An Observing Science

In this paper I make the arguments that I seesupporting a view of how we can come to knowthe world we live in. I start from a position in second ordercybernetics which turns out to be a RadicalConstructivist position. This position isessentially epistemological, and much of thispaper is concerned with the act of knowing,crucial when we try to develop an understandingof what we mean when we discuss a field ofknowing (knowledge), which is at the root ofscience. The argument follows a path in which I discussthe essential role of the observer inobserving, the creation of constancies betweendifferent observings and their exteriorisationas objects which are then represented and usedin communication with and between otherobservers, each unique (and therefore eachobserving in its own way). This leads to theassertion that the qualities we associate withthe objects of our universes are attributes,rather than properties inherent in the objectsthemselves. At each step in the argument I exploreconsequences for how we understand the world,in particular through science. I showlimitations, new insights and understandings,and re-evaluate what we can expect to gain fromscience. One change is the shift from noun toverb in the consideration of processses – forinstance, the study of living rather than life.In this way, I intend to show not only thatRadical Constructivism is sensible, but that itdoes not preclude us having a science. Incontrast, it can enrich science by taking onboard the sensible.In the process, which science is seen to be themore basic is challenged.     

延迟选择实验及其引发的实在问题

惠勒提出的延迟选择实验是量子双缝实验的一个扩展，它给出了一个特殊的结论：我们现在的行为对过去产生了影响。观测与实在紧密地缠绕在一起。这个实验深刻地揭示了微观世界在空间、时间乃至实在本体等方面与宏观世界的不一致性，把哥本哈根学派的思想推到了极端。经典物理的实在观不能深入到量子层次，量子理论要求一种新的实在观。     

Constructivism: A ‘Next’ Area of Scientific Development?

Radical Constructivism has been defined as an‘unconventional approach to the problem ofknowledge and knowing’. Its unconventionalityis summarised by its claim that it isimpossible to attribute unique meaning toexperience – as no mind-independent yardstick canbe assumed to exist against which to identifyuniqueness, and hence to produce knowledge andknowing. In other words, it is claimed thatthere is no ‘reality’ that is knowable to allindividual knowers. This claim appearsindefensible by itself, as it does not explainwhy the successes of traditional science appearas such. However, it is defensible in thecontext of numerous failures to achieve uniqueattributions, or of the history of science.Even so, what is missing are concrete methodsand research designs. This often leaves RadicalConstructivism to be critical only, toconcentrate on justifying the impossibility ofsuccess without contributing itself.Where this is the case it reduces scientiststo individuals considered unable to communicatewith others on public (and unique)attributions-who may do so only by borrowingmethods from previous approaches. It is arguedthat a more valuable contribution is possibleif Radical Constructivism is seen as a responseto the challenge defined by frequent failuresof traditional approaches. The latter may beextended such that the extensions converge toRadical Constructivism. Such extensions arebased on reported observations, rather than onexperiences in general, and are to beattributed meanings – uniquely as well asnon-uniquely – by way of a collective. The lattershould allow its ‘actors’ to restrict whatmaintains the collective to what is observableto others, as well as use the collective torestrict their own observations. The study ofcollectives thus allows for the study ofrestrictions or values, and hence for includingsubjective or constructivist experiences beyond(reportable) observations.     

The Epistemological Functions of Symbolization in Leibniz’s Universal Characteristic

Leibniz’s universal characteristic is a fundamental aspect of his theory of cognition. Without symbols or characters it would be difficult for the human mind to define several concepts and to achieve many demonstrations. In most disciplines, and particularly in mathematics, the mind must then focus on symbols and their combinatorial rules rather than on mental contents. For Leibniz, mental perception is most of the time too confused for attaining distinct notions and valid deductions. In this paper, I argue that the functions of symbolization differ depending upon the kind of concepts that are replaced with characters. In my view, most commentators did not sufficiently underline the distinction between two main functions of formal substitution in Leibniz’s characteristic: either increasing our knowledge or simply structuring it. In the first case, we complete our knowledge because formal substitution makes sensible and imaginary concepts more distinct. In the second case, symbolization helps to organize contents that are already conceived of by reason. Thus the process of substitution is not always identically applicable, for symbols replace different types of concepts.     

增强现实(AR)技术环境下真实与虚拟关系的实在性分析

增强现实(AR)技术具有虚实结合、实时交互、虚实配准的特性,可以消解经典实在论下真实与虚拟关系面对的挑战.沟通技术与现实的科技连续统不能直观贴切地表现实在世界中真实和虚拟的关系.基于三重实在理论,可以重新规范真实与虚拟的含义.借助对真实世界和虚拟世界三种形态的实在成分分析,三个世界的关系由一维线图转变为二维面图.借此可...     

试论科学家异化

科学家异化在当代社会并不是什么稀罕之事。由于不良的社会大环境的影响,失范的共同体小环境的熏染,以及科学家个人因素,致使部分科学家背离科学活动的宗旨与初衷,做出种种违背科学规范和泯灭科学良心的事情,从而发生异化。科学家要防止被异化,就要勇于承担社会责任,永葆科学良心,不断提高道德素质。     

Systems and Beliefs

Systems thinking provides insights into how ideas interact and change, and constructivism is an example of this type of systemic approach. In the 1970s constructivism emphasised the development of mathematical and scientific ideas in children. Recently constructivist ideas are applied much more generally. Here I use this approach to consider beliefs and their role in conflicts and the conditions needed for reconciliation. If we look at Reality in terms of how we construct it as a human cognitive process, we recognise two things. First, that we cannot go beyond our senses and thoughts to what exists independently of us, and second, if we construct what we know we have to take responsibility for this. This inevitably focuses our thinking on the relation we have with the physical and social world, we are a part of the universe rather than apart from it. This paper argues that accepting and understanding these limits of human knowing together with our interconnectedness provide opportunities to understand conflicting positions. To resolve conflict, people with opposing viewpoints have to be prepared to understand each other. That is a challenge because our own reality plays a vital role in our lives, for everything from personal survival to social support.     

The Screen as an In-between

This article refutes the apparently innocent, common sense idea that the audiovisual screen is just a window to the world that displays an extra set of sensual data alongside and independent of our personal, unmediated experience of reality. On the contrary, the screen as an in-between is both a mediator and generator of reality that eventually compromises the distinction between us and our environment. Part 1 discusses three examples of mediation: eclipsing, interpassivity and audiovisual media as a truth-procedure. Part 2 discusses three examples of generation: the production of simulacra, hyperreality and the emergence of a mixed reality.     

心的科学认识何以可能?——从功能主义看心身问题

二元论与物理主义都不能对心身问题给出合理的解答,图林机功能主义在解释心身关系中也存在诸多困难,但并不导致取消主义。心仍然可以成为科学认识的对象,只不过认识心的方法必然是目的论功能主义的,而且目的论方法表明功能主义并不能给心带来惟一的、排它性的知识。     

The God Concept: Aristotle and the Philosophical Tradition

Before beginning a paper on metaphysics, it is wise to acknowledge the paper’s own “metaphysical” assumptions. In what follows, we must bear in mind that the history of philosophy is as interpretively diverse as it is long. We will begin with the premise that Metaphysics is indeed a foundational science. We will posit that Aristotle’s corpus is unified; that is, that Aristotle can be read as a “systematic” philosopher. Moreover, we will assume that the history of philosophy is itself a unity. If we posit such, “philosophy” can be read as a comprehensible continuity: a certainly contestable position. We must bear in mind that similitude is decidedly not identity; however, similitude does imply a certain conceptual correlation, one which, when pressed, may yield interesting, if not unexpected, results. Thus, we will travel at lightning speed through what took a snail’s pace to develop, “mapping,” so to speak, the structure of the unmoved mover of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1941) onto the traditional historical divisions of the history of philosophy. We will begin with Aristotle himself in the Ancient period, move to Averroes (the Ibn-Rushd of this paper) in the Medieval period, focus on Descartes and Spinoza as Modern thinkers and, finally, end in Heidegger and Sartre in Contemporary philosophy. This is philosophy with a capital “P,” which may or may not be the reader’s preferred position, let alone the writer’s. But, for our purposes here, it is, nonetheless, inevitable.     

Living in Conceivable Worlds

Certain cognitive and philosophical aspects of the concept of conceivability with intended or established diversion from (putative) reality are discussed. The “coherence gap problem” arises when certain fragments of the real world are replaced with imaginary situations while most details are (intentionally or not) ignored. Another issue, “the spectator problem”, concerns the participation of the conceiver himself in the world conceived. Three different examples of conceivability are used to illustrate our points, namely thought experiments in physics, a hypothetical world devoid of consciousness (zombie world), and virtual reality. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

身体的自然化与符号化

"本体论承诺"使得心灵哲学家重新关注身心关系问题,他们因此开始涉及到身体,然而,这里的身体并不是本己的身体,而是被纳入物质世界中的"物体"。20世纪后半叶对身体的解读,力图消除其间的自然化残余,并融合了不同视阈的价值判断。自我的反思性也拓展至身体,后者被话语实践社会性地建构着,其活动方式通过各种制度和仪式的规定而被社会化和文化象征化。     

A Physical Approach to the Construction of Cognition and to Cognitive Evolution

It is shown that the method of operationaldefinition of theoretical terms applied inphysics may well support constructivist ideasin cognitive sciences when extended toobservational terms. This leads to unexpectedresults for the notion of reality, inductionand for the problem why mathematics is sosuccessful in physics.A theory of cognitive operators is proposedwhich are implemented somewhere in our brainand which transform certain states of oursensory apparatus into what we call perceptionsin the same sense as measurement devicestransform the interaction with the object intomeasurement results. Then, perceivedregularities, as well as the laws of nature wewould derive from them can be seen asinvariants of the cognitive operators concernedand are by this human specific constructsrather than ontologically independent elements.(e.g., the law of energy conservation can bederived from the homogeneity of time and bythis depends on our mental time metricgenerator). So, reality in so far it isrepresented by the laws of nature has no longeran independent ontological status. This isopposed to Campbell's `natural selectionepistemology'. From this it is shown that thereholds an incompleteness theorem for physicallaws similar to Gödels incompletenesstheorem for mathematical axioms, i.e., there isno definitive or object `theory of everything'.This constructivist approaches to cognitionwill allow a coherent and consistent model ofboth cognitive and organic evolution. Whereasthe classical view sees the two evolutionrather dichotomously (for ex.: most scientistssee cognitive evolution converging towards adefinitive world picture, whereas organicevolution obviously has no specific focus (the`pride of creation').     

Abductive Reasoning as a Way of Worldmaking

The author deals with the operational core oflogic, i.e. its diverse procedures ofinference, in order to show that logicallyfalse inferences may in fact be right because –in contrast to logical rationality – theyactually enlarge our knowledge of the world.This does not only mean that logically trueinferences say nothing about the world, butalso that all our inferences are inventedhypotheses the adequacy of which cannot beproved within logic but only pragmatically. Inconclusion the author demonstrates, through therelationship between rule-following andrationality, that it is most irrational to wantto exclude the irrational: it may, at times, bemost rational to think and infer irrationally.Focussing on the operational aspects of knowingas inferring does away with the hiatus betweenlogic and life, cognition and the world(reality) – or whatever other dualism one wantsto invoke –: knowing means inferring, inferringmeans rule-governed interpreting, interpretingis a constructive, synthetic act, and aconstruction that proves adequate (viable) inthe ``world of experience', in life, in thepraxis of living, is, to the constructivistmind, knowledge. It is the practice of livingwhich provides the orienting standards forconstructivist thinking and its judgments ofviability. The question of truth is replaced bythe question of viability, and viabilitydepends on the (right) kind of experiential fit.     

Symbolic Languages and Natural Structures a Mathematician’s Account of Empiricism

The ancient dualism of a sensible and an intelligible world important in Neoplatonic and medieval philosophy, down to Descartes and Kant, would seem to be supplanted today by a scientific view of mind-in-nature. Here, we revive the old dualism in a modified form, and describe mind as a symbolic language, founded in linguistic recursive computation according to the Church-Turing thesis, constituting a world L that serves the human organism as a map of the Universe U. This methodological distinction of L vs. U helps to understand how and why structures of phenomena come to be opposed to their nature in human thought, a central topic in Heideggerian philosophy. U is uncountable according to Georg Cantor’s set theory but Language L, based on the recursive function system, is countable, and anchored in a Gray Area within U of observable phenomena, typically symbols (or tokens), prelinguistic structures, genetic-historical records of their origins. Symbols, the phenomena most familiar to mathematicians, are capable of being addressed in L-processing. The Gray Area is the human Environment E, where we can live comfortably, that we manipulate to create our niche within hostile U, with L offering overall competence of the species to survive. The human being is seen in the light of his or her linguistic recursively computational (finite) mind. Nature U, by contrast, is the unfathomable abyss of being, infinite labyrinth of darkness, impenetrable and hostile to man. The U-man, biological organism, is a stranger in L-man, the mind-controlled rational person, as expounded by Saint Paul. Noumena can now be seen to reside in L, and are not fully supported by phenomena. Kant’s noumenal cause is the mental L-image of only partly phenomenal causation. Mathematics occurs naturally in pre-linguistic phenomena, including natural laws, which give rise to pure mathematical structures in the world of L. Mathematical foundation within philosophy is reversed to where natural mathematics in the Gray Area of pre-linguistic phenomena can be seen to be a prerequisite for intellectual discourse. Lesser, nonverbal versions of L based on images are shared with animals.     

扩增现实与人类的认识

扩增现实作为真实世界物体与虚拟物体所组合而成的技术,其由"真实"和"虚拟"两部分混合而成的特性正是人类认识过程中普遍存在的特性.从人类的基本感知到高级认知都存在着与人相关的"虚拟"附加信息,附加信息存在的根本原因是它能有效地决定人的行为.     

A Proposal for a Coherent Ontology of Fundamental Entities

We argue that the distinction between framework and interaction theories should be taken carefully into consideration when dealing with the philosophical implications of fundamental theories in physics. In particular, conclusions concerning the nature of reality can only be consistently derived from assessing the ontological and epistemic purport of both types of theories. We put forward an epistemic form of realism regarding framework theories, such as Quantum Field Theory. The latter, indeed, informs us about the general properties of quantum fields, laying the groundwork for interaction theories. Yet, concerning interaction theories, we recommend a robust form of ontological realism regarding the entities whose existence is assumed by these theories. As an application, we refer to the case of the Standard Model, so long as it has proved to successfully inform us about the nature of various sorts of fundamental particles making up reality. In short, although we acknowledge that both framework and interaction theories partake in shaping our science-based view of reality, and that neither would do by itself the work we expect them to accomplish together, our proposal for a coherent ontology of fundamental entities advances a compromise between two forms of realism about theories in each case.     

Points of View Beyond Models: Towards a Formal Approach to Points of View as Access to the World

According to Vázquez and Liz (Found Sci 16(4): 383–391, 2011), Points of View (PoV) can be considered in two different ways. On the one hand, they can be explained following the model of propositional attitudes. This model assumes that the internal structure of a PoV is constituted by a subject, a set of contents, and a set of relations between the subject and those contents. On the other hand, we can analyze points of view taking as a model the notions of location and access. If we choose to follow the second approach, instead of the first one, the internal structure of a PoV is not directly addressed, and the emphasized features of PoV are related to the function that PoV are intended to have. That is, PoV are directly identified by their role and they can solely be understood as ways of accessing the world that bring some kind of perspective about it. Having this in mind, we would like to propose a notation that explains how to understand such access as a sort of models (that can allow the creation of concepts), independently of whether the precise PoV under consideration is impersonal or non-impersonal, its kind of content, and its subjective or objective character. First, we will present an account of some previous approaches to the study of points of view. Then, we will analyze what kind of structure the world is assumed to posses and how the access to it is possible. Third, we will develop a notation that explains PoV as qualitative dimensions by means of which it is possible to valuate objects and states of the world.     

Performing Phenomenology: Negotiating Presence in Intermedial Theatre

This paper analyzes from a pragmatic postphenomenological point of view the performative practice of CREW, a multi-disciplinary team of artists and researchers. It is our argument that this company, in its use of new immersive technologies in the context of a live stage, gives rise to a dialectics between an embodied and a disembodied perspective towards the perceived world. We will focus on W (Double U), a collaborative interactive performance, where immersive technology is used for live exchange of vision. By means of a head mounted omni-directional camera and display the fields of vision of two participants are swapped, which enables the participants to perceive the world through another person??s point of view. This intermedial experience brings a classic dichotomic perception of space to falter: material reality as a ??live?? condition can no longer be opposed to a virtual mediated reality. In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the ??real?? and the ??virtual?? to a meaningful experience. In this respect, we refer to recent neurological experiments such as the ??rubber hand illusion?? in order to clarify the spectator??s tendency to fuse both ontologies and to embody a coherent image-world.     

科学客观性:外在性与内在性的交融

本文试图从内在性与外在性两个层面重建科学客观性。一方面,科学对象的客观实在性并非一种外在于人的自在性,而是主体在自身的对象性活动中与客观世界耦合而得到的结果,是一种属人的现实,是在实践中被确立起来的。科学家们借助于直观方法与理性工具把所捉到实体与过程、类型与结构、解释句与理论模型等等,都在某种程度上独立于我们的主观表象,承载着对象的客观性——外在客观性。它们构成了"科学共同体"的"本体论承诺"。另一方面,这种外在的客观性,是在人类主体的内在化过程中实现的。在现代科学中,科学家们自觉地运用对称性工具实现的"内在化"所得到的"变换下的不变性",使得科学具有了公共可理解性与可接受性。这种在人类旨趣、目的和价值引领下对世界实行的主动干预所实现的公共性,就是内在客观性。因此,科学客观性是一曲由外在性与内在性合奏出来的交响曲。