Books sort of like Consilience

DiscussieConsilience

Sluit je aan bij LibraryThing om te posten.

Books sort of like Consilience

Dit onderwerp is gemarkeerd als "slapend"—het laatste bericht is van meer dan 90 dagen geleden. Je kan het activeren door een een bericht toe te voegen.

1mkjones
Bewerkt: apr 23, 2007, 2:29 pm

Are there other books that are sort of like Consilience? I like Max Delbruck's Mind from Matter and Nicholas Maxwell's The Human World in the Physical Universe. Anyone read Seven Mysteries of Life by Guy Murchie? I know there's got to be something out there by Ken Wilber. They can be reductive or not, all are welcome.

2DigitalOntology
apr 23, 2007, 2:43 pm

I've read four books by Ken Wilber and all of them address consilience to some extend. Ken is essentially an integral psychologist. He tends to see things from the human perspective. One of his most frequent models in a four quadrant model in which he tries to categorize the different forms of human knowledge.

Ken might be said to be the direct opposite of Wilson in that Wilson takes a reductionist view of things, i.e. he feels that everything can be reduced to physics, whereas Wilber sees physics as the least significant aspect of reality. This needs some clarification. Ken writes of the great chain of being. This goes back to Plotinus (Eneads) or even earlier and speculates that reality is hierarchical with God (or spirit) as the highest level and matter as the lowest. So Ken inverts the hierarchy.

The Wilber book that comes closest to addressing the reconciliation of science and religion is The Marriage of Sense and Soul. I liked the problem description but could not embrace his solution which was to try to argue that meditation could be viewed as science and that all religions could be reducted to the great chain of being.

3DigitalOntology
apr 24, 2007, 9:41 am

I would want to add to my last post that I believe Ken Wilber has almost no adherents in the physical sciences community because his approach to consilience provides almost nothing that the scientific community can focus on; there are no scientific predictions (positive or negative) nor are there any new explanations of scientific observations.

What I find most interesting about Ken's approach is that his model is the exact opposite of Wilson's model. Wilson starts with subatomic phenomena and trys to build up to the social sciences and humanities whereas Wilber starts with "spirit" and works down to matter and energy as the lowest level.

I do not believe that a hierarchical model of any kind can adequately address our complex reality. I'll have more to say on this later.

4mkjones
Bewerkt: apr 24, 2007, 6:14 pm

Thanks for your thoughts on Wilber's books, DigitalOntology. I haven't read anything by him, but your description is in accord with my impressions. If you have browsed through Engelhart's thesis, you will see that Wilber's books are discussed in depth.

5mkjones
Bewerkt: apr 25, 2007, 5:48 pm

And here's a book that has a unique physico-idealistic approach: Extending Mechanics to Minds: The Mechanical Foundations of Psychology and Economics by Jon Doyle, who is a AI researcher at North Carolina State University. From Amazon's book description:
This book deploys the mathematical axioms of modern rational mechanics to understand minds as mechanical systems that exhibit actual, not metaphorical, forces, inertia, and motion. Using precise mental models developed in artificial intelligence the author analyzes motivation, attention, reasoning, learning, and communication in mechanical terms. These analyses provide psychology and economics with new characterizations of bounded rationality; provide mechanics with new types of materials exhibiting the constitutive kinematic and dynamic properties characteristic of different kinds of minds; and provide philosophy with a rigorous theory of hybrid systems combining discrete and continuous mechanical quantities. The resulting mechanical reintegration of the physical sciences that characterize human bodies and the mental sciences that characterize human minds opens traditional philosophical and modern computational questions to new paths of technical analysis.
This old paper gives you a taste.