Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

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interaction, such as your foot kicking a desk, gives rise to a mental experience, pain. Further, a mental state, such as wanting to write a certain word, gives rise to the physical appearance of the word on a page. How does this interaction between the mental and the physical take place? It is the size, shape, and mass of one object that lets it act on another. If ideas have no physical properties, how can they give rise to physical movements, such as writing? This problem of interaction seems to plague the move to include nonmaterial things in the universe. Descartes tried to solve this problem anatomically, positing spirits that carried news of the physical world to the brain and sent out the brain’s commands to the body. Of course, this view is incorrect, but the central metaphysical question remains: Is there a single sort of thing in but the idea reality, just material, or is there some other sort of entity? For Descartes, this “other sort of entity” was a soul and was particular to humans. Over time, living things were held to possess what the French philosopher Henri Bergson called an (“vital force” or “vital impulse”) or what the German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer called the will to be. Living things have a will that nonliving things do not. © wildpixel/iStock/Thinkstock. 90
see from CAT scans that when someone has a certain kind of thought, a certain area of the brain is active. There is, thus, a correlation between a state of the brain and a human experience, but the dualist will say that this correlation is a relation between two different things. The materialist, someone who contends that there is only one sort of metaphysical entity and that reality is strictly material, must hold that brain states and mind states are the same thing, that they are different descriptions of the same occurrence. One physicist who made the case that consciousness is nonmaterial was Eugene Wigner. He was concerned with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. As we’ve said, when a quantum system is not observed, it occupies a state of superposition; it is in a combination of every possible state it could occupy. But the instant we observe the system, it collapses into one state. The Schrödinger equation but the best we get is a probability. We have a physical law in the Schrödinger equation that always holds, except when we look. Wigner sought to determine what it is about us looking that causes the violation of the physical law. Quantum systems become entangled. If two electrons bounce off each other, we may be able to label them as A and B coming in, but we cannot say which one is A or B coming out. The two electrons cease to be independent things but, rather, are just disturbances in the reality of the things themselves is lost; we can describe only the system as a whole. 91
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Topic Philosophy & Intellectual His
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Steven Gimbel, Ph.D. Professor of P
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Table of Contents LECTURE 11 Dark M
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Table of Contents SUPPLEMENTAL MATE
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: I and technological a
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This question allows us to turn fro
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The study of reality is what philos
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Semmelweis noticed that the inciden
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ut sometimes, even after checking t
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. The Matrix. We don’t believe
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Wisdom comes from rejecting the imp
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Thus, Aristotle’s prime mover, th
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Aristotle had said that an object
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For centuries, mathematics was cons
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th century, the Russian mathematici
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had turned their attention to logic
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Abbott, . Bell, Men of Mathematics.
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Scientists thought that the physica
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H. A. Lorentz had found, when you a
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Thinkers as far back as Gottfried L
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E grounds. First, the prin
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If you woke up tomorrow in a small
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speed up going in and slow down com
Page 47 and 48: Is it true that a difference that m
Page 49 and 50: Einstein thought, there would be lo
Page 51 and 52: Scientists largely hated this idea,
Page 53 and 54: If Gamow and Alpher’s work was ri
Page 55 and 56: Although physicists at the end of t
Page 57 and 58: In the 19 th century, there was the
Page 59 and 60: In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell publis
Page 61 and 62: The idea of a large central mass at
Page 63 and 64: We know, however, that for a given
Page 65 and 66: whether light is a particle or a wa
Page 67 and 68: is a particle, then the slits would
Page 69 and 70: One of the early results of quantum
Page 71 and 72: eams, we also knew that there were
Page 73 and 74: The hadrons are made up of quarks,
Page 75 and 76: As the meaning of the physics began
Page 77 and 78: The demon is a being with a super-i
Page 79 and 80: ignoring certain elements, we can c
Page 81 and 82: One of the simplest fractal pattern
Page 83 and 84: Earlier, we talked about Thomas Kuh
Page 85 and 86: so greatly separated that no proces
Page 87 and 88: een able to form in that environmen
Page 89 and 90: Nicolson, . Panek, . Our theories
Page 91 and 92: Similarly, James Clerk Maxwell, in
Page 93 and 94: But as we move away from the pole,
Page 95 and 96: Great press has been given to a pot
Page 97: Some people take the idea of a theo
Page 101 and 102: Because we are just atoms, we, too,
Page 103 and 104: Would the randomness of quantum mec
Page 105 and 106: Aristotle thought that this world i
Page 107 and 108: If you select strange enough traits
Page 109 and 110: Although this aspect of the theory
Page 111 and 112: Darwin posited that children look l
Page 113 and 114: The key to understanding how we pas
Page 115 and 116: This picture of illness is quite di
Page 117 and 118: How much of who we are is determine
Page 119 and 120: inferred that the function of that
Page 121 and 122: a byproduct of mental illness, Freu
Page 123 and 124: With the genetic approach, we are w
Page 125 and 126: After Freud, psychology developed i
Page 127 and 128: experiences that are not our own, t
Page 129 and 130: Behaviorism was an attempt to make
Page 131 and 132: Psychology, which had begun as a se
Page 133 and 134: I th century, psychology had the lu
Page 135 and 136: part, in the group. To understand t
Page 137 and 138: acting in ways that showed a lack o
Page 139 and 140: has learned from the so-called barb
Page 141 and 142: led him to begin one of the most fa
Page 143 and 144: ules. We are now adult in our ethic
Page 145 and 146: In a contract-based relationship, y
Page 147 and 148: The study of psychology changed for
Page 149 and 150:
Instead, we are a part of the world
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But it turns out that exposure to c
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Glickstein, . Lynch, . mean we
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But evolutionary psychologists Leda
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suited to solving these problems an
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As such, when we look at the innate
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In looking at reality, we can exami
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We see this also in the writings of
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one universal is crime. Crime is no
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To avoid such situations of anomie
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Historians create narratives that e
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Society is composed of individuals
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© Digital Vision/Thinkstock.
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The concept of race has long been a
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there are different combinations am
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Perhaps race is what Durkheim calle
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Gould, . Hernnstein and Murray, . K
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Slavery, for example, was a necessa
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Parsons’s picture is not the Marx
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In defeat, the smaller neighbors wo
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Economics became a science with the
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self-interest. Second, the large-sc
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Under the classical model, this sho
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How do we account for these effects
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If the star is large enough, when i
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© amenic181/iStock/Thinkstock.
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What environment on Earth could pro
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The possibility of life on other pl
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Our newfound alien interlocutors te
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Perhaps the best evidence for extra
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Mayor and Frei, . Morrison, Billing
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It has long been argued, however, t
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But the idea of using the body’s
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Although that seems worrisome, it i
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I equally much for how w
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The use of one’s DNA in creating
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With cytoplasmic transfer, the nucl
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Macintosh, . Given that multiple
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we could begin with the desired por
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The second step is trickier. Here,
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Aside from medical uses, we can alt
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We can now use medical technology t
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The problem here is that sometimes
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of disease and disorder. In America
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performance-enhancing drugs? We see
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Advances have led to hand-shaped ap
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Warwick then went a step further. H
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Scientists at MIT have taken DNA fr
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Computers can do many things, but c
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possible right answers. The machine
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player having a king and a pawn and
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If intelligence or sentience is an
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enable us to become a global villag
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engineers used their technological
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Another intriguing development on t
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In these lectures, we’ve seen tha
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leave messages or comments, and whe
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This ability of mothers doesn’t m
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But Einstein showed us that the rea
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Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: Th
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———. The Descent of Man: and
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Gilligan, Carol. . Cambridg
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Kramer, Peter. . New York: Viking
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eings that we are willing to act in
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Rothman, Sheila M. Medical Enhance
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———. . London: Century, 2002.
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