home.social

#philosophyofscience — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #philosophyofscience, aggregated by home.social.

  1. “Reality is a very subjective affair”*…

    As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…

    …The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist. 

    As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”

    For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

    “Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality. 

    “If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics. 

    “Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.” 

    Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. 

    For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.” 

    As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”

    That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”

    Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…

    Eminently worth reading in full.

    Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.

    Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”

    * Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

    ###

    As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.

    Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.  His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.

    source

    #AugusteComte #CarloRovelli #consciousness #culture #history #philosophy #philosophyOfScience #Science #sociology
  2. “Reality is a very subjective affair”*…

    As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…

    …The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist. 

    As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”

    For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

    “Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality. 

    “If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics. 

    “Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.” 

    Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. 

    For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.” 

    As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”

    That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”

    Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…

    Eminently worth reading in full.

    Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.

    Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”

    * Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

    ###

    As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.

    Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.  His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.

    source

    #AugusteComte #CarloRovelli #consciousness #culture #history #philosophy #philosophyOfScience #Science #sociology
  3. “Reality is a very subjective affair”*…

    As Nathan Gardels reports, the Berggruen Institute recently gathered religious scholars, philosophers, quantum physicists, AI technologists, neuroscientists and science fiction novelists at Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice to ponder the nature of consciousness. Noting that “it is fascinating to see how their ideas correspond to the long-ago musings of Medieval mystics and even the “pagan masters” of antiquity'” Gardels observes that “the great question then, as now, and probably forever, is whether there is a metaphysical gap between the body and the soul, or if they are made of the same substance, symbiotic aspects of a singular reality that entail each other.” He concludes…

    …The quantum physicist Carlo Rovelli argues that the much-discussed metaphysical gap between body and soul, subjective and objective, doesn’t exist. 

    As he has written in Noema, “We, subjects of knowledge and understanding, are not outside the world. We are part of it. Our theories and knowledge are embodied tools to help us navigate the real world, not disembodied views on reality from the outside. They are themselves aspects of the very world they describe. Our understanding, like our feelings, perceptions and experience, is a natural phenomenon.”

    For Rovelli, the notion of a metaphysical gap “contradicts everything we have learned about nature in the last centuries. The mind is the behavior of the brain, properly described in a high-level language. Neither my own experience of myself nor an external experience of me is primary: They are two distinct perspectives on the same events. We do not need to assume that the circle between epistemology (how we get knowledge) and ontology (what exists) requires a starting point. There is nothing wrong with its circularity: The world I access is the information I have about it, and I am part of that world.

    “Nor do we need to require that there is any ultimate or fundamental account of reality. Any account is approximate, has blind spots and is realized within reality, so it is embodied in a part of that same reality. 

    “If we do not fall into the error of dualism upfront, we can safely speak of soul and emotions just as we speak of a kitchen table, even if the table is also a collection of atoms. It is time to give up the pernicious dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness and embrace the reality that our soul, or our spiritual life, is consistent with our fundamental physics. 

    “Earth is not metaphysically different from the heavens, living beings are not metaphysically different from inanimate matter, humans are not metaphysically different from other animals. The soul is not metaphysically different from the body. We are all parts of nature.” 

    Rovelli’s scientific case that we humans are not outside the world of reality, but constitutive participants in it and constructors of it, tracks with the intuition of Medieval thinkers like the 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart. 

    For Eckhart, consciousness was being aware we are not apart from, but both inhabit and are inhabited by, the mind of God — that is, “objective reality.” 

    As stated in the New Testament’s Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.” In biblical terms, the Word, or Logos, is divine reason. Eckhart interpreted this passage as meaning that the incarnation of the divine in man was not a one-time event of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, but takes place through continuous human participation in the unfolding Logos of the Word, making us part of and conjoining with the mind of God; co-essences, so to speak.” If God is the pure thought of divine reason, then, as Sloterdijk has put it, ‘To think is to give birth to God.’”

    That Medieval insight is another way of saying, in Rovelli’s words, that “objectivity without a subject is an abstract construct, of little relevance — it is the illusion of a science now belonging to the past.”

    Consciousness, then, can be said to be the perspective of the aware self in a world where there is no outside. The “I” is not detached from some order of objective reality, but in all the diversity of personal experience, part of what makes it “everywhere whole.” Not only is “the universe disclosed by a knowing subject;” the knowing subject is its co-creator from within…

    Eminently worth reading in full.

    Striving to understand the nature of consciousness: “Subjective Perspective Makes Objective Reality ‘Everywhere Whole’,” from @noemamag.com.

    Pair with: “Everything is not itself.”

    * Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

    ###

    As we muse on our minds, we might spare a thought for a man who wrestled with these same issues, Auguste Comte; he died on this date in 1857. A philosopher (and mathematician), he is remembered as the father of the doctrine of positivism. He developed the Law of Three Stages to describe the historical evolution of human thought and consciousness, arguing that the human mind, in its search for understanding, progresses through three distinct intellectual phases (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive (or scientific), each with a different method of explaining reality.

    Comte is widely regarded as the first “philosopher of science” in the modern sense, and as the forebearer of sociology (the name of which he coined, as he did the word “altruism”). He had a major impact on 19th-century thought, influencing the work of social thinkers like John Stuart Mill and George Eliot.  His concepts of “sociology” and social evolutionism set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists including Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into modern academic sociology (a la Émile Durkheim) as practical and objective social research.

    source

    #AugusteComte #CarloRovelli #consciousness #culture #history #philosophy #philosophyOfScience #Science #sociology
  4. Die Leere, die zur Zeit viele Jugendliche zu empfinden scheinen, ist eine Art Verkümmerung aus Einsamkeit und zu wenig Austausch von Ladungen.
    Keine Bewegung. Keine Energie.
    Mittlerweile im Kollektiv. Einer epidemischen Ausbreitung gleich.

    czastka.de/public/news/view.ht

    #materie #naturphilosophie #entwicklung #null #symmetrie
    #theoreticalPhysics
    #philosophy
    #philosophyofscience #Detektor #Mensch

  5. Menschen bestehen aus Atomen.
    Wenn der Mensch Sehnsucht oder Sättigung fühlt, müssen diese Zustände ihre Wurzeln auf der atomaren Ebene haben.
    Ein Mensch kann an Vereinsamung verkümmern. Hospitalismus.
    Was macht ein Teilchen, wenn es sich nicht verbinden kann? Es sucht nach passender Energie. Es muss?

    czastka.de/public/news/view.ht

    #materie #naturphilosophie #entwicklung #null #symmetrie
    #theoreticalPhysics
    #philosophy
    #philosophyofscience

  6. Ein Zitat: "In der Logik und der klassischen Systemtheorie steht die Ziffer „0“ für das absolute Nichts – das Fehlen von jeglicher Substanz, Information, Raum, Zeit oder eben Energie." Meine Frage: Was ist das Nichts? Ausgehend davon, dass Energie immer da ist, ist das Nichts = Alles. Wenn ich die Aussage des Zitats bedenke, komme ich zu folgendem....

    czastka.de/public/news/view.ht

    #materie #naturphilosophie #entwicklung #null #symmetrie
    #theoreticalPhysics
    #philosophy
    #philosophyofscience

  7. Materie und Nicht-Materie - Mein Gedanke: Damit Nicht-Materie beständig wirken kann, braucht diese ein UMfeld. Also ein UMherum, welches in Balance hält, damit das Kraftfeld kontrolliert Wirkung hat und nicht ausbricht. Solange die Materie ein Umfeld hat, was harmoniert, solange wäre die Kraft der Nicht-Materie in Entwicklung....

    czastka.de/public/news/view.ht

    Was siehst du? Wie denskt Du?

    #materie #naturphilosophie #entwicklung #brainshit #theoreticalPhysics #philosophy #philosophyofscience

  8. To The Erudite In Mathematics Who Wish To Remove Infinity (∞)

    An axiom of which we are all conscious: the acknowledgement of the unknown.

    The symbol of Infinity is the mathematical constant that, through its own logic and reason, grants us the ability to formulate useful formulae. It demarcates a value that is unknown, yet undeniably present.

    #Infinity #Mathematics #Maths #Axiom #PhilosophyOfScience #Logic #Reason #TheUnknown #Calculus #Academic #MathChat

  9. 10/x Thanks for reading in case you made it this far.

    I noticed that I forgot speakers' affiliations in some of the posts, so please find here again the abstract.

    And once again links to the book
    global.oup.com/academic/produc

    and the book review:
    rdcu.be/dXACh

    #HRQL #ISOQOL #PhilosophyOfScience #PatientCentered

  10. 8/x The last chapter focuses on the contexts of use of #HRQL measures (e.g., #FDA, agencies, #PatientCentered initiatives). Kevin Weinfurt (👇) and Rebecca Jackson discussed how even the often ignored response options reflect assumptions of how we want to represent what we are measuring!

    #PhilosophyOfScience #Measurement

  11. 7/x Leah took the last straw the audience was holding on to:

    No, even when thinking about clocks and time, ongoing coordination is an issue. There is no #GoldStandard for time, its #measurement is under constant development.

    #PhilosophyOfScience #ISOQOL

  12. 2/x We had a good panel of presenters.

    Melanie Hawkins (Swinburn UT) opened the session with a discussion of how values and assumptions impact on interpretations of scores in application contexts, and how this may reinforce and exacerbate societal inequities.

    #PhilosophyOfScience #Measurement #HRQL #ISOQOL

  13. Scientific Attitude • 1
    inquiryintoinquiry.com/2015/03

    There is an outlook on the world I call the Scientific Attitude (SA). There are times when the letter “A” is better served by apperception, approach, or attunement, but attitude will do for a start.

    The scientific attitude accepts appearances, as appearances, but it does not stop there — it inquires after the possible realities that would both save and solve the appearances.

    Reality is what persists and the scientific attitude accepts its limitation to what persists. Thisness and thatness may come and go, but scientific knowledge rests on results that are reproducible. It is knowledge of particulars in general terms.

    #Appearance #Epistemology #Generality #Haecceity #Inquiry
    #InquiryIntoInquiry #Knowledge #Logic #LogicOfScience
    #PhilosophyOfScience #PragmaticMaxim #Reality #Reproducibility
    #Science #ScientificAttitude #ScientificMethod