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Category: physics

Kuhn: The structure of scientific revolutions

Kuhn: The structure of scientific revolutions

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This excerpt from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Kuhn about paradigms supports my claim that worldviews are transcended and replaced, not included. Kuhn, by the way, got his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard before going into the philosophy of science. “The functions of a paradigm are to supply puzzles for scientists to solve and to provide the tools for their solution. A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve…

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Climate change and social transformations

Climate change and social transformations

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Article subtitled “Is it time for a quantum leap?” By Karen O’Brien (2016), Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 7(5), 618-626.  She is Professor of Sociology and Human Geography,  University of Oslo.  She has been heavily involved in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Global Change Programmes and the transition to Future Earth, a 10-year global change research initiative. More bio here. The abstract: “Climate change is recognized as an urgent societal problem with widespread…

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The blind spot of science

The blind spot of science

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Good essay by an astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and philosopher on the nature of human experience and its relationship to science. Some excerpts: “This brings us back to the Blind Spot. When we look at the objects of scientific knowledge, we don’t tend to see the experiences that underpin them. We do not see how experience makes their presence to us possible. Because we lose sight of the necessity of experience, we erect a false idol of science as something that…

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Objective reality does not exist

Objective reality does not exist

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From this article at MIT Technology Review: “Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a few colleagues say they have performed this experiment for the first time: they have created different realities and compared them. Their conclusion is that Wigner was correct—these realities can be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts about an experiment. .[…] ‘This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,’ say Proietti and…

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Ideas of Stuart Kauffman

Ideas of Stuart Kauffman

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If you are familiar with complex systems theorist Dr. Stuart Kauffman’s ideas you know he covers a broad range of disciplines and concepts, many in considerable depth, and with a keen eye for isomorphic and integrative principles. If you peruse some of his writings and other communications, please share with us how you see Kauffman’s ideas informing our focal interests: brain, mind, intelligence (organic and inorganic), and self-aware consciousness. Do you find Kauffman’s ideas well supported by empirical research? Which…

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Vibration: A new theory of consciousness

Vibration: A new theory of consciousness

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Article in Scientific American. One point. The article sees energetic fields underlying matter as if they are separate things, one the cause of the other. Whereas a naturalistic, postmetaphysical view might be that they mutually entail and co-generate each other within an ecological frame. The cause/effect frame still clings to a form of dualism.

Exobiology – Would physics constrain evolution to yield similar organisms everywhere?

Exobiology – Would physics constrain evolution to yield similar organisms everywhere?

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Charles Cockell’s The Equations of Life: How Physics Shapes Evolution argues physics sets the boundaries and shape possibilities for what evolution can produce in the universe. Read a review here. Chapter by chapter, he aims his lens at all levels of biological organization, from the molecular machinery of electron transport to the social organisms formed by ant colonies. In each instance, Cockell shows that although these structures might be endless in their detail, they are bounded in their form.

Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

Should quantum anomalies make us rethink reality?

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Indeed we should according to this recent Scientific American article. One thing I learned from Dennett in his new book is that according to him the scientific image uncovers an objective, underlying reality, while the manifest image is corrupted by our personal ontology. Not so according to quantum mechanics, which operates on the premise that our scientific results themselves are tied to our perceptions and constructed categories, not “a purely objective world out there.” There is a paradigm shift in…

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Does quantum mechanics play a role in consciousness

Does quantum mechanics play a role in consciousness

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A 2017 BBC article concisely reviews essential concepts of quantum physics and summarizes the state of scientific speculation into the possible interactions of consciousness and quantum mechanics. Of interest are some specific, possibly testable, suggestions about chemical structures that could sustain nuclear spin entanglements in the brain for up to two days.