The World view of contemporary physics : does it need a new metaphysics?

Paavo Pylkkänen

It is my proposal that future cognitive science needs to be developed in the context of a general scientific world-view that is based upon contemporary physics. It is within such a general world-view that the special sciences studying the mind (psychology, AI, neuroscience etc.) need to find their proper place, and will hopefully find new avenues for progress when doing so. One research programme that has attempted to articulate such a new world-view is due to the physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley. They have developed both a general “implicate order” framework as well as a more specific “ontological interpretation” of quantum theory. Both schemes involve radically new ideas and concepts, which also promise to open up new possibilities for understanding the place of cognition and consciousness in nature. Within philosophy, a particularly intense attempt to develop a new world-view based on contemporary physics has recently been made by James Ladyman and Don Ross. In this article I will briefly describe some key features of these research programmes and sketch tentatively how they might change our picture of cognition in the future.

Clifford Alan Hooker

Irina A. Rybakova

W. Heisenberg's treatise “Reality and its order” is a philosophical work of a scientist and philosopher and reflects the totality of his views on various aspects of reality. In this article, the author attempts to analyze the central concepts of quantum mechanics, “state” and “time”, as well as to determine how relevant the ideas of the treatise may be in the world of modern natural science. This point seems especially important, given the time of writing the treatise (no later than 1942), which gives reason to recall the philosophical foundations on which physics rests, and give them a new interpretation that meets modern challenges. The article shows the need to build modern physics on the principles of metaphysics, that is, to study the subject of physics from the position that the world has a metaphysical basis. Statements about the nature of time by various authors are given: from ancient natural philosophers (Aristotle) to medieval thinkers (Augustine, Grossetest), as well as modern researchers (A.Yu. Sevalnikov, Yu.S. Vladimirov, V.D. Zakharov), etc.

Bernardo Kastrup

The contemporary cultural mindset posits that the world has no intrinsic semantic value. The meaning we see in it is supposedly projected onto the world by ourselves. Underpinning this view is the mainstream physicalist ontology, according to which mind is an emergent property or epiphenomenon of brains. As such, since the world beyond brains isn’t mental, it cannot a priori evoke anything beyond itself. But a consistent series of recent experimental results suggests strongly that the world may in fact be mental in nature, a hypothesis openly discussed in the field of foundations of physics. In this essay, these experimental results are reviewed and their hermeneutic implications discussed. If the world is mental, it points to something beyond its face-value appearances and is amenable to interpretation, just as ordinary dreams. In this case, the project of a Hermeneutic of Everything is metaphysically justifiable.

John M. Quinn