Organic Learning

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HOW WE THINK OF SPACE

from: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/spooky-action-distance.html

"If there is space between two objects—if there are two birds in the sky and one is way off to your right and the other is way off to your left—we can and do consider the two objects to be independent. We regard them as separate and distinct entities. Space, whatever it is fundamentally, provides the medium that separates and distinguishes one object from another. That is what space does. Things occupying different locations in space are different things."

"But a class of experiments performed during the last couple of decades has shown that something we do over here (such as measuring certain properties of a particle) can be subtly entwined with something that happens over there (such as the outcome of measuring certain properties of another distant particle), without anything being sent from here to there."

Physics would describe reality as being the physical universe without God.  Instead of God being before and beyond 'Einstein's' space-time universe, the science of physics imagines a big bang from extremely dense order to a universe of ever less order.  These ideas influence our understanding of the way our minds work in perceiving reality.  They influence our ability to think about the ways we learn.  They influence us to imagine reality in reductionist terms, and if to frame our thought in terms of the big picture to do so analytically in frames of discrete lines and points.  Even Quantum Physics, as discussed in the paragraph above, frames its observations beginning from reductionistic assumptions.  There are theistic models of Creation, and even some non-theistic models of the universe, which try to cultivate more holistic or even organic ideas of how we may be conscious and how we might be able to learn without only being sequential and linear.  However, these models are all very hard to make work for one reason.  God cannot be made into a theoretical item.  Thought must come from God and not just be thought about God, much less merely thought about the idea of God.  However, even though organic models of Creation or of a non-theistic notion of the universe, do not work well because of this, they can work well enough to show that reductionist models of thought, reality and learning, do not represent the only possibility.

In an organic model of reality one would not speak of a seemingly mysterious connection between two apparently independent objects at a distance.  One would expect there to be a relationship between all aspects of the world organically and it would be the sinews that connected one nexus of functional design elements with another which would be the focus of attention and learning, not those 'points' or 'lines of force' as independent objects in themselves.