The New Paradigm in Cosmology

PART 1

Overview of Symposium Events

Opening Address from the Director of Research at the Laszlo Institute

Welcome to the second Global Symposium of the Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research on "The New Paradigm in Cosmology. And welcome back to those who attended the first symposium on The New Paradigm in Politics." I am Alexander Laszlo, and I serve as Director of Research at the Laszlo Institute, and I am speaking to you from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

We have a wonderful program for you today and tomorrow, at the cutting edge of science where it meets with wisdom traditions and perennial spiritual insight. This is part of what we here at the Laszlo Institute explore—how to make sense of the world around us—from the micro-dimension of the quantum down to the Planck length and from the meso-dimension of the world we navigate on a day-to-day basis here on Earth to the macro-dimension of the entire universe and the cosmos beyond.

Over the course of these two days of this symposium on the new paradigm in cosmology, we’ll be mainly exploring the macro-dimension of the whole cosmos, but it will inevitably take us down into the sub-quantum realms with implications for how we live our lives and the story we tell ourselves of who we are and what we are doing on this third rock from the sun. I encourage you to explore a bit about our program of research and to consider ways in which you, yourself, might participate.

As mentioned, our first symposium, the one immediately preceding this one, was on The New Paradigm in Politics—that meso-dimension of human affairs and experiences that constitutes our every-day reality. Through a rich exchange among leading authorities on governance, policy making, organization development, law, civil society and self-organizing participatory community dynamics, we explored how interdependent and truly interrelated we are—not just as people on this planet, but as part of the way the planet, itself, evolves and adapts. We have just finished the first e-book based on the first symposium to be included in a volume of social science research reports on this symposium series. It was compiled by one of our guest speakers in our current symposium, Dr. Anneloes Smitsman, and yours truly. The next symposium already in the works and will be The New Paradigm in Sentience and Consciousness, planned for later in 2022, so stay tuned!

The symposium that we start today takes these insights and casts them onto the broadest canvas to paint the biggest picture of the grand scheme of things. We will explore the difference between what it would mean if we were living in a universe of cold, sterile forces and one of a participatory nature. The shift from one narrative to the other would change the part we play from one of being passive victims of the forces of evolution to being its active agents, and that would mean a shift from thinking that change merely happens to us to understanding that change actually happens through us. But to get to this understanding, we need to upshift our consciousness … though I believe you will hear more about that in just a moment.

But before we go there, let me introduce the team that has been working so hard to bring it all together for the symposium today—there are many more of us at the Laszlo Institute, so this is just the Symposium Crew. Richard Blum is the Symposium Director and he is really both the chief architect and the orchestra conductor of this whole event—in addition to being one of the guest speakers. Dr. Györgyi Szabo is the Executive Director of the Laszlo Institute, whose understanding of the institute is beautifully matched by her depth of knowledge of new paradigm science and spirituality. Nóra Csiszár is our Director of Communications and Public Relations, so all the messages that you have been seeing and continue to see have most likely come through her. Fabrizio Beria is our fearless webmaster and sysop, and Izzy Cring is with us as part of our technical support team subcontracted with Lifted AV Productions. And our Founder and President is Prof. Ervin Laszlo. All of this, truly all of it, revolves around him, his insights and his ground-breaking work in this area. So, without further ado, I pass the talking stick to him. Over to you, Ervin.

Preliminary Observations

Ervin Laszlo

Why does a research institute committed to researching and improving the state of the contemporary world hold a symposium on cosmology? The state of the cosmos seems hardly to be a factor in determining the state of human beings on this planet …

On deeper reflection, this is not necessarily true. There may be a connection between cosmology and practical human concerns. To find this connection, we need to distinguish between cosmos and universe. Cosmos in the sense of the original Greek term is the totality of all that is. It is eternal: infinite in time. If it is all there is, and not everything is evanescent, it is also infinite in space.

The term universe refers to a different reality. According to current conceptions, the universe is not infinite in time and also is not infinite in space. It is a limited spacetime domain within the all-encompassing reality we call cosmos. It has originated in a given point in spacetime (generally assumed to have been in the aftermath of the singularity known as the big bang), and it has been persisting in time and expanding in space ever since. Its persistence and expansion are infinite in light of some universe models (e.g., the big freeze) and finite in light of others. Some models maintain that there will be a coming of the big crunch: a time when the expansion of the universe reverses and leads back to the quantum-dimensional spacetime point of its origination.

The universe could also remain eternally balanced between expansion and contraction. But regardless of which model holds true, we can affirm that the universe—our universe, because there could be myriad others as well—is a limited spacetime domain within the cosmos.

Why is information regarding such a universe relevant to human concerns? The answer is this: If the universe arose within the womb of the cosmos, and if it is not an eternally fixed domain but is subject to change, development, and evolution, then the way it changes, develops, and evolves could be an indication of the of the laws and regularities that govern change and evolution within the universe. This, of course, is a speculative hypothesis, but it is the most plausible one, given the empirical data we now have regarding connection among processes and entities in space and time. These connections appear to be nonlocal, bridging distances—removed in both space and time. This appears to be a fractally structured universe, a kind of hologram, with all its elements structurally and dynamically interlinked. If so, the evolution of the universe as a whole is relevant to the existence of things in it, including human existence. Humankind is an integrally linked part of a holistic universe, the same as every quantum and every galaxy in space and time.

Given that the human species is part of the universe, and given that this is a changing, evolving universe, we have good reason to maintain that the change, development, and evolution we experience reflects the laws and regularities that govern not only the evolution of the universe, but also the evolution of things in the universe.

This is known as the naturalistic approach in cosmology, as contrasted with the theological or esoteric approach. Current observations suggest that it is the correct one. But whether or not it is ultimately true, it fulfills the requirement Einstein posed for all scientific theory: to be the simplest possible scheme of thought that can tie together the observed facts. The universally interconnected systemic universe appears to be the simplest account that can tie together the interconnections that come to light among phenomena—even spatially and temporally distant phenomena.

If the change and development of the universe as a whole governs to some extent the change and development of the things and processes that take place within it, it makes sense to ask if we can comprehend some features of the change and development of the universe. If we could, we could try to map these features against what we know of the evolution of human beings, and of life and nature as a whole. This would give us the largest possible reference frame for inquiry into the ultimate laws and regularities that govern existence in the universe. It would also be the largest empirical-rational framework for all branches of the empirical natural sciences. Inquiry beyond it would take us to the cosmos; an eternally unchanging fundamental reality about which we could not say more than that it exists. On the other hand, inquiry into the nature of the spatiotemporally changing universe is a fertile field for considering basic questions such as what is reality, and how does it change and evolve. On the strength of the universal interconnection, what is known as fractal, or holographic universe theory offers meaningful answers to these questions. It provides a lens through which we can say something empirically grounded about what human beings (and entities in spacetime in general) actually are, how they originated, and toward what state or condition they are evolving.

The evolving-universe theory, joined with the systemic interconnection hypothesis, makes the evolution of the universe relevant to human concerns. It is in view of this realization that the Laszlo Institute offers this second symposium on cosmology in The New Paradigm Symposia series.

Cosmiconsidertions*

by Alexander Laszlo, Director of Research at The Laszlo Institute of New Paradigm Research

From Cosmology to Kosmology

Exploration of our place in the grand scheme of things spans the breadth of human interpretive contemplation. When confronted with the immensity of the cosmos and concepts such as infinity and eternity, the human mind tends to reach toward sacred interpretations that acknowledge awe and mystery. And yet, in the ongoing quest to better understand things, the boundaries of that which is ineffable are constantly pushed back by secular enquiry. What we are finding is that it is unnecessary to have to choose between these two modalities; that we can explore various facets of reality—ones that may even appear contradictory—with both science and spirituality. As author David Zindell points out, one can never come to fully human understandings if afraid of paradox or enslaved by the god of consistency.¹

Coherence is another matter. The narratives of scientific cosmologies and those of spiritual kosmologies often complement each other, reinforcing insights of interconnectedness and strengthening conceptions of coherence. This is a theme that appears to be emerging from both spiritual and scientific directions: that of the patterning of coherence, the tendency toward wholeness, what has been described as holotropism.²

Intersubjective Science and the In-formed Universe

The quest for objectivity in science, for definitive answers and the unveiling of The Truth about the nature of reality, has long been transcended by a scientific paradigm that acknowledges the information plenum that in-forms (literally, puts form into) manifest reality.³ As this symposium explores and affirms, the intersubjectivity of meaning-making regarding the characteristics and functioning of the world (including all realms from the micro- through the meso- to the macro-dimensions) extends beyond purely human domains to include all manner of interdependent co-arising. This points the way toward truly participatory cosmologies of interpenetrating concordances along the full spectrum of spacio-temporal existence. In other words, nothing ever emerges by itself, an insight that has given rise to the postulation of sympoiesis as an update to