Saturday, November 22, 2008

A Second Scientific Revolution

“Wilberg's 'Qualia Revolution' is easily one of the most monumental, moving, stupendous works I have had the privilege of reading.”

Joseph Chilton Pearce - author of Crack in the Cosmic Egg

Cosmic Qualia Science is truly a ‘Second Scientific Revolution’ – no mere ‘quantum leap’ but a wholly new qualitative understanding of science – a ‘Qualia Revolution’.

The Qualia Revolution begins by recognising that the true starting point of science is not the ‘objective’ existence of a space-time universe but a subjective and qualitative experience of that universe. Yet not even the most advanced quantitative science can explain the most elementary qualities of our sensory experience – the experience of ‘redness’ for example.

Qualia used to be defined by philosophers simply as experienced ‘sensory’ qualities such as colours and sounds. Yet what if subjective awareness is no mere empty receptacle for the experience of such sensory qualities but has its own innately, inwardly sensed and sensual qualities – qualities such as the sensed colour and tone, lightness or darkness, levity or gravity, texture and density of moods, or those sensed qualities of inner ‘warmth’ or ‘coolness’, ‘closeness’ or ‘distance’ towards other human beings that we sense in ourselves and others?

Peter Wilberg argues that it is not material particles or energetic ‘quanta’ but ‘qualia’ in this sense – sensed and sensual qualities of awareness or ‘soul’ – that are the basic stuff of which both we and the the universe we experience are composed. Atoms, molecules and cells are seen as the outwardly perceived form taken by patterned qualities of atomic, molecular and cellular awareness.

Challenging the quasi-religious dogma that is shared by modern ‘science’ and New Age ‘spiritual’ teachings alike, the dogma that ‘Everything is Energy’, Qualia Science reveals a conscious cosmos - one made up of fields and field-qualities of awareness rather than ‘energy’. This is a cosmos in which God not only can but must have a scientific place - understood not as some sort of ‘universal energy’ but as a universal awareness – one whose innate qualities or qualia are the source of all sensory phenomena and all individualised consciousness.

Synthesising insights from the SETH books of Jane Roberts, the field-phenomenology of Michael Kosok and Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of directly felt meaning or ‘sense’, Qualia Science clarifes essential nature of what Rudolf Steiner termed "spiritual science", whilst at the same time fulfilling Marx’s vision of a "natural science of man" that is at the same time a "human science of nature".

The new understanding and approach to science offered by 'The Qualia Revolution' has not only profound theoretical implications but immediate practical applications - not just in the sciences themselves but in key areas of human social life such as education, economics, health and medicine.