Introduction
Between November 2022 and November 2023, a group of some 30 members of the Shepway and District u3a considered and discussed twelve questions about how the present state of the world has come about. Each of the following sections describes the focus of one month’s discussion. Click on the particular section to read the article I wrote to summarise the month’s topic.
The materials we studied, and some of the ideas that we discussed can be found by following the clickable links on the following website page: Science, Philosophy & Spirituality – In Search of Wisdom
1. How stories shape our individual perceptions and values, and how shared fictions shape the human world.
2. How we can assemble all that we have learned into a single story of who we are and from where we came.
3. How the experiences and history of different geographical regions lead us to very different perspectives on the world.
4. How the adoption of the Christian Faith by the Roman Empire helped to shape the modern Western world.
5. How the Islamic conquest of Asia and parts of Europe created the International “mycelium” from which roots of modern science drew nourishment.
6. How the emergent shoots of science, the age of discovery, and the flowering of the Enlightenment gave rise to the modern Western world.
7. How the theory of evolution and its modern synthesis with genetics led to discovering the secret of life.
8. How “entanglement” better describes the past and present relationships between sciences and the world’s religions than either “conflict” or “partnership”.
9. How the mind is neither independent of the brain, nor simply an emergent property, but is a product of the brain’s activity, its bodily interactions, and the social context in which its owner is embedded.
10. How generative artificial intelligence (AI) offers humanity extraordinary opportunities, while posing numerous serious threats.
11. How, brick-by-brick, physical science has created a complex concept of a world composed entirely of material objects and the forces that hold them together.
12. How the human species has become so powerful that we are now shaping the world itself and consequently are experiencing “grand challenges” to our continued well-being that we may not be able to resolve.
