Reality and empathy : physics, mind, and science in the 21st century
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Reality and empathy : physics, mind, and science in the 21st century
State University of New York Press, c1984
- pbk.
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Note
Bibliography: p. 261-265
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Once in a century an overview shakes the mold of preconception and makes a world model fall into shape. This is such a book—absorbing, provocative, original, skeptical, and often very funny in spite of formidable scholarship. The focus of the book is on the change in self-perception which physics might bring about if it were made in some way empathically real to non-physicists. The common man's "existential" attitude is a product now of nineteenth-century, mechanistic models. But in pursuing this, the author lays out a comprehensive survey of impending changes in the philosophy of science, and ranges through physics, biology, mathematics, Jungian psychology, and evolutionary theory, turning also to look at other, non-Western-scientific, world models.
"In the task of reshaping the world model of scientists and others, only commitment to the discipline of science will do. It can be combined with enough controlled lunacy to bring conventionally self-evident ideas of reality into question (in mathematics this has always been a winning mixture), but it has to produce testable predictions."
"What we are now looking at is the prospect of 'Jungian physics': a physics model which also addresses the image-forming mechanism and possibly even the non-locality of mind."
"The hard-hat model of an objective reality has had to yield to a growing perception that the objective is, in form at least, a construct: what we appear to see is a function of the manner of seeing (hardly a new idea to Greek philosophy), but with the awkward complication that the cogitating I arises from the structures which it sees and orders."
Table of Contents
Preface: The Study of World Models
Introduction: The Cartesian Homunculus Revisited
One. PHYSICS, BRAINS, AND WORLD MODELS
1. The Needle, the Haystack, and the Holomovement
2. World Models: Some Eastern Melodies
3. Interval: Meet the Metaphysical Fauna
Two. MATHEMATICAL MODELS AND THE DEMONIC COMPUTER
1. Demonics: Talking to Gezumpstein
2. Interlude: Gezumpstein's Teaching Tape
3. Demonics and the Phenomenal Time-Arrow: The Nine Lives of Schroedinger's Cat
4. Commercial Break: Gezumpstein's Charmed Balloons
Three. TIME AND BIOLOGY
1. Interlude: How the Bird and the Snake Played Evolutionary Scrabble
2. The Death of Vitalism: Implicate and Explicate in Biology
Four. MIND AND THE MAKING OF MODELS
1. Mind and the Psychiatry of World Models
2. A Few Instructive Fossils
3. Some Contemporary Considerations
Five. SINGULARITIES AND THE UNFAMILIAR
1. Interlude: The Ghost of Uncle Past
2. The Rank Outsider: Is Parapsychology Real, and Does It Matter?
3. Anxiety Dream: A Born-Again Demon?
Six. PATTERNS AND ARCHETYPES
1. The Peculiar Statements Made by Dreams
2. A Psychiatric Session
Afterword
Appendix A. Iterants
Appendix B. Quantum State as Superposition
Glossary
References
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
