Two hundred years ago, thinkers like Lamarck, Laplace but even Darwin and later Freud believed that knowledge will be one day one single science; immagine a layer picture where the bottom is physics, the next layer is chemistry, then biology, then the neurosciences as a science that explains the human mind, after that sociology; each of these layer can be explained in terms of the next one under, and finally physics is the last one where everything is explained in terms of physical laws of nature. In other words, the science that today explains the macro and microcosm with realitivity and quantum mechanics is charged with the task of explaining everything including the mind.
But both relativity and quantum physics seem to reintroduce the notion of the mind to explain certain phenomena,therefore if we need the mind to explain physics, how can physics explain the mind? This is the modern dilemma.
In addition to that there are properties that are peculiar to the mind, for instance mental phenomena like language are normative, and normativity is an aspect of conventionality. Let me give you an example: if a certain canine animal in English is called' dog'; you notice that by substituting that name with a different one within a community, would work with no serious problems; for instance once growing up children have laerned the new word for dog, their talking about the dogs will flow with no imaginable problems. If you try on the other hand to change certain laws of nature, let's say gravitation you cannot do it! you can't tell children to fly because laws of nature are such that they will die if they try to fly!
There is no echo in Nature of what we call normativity referred to the mind!
Many scientists, the more are ignorant about mental phenomena the more they insist that the theory is one, repeating what people were saying 200 years ago and even 2000 and more years ago.
Everyone who is seriously interested in a Toe, a theory of everything, must solve the problems I have hinted at in this note.
giovedì 20 agosto 2009
Some Notes on philosophy and Reductionism
Two hundred years ago, thinkers like Lamarck, Laplace but even Darwin and later Freud believed that knowledge will be one day one single science; immagine a layer picture where the bottom is physics, the next layer is chemistry, then biology, then the neurosciences as a science that explains the human mind, after that sociology; each of these layer can be explained in terms of the next one under, and finally physics is the last one where everything is explained in terms of physical laws of nature. In other words, the science that today explains the macro and microcosm with realitivity and quantum mechanics is charged with the task of explaining everything including the mind.
But both relativity and quantum physics seem to reintroduce the notion of the mind to explain certain phenomena,therefore if we need the mind to explain physics, how can physics explain the mind? This is the modern dilemma.
In addition to that there are properties that are peculiar to the mind, for instance mental phenomena like language are normative, and normativity is an aspect of conventionality. Let me give you an example: if a certain canine animal in English is called' dog'; you notice that by substituting that name with a different one within a community, would work with no serious problems; for instance once growing up children have laerned the new word for dog, their talking about the dogs will flow with no imaginable problems. If you try on the other hand to change certain laws of nature, let's say gravitation you cannot do it! you can't tell children to fly because laws of nature are such that they will die if they try to fly!
There is no echo in Nature of what we call normativity referred to the mind!
Many scientists, the more are ignorant about mental phenomena the more they insist that the theory is one, repeating what people were saying 200 years ago and even 2000 and more years ago.
Everyone who is seriously interested in a Toe, a theory of everything, must solve the problems I have hinted at in this note.
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