Life Beyond Mechanism

Welcome to Issue 20 of Pari Perspectives which explores the topic Life Beyond Mechanism: Undoing the Legacy of the Machine Metaphor with guest editors Jonathan Allday and Gary Goldberg. 

Given the major challenges faced at this point in human history, which could arguably be attributed to a reductionist, materially focused worldview, it was felt that exploring the challenge of overcoming the limitations of Newtonian mechanics and seeking a new ‘organismic’ approach was warranted. Since the 1920s and 30s, relativistic quantum mechanics has become the dominant physical theory. In many ways, it has been even more successful than its Newtonian predecessor, opening areas of technology and scientific understanding that the founding fathers could not have dreamt of. Perhaps understandably, people are looking to quantum theory to stimulate new paradigm thinking. But is there a danger here and are we repeating the mistakes of the past? Is there life beyond mechanism and how do we go about undoing the legacy of the machine metaphor.