Les Racines Physiques de l'Esprit

This is a serious attempt to create a new model of science and consciousness, using a number of fertile new concepts, which are explained in the course of the book. The structure entails a preface by Emmanuel Ransford followed by a series of chapters from Tom Atham about Ransford's scheme and a concluding observation by Ransford. A key idea is that of psychomatter as a result of the search for the causal principle within the heart of matter itself. The reader is reminded of Penrose and others who state that no theory of everything that ignores consciousness can possibly be adequate. The book elaborates a new ladder of causality, beginning with what is called exo-causality, associated with the external deterministic factors such as gravity. The next level is exo-a (aleatoire), signifying determinism and chance; then we have endo-causality to which psychomatter corresponds, and finally a combination of all four, where physics abuts onto metaphysics.

This in turn corresponds to four forms of medicine along the lines elaborated by Larry Dossey; and again to the structure of the self as it becomes more universal, moving from what is called 'supral' (connected to the whole) through to the total self, where we are linked to the whole universe in its invisible and essential depths. The final picture is a rich one of sharing, unity, interdependence and abundance. Instead of being complete only in a physical sense, our world and our lives are seen to open up to a transcendence that is both an extension and a ground, or, to use another expression, a cosmic supral canvas which harmonises and envelopes everything in a parallel fashion to quantum entanglement. One gap in the analysis was the distinction between life and death as two forms of matter, the substance of which is identical, but in the latter case the psycho part seems to have been removed elsewhere. A very stimulating treatise for those whose French is up to it.