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A Second Scientific Revolution |
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Just another ‘Theory of Everything’? A Review of Peter Wilberg’s book ‘The QUALIA Revolution’ by Andrew Gara |
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Nowadays, books appear all the time which promise or offer us a new Theory of Everything. Usually these deal with ‘quantum physics’ - abstruse theories of energetic fields, ‘strings’ and ‘quanta’. The Qualia Revolution is also a ‘Theory of Everything’. But unlike these other books, its basis is not the mathematical physics of ‘quantised’ energy but our everyday qualitative experience of things. What makes it truly revolutionary is that it raises a fundamental question that ALL theories of EVERYTHING have previously ignored – what actually is a THING – ANY THING? To answer this question Peter Wilberg first reminds us that the most fundamental scientific ‘fact’ of all time is not the existence of a universe of things but our own subjective awareness of those things. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. Shakespeare
The truly original and profound insight on which THE QUALIA REVOLUTION is founded is that ‘consciousness’ or ‘awareness’ is not like a mirror or blank sheet on which we register our perceptions of things and their sensory qualities. Instead awareness has its own sensed but immaterial substantiality – it is the very “stuff” of which we and all things are made. Awareness also has its own innate sensual qualities or QUALIA. Examples of qualia are the felt ‘light’ and ‘darkness’, ‘colour’ or ‘tone’,‘levity’ or ‘gravity’, ‘expansivenes’ or ‘density’ of our moods - and of our inwardly sensed body. Matter is the bounded outwardness of energy. Awareness is its unbounded inwardness. Peter Wilberg
The
Qualia Revolution explains
why EVERYTHING we experience around us, the entire outer universe
of bodies in space-time is NOT ultimately an expression of
quantitative energy fields and energy units – so-called QUANTA - but
of qualitative fields and units of awareness - QUALIA. For anyone
with an interest in a new and totally original philosophy of
science, in the physics and physiology of consciousness, in
phenomenology and phenomenological science, or in theosophy and
spiritual science, this book is a must - as it is to those
familiar with the alternative scientific philosophies of Seth / Jane
Roberts, Rudolf Steiner, Eugene Gendlin, Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl
and Martin Heidegger. |
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