I don’t believe the currently accepted scientific worldview of the cosmos is true.
I don’t think it could possibly be true. But I might be overstating the case.
If you’re interested in the question, you’d do far better to look up the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
I think a lot of scientists are uncomfortable admitting that the consensus worldview has obvious problems. And so they don't talk about them. But every once in a while, someone does.
The New York Times recently ran an interview with Dr. Roland Griffiths, founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. He said this:
… I can easily inhabit an evolutionary account that explains how we have come to be who we are — with the exception of the question of interiority! Why would evolution waste its precious energy on our having interior experiences at all? I don’t get that. To me, it’s a very precious mystery, and that mystery, if you want to put it in religious terms, is God. It’s the unknowable. It’s unfathomable. I don’t believe in God as conceptualized within different religious traditions, but the mystery thing is something that strikes me as undeniable.
Our best, most coherent scientific worldview doesn’t explain what many people call consciousness and what Griffiths calls “interiority” — our awareness of our own thoughts and feelings.
I think this failure to explain is not from lack of trying. I think our best scientific worldview can’t explain it. It’s a conceptual problem with the foundations of science — not a problem of physics but of metaphysics. But bad thinking about the underpinnings of science leads to a picture of the cosmos that is incomplete and thus distorted.
• Sources: David Marchese, “A Psychedelics Pioneer Takes the Ultimate Trip”; New York Times, April 7, 2023. It can be found here:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/03/magazine/roland-griffiths-interview.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Thomas Nagel, Mind & Cosmos; Oxford University Press, 2012. For more on view of Nagel see, “Nagel: 'Mind & Cosmos,'” Nov. 27, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment