Mystics and Scientists 2018 – Eastern and Western Perspectives on Science and Spirit

Causal influences in the real world occurring on evolutionary, developmental, and functional timescales are characterised by a combination of bottom up and top down effects. Digital computers give very clear examplars of how this happens, and it is crucial to brain functioning. There are five different distinct classes of top down effects, the key one leading to the existence of complex systems being adaptive selection. The case will be made that while bottom-up self-assembly can attain a certain degree of complexity, truly complex systems such as life can only come into being if top-down processes come into play in addition to bottom up processes. They allow genuine emergence to occur, based in multiple realisability at lower levels of higher level structures and functions.

The Quaker George Cadbury was considered by his biographer to be both a businessman and a mystic. In this talk Mike King explores the role of religion and spirituality in the origins and legacy of the Industrial Revolution, and the implications of the Quaker ethos for an ethical capitalism. This is the subject of his new book, ‘Quakernomics: An Ethical Capitalism’, one which spans the disciplines of religion, science and economics. The Cadburys were only one of many Quaker families whose enterprises shaped the British economy. Does their example give us a way forward for re-shaping contemporary capitalism on ethical lines?