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The Concept of Uncompromising Humanism. Hans Widmer
Читать онлайн.Название The Concept of Uncompromising Humanism
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783907625842
Автор произведения Hans Widmer
Жанр Философия
Издательство Bookwire
Ask a three-year-old who has a brother whether the latter also has a brother and he will answer no, there are only two of them. Not until a year later will he come to consider his relationship with his brother from the outside, thereby objectivising it. Small children also relate the rest of the world to themselves, for example, when they say the moon shines so they can find their way home. The cognitive development of the human race, as well as individuals, is characterised by increasingly letting go of a viewpoint defined by how the outside world affects us.
Animism in hunter-gatherer cultures projects intentions onto everything that happens in the world—clouds as an expression of the moods of the gods, these in turn being a response to human behaviour. The first turning point in intellectual history was initiated by the pre-Socratic philosophers (600–400 BC): they considered world events as something apart from divine intentions, and justified reality with reality, although spatially as well as spiritually people were still at the heart of things. This world view, to which Ptolemy (100–170 AD) put the final touches, held its ground and was supported by scholars for some 2000 years.
Giordano Bruno,
1548–1600
It was Copernicus who introduced the second turning point: the universe did not revolve around the Earth, but the Earth around the sun. His grounds for believing this were because it made it easier to understand the movement of celestial objects: “Any visible movement of the firmament with its fixed stars is not due to movement of the firmament, but as it is seen from the Earth ...” The Earth and the human race were thus shifted from the centre of all cause and purpose—a colossal attack on the word of God, the authority of the church and the understanding at that time of the self and the world. To begin with, Copernicus was not taken seriously by very many (Luther considered him a fool), but then, sixty years after the publication of his work, Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for making the same statements.
In 1905, Einstein’s theory of relativity introduced a third turning point, although this upset the a priori intuitions. It does not show that physics is thought out within the limits of human cognitive capability; nor does it show that it is a collection of abstract concepts and principles to explain the aspects phenomena have in common.
It has always been apparent contradictions that have led to new findings, in particular to a higher plane of objectivisation:
–Copernicus asked: “Why do the planets not move in the same way as the other celestial objects?”,
–Einstein asked: “Why does light arrive at c, when it would be expected to have been emitted at c + v?” (where c is the speed of light, and v is the approach velocity of the emitting light source),
–In deductive physics the equivalent would be, “If the a priori intuitions are an immutable part of the thought process, how can the results of the theory of relativity be brought into harmony with one another?”
2
Matter from the void:
dynamics of the logically essential continuum
In order to gain an idea of the world, the human brain provides the a priori intuitions as the coordinate system (like a box) and a continuum within it (like the sand in this box). The task of physics should now be to represent the material world from the elementary particles to the universe using this “sandbox”. It is a long way from achieving this, as its two completed theories comprise 75 laws and constants, and those that are still partially incomplete well over one hundred. Despite this plethora of laws and constants, the starting point for all physics—inertia and gravity—remain unexplained; its four major theories do not interconnect, as it proceeds on the basis of phenomena, measures correlations in experiments and uses these to produce laws; in other words, it proceeds inductively. Whenever phenomena appear that are not explained by the existing laws, it adopts new concepts, thus increasing the number of independent laws and constants. It countered this tendency with a constant striving for unification (the “Theory of Everything”, “Grand Unification”, etc.)—since the pre-Socratic philosophers it has been expected that the world has a single, comprehensive explanation.
Despite all its triumphs, inductive physics1 has reached a crisis point, and significant thinkers criticise its tendencies towards the esoteric, to the extent that the Higgs boson could be said to be the carpet beneath which all contradictions are swept. String Theory, in particular, has met with scepticism and even scorn—“Not even wrong”.Woit The epilogues of textbooks often contain speculation as to the need for a totally “unexpected approach” in elementary particle physics, implying that “more of the same” would be unlikely to move things forward. Instead of “bringing down the concepts of space and time from the Olympus of the a priori”, as proclaimed by Einstein in 1921, it now appears that philosophy will have to take up the task of bringing down physics from the Olympus of the inconceivable.
The starting point of deductive physics
What all the concepts and principles of physics have in common is that they are located in the realms of human understanding. In his “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), Kant stated that anyone who wants to understand the world must first explain what understanding means. The theory of relativity incorporates the movement of the observer in its laws, and quantum mechanics the effect of the observer, but they nevertheless perceive themselves to be uninvolved witnesses of an objective world.
A new “unexpected approach” must proceed on the assumption that
1.Physics is freely invented, not discovered in nature like hidden Easter eggs or the ideas of Plato (cf. Einstein’s notion that the concepts that occur in our minds are all free inventions);
2.These inventions are initially random hypotheses and only gain validity if they have passed through the eye of the experimental verification needle (like mutation and selection in evolution);
3.Space, time and causality are components of the system of thought—not of the world that is the subject-matter of that thought;
4.Perception is the basis of all knowledge—even if the most abstract mathematics is mounting up;
5.A continuum in space and time, in particular, is an inevitable necessity of thought;
6.There are hierarchies of knowledge whose higher levels do not arise from accumulation or abstraction, but—like concepts—are initially invented as hypotheses with their worth proved by the possibility that lower level laws and constants can be derived from them (hyperstases).
The logically essential continuum of deductive physics
The continuum does not remain a mere idea (as with Descartes) or something hidden away in mathematics (as with Einstein), but is the equivalent of a gas at a constant temperature2 (physics: “isothermal”), which is already implied by the equations of the theory of relativity; the continuum is specified by the fundamental constants3 c, G, and ħ and it explains that which inductive physics simply has to accept, namely why:
–Interactions do not happen instantaneously,
–Gravity and electromagnetism have the same velocity of propagation,
–Interferences at atomic distances bring about quantum mechanical phenomena,
–Interferences at distances of the magnitude of the elementary particle radius (Compton length) bring about the strong interaction.
In deductive physics, the dynamics of masses provides the starting point for all explanations of elementary particles, while inductive physics has not succeeded in bridging the gap between the macroscopic and elementary particles. N.B.: The continuum does not explain what it actually is—apart from indirectly through its functionality as a substrate for the idea of the material world. Those who can imagine the dynamics of the continuum have laid the foundations for all further understanding.
Dynamics