Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

2. Anima mundi. The large circle represents the cosmos and the blue color represents consciousness or mind. In primitive cultures consciousness permeates the whole world and the boundaries of the "I" are permeable (dotted line): there is no sharp separation between I and world

4. The advent of agriculture made the accumulation of surplus possible and ushered in complex social organization, specialization, hierarchy, the city-state, commerce, religion and empires (tablet from Uruk)

7. Copernicus (1473-1543) realized that everything would neatly fall into place if only one just looked at it from the perspective of the Sun instead of that of the Earth. Then all the planets appeared to be circling around the Sun in perfectly regular elliptic orbits.

9. The modern world. Human beings are no longer at the center. Consciousness is only present in us (if at all, if it is not a mere epiphenomenon!) and it came about as a random outcome of purely biochemical processes. The universe is a vast inert assembly of matter devoid of ultimate purpose or meaning.

10. Galileo realised that the immense variety of ways in which things move exhibits simple mathematical regularities. The crucial innovation he introduced lies in the emphasis on measurement, and on the mathematical relationships obtained by measuring various quantities. Galileo found that ‘the book of nature is written in mathematical characters’. What appears to a superficial observer as a vast and diverse collection of phenomena, reveals a common pattern, an unexpected essential simplicity, when it is stripped of all its ‘inessential’ aspects and reduced to mathematical relationships between sizes, distances, masses and times. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

11. This process of abstraction is wonderfully analysed by Husserl in his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl is acutely aware of the fact that something is amiss in modern science: something essential for our understanding of the natural world and of our being in the world has been lost along the way. The problem consists in forgetting the foundational process underlying our notions. Abstraction is fine, as long as we are conscious of the abstracting processwhich is the root of our concepts.‘Reification’, making concepts into ‘things’, is the fundamental mistake. So, what Husserl is trying to do is recollecting the foundation of ‘European sciences’: remembering how we got here is re-membering the wholeness of our experience, the wholeness of the surrounding-world-of-life. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

12. A key aspect of the mathematization of nature was the development of a new concept of time, clearly formulated by Galileo’s successor, Isaac Newton who considered it to be so important as to put it at the very beginning of his great book, Principia Mathematica. It is the idea of an “absolute, true and mathematical time, which of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external”. Ilya Prigogine comments: “The inclusion of time in the conceptual framework of Galilean physics was the starting point of Western science.” The second law of motion (F = ma) and the law of gravitation, discovered by Newton, together encompass a wide range of phenomena in heaven and earth (the planetary orbits, the trajectory of a cannon ball or a falling apple, … Isaac Newton (1642-1726/7)

13. The most famous (infamous in New Age literature) representative of the inebriating effect of the Newtonian physics is the mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace, who lived about a century after Newton. If we imagine a demon, said Laplace, endowed with such an acute power of observation that it can know the present position and velocity of all the particles that make up the universe, that demon would be able to predict exactly the entire future of the universe. Given the initial conditions of all particles in the universe, the laws of motion exactly determine the future evolution of all of them. But there is an extra twist to the argument, which is important for our inquiry: not only the future is determined by the present state of all particles in the universe, but also the past. Newton’s equations are time symmetric: they make no distinction between +t and -t, they don’t care which way time flows. Take any instant at will, and the situation existing at that moment determines both all the past and all the future. Pierre Simon de Laplace (1749-1827)

14. The ‘film’ of reality is fully determined by any sigle frame. The film contains all past, present and future. And it can run indifferently forward or backwards. Both possibilities are equally consistent with the equations of motion. Which frame we call ‘the present’ is entirely arbitrary and past and future are interchangeable. In the following centuries the picture will become richer and more complex, but it will only deepen the emphasis on timelessness at the fundamental level.

15. Thus, only a short time after human beings had learned to build clocks, the whole universe had become an immense clockwork. Thus, paradoxically, the advent of “absolute, true and mathematical time” amounts essentially to an abolition of time, since no new information is ever acquired or lost, and the history of the universe is a mechanical unfolding of a drama already written down to the minutest detail. In the XX century this deterministic philosophy will be shaken by two important changes: quantum physics, which we’ll examine in detail chaos theory, the “butterfly effect” (Laplace is still right in principle, but not in practice)

16. Descartes (1596-1650) was brought to consider two essentially different 'substances': res cogitans, mind, about which we have immediate and primary evidence, and res extensa, matter, the external world, about which we can only reason by inference based on the input of our sense organs.