October 2019 Newsletter

Dear member,

I trust you are well and thriving.

Among the important books I am currently reading is one by adviser Dr Andrew Fellows – Gaia, Psyche and Deep Ecology, which I will review in the  next Paradigm Explorer. In the Galileo Commission Report, Harald Walach lays considerable emphasis on the need to become aware of one’s presuppositions, principally of what I have come to call ‘the central dogma of neuroscience’: that the brain actually generates consciousness.

In a discussion about presuppositions in biology (p. 59) Andrew quotes Michael Ruse as observing that there is a deep divide between the mechanist/reductionist and the holist/emergentist and that ‘the side one takes influences the science one does and the science one finds acceptable. The holist/emergentist is going to be looking groups and wholes in a way that the mechanist/reductionist is not.’ Later in the same paragraph Ruse remarks that ‘their allegiance is beyond reason and evidence. It is all about commitments, philosophies.’ Andrew then quotes George Henrik von Wright on the same topic and he comments that the position one adopts ‘is built into a choice of primitives, of basic concepts for the whole argumentation. This choice, one could say, is existential. It is a choice of point of view that cannot be further grounded.’ In other words, this is exactly what RG Collingwood calls an absolute presupposition. The link between the mechanist/reductionist position in relation to neuroscience is immediately striking – though for me these approaches should be complementary rather than in opposition.

A seminal article for you to read and published in New Ideas in Psychology [50, 2018, 21-33] is by Mario Beauregard, Natalie Trent and Gary E. Schwartz is Toward a Postmaterialist Psychology: theory research and applications.

The National Bureau for Economic Research recently published a study: Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time? [an implicit reference to a famous remark by Max Planck].

The authors show that:

the premature deaths of elite scientists affect the dynamics of scientific discovery. Following such deaths, scientists who were not collaborators with the deceased stars become more visible, and they advance novel ideas through increased publications within the field of the deceased star. These “emerging stars” are often scientists who were not previously active within that field. The results suggest that outsiders to a specific scientific field are reluctant to challenge a research star who is viewed as a leader within that field.

Please encourage friends and colleagues to sign up as professional affiliates, and keep us updated with any new articles, projects and videos for the websites.

With warm good wishes,

David Lorimer
Chair, Galileo Commission