The Self The Soul And The World Affect Reason And Complexity
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The Self The Soul and The World: Affect Reason and Complexity
This book looks at the affective-cognitive roots of how the human mind inquires into the workings of nature and, more generally, how the mind confronts reality. Reality is an infinitely complex system, in virtue of which the mind can comprehend it only in bits and pieces, by making up interpretations of the myriads of signals received from the world by way of integrating those with information stored from the past. This constitutes a piecemeal interpretation by which we assemble our phenomenal reality. In perceiving the complex world and responding to it, the mind invokes the logic of affect and the logic of reason, the former mostly innate and implicit, and the latter generated consciously in explicit terms with reference to mind-independent relations between entities in nature. It is a strange combination of affect and reason that enables us to make decisions and inferences, --- the latter mostly of the inductive type --- thereby making possible the development of theories. Theories are our tool-kits for explaining and predicting phenomena, guiding us along in our journey in life. Theories, however, are defeasible, and need to be constantly updated, at times even radically. In this, the self and the soul are of enormous relevance. The former is the affect-based psychological engine driving all our mental processes, while the latter is the capacity of the conscious mind to examine and reconstruct the self by modulating repressed conflicts. If the soul remains inoperative, all our theories become misdirected and a rot spreads inexorably all around us.
Complexity and Emergence
This monograph focuses on two major themes of current interest---those of complexity and emergence. Neither of the two concepts is, in the very nature of things, precisely defined or easily comprehended. Complexity is all around us while the sciences often analyze entities and events by making simplifications, but the fault lines in the latter get exposed over larger spans of space and time. Complexity entails emergence that involves discontinuity and novelty in the evolution of complex systems, based on the appearance of distinctive spatial and temporal structures. Underlying an occurrence of emergence is an instability involving the transition from one stable regime to another, where distinct space-time scales acquire relevance across the transition. The structures on the two sides of the transition are characterized by distinct sets of state variables where, on one side of the transition, collective variables make their appearance. Complexity and emergence are viewed in this book in the context of the Kantian noumenal-phenomenal divide. The noumenal reality is the repository of all the complexity that there is, while the phenomenal reality emerges from the noumenal in the process of our perception, interpretation, and inference. The noumenal exists in itself as a self-determined whole, and reveals itself to us in fragmentary patches as skewed projections that we assemble to form our phenomenal world that keeps on emerging ceaselessly. Our own biological evolution and the evolution of our phenomenal world occurs in a mutually consistent process, that can be referred to as co-evolution. We seek regularities in the phenomenal world by means of our scientific theories which are often successful, but that success is fragile as, over larger spans of space and time, anomalies make their appearance, giving a lie to the simplicity and regularity previously presumed to have been unearthed. Simplicity, regularity, and harmony are only fleetingly located in the phenomenal world by means of our theories as these keep on being revised endlessly and often radically, thereby generating a mosaic of theories that becomes ever more complex, indicating a pervasive complexity of the noumenal world from which the phenomenal emerges by way of strictly limited projections. The foundational metaphysics on which this book is based tells us that reality is fundamentally complex, while tiny islands of simplicity, regularity, and harmony are embedded in it in isolated space-time domains.
Inference Belief and Interpretation in Science
The book is an engaging discourse on a number of interesting and deep issues relating to how Science inquires into Nature. It constitutes a critique of the received view that objectivity and logic are the cornerstones of science, and emphasises the role of inductive inference, of which an essential feature is that, compared to its deductive counterpart, the correspondence between evidence and conclusion is not unique, and that it entails a fundamental element of choice or decision. Induction takes place in the mind of the individual and also in the collective mental process of a scientific community. More precisely, the process of inductive inference is essentially dependent on beliefs, tied to affect and emotions, mostly playing their role in a substratum of conscious, deductive activity. In this the scientific process, which involves induction and deduction in complementary roles, is seen to have deeply cognitive roots. Building around this basic perception and drawing from diverse current trends of research, the book adopts a naturalist approach to pose a critique of a widespread but naive version of scientific realism. The presentation is lucid, informal, and witty, mainly addressed to general readers, though the discourse is at once deep, intriguing and provoking wherein it will prove to be of value to specialists in the areas of philosophy of science and cognitive science.