Abstract.The basic laws of physics for particles and fields can be formulated in terms of variational principles. The initial development of a variational principle had distinct teleological implications. The formulation of physical laws in terms of variational principles is outlined with specific reference to classical and quantum mechanics and field theory. Because of time irreversibility no variational principle exists for thermodynamics. In order to obtain time irreversibility molecular trajectories must be abandoned in the lowest‐level description of complex multicomponent systems. A (...) more open set of possibilities results. I suggest that this may be more consistent with a modern teleology. (shrink)

Addressing Walter Hopp’s original application of the distinction between agent-fallibility and method-fallibility to phenomenological inquiry concerning epistemic justification, I question whether these are the only two forms of fallibility that are useful or whether there are not also others that are needed. In doing so, I draw my inspiration from Husserl, who in the beginnings of his phenomenological investigations struggled with the distinction between noetic and noematic analyses. For example, in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Logical Investigations (...) he criticizes the First Investigation as having been “one-sidedly” noetically directed and as having thus neglected the noematic aspects of meaning (XVIII 13–14). Also, in an addendum to the Fifth Investigation he notes that in the transition from the First Edition to the Second he has learned to broaden the concept of “phenomenological content” to include not only the “real” ( reell ) contents (noetic, subjective) of consciousness but also the “intentional” (noematic, objective) (XIX/1 411). The fact that, in gradually moving from consciousness (noesis) to what consciousness is of (noema), Husserl struggled with this distinction is an indication of the immensity of the perplexing problems and potential solutions that Hopp has led the phenomenology of knowledge into by introducing his useful notions of agent-fallibility and method-fallibility. Like Husserl, he has focused mainly and mostly on the noetic issues; like Husserl as well, I will try to move step by step from the noetic area into the noematic. I conclude that Hopp’s approach has the potential to become seminal. (shrink)

J. L. Austin's claim that language ‘used not seriously’ is ‘parasitic’ upon ‘normal use’ has proved a puzzle to literary scholars, who have often taken this to mean that they are not allowed to apply the insights of speech-act theory to their own object of research. This article explores how, when read together, Michel Serres’ definition of the parasite as a ‘thermal exciter’ and Deleuze's concept of ‘minor literature’ bring out the hidden potential inherent in Austin's claim. More specifically, the (...) article argues that Austin's reference to literature as a parasitic entity might become a promising conceptual gift, allowing us to generate a new model for approaching the world-shaping potential of literary texts. (shrink)

Many methods are used in research on complexity. One of these is qualitative comparative analysis. Although many authors allude to the relationships between complexity and QCA, these links are rarely made explicit. We propose that one way of doing so is by using critical realism as a meta-framework. This article discusses the viability of this approach by examining the extent to which QCA is a complexity-informed method. This question is answered in three steps. First, we discuss the nature of complexity (...) and its epistemological implications. Second, we focus on Bhaskar’s perspective on critical realism and show how it can be used as a framework for understanding social complexity. Third, we examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying QCA and synthesize these with our critical realist approach to complexity. We argue that complex reality is non-decomposable, contingent, non-compressible and time-asymmetric. We conclude that, although QCA is inevitably reductive and partial, its core premises are built upon the notions of contingency and time-asymmetry. Therefore, it is not only a powerful method for doing complexity-informed research, but is also a complexity-informed method by itself. (shrink)

Masturbation is a neglected topic in debates around biopower and biopolitics. This article takes Michel Foucault’s recasting of the idea of a regulatory, population-level form of biopower in terms of ‘mechanisms of security’ as its starting point for an investigation into the ways in which bodies enter into and are reshaped by biopolitical discourses on masturbation. While the notion of security faded from view in favour of Foucault’s better known focus on governmentality, this article argues that there is value in (...) recovering the concept of security in the context of a genealogy of modern bodies. Specifically, it explores the possibility that a biopolitical perspective on security operates not only above, but also below the disciplining of individual masturbating bodies. The article proceeds, initially, via an examination of contemporary studies of masturbation, arguing that they largely neglect the material dynamism of bodies. The main focus, however, is on rereading some of the key works in the historical anti-masturbation literature from a complexity perspective. It is shown that these texts engage with a ‘population’ of vital forces and affects that must be regulated if life is to remain secure, and which circulate below the level of individual bodies in relation to a complex milieu. Finally, the article claims that men’s bodies appear as crucial sites of biopolitics, and that normative forms of masculinity can be regarded as interventions into embodiment that are designed to nullify or regulate complexity. (shrink)

This paper explores the thermodynamic property ‘entropy’ as a metaphor for aesthetics and politics, law and resistance in the case of the Summer Riots 2011. The aim of the paper is to use the framework and structure of entropy to demonstrate a political aesthetics of property. This shall be done by firstly linking entropy with aesthetic concepts of order, disorder, symmetry and equilibrium. Works on complex adaptive systems to account for collective behaviour, combined with Benjaminian and Adornian accounts of the (...) commodity, shall be used alongside the relevance of crowd theory in explaining not the riots themselves but the sentencing of collectivity in the case of R v Blackshaw & Others [2011] EWCA Crim 2312. Following Rancière and the arts and crafts movement, utility and beauty, the breaking down of the divisions of art, life, philosophy and science are summarised as the lesson of entropy for law. This re-visiting of the Summer Riots 2011 hopes to re-evaluate the sentencing procedures in light of ‘Riot-Related Offending’ through an aesthetic politics of collectivity, property and commodity. (shrink)

While complexity science is gaining interest among educational theorists, its constructs do not speak to educational responsibility or related core issues in education of power and ethics. Yet certain themes of complexity, as taken up in educational theory, can help unsettle the more controlling and problematic discourses of educational responsibility such as the potential to limit learning and subjectivity or to prescribe social justice. The purpose of this article is to critically examine complexity science against notions of responsibility in terms (...) of implications for education. First, themes of complexity science prominent in contemporary educational writing are explained. Then dilemmas of responsibility in complexity are explored, such as what forms and meanings responsibility can have in a ‘complexified’ perspective of education, how care for others is mobilised, and how desire can be understood. Analyses of ethical action grounded in complexity science are then examined, as well as theories of the ethical subject and participatory responsibility that are congruent with certain tenets of a complexity ontology. Finally, the possibility of an educational vision of responsibility animated by complexity theories is considered, drawing from related writings of Bai, Biesta, Derrida, Levinas and Varela. (shrink)

One of the main functions that introductory chemistry courses have fulfilled during the past century has been to provide evidence for the general validity of 'the atomic hypothesis.' A second function has been to demonstrate that an analytical approach has wide applicability in rationalizing many kinds of phenomena. Following R.G. Collingwood, these two functions can be recognized as related to a philosophical 'cosmology' (worldview, weltanshauung) that became dominant in the later Renaissance. Recent developments in many areas of science, and in (...) chemistry, have emphasized the central importance of understanding synthetic, developmental, and evolutionary aspects of nature. This paper argues that these scientific developments, and changes in other aspects of culture, amount to a widespread shift to an alternative cosmology, a quite different general worldview. To the extent that this is the case, introductory chemistry courses ought to be changed in fundamental ways. Rather that having a main focus on analysis to microscopic components, introductory chemistry instruction should emphasize current scientific understanding of the (synthetic) evolutionary origins of the present world. This altered approach would provide good preparation for future professional work, while also making better contact with the perceived concerns of students. (shrink)

This paper recommends that chemistry educators shift to a different ‘idea of nature’, an alternative ‘worldview.’ Much of contemporary science and technology deals in one way or another with dynamic coherences that display novel and important properties. The notion of how the world works that such studies and practices generate (and require) is quite different from the earlier concepts that are now integrated into science education. Eventual success in meeting contemporary technological and social challenges requires general diffusion of an overall (...) outlook that focuses on creative generation of novel and useful coherences, replacing a worldview that concentrates on analysis of pre-existing items to minimum constituents. Such a shift in emphasis would amount to general adoption of a new basic model of how nature functions. Chemistry educators can and should provide leadership for this urgently-needed development. (shrink)

The study of world politics in theoretical and empirical terms has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest in the question of complexity, drawing upon complexity theory; particularly, renewed interest in emergent properties and the aleatory nature of the political. This article seeks to demonstrate, primarily via an exploration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the possibilities for a type of thinking about the ‘international’ that utilises the notion of social complexity as its primary mode of enframing the (...) major dimensions to world politics. As such it argues for a theoretical reconceptualisation of the system of states, markets and societies as individual and overlapping scale-entities, each possessing causal agency, with overlapping and enmeshed boundaries, situated in their historical and concrete manifestations. The reified concepts of polity, economy and society are re-cast in the language of assemblage theory as ordering, exchanging and cohering, thus highlighting process in world politics and providing a theoretical base better equipped to cope with complex social processes and practices. And this I conclude clears the way to re-situate international space theoretically as a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

In this paper, we aim at an exercise that is transdisciplinary, involving science and religion, and interdisciplinary, involving disciplines and theories which appeared in the second half of the 20th century. The latter required the reformulation of quantum mechanics theories starting with the beginning of the century, based on the substance-energy-information triangle. We focus on information and we also attempt a transdisciplinary approach to the imaginary from a psychological - physical - mathematical perspective, but the religious perspectives find their place (...) along with the philosophical or even philological vision. (shrink)

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space (...) of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history, the ‘social body’, the society of generalized communication, multi‐media culture, and computerization. (shrink)

This article looks at the prevalent view of time in the history of Western philosophy and science and then contrasts it with the emerging new vision of time as ontologically constructive. Throughout Western history, philosophers and scientists attempted to marginalize and anesthetize the role of time by prioritizing being over becoming. But beginning with the Darwinian revolution in biology, the West could no longer deny the constructive role of time in bringing forth new ontological orders. While the 20th century witnessed (...) the split between the reversible time of physics and the developmental time of biology, the time has now come for this divide to be reconciled. Twenty-first century science is already revealing the constructive role of time in cosmology with the likelihood of multiple universes. In conclusion, the authors speculate that our moment in human cultural development is ripe for a complex, multidimensional, and transdisciplinary understanding of time. (shrink)

There are a number of problematic features within the current treatment of time in physical theories, including the “timelessness” of the Universe as encapsulated by the Wheeler–DeWitt equation. This paper considers one particular investigation into resolving this issue; a conditional probability interpretation that was first proposed by Page and Wooters. Those authors addressed the apparent timelessness by subdividing a faux Universe into two entangled parts, “the clock” and “the remainder of the Universe”, and then synchronizing the effective dynamics of the (...) two subsystems by way of conditional probabilities. The current treatment focuses on the possibility of using a realistic clock system; namely, a coherent-state description of a damped harmonic oscillator. This clock proves to be consistent with the conditional probability interpretation; in particular, a standard evolution operator is identified with the position of the clock playing the role of time for the rest of the Universe. Restrictions on the damping factor are determined and, perhaps contrary to expectations, the optimal choice of clock is not necessarily one of minimal damping. (shrink)

Many contemporary theologies have given considerable attention to the inbreaking work of God whereby the Spirit imbues creation with life and vitality, but in the process the seriousness of the destructive forces that plague the world has been overlooked. This oversight not only has significant theological consequences, but it also generates a tension with scientific postulates about physical reality. Paradoxically, increasing complexity, including emergent life systems, arise in spite of the overarching conditions. I posit from a theological perspective that the (...) Spirit acts within the world to generate pockets of organization out of disorder. The Spirit not only was present and active at initial creation but also continues to act within the cosmos, sustaining the natural order and giving rise to innovative acts of creation. The world, which groans for and anticipates transformation, experiences local decreases in entropy as proleptic events of God's inbreaking kingdom. This theological hypothesis provides the framework for considering an eschatological response to the world's decay. (shrink)

‘Taking time seriously’ is an enduring human concern and questions about the nature of time bear heavily on the meaning of childhood. In the context of the continuing debates on readiness for school, ‘taking time seriously’ has contributed to policies on ‘early interventions’ which claim to support children in reaching their full potential but limit this potential when enacted in practice. Much of current policymaking takes the meaning of time for granted within a ‘quantitative’ view of time as a neutral, (...) standardised parameter. In everyday educational practice, this view of time may lead to an excessive preoccupation with assessing standardised characteristics of ‘school ready’ children, who are expected to follow a uniform path of development predetermined by their biological clock. However, the quantitative view of time has been challenged both in philosophical and scientific thought by an understanding of time as complex, irreversible and emergent in the present. George Herbert Mead’s ‘philosophy of the present’ and Ilya Prigogine’s ‘arrow of time’ point to important implications of a ‘complex’ view of time for readiness for school as an event rather than a fixed set of characteristics that children should possess upon entry to primary school. Engaging in educational practice as it unfolds in the present also calls for ethics that are not focused on adhering to fixed moral universals but on our actions ‘here and now’ and attending to the ethical meaning that arises in children’s responses to our actions. (shrink)

Infinite idealizations appear in our best scientific explanations of phase transitions. This is thought by some to be paradoxical. In this paper I connect the existing literature on the phase transition paradox to work on the concept of indispensability, which arises in discussions of realism and anti-realism within the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mathematics. I formulate a version of the phase transition paradox based on the idea that infinite idealizations are explanatorily indispensable to our best science, and (...) so ought to attract a realist attitude. I go on to offer a solution to the paradox by drawing a distinction between two types of indispensability: constructive and substantive indispensability. I argue that infinite idealizations are constructively indispensable to explanations of phase transitions, but not substantively indispensable. This helps to resolve the paradox, I maintain, since realist commitment tracks substantive, and not constructive, indispensability. (shrink)

The new science of Complexity explains that limited knowledge prevents societies from predicting and controlling their developments. But Complexity further suggests that nature uses the limits of knowledge to evolve, which turns an apparent obstacle into an opportunity to reevaluate governmental institutions. As in nature, the limits of knowledge lead social systems to evolve by individuating, liberating, and empowering their members. Societies individuate and liberate their members to probe environments and exploit opportunities. Societies empower individuals to globalize their findings which (...) requires constitutionally constraining governmental powers. Societies that respect human rights thus gain selective advantage. Showing that what nature is models what societies ought to be, Complexity may finesse the "naturalistic fallacy" of Hume and Moore. (shrink)

(2000). Machines and meaning: Technological autonomy and social adaptation. World Futures: Vol. 55, Challenges of Evolution at the Turn of the Millennium: Part II: The Chllenges of Civilizational Transition, pp. 71-90.

Constantin Caratheodory offered the first systematic and contradiction free formulation of thermodynamics on the basis of his mathematical work on Pfaff forms. Moreover, his work on measure theory provided the basis for later improved formulations of thermodynamics and physics of continua where extensive variables are measures and intensive variables are densities. Caratheodory was the first to see that measure theory and not topology is the natural tool to understand the difficulties (ergodicity, approach to equilibrium, irreversibility) in the Foundations of Statistical (...) Physics. He gave a measure-theoretic proof of Poincaré's recurrence theorem in 1919. This work paved the way for Birkhoff to identify later ergodicity as metric transitivity and for Koopman and von Neumann to introduce spectral analysis of dynamical systems in Hilbert spaces. Mixing provided an explanation of the approach to equilibrium but not of irreversibility. The recent extension of spectral theory of dynamical systems to locally convex spaces, achieved by the Brussels–Austin groups, gives new nontrivial time asymmetric spectral decompositions for unstable and/or non-integrable systems. In this way irreversibility is resolved in a natural way. (shrink)

. Values in the cultural timescapes of science. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 385-402.

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)

В монографии представлены несколько смысловых блоков, связанных с восприятием и интерпретацией человеком исторического бытия. Ранние греческие мыслители пытались получить доступ к исходникам (началам) бытия, и эти интенции легли в основу научного знания, а также привели к появлению метафизики. В классической (и в неклассической) метафизике за основу была принята догма Пифагора и Платона о неизменности подлинной реальности, из чего следовало отрицание бытийного характера времени. Автор монографии отказывается от этой догмы и предлагает стратегию обновления метафизики и перехода ее к новому — постнеклассическому (...) — этапу. Поскольку трансформационный потенциал реальности наиболее явно представлен в историческом становлении, авторская стратегия реализуется в метафизике истории. При этом выявляются начала истории, в каком качестве выступают «дух», «культурно-историческая матрица» и «метафизический проект организации бытия» («онтологический проект»). Исследуются формы и механизмы «работы» человека с прошлым, обсуждаются вопросы, связанные с постижением логики исторического процесса, а также с ролью (творческой) личности в истории. Анализируются причины цивилизационных кризисов и очерчиваются возможные пути их разрешения, предлагается метафизическая интерпретация социальных и военных конфликтов. Завершает исследование рассмотрение трансформации человеческого естества под влиянием информационных, био- и нанотехнологий. (shrink)

Morphological Computation is based on the observation that biological systems seem to carry out relevant computations with their morphology (physical body) in order to successfully interact with their environments. This can be observed in a whole range of systems and at many different scales. It has been studied in animals – e.g., while running, the functionality of coping with impact and slight unevenness in the ground is "delivered" by the shape of the legs and the damped elasticity of the muscle-tendon (...) system – and plants, but it has also been observed at the cellular and even at the molecular level – as seen, for example, in spontaneous self-assembly. The concept of morphological computation has served as an inspirational resource to build bio-inspired robots, design novel approaches for support systems in health care, implement computation with natural systems, but also in art and architecture. As a consequence, the field is highly interdisciplinary, which is also nicely reflected in the wide range of authors that are featured in this e-book. We have contributions from robotics, mechanical engineering, health, architecture, biology, philosophy, and others. (shrink)

Can literature make it possible to represent histories that are otherwise ineffable? Making use of the Deleuzian concept of “the powers of the false,” Doro Wiese offers readings of three novels that deal with the Shoah, with colonialism, and with racialized identities. She argues that Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing are novels in which a space for unvoiced, silent, or silenced difference is created. Seen through (...) the lens of Deleuze and his collaborators’ philosophy, literature is a means for mediating knowledge and affects about historical events. Going beyond any simple dichotomy between true and untrue accounts of what “really” happened in the past, literature’s powers of the false incite readers to long for a narrative space in which painful or shameful stories can be included. (shrink)

Complexity theory has become a major influence in discussions about the theory and practice of education. This book focuses on a question which so far has received relatively little attention in such discussions, which is the question of the politics of complexity. The chapters in this book engage with this question in a range of different ways. Whereas some contributions make a case for the promotion of complexity in education, others focus more explicitly on questions concerning the reduction of complexity (...) in and through education. The chapters do so using theoretical, historical and empirical arguments, paying attention to a range of different educational settings (including early childhood education, school education, post-compulsory education, lifelong learning and work-based education), and focusing on different aspects of these practices (such as curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, architecture, and management). Taken together the chapters not only reveal the potential of complexity for engaging with questions about the politics of education in new and different ways. They also provide examples of a more reflexive engagement with the politics of complexity in education itself. The book will be of interest to scholars in the fields of education studies, curriculum studies, curriculum theory, educational theory, educational policy, and philosophy of education. It should also be of interest to practitioners in more specialised fields such as early childhood education, school education, post-compulsory education, work-based education and lifelong learning. (shrink)

This thesis seeks to understand the nature of and relation between science and philosophy articulated in the early work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It seeks to challenge the view that Deleuze’s metaphysical and metaphilosophical position is in important part an attempt to respond to twentieth century developments in the natural sciences, claiming that this is not a plausible interpretation of Deleuze’s early thought. The central problem identified with such readings is that they provide an insufficient explanation of the (...) nature of philosophy’s contribution to the encounter between philosophy and science that they discern in Deleuze’s work. The philosophical, as opposed to scientific, dimension of the position attributed to Deleuze remains obscure. In chapter 1, it is demonstrated that this question of philosophy’s contribution to intellectual life and of how to differentiate philosophy from the sciences is a live one in Deleuze’s early thought. An alternative, less anachronistic interpretation of the parameters of Deleuze’s early project is offered. The remaining chapters of the thesis examine the early Deleuze’s understanding of the divergence between philosophy and science. Chapter 2 gives an account of Deleuze’s metaphilosophy, alongside a reconstruction of his largely implicit early understanding of science. The divergent intellectual processes and motivating concerns that account for Deleuze’s understanding of the differentiation of science and philosophy are thus clarified. In chapter 3, Deleuze’s use of mathematical and physical concepts is examined. It is argued that these concepts are used metaphorically. In chapter 4, the association between modern science and the Deleuzian concept of immanence that has been proposed by some Deleuze scholars is examined and ultimately challenged. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the significance of Deleuze’s early work for contemporary debates concerning the future of continental philosophy and the nature of philosophy more generally. (shrink)

The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal Is Bringing Science and Spirit Together by Charles T. Tart. Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality by Logi Gunnarsson. Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena by Hereward Carrington. Can the Mind Survive beyond Death? In Pursuit of Scientific Evidence by Satwant K. Pasricha. Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation by Rupert Sheldrake. “Why AI Is a Dangerous Dream,” (...) Opinion, Interview with Noel Sharkey by Nic Fleming. (shrink)

In 1675, Burchard de Volder became the first university physics professor to introduce the demonstration of experiments into his lectures and to create a special university classroom, The Leiden Physics Theatre, for this specific purpose. This is surprising for two reasons: first, early pre-Newtonian experiment is commonly associated with Italy and England, and second, de Volder is committed to Cartesian philosophy, including the view that knowledge gathered through the senses is subject to doubt, while that deducted from first principles is (...) certain. On the surface, it is curious that such a man would bring experiments to university physics. After all, in demonstrating experiments to his students, he was teaching them through their senses, not reason. However, if we consider the institutional context of de Volder’s teaching, we come to see de Volder’s Cartesian experimentalism as representative of a certain form of pre-Newtonian Dutch Cartesian science, as well as part of a larger tradition of teaching through observation at the University of Leiden. Considering de Volder’s institutional context will help us see that de Volder’s experimentalism was not in spite of his Cartesianism, but motivated by it. This paper will describe de Volder’s physics curriculum, the Theatre in which it was taught and how his work predates similar efforts in other European Universities. The second part will consider three aspects of the culture at the University of Leiden: a tradition of teaching through observation, a particular reception of Cartesianism, and an eclectic approach to the New Philosophy. The concluding portion shows how de Volder would have understood his enterprise in Cartesian terms. (shrink)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2008.

The scientific worldview is based on laws, which are supposed to be certain, objective, and independent of time and context. The narrative worldview found in literature, myth and religion, is based on stories, which relate the events experienced by a subject in a particular context with an uncertain outcome. This paper argues that the concept of “agent”, supported by the theories of evolution, cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, allows us to reconcile scientific and narrative perspectives. An agent follows a course (...) of action through its environment with the aim of maximizing its fitness. Navigation along that course combines the strategies of regulation, exploitation and exploration, but needs to cope with often-unforeseen diversions. These can be positive (affordances, opportunities), negative (disturbances, dangers) or neutral (surprises). The resulting sequence of encounters and actions can be conceptualized as an adventure. Thus, the agent appears to play the role of the hero in a tale of challenge and mystery that is very similar to the "monomyth", the basic storyline that underlies all myths and fairy tales according to Campbell [1949]. This narrative dynamics is driven forward in particular by the alternation between prospect (the ability to foresee diversions) and mystery (the possibility of achieving an as yet absent prospect), two aspects of the environment that are particularly attractive to agents. This dynamics generalizes the scientific notion of a deterministic trajectory by introducing a variable “horizon of knowability”: the agent is never fully certain of its further course, but can anticipate depending on its degree of prospect. (shrink)

The foundation of irreversible, probabilistic time -- the classical time of conscious observation -- is the reversible and deterministic time of the quantum wave function. The tendency in physics is to regard time in the abstract, a mere parameter devoid of inherent direction, implying that a concept of real time begins with irreversibility. In reality time has no need for irreversibility, and every invocation of time implies becoming or flow. Neither symmetry under time reversal, of which Newton was well aware, (...) nor the absence of an absolute parameter, as in relativity, negates temporal passage. Far from encapsulating time, irreversibility is a secondary property dependent on the emergence of distinct moments from the ceaseless presence charted by the wave function. (shrink)

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of such (...) a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination. (shrink)

My objective in this article is to question whether the problem of free will can, within our current conceptual system, be framed coherently. It is already widely recognized that a mental faculty, the will, needed to initiate action, no longer fits with current thought. However, we can still ask whether human decisions and actions are determined by something other than the agent. So the important question is whether we still have a cogent concept of determinism. The two prevalent alternatives are (...) a closed set of deterministic laws of nature, and a simple distillation of the principle of sufficient reason: all events must have a cause. I first provide examples showing that philosophical concepts come and go as categorial frameworks change. The modern concept of deterministic laws of nature was developed during the latter half of the modern period and is now being called seriously into question. G. W. Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason could only be justified in theological terms, which most contemporary Western scholars reject. I end with an inadequate account of a dawning worldview based on complex adaptive systems theory, in which most human actions are best described in terms of non-necessitating propensities. (shrink)

It should now be recognized that codes are central to life and to understanding its more complex forms, including human culture. Recognizing the ‘conventional’ nature of codes provides solid grounds for rejecting efforts to reduce life to biochemistry and justifies according a place to semantics in life. The question I want to consider is whether this is enough. Focussing on Eigen’s paradox of how a complex code could originate, I will argue that along with Barbieri’s efforts to account for the (...) origins of life based on the ribosome and then to account for the refined codes through a process of ambiguity reduction, something more is required. Barbieri has not provided an adequate account of emergence, or the basis for providing such an account. I will argue that Stanley Salthe has clarified to some extent the nature of emergence by conceptualizing it as the interpolation of new enabling constraints. Clearly, codes can be seen as enabling constraints. How this actually happens, though, is still not explained. Stuart Kauffman has grappled with this issue and shown that it radically challenges the assumptions of mainstream science going back to Newton. He has attempted to reintroduce real possibilities or potentialities into his ontology, and argued that radically new developments in nature are associated with realizing adjacent possibles. This is still not adequate. What is also involved, I will suggest, utilizing concepts developed by the French natural philosopher Gilbert Simondon, is ‘transduction’ as part of ‘ontogenesis’ of individuals in a process of ‘individuation’, that is, the emergence of ‘individuals’ from preindividual fields or milieux. (shrink)

In the last decade, Systems Biology has emerged as a conceptual and explanatory alternative to reductionist-based approaches in molecular biology. However, the foundations of this new discipline need to be fleshed out more carefully. In this paper, we claim that a relational ontology is a necessary tool to ground both the conceptual and explanatory aspects of Systems Biology. A relational ontology holds that relations are prior—both conceptually and explanatory—to entities, and that in the biological realm entities are defined primarily by (...) the context they are embedded within—and hence by the web of relations they are part of. (shrink)

Because an unmeasured quantum system consists of information — neither tangible existence nor its complete absence — no property can be assigned a definite value, only a range of likely values should it be measured. The instantaneous transition from information to matter upon measurement establishes a gradient between being and not-being. A quantum system enters a determinate state in a particular moment until this moment is past, at which point the system resumes its default state as an evolving superposition of (...) potential values of properties, neither strictly being nor not-being. Like a “self-organized” chemical system that derives energy from breaking down environmental gradients, a quantum system derives information from breaking down the ontological gradient. An organism is a body in the context of energy and a mind in the context of information. (shrink)

Cognitive sciences as an interdisciplinary field, involving scientific disciplines (such as computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, economics, etc.), philosophical disciplines (philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, analytic philosophy, etc.) and engineering (notably knowledge engineering), have a vast theoretical and practical content, some even conflicting. In this interdisciplinary context and on computational modeling, ontologies play a crucial role in communication between disciplines and also in a process of innovation of theories, models and experiments in cognitive sciences. We propose a model for (...) this process here. An ontological commitment is advocated as the framework of a scientific realism, which leads computational modeling to search for more realistic models, for a complex systems perspective of nature and cognition. In that way multiagent modeling of complex systems has been fulfilling an important role. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought (...) within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws. (shrink)

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2012.

Chemistry is typically considered to be a nomothetic science, i.e. a science interested in general laws rather than historical facts. Also, the unification of science is usually envisioned as an effort to connect particular scientific disciplines through their laws, e.g., the laws of chemistry are to be derived from the laws of physics. It is however equally sensible to combine the sciences through a single cosmic history. There is a large literature following this direction, albeit rarely focused on chemistry. In (...) this paper some ideas concerning the possible role of a 'historical' (or 'idiographic') chemistry are presented, with special attention to the notion of a 'genetic' classification of chemical compounds, and to the counterintuitive proposition that many major branches of physics may in fact be explained by chemistry, not the opposite. (shrink)

This second part of a two-part essay discusses recent developments in the Brussels-Austin Group after the mid 1980s. The fundamental concerns are the same as in their similarity transformation approach (see Part I), but the contemporary approach utilizes rigged Hilbert space (whereas the older approach used Hilbert space). While the emphasis on nonequilibrium statistical mechanics remains the same, the use of similarity transformations shifts to the background. In its place arose an interest in the physical features of large Poincaré systems, (...) nonlinear dynamics and the mathematical tools necessary to analyze them. (shrink)