General

This book deals with questions of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind from the vantage point of physics. Combining general philosophy with physics, it covers such topics as the definition of matter, the nature of space, motion, gravity, electromagnetic fields, the character of physical knowledge, and consciousness and meaning. Throughout, the book maintains an historical perspective and seeks to determine how much we really know of the world described by physics. It defends a version of “structuralism”: the thesis that our knowledge is partial and merely abstract, leaving a large epistemological gap at the center of physics. The book then connects this element of mystery to parallel mysteries in relation to the mind. Consciousness emerges as just one more mystery of physics. A theory of matter and space is developed, according to which the impenetrability of matter is explained as the deletion of volumes of space. The book proposes a philosophy of science that distinguishes physics from both psychology and biology, explores the ontology of energy, and considers the relevance of physics to seemingly remote fields such as the theory of meaning. In the form of a series of aphorisms, this book presents a metaphysical system that takes laws of nature as fundamental.

Understanding the emergence of a scientific culture—one in which cognitive values generally are modelled on, or subordinated to, scientific ones—is one of the foremost historical and philosophical problems with which we are now confronted in understanding our own culture. The significance of the emergence of such scientific values lies above all in their ability to provide the criteria by which we come to appraise cognitive enquiry, which shapes our understanding of what it can achieve. The period between the 1680s and the middle of the eighteenth century is a very distinctive one in this development. It is then that we witness the emergence of the idea that scientific values form a model for all cognitive claims. It is also at this time that science explicitly goes beyond technical expertise and begins to articulate a world‐view designed to displace others, whether humanist or Christian. However, what occurred took place in a peculiar and overdetermined fashion, and the outcome in the mid‐eighteenth century was not the triumph of ‘reason’, as has commonly been supposed, but rather a simultaneous elevation of the standing of science and the beginnings of a serious questioning of whether science offers a comprehensive form of understanding.

Calls for a “consilient” or “vertically integrated” approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of nonhuman phenomena, rather than as something to which humanists and scientists contribute equally. The other major reason that consilience has yet to catch on in the humanities is a dearth of compelling examples of the benefits of adopting a consilient approach. This book is the product of a workshop that brought together international scholars from a variety of fields to address both these issues. It includes representative work from workshop speakers and participants that examine how adopting such a consilient stance—informed by cognitive science and grounded in evolutionary theory—would concretely impact specific topics in the humanities, studying each topic in a manner that not only cuts across the humanities-natural science divide, but also across individual humanistic disciplines. By taking seriously the fact that science-humanities integration is a two-way exchange, this volume seeks to facilitate the creation of a new, shared framework for the sciences and humanities.

This book argues that the widely accepted world view of materialist naturalism is untenable. The mind-body problem cannot be confined to the relation between animal minds and animal bodies. If materialism cannot accommodate consciousness and other mind-related aspects of reality, then we must abandon a purely materialist understanding of nature in general, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. No such explanation is available, and the physical sciences, including molecular biology, cannot be expected to provide one. The book explores these problems through a general treatment of the obstacles to reductionism, with more specific application to the phenomena of consciousness, cognition, and value. The conclusion is that physics cannot be the theory of everything.