Saturday, March 12, 2016

"Mind and Cosmos: Philosopher Thomas Nagel’s Brave Critique of Scientific Reductionism"

"The greatest advances in the physical and biological sciences were made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This has permitted a quantitative understanding of the world, expressed in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws, But at some point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of science has become familiar through the transformation of biology by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science. Mind, as a development of life, must be included as the most recent stage of this long cosmological history, and its appearance, I believe, casts its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and principles on which the process depends."
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/30/mind-and-cosmos-thomas-nagel/


Wow. Interesting to think that in a few decades, the field of neuroscience could be in the realm of cosmology. But I sort of totally see that. Like, a split between the biomedical and the physical aspects of the field.

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