The “Cartesian Split” Is a Hallucination; Ergo, We Should Get Rid of It

June 12, 2005 | Jean F. Drew

[betty boop]

PING!!! just in case you-all might find this of interest... and possibly have the time to share your insights....

[null and void]

Sounds like someone's putting Descartes before the Force...

[muawiyah]

No doubt it's all very interesting at one level or the other.

[PatrickHenry]

Thanks for the ping, but I've been setting up a new computer this weekend, and it's consuming me entirely. I won't have the time right away to dig into this meaty article.

[ClearCase_guy]

I had this same realization during my freshman year in college. Then the buzz wore off.

[GladesGuru]

This paper is an excellent example of why thousands of years of philosophy produced little, but just a few lifetimes of application of the rules of science created the modern world.

All the philosophical commentaries on the cell to baby issue went nowhere, to use an example from the paper. But some embryology and the advent of DNA research has made possible an answer to such questions.

Mind alone produces only philosophy - a mind using the scientific method is capable of adding to the accreted total of knowledge. That has made the modern world.

Summary: Philosophers talk. Scientists experiment.

[onedoug]

But for quantum gravity. "Ah, there's the rub."

[Red Sea Swimmer]

Yes but what comes first ?

The Eggsistensialist or the Cartesian ?

[HighWheeler]

"Summary: Philosophers talk. Scientists experiment."

Good line, and I'll add to that logical line of thought.

"Summary: Philosophers talk. Scientists experiment. Engineers design and build."

[null and void]

Let's ask the eggsperts.

[Oh hell how does eggzactly spell his screen name!!!]

Make that:

Let's ask an eggspert...

[paudio]

ping

[mindwasp]

Man's mind cannot explain his own existence. That is why the greatest book of mankind is The Prince by Machiavelli.

[spinestein]

[On this formalism, even “the mind of the observer” is reducible to the operations of physical-chemical laws: The modern-day scientific materialist insists that mind is only the epiphenomenon of the physical-chemical activity of the brain. ....The formalism requires the observer to be not outside the material system he observes; for the observer himself is completely reducible to its rules. He is just another “cog” in the universal, physical machine. So how can the observer be “separate from the observed system of matter?” I am not aware that this question has been much engaged in recent times.]


Nobel physicist Robert B. Laughlin engaged similar questions with his new book "A different Universe".

He argues that science is in the process of changing from a "reductionist" mode to an "emergent" mode, whereby we examine complex systems and large quantities of atoms as a whole, in order to determine their properties because those properties are an emergent result of their being complex, and their qualities disappear if examined at to close a level.

This has implications for all branches of science as he seems to advocate for scientists to pay more attention to the results of actual experiments rather than try to reduce them into philosophical packages.

[MHGinTN]

Morphic Fields sound hauntingly similar to Jung's 'collective unconscious' concept. I still prefer my alternate paradigm, where dimensions have three variable expressions (of increased in complexity from first to third, as in space having linear, planar, then volumetric variability, and dimension life force having will, emotion, then mind --for want of better terms-- as variability expressions) and the dimensional variables combine in continua through which energy has expression.

[TexasTransplant]

>>>"Summary: Philosophers talk. Scientists experiment. Engineers design and build." <<<

May I offer "Summary: Philosophers talk. Scientists experiment. Engineers over design. Builders build. Customers Complain. Government Taxes. Time and Elements consume."

"Repeat" ;^)
TT

[GladesGuru]

We both forgot the latter steps - than came the Libroids and lawyers to impose tax and spend programs upon all.

[HighWheeler]

"We both forgot the latter steps - than came the Libroids and lawyers to impose tax and spend programs upon all."


Yeah, they vomit on every creation, don't they? They aren't happy unless they are miserable. ;o)

[chilepepper]

all this seems to tie in with Roger Penrose and Stu Hameroff's ideas about how the brain works... truly fascinating stuff (Hameroff is/was an anaestesiologist professor at U of Az), Roger Penrose has some pretty good credentials to be backing Hameroff's radical ideas...

[MHGinTN]

BTW, thank you so much for the ping! I'm printing the paper out to reread it and ponder implications.