Connecting the Circle

I’ve been considering connections between The Botany of Desire and Aristotle’s Physics as well as many of the good ideas brought up by other students in class. In Pollan’s book, the potato is used to demonstrate humankind’s desire for control. The New Leaf is a good example of our attempts to manipulate nature to our will. It has many benefits in the short term, like insect immunity and bigger harvests, but the long terms effects of such a product on the natural balance of the environment are potentially more damaging and costly. History has demonstrated over and again that our egotistic mingling blinds our foresight. We often run into unforeseen consequences as a result of our desire for control, such as global warming, ozone depletion, pollution, poverty, and war. We haven’t fully grasped the circular flow of nature nor our place within it.

The climax of Aristotle’s physical philosophy is a breakthrough into a metaphysical framework. He places the intellect of humankind in relation to the change and motion of nature. He formulates a circular explanation for natural events. Matter arises into a particular form, the form changes through time and moves through space, and then breaks back down into a baser form of matter to be recycled. His metaphysics are centered on the intellect as it passively observed nature around it. Aristotle’s explanations lend themselves to the Enlightenment when many believed that science was a passive observation of nature rather than an integrated part of it. I’ll have to study the Enlightenment more before I can expand on the effects of a passive intellect.

Thanks to breakthroughs in modern quantum mechanics, we now know that we are not separated from nature and there is no such thing as passive observation. All our observations have a finite amount of physical interaction with the system we’re measuring with our senses. Some films have been made, like The Secret and What the Bleep?!, which propose that quantum physics has revealed that consciousness is the foundation of all being and that we create our own reality. To the contrary, all science and philosophy dedicated to quantum theory over the past 30 years have made advances in mechanistic explanations of the subatomic realm as well. What this does mean is that we are intrinsically connected to our environment through our material systems and our actions should be closely informed by that knowledge. We should humble ourselves before the natural universe.

My questions to the class are: Do you agree with these connections? Have you noticed any others? Has anyone seen The Secret or What the Bleep!? and would like to defend those positions?