Everything Only Looks Like a Thing: Neil Theise - Musings and Meditations
- filipvk
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Dear friends,
As promised in the previous post, I will begin this series Musings and Meditations by introducing a number of remarkable scientists and philosophers whose work opens up extraordinary perspectives on a possible new understanding of what the world actually is, and what we actually are.
All these extraordinary scientists and thinkers whom I will give a voice will come to similar conclusions, insights that will radically change our worldview in the coming decades.
I will keep the accompanying texts short: the lectures and interviews largely speak for themselves.
First, I will give the floor to Neil Theise.
Neil Theise is a physician, liver pathologist, stem cell researcher, and professor of pathology and medicine at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York. He is also a lifelong student of Zen meditation, a practicing Jew with an interest in the mystical traditions of the world, ánd a (science-) philosopher.
So, an extremely interesting person to listen to!
In this fascinating interview on the platform of Science and Nonduality, Neil talks about the path he has taken in his research and how his work as a stem cell researcher led him to reflect on complexity and emergence (topics that philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger discussed in an extremely fascinating way in the Musing “The Most Important 25 Minutes of Your Life”).
In this interview, from minute 10:30 onwards, Neil begins to explain how everything we perceive as a ‘thing’ can, at an underlying level, be seen as an emergent and self-organizing process of a set of smaller ‘things’, which in turn can be seen as emergent and self-organizing processes of even smaller things, and so on ad infinitum. A human being is an emergent process of cells, each of which is itself an emergent process of molecules, which are an emergent process of atoms, which are an emergent process of elementary particles. (See also Walkie-Talkie five, six, and seven)
From minute 15:30, Neil takes this idea even further: Where do these smallest particles come from? On the smallest possible scale, we see that everything arises from ‘quantum foam’, which in turn bubbles up from the quantum vacuum, the nothingness that is not empty but chock-full of energy. And then the inevitable question follows: where does that quantum field come from?
Neil Theise, like the fathers of quantum physics Niels Bohr, Max Planck, and Werner Heisenberg, has through his research come to see consciousness itself as the basis of everything that exists. This idea also emerges in the work of Western philosophers such as Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, as well as in Eastern traditions such as Vedanta and Shaivism. In contemporary philosophy and science, this proposition is called “idealism.”
From the perspective of idealism, consciousness is not something that gradually arises as a byproduct of time-space, physics, and biology; it is the other way around. Time-space and physics themselves arise from the differentiation or dissociation of the original one consciousness into subject and object. And guess what: our own individual consciousness is also inextricably one with that original awareness that has produced everything we call ‘reality’.
So what, you might ask. Even if that is true, what good does it do me to know something like that? I have other things to deal with in life. Bills need to be paid, I have to see that the kids do their homework, and what not.
If you ask yourself that question, that is very understandable, but it also indicates you have not yet fully understood the implications of this notion, as in Niels Bohr's famous dictum, “if quantum physics has not thoroughly shocked you, you have not really understood it yet.”
But that's okay, because I will come back to it often. We have time. Let us not rush hastily into a shift of perspective which is the biggest since we learned that Earth orbits the Sun, instead of the other way around. We will come back to it time and again, because it is a realization that is as profound and far-reaching as it is simple.
This proposition and variants thereof, such as 'dual-aspect monism,' which are of course still highly controversial, have a growing number of ‘supporters’ in the scientific and philosophical community. To be continued, because this ‘idealism’ will play a leading role in these Musings.
For now you can enjoy this fascinating interview with a brilliant and engaging thinker, who, in just half an hour, builds up this entire argument in a clear and accessible way.
Thank you for reading and watching, and until the next episode,
All the best to you,
Filip
