"Integrative Science”: The Death-Knell of Scientific Materialism?

various ^ | various | vanity with much help

[betty boop]

When the Berlin Wall fell, a lot of formerly "secret" scientific research began to leach into the West -- where it's been percolating ever since. This essay attempts to capture some of the main thrusts of that body of thought and its relevance to contemporary scientific problems in the fields of physics, biology, and artificial intelligence (among others.)

[betty boop]

This runs long, and is hard work. But IMHO it is totally worth the time and energy expended! I welcome your thoughts...if you have the interest and the motivation.

[unspun]

This runs long, and is hard work. But IMHO it is totally worth the time and energy expended! I welcome your thoughts...if you have the interest and the motivation.

I'm kinda still working on the names here (Menas Kefatos, Mihai Drãgãnescu, Attila Grandpierre) but sure, why not?

The names of baseball players, Hollywood actors, talent show singers, reality tv performers, and American politicians are easier, though....

[ALS]

Thanks for the *ping*!

WoW BB!

Quite an amazing concept you've put forth here.

[boris]

I have not been aware of these researchers. For most of my life I have been a "materialist". I note that the word "causality" is never mentioned in this essay, which is interesting.

I believe in strict causality, at least in the macro world, at least in realms accessible to human perception.

The tension between strict causality and free will is well known.

When someone claims to have free will, he or she is saying [my translation] "My outputs are not functions of my inputs." Very well, the question fairly leaps out: What are they functions of?

Heisenberg uncertainty does not rescue free will: a random robot is still a robot.

So I believe(d) in "strong AI", in other words that we could eventually construct an intelligent machine. If the world is reducible to physics, strong AI sort of follows.

Now:

Of late I have been reading widely in Buddhism (no worries; a 52-year-old Jew is not going to convert to Buddhism) and also on the nature of Time. Having convinced myself (on grounds other than his) that Julian Barbour is correct and that the passage of time is an illusion (a phenomenon, a perception...not 'really' real), and mixed up with all the Buddhism I've absorbed...I have come around to the ideas expressed here that "structural science has arrived at the frontier of a deep reality, which is outside of space and time (Drãgãnescu, 1979, 1985), and has opened the doors of a realm of reality in which phenomenological processes become predominant."

Not to say I understand all of this, but it "integrates" much of my reading into a semi-coherent whole.

I am still deeply confused (who is not?) about the nature of time. And why does causality appear regnant at our level?

I was trained as a scientist and engineer; these conclusions represent a difficult and painful journey.

Buddhism (among many other things) tells us to cease our constant conceptualizing; the world cannot be understood via concepts. But my JOB is to do little more than fancy conceptualizing....the outcome of which (among other things) is Neil Armstrong's bootprints on the Moon, rather undeniable.

So conceptualizing works (in a limited regime). But does it lead us anywhere that is not ultimately sterile?

Very strange.

And, BTW, it is fascinating that modern theories of the origin of the Universe can be boiled down (oversimplified) to "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"...

--Boris, bemused

[ALS]

"We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute…"

Oddly enough, we see this same pseudo-science slit-filtering process taking place on a daily basis right here in these threads. This guy just defined his religion/god, not science.

[MHGinTN]

In the end, this solar physicist speculates that the final cause of our universe and all life in it is extra-cosmic — completely outside of space and time. Well, duh! Even the notion of a 'big bang' begs the question of 'from what'. I'll side with Feynman's speculation and accept that this is all a bubble on the negative side of a greater positive whole, kind of an 'implosion of specificity' perculated out of a greater dimensional reality.

[MHGinTN]

On the nature of time:
We experience the universe as a past (nothing is instantaneously real to us as it takes 'time' to register once a phenomenon has occurred); could it be that time has three variable expressions, much as dimension space does ... linear, planar, volumetric ... such that time has past (linear), present (planar), and future (volumetric)? Is our consciousness residing in (planar) present, while our spacetime mechanism registers (linear) past?

[Cicero]

I can't agree with some of the speculation here, but some of the basic points are perfectly reasonable. Philosophical realism is very different from philosophical materialism. Materialism simply cannot account for all of the phenomena. Most obviously, it contradicts our own strong sense that we can think and can make free choices. But a purely materialist explanation of the universe has to say that such beliefs are illusory. We only think that we are thinking or that we have anything like a "self."

Simplistic nineteenth-century materialism already was breaking down under the findings of atomic science and physics in general. The old atomistic or billiard ball model no longer has any credibility.

Thomas Nagel, one of the country's most respected philosophers, has recently admitted that it's extremely difficult to find an basis for having rational discussion or rational philosophical discourse without bringing in religion--which he refuses to do. As Christians would say, without the Logos, there's no reason why the universe should be rational or why our logic should correspond to it in any way.

[boris]

Read Julian Barbour's The End of Time (available on Amazon) and get back to me.

--Boris

[MHGinTN]

I'll see if I can get a copy trhough my library. Thanx ... I find the topic most invigorating.

[MHGinTN]

BTW, have you read David Wick's THE INFAMOUS BOUNDARY?

[r9etb]

Self-ping for later. Looks interesting.

[betty boop]

I note that the word "causality" is never mentioned in this essay, which is interesting.

boris, causality is "implied," once one starts talking about a "Fundamental Consciousness." IMHO at least.

We run to Buddhism when we've "given up" on getting answers from Reason. Perhaps ultimate answers cannot be gotten from Reason. But the moment we say that, the entire course of Western science, and maybe Western civilization itself, is DEAD.

My own view is that man is perfectly capable of exploring the truth of our universe by Reason -- and experience: His Creator equipped him that way. The amazing thing to me is these three thinkers, coming out of a regime of Soviet "thought repression" that some of their peers had to die for (cf Ervin Bauer) are the ones pointing the way.... That must mean something, in the great scale of things. JMHO FWIW.

Thanks so much for writing!

[betty boop]

As Christians would say, without the Logos, there's no reason why the universe should be rational or why our logic should correspond to it in any way.

That would seem to be the entire point, Cicero. At least to my way of thinking which -- God knows -- ain't "perfect."

So what do you suppose is Thomas Nagel's problem? WHY the self-censorship?

[Consort]

Is our consciousness residing in (planar) present, while our spacetime mechanism registers (linear) past?

Maybe consciousness is the "carrier wave" of all existence, based on how it was all created.

[betty boop]

This guy just defined his religion/god, not science.

THAT point seems abundantly clear to me, ALS. Thanks for "the reality check!"

[Justa]

Heavy reading. I wonder what it'd be like to be around one of these people when they're drunk.

[mikegi]

“Quantum theory states that whatever is meant by the word reality, it has to be non-local and counter to the view of local, realistic classical theories..."

All I hope is that I live long enough to see quantum mechanics thrown into the trash heap of ridiculous physics theories. It will happen.

"Nonlocal" is a deceptive way of saying "instantaneous action at a distance" (IAD). Any dynamic physical theory that requires or predicts IAD is bogus. The theory may be bogus because it is fundamentally a static theory (Newtonian gravity) or rotten to the core because it predicts IAD (quantum mechanics).

[MHGinTN]

Actually, if the universe exists in a planar present mode at any given moment (all of the universe exists simultaneously), all events are on the same plane, temporally, and the past is the 'left behind' evidence of the plane in non-static reality. Perhaps electromagnetic phenomena are carrying a piece of the present of the physical universe at the planar present when the energy was/is 'liberated'. Do you experience any event in the present of the event?