Towards the Soul-Centered Worldview

A plaidoyer for a post-material Copernican paradigm shift

As is well known, the Copernican revolution shifted the Earth to a peripheral position, placing the Sun at the center of the known universe. It was only this conceptual move, no particular discovery, that allowed humanity to transition from cultural stagnation to a new flourishing cultural and scientific renaissance. For some time, the Ptolemaic worldview, which insisted on placing the Earth at the center of all there is, by adding epicycles after epicycles to save appearances, still had some leverage, but soon had to surrender in front of the progress made by its opposite paradigm. Where would humanity be today if it had stubbornly insisted on an anthropocentric belief system that was unwilling to step back?

In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin notoriously led science to another tectonic shift. The belief in the idea that the human being stands at the center of creation was shattered into pieces. Human animals are the product of an evolutionary process, like all the other species. Anthropocentrism was replaced by an ‘evolution-centered’ view of life. Contrary to Copernicus, Darwin built upon evidence. For example, he was moved by the fossil record that showed a progression of life forms from simpler to more complex forms over geological time. He was impressed by the selective breeding practices of humans, which demonstrated that deliberate selection for specific traits could lead to significant changes in populations over generations. He recognized that similar processes could occur in nature through natural selection. But was his change of mind triggered only by new empirical data, or was it rather his acceptance that an ideological shift was necessary to account for it? Where would humanity be today if we continued to believe in a strictly creationist conception of life stubbornly?¹

Source: Worldhistory.org

Less known is the ‘second Copernican revolution’ that, in the mid-1930s displaced our whereabouts from a Sun-centered to a galaxy-centered position. The Sun is not the center of the universe but is only one of the billions of other stars populating the Milky Way. No serious progress in astronomy would have been possible without accepting this second paradigmatic shift.

At about the same time, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum theory entered the stage by putting upside down, again, our conceptions about physical reality. In relativity, the idea that a preferred reference frame exists, such as a frame fixed with the Earth or the Sun, and in which the laws of physics could be universally described, had to give way to a conception of physical reality with no preferential place in the universe and no particular state of motion. Contrary to its name and popular belief, relativity is much more about non-relative—that is, invariant—aspects of reality. The laws of physics are the same in whatever frame of reference and whatever state of motion. Not only that but also the speed of light turns out to be the same in all these frames. Again, it was no groundbreaking discovery but first and foremost Einstein’s shift from one worldview to another one that opened the doors for further progress.

On the other side of Einstein’s 20th-century scientific revolution, stood Max Planck who introduced a crazy idea: Energy is not emitted and absorbed continuously but in tiny ‘packets’ or ‘quanta.’ Later on, Einstein himself, showed that light could be conceived as made of a flux of particles, the photons, instead of waves, while Werner Heisenberg introduced his famous uncertainty principle that, to put it bluntly, states that everything is somehow ‘fuzzy,’ ‘unsharp,’ or ‘indeterminate.’ The universe is no longer a precise clockwork, with which our analytic mind is still so much in love, but these great minds forced us to accept another ‘Copernican shift’ that projected us from a world centered on certainties where everything could be predicted, at least in principle, to an inherently unpredictable reality. Again, it wasn’t so much a series of discoveries that impelled them to frame their world-changing models of reality, but to the contrary, it was a lack of progress and the presence of anomalies that urged them to think otherwise and displace the center of reality from one viewpoint to another. Where would humanity be today if it had stubbornly insisted on maintaining a classical conception of reality? You would certainly not read this post, or at least not from a monitor. Especially the advent of quantum physics allowed for all those developments in solid-state physics on which all of microelectronics is based and that sparked the digital revolution beginning from the 1950s.

Many other examples of this sort could be made in the history of science and human cultural evolution. But the essential point in common to all these ‘paradigm shifts’, as Thomas Kuhn used to call it, wasn’t simply a discovery, observation, or anomaly, but rather a change of mind that cut through the chains of a past belief system. It was the willingness to switch from a worldview fixed on an anthropomorphic belief system to another standpoint that was centered on a more universal way of seeing the world and ourselves.

What came after the mid-20th century? Any new paradigm shift? Some groundbreaking discovery or a new way of seeing the world?

The question is: Do we need one?

One could argue that after the tremendous success of science and all its marvellous applications we don’t need any paradigm shift. All is fine and well. Science is productive more than ever.

However, we already saw how, despite all the appearances to the contrary, the progress of modern science is stagnating. It is an incremental and cumulative enterprise that needs much larger financial and human resources to proceed. Especially the so-called big science projects are in a deep crisis. We have already seen how the progress and practical applications of the discoveries in neuroscience are vastly overrated. It did not lead, as formerly expected, to any useful application in psychiatry. My last post on how scandals are rocking cancer research is only the last example of a very long list. The truth of the matter is that the explosive progress of digital technologies and the internet has blinded us from seeing the much less impressive progress in other fields. Most of modern science is hyped and is either overly exaggerated and/or amplified by social media. Every day we read of a great ‘breakthrough,’ or whatever discovery or invention that is supposed to change the world. But if you carefully follow the development of all these scientific ‘breakthroughs,’ you will find out how, the vast majority of them, after a moment of notoriety, will disappear in the dustbin of history. Science and technology will not deliver what we (more or less unconsciously) expect. Stagnation is felt everywhere. Something is missing.

Should we shift our center again (?)

What about giving up the exclusively matter-centered and reductionistic worldview of Nature and, especially, ourselves, by considering a wider spirit-centered perspective?

Maybe it isn’t enough to focus primarily on explaining phenomena in terms of physical properties and interactions of matter to understand reality. While this perspective has been incredibly successful in advancing scientific understanding and technological progress, it also has inherent limitations when it comes to fully comprehending the complexity of reality and the nature of consciousness. Materialism struggles to explain subjective experiences such as consciousness, emotions, and thoughts solely in terms of physical processes. The "hard problem of consciousness" remains a mystery that is dismissed only by those who don’t understand the mystery. Reductionism assumes that complex systems can be fully understood by breaking them down into their constituent parts and analyzing their interactions. However, emergent phenomena, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts, challenge this reductionist approach. Properties such as consciousness, life, mind, and self-organization emerge from complex interactions in ways that cannot be predicted solely by studying individual components. You cannot understand a forest by studying it as an aggregate of microscopic cells without life and mind. A matter-centered science studies only the quantitative aspects of reality that can be measured and quantified, such as mass, energy, and physical or chemical properties. However, it ignores all the qualitative aspects of reality, such as consciousness, experience, will, life’s desire, goal-directedness, and meaning, and even dismisses these as subjective illusions that could be explained away, in mere dynamical terms of scattering particles.

We assume that all that we are will be explained by the complicated interaction of neurons. We hope that any mental health issue will one day be fixed with some drug that meddles with our brain chemistry. The belief is that mapping the territory of every single cell, molecule, atom and their interactions will tell us what the territory is about.

Take, for example, allopathic medicine.

It was and remains firmly entrenched in a purely mechanistic and materialistic conception of life, our bodies, and health which inevitably determines how medical sciences are practiced, not to mention how its related R&D is funded.

But, maybe, there is a “Life-Force” that determines our personality and well-being. If so, it should become pretty clear how limited and superficial a purely physicalist and mechanistic worldview of ourselves and our bodies must be. Our bodies are more than just complex machines. They are more than a compound of organs, bones, and a brain. The reductionist physicalist understanding of what determines our physical health and well-being, and which reduces the body’s functions to genes, cells, and chemistry, carefully avoiding any wider perspective, has led to stagnation and a lack of progress in many fields. The popular belief deludes itself with supposed giant leaps of the medical sciences which, at closer scrutiny and critical analysis, largely evaporates or reveals itself to be much more limited than expected.

The ‘anima mundi,’ or ‘World Soul,’ inspired mystics and philosophers.

For at least a century, more or less veiled forms of scientism hammered into the collective consciousness the dogma that reason and a purely materialistic and reductionist science are the ultimate tools for knowledge on which everyone must agree with what tells us the so cherished analytic mind. Ultimately, this is a form of anthropocentrism too. Whereas, the so-called ‘Age of Reason’ yearns more than ever for an ‘Age of Wisdom’.

In my view, the most eminent example of this state of affairs, is the so-called, ‘war on cancer,’ and that has been going on for about half a century but despite some substantial and notable advances, overall, the results did not meet expectations. Cancer remains the most feared cause of death. After the mapping of the human genome and decades of intensive R&D in genetics, indeed, groundbreaking discoveries have been made, but these were mostly theoretical rather than practical, and the expected ‘personalized medicine’ or therapeutic applications all hoped for did not materialize. The typical objection is that things are much more complicated than expected and that another 10, 20, 30… years are needed with a huge injection of funds, and that then we will finally get there. How long will we refrain from asking questions?

This is not to say that these sciences are of no value. Medicine based on a pharmacological and surgical paradigm is useful and will continue to play a role. It led to a longer life expectancy, and several potentially deadly illnesses are nowadays curable. However, an honest assessment of what was promised by past research projects and what was achieved to date reveals that, in most cases, their successes and progress have been largely overemphasized. This slow and disappointing progress has yet to come into the professional as collective surface awareness and is still denied. The sooner we recognize that there are several aspects of modern medical research that are a ‘no-progress quest’ rather than a slow progressive-quest, the better for us all. We still delude ourselves by invoking more funds for R&D, more technology, even more microscopic and functional descriptions, asking for yet another two decades of time to build even more precise maps that will supposedly lead us to a bright future and, as usual, afterward realizing that these maps don’t tell us much about the territory. But sooner or later, we will have to recognize how we are only scratching a thin material surface underneath which a much vaster non-material reality exists.

Even tiny cells reveal to be much more than a complex genetic automaton; they have a mind of their own. And our body is more than a machine; it has a consciousness of its own. Beyond our physical appearance, there is a subtle physical bodily existence. A healing process depends on mental and submental individual self-suggestions and maybe also on external suggestions that also come from a collective and universal domain. Life may not be only a material and biochemical process but may depend on other dimensions.

As long we dismiss these possibilities, clinging to a matter-centered view, ignoring and even denying the possible existence of a spiritual or ‘psychic’ dimension, further real progress will be excruciatingly slow or eventually also permanently delayed. Some fields of science resemble the Ptolemaic refusal to change perspective and insist on adding epicycles upon epicycles. Once we have fixed an illness, an infection, or a genetic disease on one side, we will have to cope later with another new physical or mental disorder that was formerly unknown or unexpected. This is how the evolution of consciousness works: No real progress is possible without inner progress as well.

Thus, it is time to shift from materialism—that is, from a matter-centered understanding of reality—to a post-material ‘soul-centered’ vision. What science and all of humanities as well need, is a spirit-centered Copernican paradigm shift. Not that of doubling and tripling down with a dying exclusively materialistic way of seeing that is blind to anything that can’t be pinned down to numbers, dots, or maps.

1. I hear creationists shouting back that we would be in a much better place. My take on this issue you can read here.