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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel. He can be contacted at: [email protected]

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Self-Organization, Adaptation, and the God Hypothesis

How Evolutionary Pressures Create Metaphysical Dogma

Joseph Dillard / AI

When highly intelligent scientists and philosophers, figures such as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake, Donald Hoffman, Bernard Katstrup, and Ken Wilber, speak of an “alive universe,” a “cosmic mind,” “spirit,” or an underlying “consciousness” that pervades reality, they are rarely appealing to a personal God in the traditional sense. Rather, they are attempting to make sense of a paradox at the heart of existence: the tension between adaptation and self-organization in evolution.

Adaptation is evolution's way of responding to what is, to changing environments, pressures, and threats. It is reactive, a process that arises from, but is distinct from, the broader principle of self-organization. Whereas adaptation adjusts existing forms to external conditions, self-organization creates new patterns and structures from within. It is evolution's proactive, stabilizing tendency toward coherence, order, and identity.

Adaptation depends on process, the same kind of dynamic flow seen when water forms whirlpools or weather organizes into hurricanes. But self-organization extends further, shaping the attractor basins, substances, things, and holons that make adaptation possible. The universe doesn't merely adapt to entropy; it continually self-organizes, building islands of stability—atoms, cells, organisms, minds, and selves—that persist long enough to explore new possibilities.

The conflict between adaptive processes and self-organizing things

What happens when these two evolutionary tendencies come into conflict? When the drive for stability, for a coherent sense of self or system, begins to outweigh the drive for novel adaptation? The recurring impulse to posit a universal consciousness or divine intelligence can be understood as an evolutionary expression of self-organizational bias, the tendency of complex systems, including human cognition, to preserve a coherent worldview, particularly when new data could destabilize it. Consciousness, faced with the vast indeterminacy of quantum probabilities and the apparent purposelessness of cosmic evolution, seeks an anchoring narrative. “God,” the “living universe,” “spirit,” and “universal consciousness” becomes ways of restoring ontological coherence. A metaphysical homeostasis preserves the integrity and stability of our identity, our “core self attractor basin,” the perspective from which we make sense of reality.

Examples of category error from brilliant modern minds

This may explain why even the most rigorous scientific minds drift toward metaphysical language when confronting the quantum realm.

• Erwin Schrödinger, though a founder of quantum mechanics, wrote of a unitary consciousness that “manifests itself in the multiplicity of beings,” a view echoing Hindu Advaita Vedanta rather than materialist physics.[1]

• David Bohm, faced with quantum indeterminacy, proposed an “implicate order” underlying the manifest world, a hidden wholeness where matter and consciousness were two aspects of a deeper reality.[2]

• Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance suggested that fields of memory underlie biological and even psychological form, offering a self-organizing principle that replaces randomness with pattern.[3]

• Donald Hoffman argues that the physical world is a user interface evolved for survival, not truth— a bold inversion of realism that replaces matter with mind.[4]

• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin envisioned evolution as a grand convergence toward the “Omega Point,” the unification of consciousness in Christ— a teleological self-organization writ large.[5]

• Bernard Kastrup holds that mind does not arise from matter; rather, matter is what mind looks like when observed from the outside. In his view, quantum indeterminacy, subjective experience, and the collapse of the wave function all become intelligible once consciousness, not matter, is taken as ontologically primary.[6]

• Ken Wilber, through his Integral AQAL model, frames evolution as an unfolding of consciousness through nested holarchies of subjectivity and objectivity, the Kosmos awakening to itself.[7]

Why our need for self-organization can outweigh, and even suppress, evolutionary adaptation

Each of these thinkers, in his own way, reintroduces meaning into a universe modern science has largely stripped of teleology. And yet, as elegant and expansive as these models are, they may also illustrate a subtle category error: mistaking the cognitive need for the coherence of self-organization for an ontological principle that exists “out there.” The desire for the universe to make sense, to have direction, purpose, or awareness, is not necessarily evidence that it does. It may be evidence that we do, and that our self-organizing cognition projects this coherence onto the cosmos to stabilize its own identity.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this can be seen as a conflict between adaptive transformation and systemic homeostasis. Adaptation thrives on uncertainty; it learns by dissolving what no longer serves. In the round of our 24 hour day, dreaming serves this function: identity dissolves and self-organization takes a back-seat to process and evolutionary emergence. Self-organization, in control during our waking hours, seeks continuity, an attractor basin that maintains the identity of our self-system over time. In humans, that attractor basin is the self or self, what The Dreaming Kosmos refers to as psychological geocentrism and heliocentrism, reality orbiting around either everyday mind and experience or around a cosmic Self, one with all. In terms of culture, that self-organizing attractor basin is a collective worldview or Zeitgeist. In religion, it is the mythic order. In science, it may be the paradigm. In spirituality, it is the source of core life meaning.

Thus, when Einstein speaks of “the mysterious” as the source of all true art and science, or when he says, “God does not play dice with the universe,” or when Wilber describes the universe as an “evolving Spirit-in-action,” we can hear the deep hum of evolution's self-organizing side, its yearning for unity, coherence, and belonging. But adaptation whispers another truth: that stability, if not continually rebalanced by transformation, becomes dogma. Even the most enlightened cosmology can fossilize into a metaphysical comfort zone.

Perhaps then, the real evolutionary challenge is not to choose between self-organization and adaptation, between ontological substances and epistemic processes, or between God and chaos, but to inhabit their oscillation, to stand where the quantum field trembles between probability and actuality, between the possible and the realized. At that boundary, duality itself begins to dissolve, and the universe, alive or not, reveals itself as a process of perpetual becoming.

NOTES

1. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? and Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).
2. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London: Routledge, 1980)
3. Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1981).
4. Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).
5. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
6. Bernard Kastrup, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality (Winchester, UK: Iff Books, 2019); see also Kastrup, Analytic Idealism: A Defense and Clarification (Waterloo, ON: Essentia Foundation, 2021).
7. Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambhala, 2000)