reductionism
It is top-down causation that is fundamental
Abstract: The errors of top-down/teleological causality make one think that only the bottom-up/ontological has fundamental value. It is however the first which is entirely creative of our mental scenes, including by lending to reality per se its models, without having direct access to it. Bottom-up causality is fundamentally constitutive of our reality, which hovers over … Read more
Can the scientist do without a philosophy?
Abstract: The scientist, equipped only with an ontological method, is not prepared for the teleological battlefield. To face it he must choose a philosophical method. Example with the paradox of gender equality. The Monastery of Science Science is a methodology. Not a policy, not a philosophy, not even a power in itself. Its power only … Read more
The platist school
Abstract: The ways of theorizing the relationship between matter and spirit are divided into three great eras: incompatibility, assimilation, coincidence. The third starts today. 1st era: incompatibility The insoluble contrast between material and spiritual has been recognized since the dawn of humanity. The approaches used during the first era, until the middle of the twentieth … Read more
The mirage of the computational mind
Natural/artificial neurons in tandem Neuroscientists are currently very busy refining neural/mental correlations. They are helped in this by analogies with artificial neural networks, especially SSL Self-Supervised Learning. It is very easy today to record the activity of hundreds of thousands of natural neurons in response to images or spoken stories. Activation sequences are obtained. If … Read more
From hard to enlightened solipsism
Abstract: Contemporary individualism is a false impulse of individuation. This is only conceivable in the relationship with the collective. But the collective is erased from the contemporary impetus, which has become a harsh solipsism: “My mind is everything”. How to find its enlightened version? By separating the powers of the Self and the Non-Self, by … Read more
Flat physics, waiting to be re-inflated
A lack of variety Physics today is defined in three main areas: the infinitely small, the infinitely large, and what is in between. This is an infinitely serious problem. Because this definition reduces physics to a limited spatial framework, which is only one of those it uses. As if all human knowledge were reduced to … Read more
Is reality only made of waves?
Vlatko Vedral, a physicist at Oxford, argues that reality is made only of waves and that the obsolete wave-particle dualism must be completely abandoned. This position is eliminatory reductionism. It denigrates the existence of the complex dimension of reality. I will show how it reintroduces a dualism, that of reality and spirit. The reductionist discourse … Read more
The trap of the mathematical universe
The relative intransigence of quantification Let’s dive into the fundamental meaning of quantification. It implies an intransigent separation between individuations. Is the nature of this separation knowable? Yes, if we can reduce individuation to parties, whose relationships create discontinuity. The separation is therefore intransigent but not irreducible. Except by adopting foundationalism, that is, to postulate … Read more