Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
metaphysical, a world other than this one, but for many a world no less
real than the one available to our senses.
One suggestion, of course, is that such efforts were but the first, feeble
steps of what would become scientific explanations of the mysteries of
the world. Another was that such speculations helped to shelter people
from the terrors of nature or the fickleness of chance. And indeed in
many cases this is probably a reasonable explanation. But the problem
still remains—the same kinds of concerns, speculations, and searchings
arose relatively simultaneously in separate geographic areas.
In these perspectives, we have another development of the evolution-
ary process that both gives a foundation for these culture-altering events
and a response to the materialism of Dawkins and Wilson. The key point
is that both our experience and our very culture suggest another dimen-
sion of life, another quality that helps explain our drive for mythmak-
ing, our drive to transcendence. Neither the great leap forward nor the
great axial age can be dismissed. The point of contention is their basis.
Complexity brought to a higher level is certainly one valid interpreta-
tion. But another dimension that has to be incorporated is the reality of
genuine difference. Ehrlich notes this by observing that we share genes,
but not cultures, with chimpanzees.
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We create a culture that grounds
the further creations of art, music, philosophy, and religion. Our larger
brain and its enormous complexity provide the biological substrate nec-
essary for such a leap. Yet the continuing question of the brain is, Is it
necessary, or is it necessary but not sufficient? The alternative reading
that I suggest argues that such capacities are not added from without; in
fact, they are the supreme fulfillment of matter manifested not only in a
great leap forward but also in moments of self-transcendence such as
those expressed in the great axial age as well as in moments of individ-
ual transcendence.
One element in this is Ehrlich's rather straightforward admission
that even though he is not a mind-matter dualist, his version of human
nature “finds a strictly materialistic interpretation of the world unsatis-
fying.” While neither denying a form of materialism influenced by
quantum physics nor the value of methodological reductionism, Ehrlich
concludes that “we seem to be always forced back to the larger view to
find a degree of satisfaction not provided by dissection of a problem into
its smallest parts.”
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While this leads Ehrlich to a kind of practical
