Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

I've mentioned Brian Swimme in passing in several threads, so I wanted to dedicate a thread to him and his work.  In my opinion, he is beautifully articulating an awe-inspiring, scientifically grounded, post-metaphysical vision of the cosmos for our age. 

Here are some excerpts from the Wikipedia article on him.  In subsequent posts, I'll post some excerpts from his work.

“Brian Swimme (born 1950) is a mathematical cosmologist and the director of the Center for the Story of the Universe at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the author of four books on cosmology, evolution and religion. He was featured in the television series Soul of the Universe (The BBC, 1991) with such scientists as Stephen Hawking and Ilya Prigogine and The Sacred Balance produced by David Suzuki (CBC and PBS, 2003). Swimme is the producer of a twelve-part dvd series Canticle to the Cosmos which has been distributed worldwide. Other DVD programs featuring Swimme’s ideas include The Earth’s Imagination and The Powers of the Universe. He lectures worldwide and has presented at conferences sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The World Bank, UNESCO, The United Nations Millennium Peace Summit, and the American Natural History Museum.”

Writes Swimme:  This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans…. 

Eric Chaisson writes that –

Brian Swimme, a mathematician by training, seeks that larger, warmer, more noble science story, stating that, not merely a collection of facts, science should be a student’s guide to a grand worldview, including, if possible, meaning, purpose and value, he sees the cosmological perspective as one to which all modern scientists can objectively subscribe, yet the meaning and purpose of it being a subjective outgrowth of an individual’s reflections upon that cosmology.

The Universe Story, often called the New Story, is a cosmological narrative that begins with the big bang, which started the whole process, and works through the evolution of the Universe, which includes life on Earth. But more than a so-what summary from a science textbook, this chronology promotes deeper relationships through scientific data (…)This manner of study, which engages heart and mind together, seems to teeter on the brink of religion. But it isn't religion; it's science. However, the New Story people claim that science, absorbed holistically, can have a soul-shaking impact on people(…)Big-picture science is filled with little mysterious coincidences, upon which our entire existence rests. Small wonder that reflecting deeply upon these data would inspire awe—even humility as cosmology gently puts people in their place (…) “The current common sense understanding of the Earth is as a gravel pit or a hardware store,” said Swimme, explaining that the modern period has been “organized around the theory that Earth is just stuff we can use.”

 

Manifesto for a Global Civilization (with Matthew Fox), Bear and Company, 1982

The Universe is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story, Bear and Company, 1984

The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos, Harper, 1992 (1994) - a culmination of a 10-year collaboration with cultural historian Thomas Berry

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Orbis, 1996 (1999)

A Walk Through Time: From Stardust to Us - The Evolution of Life on Earth (with Sidney Liebes and Elisabet Sahtouris), John Wiley & Sons, 1998

Chapter 5 – Cosmological Education for Future Generations - The Thirteenth Labor: Improving Science Education

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Excerpts from The Universe Story


“In the beginning was a flashing forth of evanescent beings.  In every instant the universe was fresh, just as a flickering flame's shape is fresh, newly created.  In the beginning the universe was a sparkling.  Nothing endured the beginning except the flickering creativity bringing forth each new billowing.  The intensity, the concentration, the shimmering of the beginning was so extreme that no single being in the entire universe endured it, but each thing disappeared almost as suddenly as it entered existence.

The image of a rapidly expanding ball of red fire fails to capture an extremely important fact of the beginning: there was no outside.  One cannot imagine the Flaring Forth as taking place off in some distance that we can then view.  Each point of the universe was in the fire, was immersed in the billowing forth of the universe.  To ask, 'If we were in the fireball, what would we see?' fails to appreciate the extreme nature of the event.  Any carbon-based life would instantly volatize if placed in the beginning.

We live in a world of green maple leaves, of cirrus clouds brushed in dry strokes on a darkening blue sky, a world where sea gulls shriek over the entrails thrown from the fisherman's home-bound trawler rocking and yawing in the great ocean drifts, the half-moon lifting above the horizon.  Our senses and our imagination have been fashioned here.  Our bodies and their sensitivities are home here, and yet all this world has for its direct ancestry an event whose dimensions break outside all the experiences humans have had in two million years of existence.  In that primordial reality the greatest of the Himalayan mountains would dissolve more suddenly than would a child's sand castle hit by a tsunami wave.  The Earth's solidity becomes smoke in the beginning.  In that beginning time, the briefest human reverie, an unnoticed flicker of a mind on a summer's day, would be an interval of time in which the primeval fireball thundered through a thousand universe annihilations and as many universe rebirths.”

~*~

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

A couple videos of his work, with more available here.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

How glorious. The expansiveness and warmth of his perspective are most welcoming.

Thanks so much, Bruce,

Love,

Nicole

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Hi Bruce

“This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans…. ”

I love this quote. Similar to Wilber's about dirt getting up and writing Shakespeare.

So this simple observation suggests that there is an inherent self-complexifying quality to hydrogen gas / matter, and that Wilber refers to this as an involutionary given. Is that right? (And this then sometimes gets conflated into “belief” in an Eros/ Intelligence /God? Which, by that point, seems to make it easier for people like Dennett to just ignore and dismiss the whole idea.)

But surely even arch materialists like Dennett have to admit that, as Swimme says, if you leave Hyrogen gas alone you get…. Daniel Dennett :-)

So my main question is, do you know what arguments there are which attempt to refute the existence this basic self complexifying quality?

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Hi, James, yes, I like that quote as well.  I don't know of anyone who seriously questions that self-complexification happens, of course, but some do object to the assertion of a particular, purposeful 'force' that is somehow 'behind' everything, pushing it in a particular direction.  To my knowledge, Swimme does not posit anything like Eros, as a force in itself; but he does frequently speak poetically and anthropomorphically of the universe 'making decisions' or 'acting' in a particular way.  More technically, Swimme distinguishes between pluriverse and universe, or microphase and macrophase, perspectives.  The 'pluriverse' perspective looks at the cosmos in terms of various relatively independent (microphase) processes, which interact in various ways.  It is a part-to-whole approach.  Swimme says this is a legitimate and very useful approach, but argues that it is also legitimate to look at things whole-to-part:  seeing activity, in some sense, as 'the universe as a whole' acting.  He bases this argument, in part, on his own work in mathematical Big Bang cosmology. 

Here's an excerpt from The Universe Story which I think illustrates the macrophase perspective:

Particles, light, and time emerged in the beginning. Space, too, unfurled out of potentiality and has continued to unfurl each instant of cosmic existence. In the beginning space foamed forth to create the vast billowing event of the expanding universe. The universe venture was under way. Had the originating powers not gushed forth a world-creating space and time, our cosmos would have existed a quintillionth of a second, just a pinprick event that would have instantly snuffed itself out. The cosmic adventure of fifteen billion years has depended upon the ever-fresh unfurling of nascent space.


The rate of the spatial emergence reveals a primordial elegance. Had space unfurled in a more retarded fashion, the expanding universe would have collapsed back into quantum foam billions of years ago. Such a collapse would have taken place even if space had unfurled one trillionth of a percent more slowly. If space had emerged more rapidly, equally disastrous results would have followed. The constituents of the universe would have been too widely separated for anything truly interesting to happen.


The original body of the universe maintained itself in a delicate balance. If either the rate of spatiation or the power of gravitation had wavered too far one way or the other, the adventure of the universe would have ceased. For instance, the universe would never have reached the moment when living cells sprouted forth. The vitality of a dolphin as it squiggles high in the summer sun, then, is directly dependent upon the elegance of the dynamics at the beginning of time. We cannot regard the dolphin and the first Flaring Forth as entirely separate events. The universe is a coherent whole, a seamless multileveled creative event. The graceful expansion of the original body is the life blood of all future bodies in the universe.


Though this law of expansion was fixed from the earliest instant of existence, other laws were not yet formed at that time. The first particle interactions were not fixed and determined in the way they are today. There was an element of freedom, of randomness, associated with these interactions. The electrons, positrons, the quarks, the neutrinos had not yet achieved their identity. They enjoyed a chaotic freedom of possibilities they would later be denied. Most likely there were even from the beginning innate biases for certain kinds of intensities to these interactions, but there were also in every interaction degrees of freedom that would disappear in later eras.


The first epoch of the Flaring Forth reached its end when the freely symmetric interactions hardened into a structure. Suddenly the universe as a whole changed phases. What had been symmetric and free was now fixed into particular interactions with determined intensities–the gravitational, the electromagnetic, and the two nuclear interactions.


These four laws theoretically could have been very different: different in number, intensity, character. Why did these particular four emerge? Perhaps their final form even depended to some extent on the experimentation and exploration of the former, freer era. Perhaps their structure was determined to some degree by what had preceded the moment of symmetry, when a pure or at least original activity had settled into a particular fixed form. If so, these four interactions can be regarded as analogous to habits that the universe adopted for its primary actions. Thus the one primordial act of the universe now appeared as four different activities.


In this phase transition the fundamental architecture of the universe's interactions was set for all time. It was not yet certain where the largest stars would appear, but the upper limits to their sizes and intensities were already fixed. It was not yet certain how many planets would come into existence, but an invisible ceiling for their highest mountains was already in place because the strengths of the interactions of the mountains' constituents were now in place. It was not at all certain if bivalve mollusks would ever exist, but the possibilities for shell sizes were now determined. It was certainly far from obvious whether or not there would ever exist anything like a mammal, but the fundamental range for how high they could leap or how powerfully they could clamp their jaws was now set into the sinews of the universe.


The universe established its fundamental physical interactions in a manner similar to the way it unfurled its space–with stunning elegance. Had it settled on a slightly different strong interaction, all the future stars would have exploded in a brief time, making an unfurling of life impossible.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Thanks Bruce

I found your summary on Swimme here particularly helpful.
“The 'pluriverse' perspective looks at the cosmos in terms of various relatively independent (microphase) processes, which interact in various ways.  It is a part-to-whole approach.  Swimme says this is a legitimate and very useful approach, but argues that it is also legitimate to look at things whole-to-part:  seeing activity, in some sense, as 'the universe as a whole' acting.  He bases this argument, in part, on his own work in mathematical Big Bang cosmology.”

Much appreciated! :-)

James

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Nicole, you're welcome.  You might appreciate this lecture, which he recently delivered to the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry.

And James – I'm glad that was helpful! 

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

darn! my heart sinks when I see a video is 73 min… is there any transcript or summary I can read, Bruce?

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Not that I know of, unfortunately.  But the video is good, if you ever get the time and opportunity.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

hi balder

did he say the universe was born of a seed in the video? i like the thought. it doesnt presuppose the space the big bang occured in, could have come from anyehere. contends well, that the universe is finite, indicates that it has a point of origin. of course evolution indicates that too. considering the relative space evolution seems over symptomatic of, there is the problem of linearity. visualising it as from a seed i can ascribe it to a natural process, no problem with linearity.

i wonder , a common perception that the universe is infinite, and considering its ridiculous size, how much it influences outcomes.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Where's Ted when you actually need him ?

Gadster 

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

I had hoped Ted would visit and contribute to this thread.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

I will go put a lady bug in Ted's ear…*

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

I saw these videos when Julian first posted them and fell inlove with cosmology and started writing all those poems about stars birthing human…wow…I had forgotten about him…

Thnx for posting this Bruce…I really resonate with it…*

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

James: So my main question is, do you know what arguments there are which attempt to refute the existence this basic self complexifying quality?

Good luck producing a workable argument like that.  Wouldn't hold together from any angle I can see.  I mean, our universe and what we see and can experience has happened only once, but this once-happening is the basis of what we call law, so ya, we're looking into the sights of physical law.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Hi Tom

Maybe you got the wrong end of the stick here. I personally have no interest at all in trying to produce such an argument. I was just scratching me head and wondering out loud how anyone could not see the self-complexifying processes going on in the universe in front of our eyes.

James

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Oh, I get you, James.  I'm with you.  What would a theory look like that says matter does what it does but doesn't (?).  I mean, it looks to me you'd have to create a notion of physical process that says, in effect, what we see is not physics, or what we see is a 'fluke' (scientists once thought that, still do!), is a 'random' irrepeatable effect, etc.  I don't call these notions theories; they look more like anti-theories to me.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Hi Bruce and Team,

I have spent some time looking at Brian's stuff a couple of years ago, through Global Mindshift - I started engaging in conversations on that site in April 2007, and have engaged in quite a few since, with Alan and the Kern.

I like many aspects of Brian's approach, and I am clear that it works for Brian, and I have discussed some aspects with him directly, and I'd say it has about an 80% fit for me.

It seems to work for most folks, and perhaps I'm just a bit too unusual.   80% is far better than most.

If anyone wants to get more specific, I can go back and revisit in detail (I still have the videos stored on my server.

Re: Brian Swimme (and The New Story)

Hi, Ted, thanks for your response.  I don't know if there's any author or thinker out there that I agree with 100%; I'm happy if I find someone with whom I can agree 80 - 90% (and can still get something worthwhile to me out of those with whom I agree much less). 

Regarding your own take on Brian's work, yes, I'd be interested in more specifics, if and when you have the time.

Best wishes,

Bruce