Amit Goswami, Ph.D.

Does Spiritual Economics Solve Capitalism?

Does spiritual economics introduced in a previous article solve the problems mentioned of capitalism?

First, the problem of limited resources. Capitalistic growth economics depends crucially on keeping consumer demands going. This is done often by creating artificial physical needs. An example is new annual fashions for women’s garments. It is very wasteful, very detrimental to finite resources.

In idealist economics, as people’s higher needs are met even partially, their physical needs reduce, reducing the demand for consumption reducing the wastage of limited material resources. The economy still expands, but in the higher planes where the resources are unlimited (there is no limit on love and satisfaction!).

Continue reading…

The Issue of Secularism

Secularism is the separation of church and state. In the past this has worked for democracy. State carries out the democratic ideal of bring meaning to everyone in society. The church gives us the ethical canopy under which everyone pursues meaning. Unfortunately, the evolution of scientific materialism puts a monkey wrench in this equilibrium.

In this country, the progressive democrats who are supposed to advance the pursuit of meaning, follow (correctly) the vehicle of creativity for that advancement. But science is supposed to be one of those creative activities that democrats utterly approve. When science advocates a Godless materialism and meaningless existentialism, the democrats get thoroughly confused. Many of these confused democrats seems to be anti-religion even anti-ethics. How then can religious people trust them to be even-handed about religions and religious ethics? Continue reading…

Consciousness and Quantum Physics

There was a revolution in physics at the beginning of the last century, consisting of the discovery of quantum physics. The message of quantum physics is this: the world is not made of matter neither is it determined entirely by material causation that we sometimes call upward causation because it rises upward from the building blocks of matter–the elementary particles . There is a source of downward causation in the world. You can call this source consciousness if you like and think of it as the ground of all being.

To be sure, the mathematics of quantum physics is deterministic and based on the upward causation model above, but it predicts objects and their movements not as determined events (as in Newtonian physics) but as possibilities (for which the probabilities can be calculated enabling us to develop a very successful predictive science for large number of objects and/or events). And yet when we look at a quantum object, we don’t experience it as a bundle of possibilities, but as actual localized event much like a Newtonian particle. Moreover, quantum mathematics does not allow us to connect the upward causation-based deterministic theory with experimental data. How do the possibilities of the theory become actualities of experience simply by our looking at them? This is the mysterious “observer effect.” Continue reading…