Menas Kafatos

There are compelling reasons to pursue a new, integrative science. According to Drãgãnescu and Kafatos (2000), “The inability of physical science to solve problems concerning the nature of ultimate reality and also to contribute to an understanding of the nature of life and of consciousness, may be indicative that, rather than pursuing different paths in trying to understand them, that these realities ought to be considered together, an undivided whole”. The approach that will be discussed in detail is to look for common, underlying principles, which apply at all realms of reality. There are a number of observational and theoretical reasons in support of the view that fundamental principles such as non-locality and complementarity may be underlying both the physical and the mental worlds. We first discuss evidence from quantum experiments that reveal spatial and temporal non-localities and from the cosmological realm, involving relationships of objects in the universe revealed by the so-called Universal Diagrams. We show that quantum-like effects are pervasive in the cosmos. A new scaling for physical parameters in the universe is proposed which reveals new results about the nature of time. This allows us to develop an axiomatic approach towards the linkage between microscopic and macroscopic quantities.

These developments make it plausible that such fundamental principles cut across different fields of natural sciences and can be considered to hold universal validity. We will discuss in detail these principles. It is likely that quantum-like effects may be pervasive at all scales in the universe. If true, these principles apply to other fields such as brain dynamics and open new ways of study. In the same way, one can search for analogous universal principles that hold in realms beyond the physical. If consciousness is the foundational substratum of the universe, principles developed in perennial philosophical systems, or metaphysics, should be even more universally applicable and cut across all levels of the cosmos, “internal” (e.g. individual mental and psychic, etc.) as well as “external” (e.g. collective unconscious, physical, etc). We sketch here a possible new prescription for a unified “science”, what I term integrative science that will encompass ordinary natural science and will extend it to new realms. We also discuss the ground state of consciousness, non-objectified awareness. The prescription will be discussed in detail. It also involves taking the statements of philosophical traditions quite seriously.

Dr. Menas Kafatos is Vice Chancellor for Special Projects and also Dean of the Schmid College of Science, Director of the Center for Excellence in Applied, Computational, and Fundamental Science, and The Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He received his B.A. in Physics from Cornell University in 1967 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. After postdoctoral work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, he joined George Mason University and was University Professor of Interdisciplinary Sciences there from 1984-2008. He also served as Dean of the School of Computational Sciences and was Director of the Center for Earth Observing and Space Research. He has 34 years experience in undergraduate and graduate Earth systems science, natural hazards and climate change, remote sensing and data information systems, physics, computational and theoretical astrophysics, astronomy, and foundations in quantum theory. He has published numerous books including The Conscious Universe, the Non-local Universe (with Robert Nadeau, Springer-Verlag), Principles of Integrative Science (with Mihai Draganescu, Romanian Academy of Sciences Press), and more than 250 articles on computational science, astrophysics, Earth systems science, hazards and global change, general relativity, cosmology, foundations of quantum theory, and consciousness. http://chapman.edu/CS/pcse/faculty/kafatos.asp.