Kevin -> RE: The Tao of Physics (Mar. 30 2015 6:07:51)
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Feynman was one of the greats, that rare breed who writes without being pedantic. In anthropology Geertz was like that. That generation seemed to be much more in tune with classical education and were able to draw from multiple historical sources to support their arguments and give depth to their work. Anyway, it is interesting that Feynman was mentioned. Although I agree with Bill and Capra that science and mysticism do not need each other, I am more interested in the effects they have on each other when they do converse, as in the annual Mind Life conversations between the Dalai Lama and scholars from different fields. Before I get to Feynman I want to bring Francisco Varela into the conversation. He was an evolutionary biologist. Although he was not a postmodernist as that term is normally understood, his conclusions resonate with many postmodern theories. He claims that perception is always perception of an individual organism and that this organism both coadapts and coevolves with the environment. This was counterintuitive in 1991 when he coauthored The Embodied Mind but is gaining proponents in cognitive science as an alternative to connectionism and cognitivism. You would have to read the book and its recent follow-up Enaction (Di Paolo et al) but I hope this suffices to contextualize where I was going. Varela claims that an individual's perceptions is shaped by its ontogenetic (natural) and phylogenetic (environmental/cultural) past. For him, as for phenomenologists and Mahayana Buddhists who he borrows from, there is no ready made world ready to be received. We interpret the world or, in his terms, we enact it based on our (epi)-genetic makeup, and our cultural past. We can never escape our cultural and individual biases completely and therefore, objectivity as it was understood before Heisenberg, is impossible. Instead, borrowing from Nagarjuna's Middle Way, Varela makes the case that everything is connected and dependent on something else and it might be fruitful to try to understand what that something else is. In the case of Feynman the "something else" is a pencil and paper. When a historian expressed his enthusiasm that Feynman had left a record of an equation he had worked out in his mind Feynman retorted that it was NOT a record, the work was not done in his head. Instead, the process is what yielded the work and the pencil and paper were a part of that process (this is related in Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind). My point is that, from the enaction perspective there is no grand narrative. There are facts, whether about flamenco or physics, but these must all be placed in an interpretive framework. Unfortunately on this forum there tends to be a trend toward mocking anything that does not fit into a grand narrative model. It is most apparent in the "He plays the best so he must know more" types of posts. I have no intention of responding to posters that do not at least skim through some of the cited works. It seems that we often talk past each other simply because we have not read the same materials. Also, please don't misinterpret my tone; I have never intended to piss members off.[;)] Oh yeah! On a final note, another point I wanted to bring up is that the "West" is borrowing heavily from the "East" now. You see it in philosophy (Garfield/Middle Way and Slingerland/WuWei), evolutionary biology (Varela), and physics, among others. This is having serious effects on our ways of thinking. For example, Cartesian dualism is on its way out; there is no West and East, no subjective/objective (subjectivity is not preferable while objectivity, except in modified/qualified form, is not possible), no nature and culture (epigenetics destroys that one as does Varela's biology). Then again, my view is not THE view.
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