Syntropy – The Spirit of Love

In 1942, the Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappie coined the term syntropy as a law symmetric with entropy that produces 'a continuous increase in complexity through the action of attractors that emanate from the future and provide systems with their purpose and design.' This is an important conceptual innovation whose implications are explored in detail in this accessible book. Current science is mainly informed by mechanistic models that emphasise deterministic push rather than the pull or attraction from the future, although the development of complexity theory over the last 30 years has moved thinking in a new direction. At the same time, Einstein coined the term übercausalität or supercausality to emphasise the need to extend the current scientific paradigm. There is the familiar causal time and the less familiar retrocausal time while supercausal time characterises systems where diverging and converging forces are balanced and where causality and retrocausality are complementary.

The book summarises and explains the relevance of syntropy to various fields of scientific endeavour, relating this key idea to the converging evolutionary theories of Teilhard de Chardin and more recent scientific work on attractors. Syntropy is not the same as negentropy, which is the opposite of entropy. Syntropy, by contrast, is the complement of entropy and syntropic information flows from the future. One experimental example is the work of Dean Radin on pre-sponse implying precisely this causality from the future. The authors present a model incorporating not only the conscious and unconscious minds, but also the superconscious mind based on intuition and finality. This is clearly active in the process of incubating inventions as well as our capacity for ESP. They look at the mind-body problem in terms of a confluence of diverging and converging energy and refer to the mind machine experiments at the Princeton PEAR laboratory as evidence of this interplay that cannot be explained by classical physics.

In line with the book's subtitle, the authors place an emphasis on the relationship between the heart and the brain, observing that the Chinese ideogram for love combines those of life and heart. Fantappie distinguishes life by the presence of syntropic qualities such as finalities, goals and attractors. This is very different from the deterministic causality of the entropic world. He goes on to explain that attraction towards a goal is felt as love, deriving from this the proposition that the fundamental law of life is the law of love. This moves life towards higher forms of differentiation rather than levelling and conformity, echoing the development of complexity and consciousness in the work of Teilhard and his final attractor of the Omega Point. Syntropy also gives life meaning that can ground us in a way that enables us to resist excessive peer pressure.

There are some more technical chapters on micro and macroevolution exploring the idea of morphogenetic fields and the importance of epigenetics. The authors suggest that macroevolution through the role of attractors is in fact a converging retrocausal process and they illustrate this in a diagram explaining supercausality (p 115). Towards the end of the book, they come back to the balancing role of entropy and syntropy, comparing this with the complementary Chinese principles of the yin and yang. They could also have drawn on the work of Victor Schauberger, who saw the energy of nature in terms of implosion and explosion, moving towards and away from the centre. Walter Russell expresses similar ideas of alternating expansion and contraction, which one also finds in the scientific work of Goethe.

In making the case for syntropy as an extension of current scientific theory, they state six criteria and show how syntropy actually meets these by going beyond only forward-in-time solutions to fundamental equations. They conclude that 'virtually all its shortcomings could easily be resolved by incorporating the negative time-symmetric solution into its calculations.' This is an exciting prospect and one that also creates a conceptual bridge between science and spirituality. They conclude that 'as the organising principle of creation, evolution and life itself, love deserves a primary role in our worldview' an important message not only for science but for our culture in general. This book provides a good overview of this significant scientific principle and its implications.