Earlier posts talked about paradigms and how science in the modern world became the lead story. It is no accident that metahistory books end up writing about the development of science and the effects of those developments. The lead metaphor was that of a machine. Robert W. Godwin writes that " science continues to stand upon a number of outmoded concepts that are not the outcome of its methods, but rather, a priori assumptions projected onto reality." He lists three:
Determinism draws its central metaphor from the mechanical clock and that all processes on the universe are entirely determined...
Materialism means that the universe is ultimately composed of stable, individual parts that interact with other parts, all of which are fully external to one another.
Reductionism is a approach that attempts to account for all of the phenomena of any level of reality in terms of a more simple or basic one.
The scientific enterprise stripped the world of value and meaning. These assumptions led to a disenchantment of the earth and a devaluation of the human being. It left the human being lost, an exile, as Camus described. The empirical methods of science while useful in many ways sucked the life and soul out of the earth and life on earth because they are immeasurable.
The conceptual views that guided the modern worldview are outmoded.
Consciousness is something that cannot be defined by materialistic methods. One must have a holistic viewpoint to be open to any valid definition of consciousness. In Pim van Lommel's book "Consciousness Beyond Life" this heart surgeon describes the evidence for believing in the eternal life of our human consciousness which does not fit into the paradigm of current science's paradigm.
ReplyDeleteOops! Sorry about the grammatical error. I should edit before posting.
ReplyDeleteDeduction takes for granted the process of conceptualization.
ReplyDeleteInduction is much more difficult and controversial than deduction and why it is not reducible to the formalism of symbols.
Induction is the conceptualization process itself in action.
- Wallace Thornhill 2012