There is a danger that Artificial Intelligence will interfere with our living intelligence, says Fritjof Capra

Half-a-century after The Tao of Physics bridged Western science and Eastern wisdom, physicist-philosopher Fritjof Capra reflects on paradigm shifts, spiritual misappropriation, and why ancient Asian insights remain crucial for our digital age. Capra is a physicist, systems theorist, and author also of The Web of Life and The Systems View of Life, among others. He is co-founder of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, where he is sitting in his studio. Behind him, a print of Nataraja’s cosmic dance creates a halo around his curly gray hair. At 86, Capra is as vibrant and sharp as the prose of the book that made him a celebrity of the cultural counter-revolution fifty years ago. He talks to Carlo Pizzati about science, mysticism, modern crises, and how metabolism is the secret to being and becoming.

What is the most enduring legacy of The Tao of Physics in the dialogue between Western science and Asian philosophies?

I was astonished by the powerful emotional reactions people had when they read the book. Then I realised the strong resonance was caused by a change of worldview and paradigms that happened in physics from a mechanistic worldview to a holistic and ecological one. It’s something that is now happening in all the sciences and in society. Again and again, I heard people say: “You have expressed something I’ve felt for a long time and couldn’t put into words.” Or: “This book has changed my life!” I think it helped them become part of a broader community embracing a new worldview which I call a systemic view of life. The emergence of this coherent worldview and also the relationship to Eastern philosophies and to spirituality is the enduring legacy. 

The Tao of Physics did create a bridge between Western science and Asian philosophy. But if mysticism cannot be learned from books, as you imply, doesn’t explaining Asian philosophy through Western scientific categories risk reducing its essence and making it more rather than less difficult to learn?

If the explanation were purely intellectual and analytical, I think I would agree with you that this risks making it even more difficult. But when I wrote The Tao of Physics, I was engaged not only intellectually but also emotionally and experientially. This is also why people had this strong emotional reaction. When I discussed the parallels between physics and Eastern mysticism, to some extent I experienced these parallels at a very deep level. So it’s been much more than a theoretical analysis. And I think it didn’t keep people away or make it more difficult for them to experience mystical traditions, but on the contrary, inspired and encouraged them. This is also part of the general cultural trend. In the 1960s or 1970s, if you worked for a company and said, “I can’t come to a meeting because I have my yoga class or my meditation class or my Qigong class,” people would have laughed and would have thrown you out. Today this is standard practice. So the engagement in the practice of spirituality has become much broader.

Yes, but today, some people in America and in Europe engage in Asian philosophical practices like yoga and meditation for materialistic gains—managers who meditate to be more efficient, people who do yoga to stay competitive. Many readers have interpreted The Tao of Physics in distorted utilitarian or in pop cultural keys. Do you agree? And which misunderstandings still surprise you?

It’s true that some rightwing groups have hijacked New Age ideas in America. On the other hand, you could say that the huge youth movements now, which arose mostly in connection with climate change like the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future, or the work of Senator Bernie Sanders, or the effects of Occupy, are all movements of people who see the world as an interconnected network, who want to preserve the beauty of the Earth and want to preserve and protect life. But as we speak, this alternative movement has mostly gone underground, facing a new tragic rise of fragmentation, of nationalism, of violence and war. I know it will be a transitory stage, but it’s extremely painful today. These are cycles. We’ll get out of it. An evolutionary movement like this shift of paradigm is stronger than short-term political actions.

Quantum physics today is more studied and widespread than before, but society still seems to reason in Newtonian terms. Do you agree, and why hasn’t the cultural leap taken place yet in meaningful ways for quantum physics integrating
into society?

I think that’s true. If you look, for instance, at medicine, doctors and hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry basically see the human body as a machine, and illness as some piece in the machine being wrong, which has to be exchanged or repaired chemically or through surgery. Now there’s a strong holistic health movement that has vastly different views, but the mechanistic view is very persistent. 

Also, if you look at management, managers often think of their organisation as some kind of machine that can be fine-tuned. This mentality is strong largely because it’s been around for a long time. Intellectually and financially, too much has been invested in the mechanistic model, so many resist changing paradigms. And now we have a grotesque situation where the energy corporations have the destruction of the planet as their business model. They hold on to it because they have invested financially. They don’t want to lose their investments. The change from the mechanistic to the ecological worldview is the defining characteristic of our era. But it’s not a smooth transition. In my life, I’ve seen scientific revolutions, but also backlashes, counter movements, entrenchments in the old worldview. But there’s an evolutionary change of our global culture that cannot be prevented by short-term political activities. But the transition process can be rough. It’s not a smooth journey. It’s been a rocky road.

Would you care to expand about this specific moment, where we have reached the point that what you defined as the “prison of the geometry” we created in our minds leads to such destructive plans?

Let’s go back to the 1970s, when The Tao of Physics was published. I was part of, and have been part of, a global network of what was called the counterculture in the 1960s, which gave birth to the New Age movement in the 1970s, both very idealistic movements with a new vision of the world, a new spirituality, new values, new ways of life, liberated sexuality, use of psychedelic drugs. What these were lacking was a political dimension. Then in the 1980s, New Age acquired a political dimension with the Green movement. The German Green Party came to power in 1983, and then the movement spread around the world. By the end of the 1980s, with the Gorbachev phenomenon in 1986, I thought we had reached a turning point, that we had all the pieces to organise society differently.

But then came something which nobody had expected: the information technology revolution. It increased the interconnectedness of the world, but at the same time it generated a new kind of global capitalism focusing on making money. Whenever there was a choice between making more money or honouring other human values, such as health, social justice, or economic equality, the computers always decided to invest in making more money.

So there was a new kind of materialism that emerged. The keyword was “globalisation”, the magical term everybody used. Of course, globalisation has many useful and beneficial aspects. However, there has been a corporate and economic globalisation which has been extremely harmful. When you talk about the alternative vision of reality that I have been part of, it took us a whole decade to cope with this globalisation. I think by the end of the 1990s, with the WTO convention in Seattle and the big demonstrations and the emergence of a global civil society, we were back to where we were in the
late 1980s.

You could say that the movement which The Tao of Physics was part of, and I myself have been part of, created a vision of an alternative future. There have been several global meetings with the World Social Forum, whose slogan is ‘Another World Is Possible’. That is a global vision. And you could also say that The Tao of Physics was part in the early days of that global vision—that also, I would say, is its legacy.

In your systemic view, connecting back to your work in The Tao of Physics on the opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus, of Being versus Becoming, do you think Asian philosophies propose an integration? 

In The Tao of Physics I call Heraclitus “the Greek Taoist” because he has this dynamic view. We can learn that underneath every structure, if you associate Being with structure, there is a process, or sets of processes, and structure emerges out of underlying processes. So I think the dynamic view is something that we can learn.

In my book, I identify two big themes joining modern physics and Eastern mysticism: the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, and the dynamic nature of the universe. Both are represented in the systems view of life. Life is a process, and life is a network. That’s an interesting idea that I just thought about when you mentioned Parmenides and Heraclitus, Being and Becoming. In the systems view of life, the defining characteristic of a living system is metabolism. Metabolism is the continuous flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, and so it has these two aspects: the flow aspect and the network aspect. Now the network is a structure, and the flow aspect is a process. So in a sense, this reflects the ancient dichotomy of Being and Becoming, which is unified in this process of metabolism. Come to think of it, I should write something about this…

Looking forward to seeing this theory developed. Especially now that AI, according to some, could become a global metabolism of sorts. In fact, after the mechanistic models of the Industrial Revolution, we entered a new technological dynamic shaped by algorithms, servers, and now AI. Do you think AI is yet another conceptual prison, or is it an opportunity for transformation in society and daily life?

It can be both. It may turn into a prison, and it depends largely on what purpose AI is used for. If you look at the various applications, you will see that most of them are implemented for the purpose of making more money, like streamlining production processes, the so-called efficiency. But this focus on financial profit is deadly. Artificial intelligence is different from the natural intelligence inherent in all life. Living intelligence, which is part of all living systems, is always tacit and is organically, biologically embedded. Its main quality is the ability to be in the world, to move around in the world, to survive in it, to evolve in it. That is common to all living beings.

When we increase the applications of AI, there is the danger that they actually interfere with our living intelligence, with our way of living. Just think, again, that we live in a society where wealth is considered more important than health. Not always, but very often. And in making money and maximising money, we often destroy the natural environment on which our survival depends. If you were to look at us from the outside, a civilisation that values making money more than human well-being, and in doing so destroys the natural environment, cannot be called highly intelligent. So there is a clash between artificial intelligence and living intelligence.

If you were to rework The Tao of Physics today in light of the digital revolution and scientific discoveries, what would you preserve and what would you revise?

The main change would be to shift emphasis. In the original text I focused heavily on the bootstrap theory, which has since receded in physics, while string theory, elegant but problematic, has taken centrestage. I would integrate that discussion more fully. But I wouldn’t change my treatment of Eastern mysticism or the parallels I drew. When I leaf through the book now, I’m still struck by the beauty of the quotations from thinkers like Ashvaghosha and Nagarjuna. That remains timeless.

The closing paragraph, however, reads almost like a manifesto today: “The worldview implied by modern physics is inconsistent with our present society, which does not reflect the harmonious interrelatedness we observe in nature. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed: a cultural revolution in the true sense of the word.” To me, that is the lasting legacy of The Tao of Physics. 

artificial intelligenceauthorFritjof Caprahuman intelligenceinterviewPhysicistThe Tao of Physics