion, Theise's theory is of a force within nature that directs in a self-organising manner, but one which deprives the human being of the respect due to the partner with God in fulfilling the divine plan for each person, for the common good, and for the planet. In response to that theory, the alert individual is led to follow Flannery O'Connor's example in reaction to another example of a great truth being emptied of meaning, in exploding with a hearty, "If that's the case, to hell with it!"

*Spitzer, Robert J. The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason. San Franscisco, Ignatius Press, 2015.

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