{Sahtouris] Hello, I'm Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris, and we're here at beautiful Lake Toya in Hokkaido for a symposium on the Foundations of Science. We're looking into the basic belief assumptions that underlie Western Science, in order to see how the paradigm shift is occurring in science nowadays, with some people still in academia doing more traditional science, and many of us who have left academia and are outside science developing new kinds of assumptions in order to do new theories and new research.

** Our foundational scientific assumptions

[Sahtouris] We're going to get to how to build a new science, but today we're on our personal assumptions, OK. It's very important for us to lay that groundwork and then figure out how to make this into a credible science.

[Genku Kimura] Even when people ask some questions, hidden assumptions are already implied. So questions are determined by the assumptions and answers that come out also are determined by assumptions. So, assumption really gives a whole context. So it is very, very, very important that we become cognisant and aware of our hidden assumptions. We hold many, many, many assumptions unknowingly, unconsciously. So, when we talk about science or anything, we don’t talk about nothing, we talk about something. So you already have an assumption that, you know, the topics on which you are talking exist.

[Josephson] You could say one is deciding something is real not only in the basis of something fairly direct or even a measurement, but theoretical models come in as well because science is trying to unify, it’s trying to produce, trying to find out models that have maximum explanatory power.

[Genku Kimura] What do I consider to be real? You know, James Jeans defined science as an attempt at setting order, a factual experience, the question is what kind of experience are we actually setting in order, but it comes across to my own assumption that whatever shows up in the field of my experience, I consider to exist. Therefore, this shows up in the field of my experience, therefore, this experience, this exists. Also when I had this -- everybody has these kind of a cosmic spiritual experience that are not sensorily accessible, somehow spiritually accessible, that’s also a part of my field of experience, they also exist. And so that is my fundamental premise or assumption regarding reality, that it shows in my experience and experience has a wide range, from sensory all the way to spiritual or you can call mystical.

[Samanta-Laughton]: I’m just making the observation, having heard a few of the comments, that there's the assumption [either] that reality is what we perceive to our consciousness, or [that] reality is consciousness itself, because some people are talking about, nothing can exist unless it's conceived of or imagined ...

[Sahtouris]: Both

[Samanta-Laughton]: Both. Yes, that’s what I’m getting. I’m getting both ... these two different things are emerging are two complementary or two the same ...

[Sahtouris]: I think it’s complementary, yes.

[Samanta-Laughton]: Well, it is interesting because -— as they said, it's like I’ve sort of experienced reality more as, it’s consciousness that creates reality.

** Consciousness and Emotions

[Bakar] The mainstream assumption is precisely that, that everything is explainable within physical reality. So if we take consciousness then, based on that assumption, consciousness has to be explained as a kind of product of physical processes [but] we can talk about cosmic consciousness as a whole ... Now we didn’t talk about the multiple consciousnesses that constitute the entire cosmic consciousness and even beyond, the meta-cosmic consciousness. And we need to go to biology--I mean, from cosmology, we need to go to the particular domain which is in biology in order to understand life, what life is and what consciousness is, we have to now define the different attributes that categorise each of these different aspects of consciousness, or different levels of consciousness. And I just want to raise that, because I think so far we have been talking about it in a rather general way.

[Texier]: I think one of the failures of science unto the moment is that they put emotions outside. And if we are thinking in consciousness science like Yasu was telling yesterday, we have to include love. That's very difficult for science, for academics but I think that it's an, important ingredient to the new science, including emotions. Now, we can work emotion beside science because we have the tools.

** Qualitative and Quantitative Science

[Genku Kimura] So, there is an assumption in science, you know, that what is not quantified does not exist, maybe. And you know, in our own way of thinking, maybe, we can expand that definition into something more than just quantifiability or communicability, so that’s my thought.

[Tiller] So, quantitative science is higher on the hierarchy than the whole range of science. Quantitative is better than—it’s more discriminating than qualitative. And that is a very important differentiation and that's one of the reasons that western science has been so powerful-- it's because it has been quantitative which means it lead to engineering, which means it needs to the manufacture of things reliably reproducible, etc. So I am glad you brought that point up—it is very important.

[Josephson] That makes it limited, as well.

[Tiller] Oh of course it does, absolutely.

[Texier] I agree with you, because-—I intend to say that I think the problem is not science, it's not technology. It's the use and what we propose to do with this because I think that for years, science and rationalism become the king and conduce the humanity, they put out the quality, okay? And I think that they have to be both.

[Samanta-Laughton] So I agree with the quantitative versus qualitative. Well, it's both and they're both beautifully complementary and whether things are processes or things it's useful to think of both as ??? said, and Mr. Shoji said also, it depends on the level to which you are looking at things.

[Sahtouris] You can't do the holistic thinking when you have to abstract only what you currently can measure in something and I do recognise that you want to be able to handle more and more variables in your quantifiability but there is a question to me whether the goal should be to only move it all into quantification or whether we need the holistic quality picture of things and I think we will always need it and that it has to be seen as not a superiority of one over the other, not a goal of going entirely into the right or the left into quantifying or qualitative but to truly be aware that any new science must have this complementarity and that means the respect of the quantifiers for the qualifiers, right? This is absolutely critical because if they keep thinking that theirs is a superior one, eventually all that fuzzy stuff will come into our domain, it's not going to work right.

** The principle of group emergence

[Ward (moderator)] What I understand through our conversation--I had forgotten why--is that is why listening to others, why everyone’s here, is to go beyond the individuality of our knowing and in coherence to allow something greater than that to emerge. And so, a significant part of that is the connectedness.

[Samanta-Laughton] When a group mind comes together, what happens is information comes through from the universe that isn’t within any individual here. It’s when the group comes together that magical emergence comes and we create something together that is bigger as a group than any of our individuals. That’s what I was talking about. not an explosion of ...

[Tiller] Can I add to that, I meant it in the following way, because I usually have this kind of thing happen often with my consulting work. You could tune to the individual you’re consulting with, to the place where you’re so paying attention, but you’re in tune, and the bandwidths of your consciousness combine, and in the larger bandwidth information can flow in, you couldn't have imagined that, I think that’s what you’re talking about.

[Samanta-Laughton] That's what I'm saying ...

** Developing intuition and imagination in science

[Tiller] ... it is that we should teach people how to develop their intuition because in these multi-variable problems, you really need to use this skill. It's a natural human skill.

[Sahtouris]: Okay, and that's your insight.

[Samanta-Laughton] I just really, really want to echo what Elisabet was saying and what Bill is agreeing with as well and from my own experience, when I developed as a mystic following my kind of Kundalilni experience over a number of years, and it also helped that my scientific life, it all came together as a oneness and some of you have read the book Punk Science so you know about my experience when I was actually in nature and I had—I was actually thrown into the universe consciousness itself and the universe consciousness came to me as a revelation but not as someone of an indigenous culture might have experienced it. For me, it was particles, it was Hawking radiation, it was an understanding that melted together completely my mystical and my academic nature as one, there was no separation.

[Josephson] Well, I think it's all very well to say science clearly includes intuition but you still have to make a big cultural change before anything will happen and before it becomes part of people's training I guess. So it's just—it's difficult to see a whole project, but we might think about how one might go about it, what kind of courses there might be, and clarify what the role of intuition is and what happens if you ...

[Shoji] the problems and challenges that we face in society are due to the fact that we lack imagination and creativity. People tend to memorise what is learned from others, and therefore if you try to really find out a better answer, you need to do more than just memorising. In other words, each one of us has to think in our own way. Otherwise, the problems and the challenges would still remain in society. That's what I feel.

** Current assumptions underlying science

[Josephson]: I just want to make a comment which really reflect to a big subject. There's been comment about the unconscious assumptions of science and that people don’t know the assumptions that they're working on, but I think that’s not the case they have been spelt out, that science is based on experiment and public observation and so on. So, that is not really the issue, the deeper assumption is that is the only valid approach to knowledge.

[Genku Kimura] Assumptions become dogmatic assumptions, but there is a distinction.

[Josephson]: Surely all dogmas are assumption, but not all assumptions are dogmas.

[Sahtouris] Exactly.

[Genku Kimura] And there are assumptions that gave rise to those dogmas.

[Elisabet]: Yes. So give us an example.

[Yasuhiko Genku Kimura]: One of the fundamental assumptions that science has is this 'reality is physical reality' that Manjir talked about, that is more like a fundamental philosophical assumption.

[Sahtouris]: That’s what I call the non-living universe.

[Genku Kimura]: Yes, the non-living universe.

[Sahtouris]: I am fascinated by the fact that the concept of non-life doesn’t seem to exist in any other human cultures except possibly was invented by the ancient Greeks when they invented the geometry of the spheres and so forth. But it's so deep an assumption that you’re considered virtually crazy if you suggest that it's not a non-living universe.

[Shoji] Some say, the earth is not living. Such people may be actually positioned in a non-living domain. In other words, if you think the earth is living, then you would have contact with the earth as an interaction between the other living things. If you treat the earth as something not living then that would already put yourself in an inorganic domain. So the earth could be considered as living or non-living depending on the way people approach it. It's completely different from the scientist's point of view.

[Genku Kimura]: Shoji says very profound things, matter of factly. When he said that when somebody sees something non-living, there must be a something within human heart that is there, that is a very profound statement. So changing the assumption from non-living universe to living universe has a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous significance and I’m sure we all know this but it’s really, really important and so when I came across a lot of cancer patients because of my past association with them. When you go to the doctors, they treat the body, they treat people like, just machine. So once we shift our thinking into seeing everything as alive, that will have a tremendous impact, and I just want to emphasize. And reverse of what he said is true, so if you are dead, you see something to be dead, but once you begin to see things alive, then the deadness within them is going to be divine.

** Towards new assumptions and a new view of science

[Samanta-Laughton]: Yes. Okay completely change in direction. New assumptions, new assumption is that the characteristics that make an organism what it is, is not reliant on the DNA sequence of genes, and that’s after the Human Genome Project.

[Genku Kimura]: Can you change your sentence from a negative statement to a positive statement?

[Bakar]: You are actually responding to a certain assumption in current biology. So what is that assumption that you are questioning?

[Samanta-Laughton]: The original assumption? Yes you’re right--there is something underlying that. The original assumption is that DNA is primary and responsible for all the characteristics as the organism. So if we change it around, we have to say that the new assumption is that there is something other than DNA that is responsible for the characteristics of the organism.

[Sahtouris]: The evolution of species is an intelligent learning process in nature. That’s an assumption I make based on my perception of what happens--and it’s very different from Darwin.

[Ward]: There doesn’t seem to be any edginess about that one.

[Genku Kimura]: I have a question. So if you make that assumption in place of the Darwinian assumption, what are the possibilities that come out of this assumption which was not available from the Darwinian assumption?

[Elisabet Sahtouris]: Well there is already evidence for things that have been built on that assumptions. For instance, Barbara McClintock’s work showed that DNA can intelligently rearrange itself under stress and so did Esher Ben-Jacob's work in Israel. So there are quite a few experiments showing that DNA literally rearranges itself to meet a particular stress problem.

[Samanta-Laughton]: And John Cairns as well.

[Sahtouris]: Yes Cairns has done it. And then there’s also the evidence that type I and type III ecosystems have the first one largely competitive species and the second largely cooperative species and I posit the theory that there’s a learning process that shows that feeding your enemies is more energy efficient than killing them and this would be a very important implication for society if this were understood by all of us.

[Genku Kimura]: So the possibility that comes up from that assumption is tremendous. And I think when we choose assumptions that are wonderful in a criteria to chose because some assumptions kind of close possibilities whereas this assumption actually opens up a new possibility. One more question. So are you [Josephson] talking about a complementarity as a new emerging principle in science or…

[Josephson]: Well as an old principle. There's more interesting things like that now.

[Genku Kimura]: Yes. And I know in Chinese anyway—so is it like emerging as a new assumption -- complementary [being] essential for the process or the phenomena in the universe?

[Josephson]: No, I meant old in conventional terms. Yes when quantum mechanics came out it was realised as Elisabet said [something can be] sometimes it is a wave, sometimes it is a particle depending on how you look at it. There is a lecture of mine you can see on the internet on how -- Bohr argued life might have to be viewed differently which is very relevant to our present discussion. He was bludgeoned into giving up the idea. I argued that it was a perfectly valid idea and is an important one.

[Sahtouris]: What was the perfectly valid idea that Bohr got talked out of?

[Josephson]: Complementarity of physics and biology, that biology might not be explicable according to ordinary quantum mechanics.

[Tiller} Let me add that basically, people have been arguing about that ever since the beginnings of quantum mechanics and it is a very, very confused subject. If you look at the writings it just goes down the history, and it's basically stated in a way that's very very complex because there are many features in it that are not simply a part of complementarity in nature. Would you agree, Brian?

[Josephson]: Yes, I think the fact that biosystems are complex is important as well.

[Bakar]: I think the relationship between biology and physics is a very important issue. It is important now, and it is going to be more important in our new, global science. Of course, we are looking for a more authentic relationship between biology and physics. We go for a new biology, new physics, so our new vision will bring about ... perhaps the relationship between the two will become closer.

[Samanta-Laughton]: For me, it's beautiful what's happening at the moment with these so-called theories of everything -- they are all showing similar patterns and I think that's a beautiful point. At this point in humanity everyone is seeing a new aspect of consciousness, a new aspect of the universe, but they're seeing it through their own lens, so if we can put our egos aside and actually say that we all have a part of the picture -- you know, that's the way to move forward.

** Global sciencing

[Sahtouris] When I use 'global', the way I meant it was 'globalisng' Western science, and so it's taught in Kuala Lumpur, in China and all over the place, it has been adopted lock, stock and barrel, and I want to make the distinction between a globally adopted Western science and a truly Global Science. I think it's important that we recognise that we're talking about two different things, the new science that we want to take to the world, the consciousness-inclusive, this new science, and the concept of a global science where any culture can set basic beliefs on which to build hypotheses and be counted as science. If they do proper methodology and definitions, and acknowledgment of axioms, the idea of opening it up, that there's not one true science, or the 'one true science' that actually says it's the only science at present, and we need to open that space so that the new science can be included in science without invalidating Western science. And, also open it to ancient sciences, to the way young people will develop science, and that's what I mean by Global Science.

[Ward]: And can I get clear, is that the primary aim of this symposium, to promote the idea of this all-inclusive science, called at the moment global science?

[Sahtouris]: The primary goal is, to reassess the foundations of Western science so that we can see what it means to build a science, to flesh out what we mean by our new science, and to create a container for other people to do similar things in the world under the rubric of a global science.

[Genku Kimura]: A common feature that I can detect among all those sciences is that it is an interpretive theory in the sense that David Bohm defined, interpretive theory that has inner coherence. And coherence does not mean logical in the sense of -- you know -- Aristotelian logic as such; there can be many different forms of logic or coherence -- somehow, a theory has inner coherence.

[Tiller]: You mean an inner self-consistency?

[Genku Kimura]: Self-consistency. Yes, or inner integrity. So one common feature, whether it is Western science, or Vedic science, or whatever the science we now term science, it is a formal theory, or theory in the sense of the perspective from which to see, and it is an interpretive theory, of phenomena, that has inner self-consistency.

[Sahtouris]: Well by Western science's own definition of science I think there are other sciences and they don't, by it's own definition.


[Genku Kimura]:I understand. I mean -- science needs knowledge.

[Sahtouris]: Well, it means ordering your knowledge in a particular way, making explicit your foundations, creating theories, hypotheses, doing research, getting answers, interpreting them, repeating them, you know, all of these things.

[Bakar]: If we go along with this definition of global science, as presented by Elisabet, then that [deals with] the concern that you have raised, precisely because the global science here includes the ancient sciences and other traditional sciences, and I, in particular, would like to refer to a living culture, one living culture which is my own living culture-- tradition, Islam, in which precisely. I mean, we use the word science to refer to a systematically organised body of knowledge with well-defined subject matter, which of course any science must have, its own assumptions, its own methodological instance of methodology, and goals that it seeks to achieve, all those define what science is. In the history of Western science, we have that narrow definition, I think that started with the British philosopher, William Whewell, when he began to define science in terms of method. In other words, there’s only one method by which you should define science. If truths and realities cannot be ascertained or cannot be verified according to that method, then it doesn’t qualify to be science. That’s why there was once a point in the history of modern Western thought when psychology was considered as a pseudoscience, not as a real science. So, in other words we have different historical experience, but I think the beautiful thing in Elisabet’s definition is that by including the other non-Western sciences whether ancient that have died out but others were still very much alive until today ...

[Texier]: I don't know when, exactly, but I think in the history of the Western science when it becomes a colonialist, and now we are in post colonialist times, of humanity. So the word that comes to me is dialogue, which is what we need, this dialogue, reciprocally with the order science.

[Bakar]: What I'm saying is based on fact. What are the facts? Facts are ... we know they exist. There are many traditions, many cultures, which have different visions of reality, not looking at it as a machine but as something else ... with practical implications. This is a very important thing, why we insist on this new global science, because the kind of vision of reality that we have will influence the kind of culture that we have. So many cultures are now starting to decay because they are forced to live with just the vision of modern science.

[Texier]: ... science has a strategic nature because it provides us with models and a presentation of reality that guides our perception and our way of doing things in, and about, the reality. So in postcolonial times such as the present of humanity [science] must be inclusive and cover the concordance of multiple skills and all cultural responses for the regulation of individual and social life.

[Sahtouris]: I love that finish to the four because it is making science very human, and it's saying that our models determine how people think, in different cultures around the world and determines their behaviour. It creates their reality because science is telling their creation story and our relationship to each other and to the universe, and you've included all of nature, so it's a wonderful finish to it.

[end of main symposium; for the participants' summary statements please refer to the video, starting at 35:56]