Summary of the blog on the major debates in the physical and human sciences.
Consciousness
There are two postures for dealing with consciousness: 1) in the first person, as an intimately experienced sensation; 2) in the third person, as an analyst of the phenomenon. These two postures are not concurrent. They determine a complementary double look, that examining the constitution of the phenomenon, and that verifying that the explanations correspond to the sensations experienced. Science, remarkable for explanations, does not account for the phenomenon. This is the “hard problem” of consciousness. The impression is not that of neurons exchanging excitations but of multiple meanings and qualities.
These qualities seem to us endowed with intention and causality, which is contested by a reductionist fringe of science, called eliminativist, which makes consciousness an illusion. I call eliminativism flatism, because it considers complexity as incidental, a simple emanation of micromechanisms. On the contrary, I argue that the complex dimension is fundamental to explain material and virtual phenomena, and to understand their independence. See consciousness summary…
Determinism and indeterminism
Some things seem perfectly determined to us, others more uncertain, but we think that more precise knowledge about them would make them determined. Then quantum physics came to make indeterminacy a fundamental principle of reality. How can these two contradictory views be reconciled?
The synthesis goes through the articles on the subject, up to a conclusion which largely impacts the other great debates: the determination of something is born at every moment from the balance between the probabilities of its different possible meanings. Each set of indeterminations is determined in an interaction that becomes a new possibility. See the synthesis…
Complex dimension
The existence of a complex dimension, more fundamental than any other framework, is at the origin of the theories presented on this site. Complexity is commonly seen as an offshoot of the micromechanisms of reality and mathematics. Every scientific discipline grapples with the complexity of a part of the world and tries to trace it back to fundamental models. But all these complexities are part of a single continuous dimension. Is complexity generated by mathematics or only described by it, as a language? I support the second hypothesis.
The splits between disciplines handicap the search for transcendental principles unifying the complex dimension. Complexity is not recognized as a discipline in its own right, likely to be more fundamental than physics. Here you will find the articles that seek to fill these gaps and to make the complex dimension the true framework of a monistic and non-reductive reality, including all the phenomena that we can observe.
Double look
The double gaze, which we have used to understand consciousness, is not only a tool of knowledge. It has a neurological foundation, which gives it a material as well as virtual foundation. The double gaze is that which the Spirit and Real poles of our mental universe exchange. The Spirit pole receives all the intrinsic perceptions of the body, builds an identity image, the self. The Real pole receives extrinsic sensory information, which builds an independent world, the non-self.
The Spirit pole examines the regularities coming from the Real with a downward gaze (from the Self to what surrounds it). It fabricates an image of the Self in the world, which fleshes out and transforms this identity. The Real pole brings together the intentions that we attribute to the real, whose gaze is ascending (from the constitution of things to their results, of which the Self is a part).
Both gazes target unique entities, objects, people, abstractions, but show them under two aspects as contradictory as they are inseparable: 1) the constitutive aspect, micromechanisms, intrinsic relationships; 2) the resulting, fusional aspect, the stable whole which emerges, with its properties and its extrinsic relations.
No aspect, therefore, no gaze is reducible to the other. They can only coincide. The double gaze fundamentally reflects the complex, bidirectional dimension: micromechanisms that organize themselves and the result that experiences its own organization. The mind simulates this bidirectionality: simulation of the micromechanisms of the real and simulation of the resulting Self experiencing the world. By integrating the double gaze we produce the best possible simulation of reality in its entirety, including ourselves.
Sex, gender, feminism, LGBT, couple
The sex/gender duo is controversial. I present the general line of the blog, anti-partisan — it criticizes the denial of gender as well as the excesses of wokism about it. Then are summarized and listed in preferential reading order the articles of the blog about gender, sex, feminism and related activism, couple life. The most important point is the redefinition of feminine and masculine, which all genders can appropriate. The other major remark is that highlighting the cultural influences on gender does not help to release its impulses, it is on the contrary to accentuate the cultural pressure on them…
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