Customer Reviews

Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (Convergence)

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Salk's Anatomy of Reality would serve as a detailed introduction to systems theory as it was presented in its fundamental form. He explains to us that "The most fundamental phenomenon in the universe is relationship." This in itself can be perplexing to many a reader, especialy those who have learned to see the world existing as separate objects which appear to him to compete with eachother. Salk tells us that there are no independant objects, instead "We must consider al events in terms of process." This process leads to integration and that in turn leads to wholeness. However the wholeness has properties that the constituent parts do not have. Salk goes further than, say, General Systems Theory, which has the same fundamental claims, in that he ascribes a fundamental importance to the binary process, revealing to us that all processes are a binary process integrated by relationships between the elements. This suggests that there is a fundamental process of existence, and if realized will constitute a principle or framework similar to the scientific theory of everything, but different in that Salks approach is not a particularized perspective.

The author doesn't really discuss the topic as "advertised" by his book's title & its subtitle. I expected a discussion on the human mechanism to create its own personal reality based on a person's perceptions of the external world. Instead he writes about evolution particularly that of the biosphere -- which is a nice discussion. He "dances" around merging intuition & reason, I guess because he has very foggy notions on how to do it. So he just dangles the topic in front of his readers. I concur wholeheartedly with Salk that morals & ethics is strictly & purely a human creation, that they have no basis in supernatural "things" or mental creations. It's just us humans down here, trying to live from day to day hopefully with some measure of meaningfulness. At least the book is very short. If Salk's book were a long one, I'm sure it would have been unbearably tedious & pedantic. But if one's never thought about the power of evolution & asked why or how come there's living things on this planet, this book would trigger some good thinking.