100
6 In Search of Reality
Facts and the Scientific World Picture
Contrary to everyday belief, the use of a scientific vocabulary doesn’t brings us
any closer to describing things “as they really are”. It merely gives us a degree
of analytic precision that doesn’t exist in informal conversation. But it still
rests on a human segmentation of reality: Science has a specialized vocabulary
based upon its own way of analyzing physical phenomena. In the conceptual
scheme used in physics, reality consists of forces, energy, mass, particles and
so on. These are formal notions that the scientific mind has abstracted out of
the bewildering flurry of ongoing activity all around us, in order to help make
sense of it. These notions correspond to images in the scientist’s mind, and it
is in terms of such images that a scientist understands and creates new ideas.
If you claim that a particle is in motion, you must be able to speak of its
position, direction, and relative speed. However, those features arise in the mind
of a human observer who perceives the world in Gestalts. Speed, direction and
trajectory could not exist if a mind had not carefully and purposefully extracted
those features out of the dynamic activity of the world and made abstractions of
them. Most importantly, such things exist only for an observer able to perceive
in Gestalt wholes. Behind the abstractions, of course, is the bustling activity
of the universe. The cosmic process which underlies our scientific abstractions
is called the primordium.
There is a module of the brain—playing a hugely important role in the
activity of all animals—which constructs the layout of space around us.
The 2014 Nobel prize in neuroscience was awarded to May-Britt Moser
and Edvard Moser for their research on spatial cognition. They showed that
the organization of space is carried out in an organ of the brain called the
hippocampus, which mentally divides space in a grid, which is like an inner
coordinate system overlaid on surrounding space. Without a conscious sense
of surrounding space, it would be impossible for animals to orient themselves,
understand where essential objects are located, or construct action plans. What
we know as “space” is the model constructed by the hippocampus, rather than
something existing externally in the universe. 6
The world as we know it is built out of sensations—it is made out of internally
felt experience. It is second nature for us to assume unquestioningly that the
physical world really is the way we picture it and experience it to be. How
else could we possibly think of it? What alternative picture of reality could
we possibly have? Moreover, it is perfectly natural for creatures who possess a
coherent model of the world to assume it’s reality.
We know by learning that the moon revolves around the earth in a roughly
circular orbit once every 28 days. This fact surely seems to be perfectly
6 In Search of Reality
Facts and the Scientific World Picture
Contrary to everyday belief, the use of a scientific vocabulary doesn’t brings us
any closer to describing things “as they really are”. It merely gives us a degree
of analytic precision that doesn’t exist in informal conversation. But it still
rests on a human segmentation of reality: Science has a specialized vocabulary
based upon its own way of analyzing physical phenomena. In the conceptual
scheme used in physics, reality consists of forces, energy, mass, particles and
so on. These are formal notions that the scientific mind has abstracted out of
the bewildering flurry of ongoing activity all around us, in order to help make
sense of it. These notions correspond to images in the scientist’s mind, and it
is in terms of such images that a scientist understands and creates new ideas.
If you claim that a particle is in motion, you must be able to speak of its
position, direction, and relative speed. However, those features arise in the mind
of a human observer who perceives the world in Gestalts. Speed, direction and
trajectory could not exist if a mind had not carefully and purposefully extracted
those features out of the dynamic activity of the world and made abstractions of
them. Most importantly, such things exist only for an observer able to perceive
in Gestalt wholes. Behind the abstractions, of course, is the bustling activity
of the universe. The cosmic process which underlies our scientific abstractions
is called the primordium.
There is a module of the brain—playing a hugely important role in the
activity of all animals—which constructs the layout of space around us.
The 2014 Nobel prize in neuroscience was awarded to May-Britt Moser
and Edvard Moser for their research on spatial cognition. They showed that
the organization of space is carried out in an organ of the brain called the
hippocampus, which mentally divides space in a grid, which is like an inner
coordinate system overlaid on surrounding space. Without a conscious sense
of surrounding space, it would be impossible for animals to orient themselves,
understand where essential objects are located, or construct action plans. What
we know as “space” is the model constructed by the hippocampus, rather than
something existing externally in the universe. 6
The world as we know it is built out of sensations—it is made out of internally
felt experience. It is second nature for us to assume unquestioningly that the
physical world really is the way we picture it and experience it to be. How
else could we possibly think of it? What alternative picture of reality could
we possibly have? Moreover, it is perfectly natural for creatures who possess a
coherent model of the world to assume it’s reality.
We know by learning that the moon revolves around the earth in a roughly
circular orbit once every 28 days. This fact surely seems to be perfectly