Dr. Leroy Little Bear connects quantum physics to Indigenous beliefs about spirit and the ethical relationship between all things. Physicist David Bohm also argued that our measurements provide an incomplete picture of reality and that everything is fundamentally linked. The document asks if infinite potential can be left out of discussions of ethics, and if science may soon discover a field connecting all things, meaning every thought and action affects the whole world. It questions if living differently would result if such a field was confirmed, or if lack of confirmation allows questionable modern behavior.

1. Watch at least one of the posted videos for Week 10 below.
Dr. Leroy Little Bear connects quantum physics to the Indigenous belief
in "spirit," an idea that implies each person's intense ethical relationship
to the world. He also reminds us that science is as much a belief system
(and value system) as any spiritual tradition. In a similar fashion,
Physicist David Bohm (a student of Einstein) wrote a book
called Wholeness and the Implicate Order, arguing that our
measurements of the physical world provide an incomplete picture of
reality, and that there is a non-local, interconnected realm in which
everything is fundamentally linked to everything else.
Do you think that "infinite potential" can be left out of our discussion of
ethics? You may recall that Kant, in the late 18th Century, left
"noumena" outside of human cognition (which only knows "phenomena"
or mental representations). In the 1920s, Whitehead questioned Kant's
move to privilege reason over feeling, and to cast the metaphysical
outside of human knowledge. In doing so, Whitehead offered a simpler
explanation of ethics: the world itself is composed of feelings or values
(prior to human cognition).
Looking at this question from your own background, tradition, and
experience, do you think that we can experience the infinite (and, in it,
infinite ethical interrelationship)?

2. Is it possible that science (as the video "Infinite Potential" suggests) is on
the verge of discovering the "field" that connects all things. Ethically, this
would mean that your every thought, word, and action affects the whole
world. Given such confirmation, would you live any differently?
Conversely, do you think that the absence of scientific confirmation
about (and interest in) the metaphysical dimensions of ethics allows us
moderns to behave in questionable ways?