I realize that the tone of the last contribution was rather theoretical, and then reading boring and inaccessible, even if it contained a number of elements necessary to support what I say. And I also realize that these are my thoughts quite personal, which end up leaving little room for criticism. But I would do the same great pleasure, if at least some of the friends who have so actively participated in the exchange of ideas on mythos and logos , could also come here to donate their valuable contributions, trying to turn the almost-monologue Shop in a more lively dialogue. (However, the small company that has followed me thus far has already given us insightful and appropriate interventions.)
One goal of this reflection, however messy and incomplete, is to propose a theory, not very innovative in hindsight according to which scientific activity is the necessary product of the human brain, specifically the mind.
The activity in question is connected with the use of mathematics, which is not a science, but it is one of the forms of their language in the human brain, that is a pure product of mind and non-existent outside of it, Like the verbal or musical (more suitable for other human activities that scientific development).
The scientific activity is the processing and organization of any feeling to cross the border of our indoor-outdoor living body. We have no choice in this. Whenever we get a visual or auditory stimulus, Every time I cross the road, whenever we compare between the two of them looking for a geometric sphere in an apple, every time we feel the urge to give a kiss to a loved face, they begin to move inside the vital chains of chemical reactions, governed by the brain's response to external stimuli that have crossed the border. Both the stimuli that the responses are processed by the mind according to a code that necessarily elaborante structure of the mind. Besides being process "uses throw-away", some of these stimulus-response chains (also including multiple levels of "round trip" between the interior and exterior) can be formalized the mind, to finish stored in memory. In the system of perceptual organization mental language of choice in which this happens is mathematics, while for other types of processes can be, for example, verbal language or music. In any case, these languages \u200b\u200b carved into the structure of the human brain. The music, speech, science, there are only in our minds.
I hope to clarify this block of concepts in more detail in the next action. In this post I will, however, insist on the contribution of Aristotelian thought provides inspiration to my thesis. In particular, the fact that the scientific ideas of Aristotle - that in the modern world, both inside and outside the academic environment, were considered a relic of a primitive or a "child" of doing science - should be regarded instead as the product of an investigation of extremely fine, and not so much not only about the objects of science itself, as the relationship between human beings and the world around . Showing that science is nothing more than this, or another form of poetic expression.
This sense of Aristotelian thought is that which stimulates many of my thoughts, or that we can not give the study an external reality independent of the activities (will?) The person who observes it. That this continuing game of projection ειδος in the outside world, internal mental images, crossing the boundaries of the body and drawing new boundaries in the geometry of the mind, and that these images, with a mathematical procedure, the mind abstracts organized forms, is the only form of access to the outside world that we are given. It starts from the Thomistic nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu for outcomes that surpass empiricism (avoiding the temptation of walking immateriality of Berkeley) and come with modern neuroscience. Our vision of reality is the result of perception and structural organization of the brain. In short, we must always see the world from behind our eyes. We can never go out of our body to an objective reality. We can never enter the brain behind the eyes of someone else, to have his own perception of his own reality. And this regardless of the value to be assigned to reality, material or ideal. Aristotle was born in
Stagira, northern Greece, the son of Nicomachus who was court physician to the royal family of Macedonia. For this reason his first studies were in medicine, until in 367, seventeen, was sent to Athens to study philosophy with Plato. He remained for twenty years in the Academy but, although it was probably the most brilliant student of all, had over time developed a specific objection to many of the teachings of Plato, so that he was appointed head of the Academy when Plato died. For this reason Aristotle left Athens and traveled for about ten years, mainly in Asia Minor. We can assume that his studies of biology Datin from this period. In 338 he returned to Macedonia, to become tutor to Alexander the Great. When his young disciple conquered Athens, Aristotle returned there and created his own school, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle remained in Athens until shortly after Alexander's death when, as a result of popular uprisings against the Macedonian invaders, his social position became increasingly critical to risk the death penalty. Was forced to retreat on the peninsula Evia island, far from Athens, where he died in 322.
It 'difficult to summarize briefly the contribution of Aristotle to the sciences of antiquity, but I think for some readers Bottega is amazing to discover how and with what skill and depth Aristotle was an empirical scientist, even before a philosopher. And 'one of the great ironies of history that the writings and ideas of Aristotle, based on large part on direct observation and manipulation, were used in the Middle Ages and beyond just to disrupt and prevent the development of formal sciences, after the School Aristotelian thought had amalgamated with Christian doctrine.
Aristotle, the first of empiricists, classified physical objects that he thought were the reality accessible only with experience. All objects, including bodies (it is he who invented the word, both the concept of body as aggregate set of elements to perform a function well-defined ) are composed of potency and act, matter or form. A block of marble has in itself the power to take any form the sculptor to give him, a seed or an embryo has the power to grow into the final shape of an animal or plant. In living creatures he identified the form with the 'soul : plants have a core of generally lower, the animals generally higher and can "feel", humans are the only ones to have a rational soul. I stress again that, in modern terms, the better identification of the soul is the Aristotelian definition of the materialist-functionalist mind that is given in neurophysiology ("can not be a change in mental status without a change in brain state") even if the plants are only partially included in this description, limited to the sensitive sphere. It should be noted that according to Aristotle the soul is a sensitive part (ψυκη) and part intellectual (νους). (An identification of the soul, for example, the genetic code or DNA would be conceptually possible, but the distance between the genotype and phenotype an individual is too large to make it almost plausible.)
The animals were classified by him according to their form of life (modern taxonomy), their actions (ethology) and, more fundamentally, in terms of their parts (anatomy ). Although Aristotle's work in zoology is not error-free compared with modern knowledge, his was the greatest synthesis of his time and was the authority in the field for centuries after his death. His observations on the anatomy of octopus, the cuttlefish, crustaceans and other marine invertebrates are remarkably accurate, and could have been made just downstream of the experiences of anatomical dissection. He described the embryonic development of chickens, distinguished whales and dolphins than fish, described the compartmentalized stomach of ruminants and the social organization of bees, he noticed that some sharks give birth to the children already live. His books on animals are filled with accurate observations, some of which were experimentally confirmed until many centuries later. It is classified in groups
kinds (a term that has a much broader sense than modern) animals with similar characters, and distinguishes between different species within the genus. Divides animals into two types, those with blood and those without blood (at least based on the presence of blood red), a distinction that corresponds closely to that between modern vertebrates and invertebrates. Animals with blood (vertebrates) were classified into five genera: viviparous quadrupeds (ie mammals), birds, oviparous quadrupeds (reptiles and amphibians), fish, whales (including that he not among mammals, including but while dolphins where he discovered the presence of the placenta: it is remarkable that on this point Aristotle was discredited by his successors, and dolphins were properly included among mammals only by modern science, more than two thousand years later). The bloodless animals were instead classified as cephalopods, crustaceans, insects (genus that included spiders, scorpions and earthworms), animals with shells (including molluscs and echinoderms), and zoophytes-plants or animals, cnidarians like that in the eyes of Aristotle resembled plants.
love for the classification and grouping similar kinds inevitably led him to formulate a hierarchy of linked progressive change in the shapes of animals, a kind of embryo of evolutionary theory in which he was joined by other thinkers of the time. Moreover, imagination and intuition led him into dead ends in some cases, such as being attributed to heart the seat of the vital functions whereas only the brain as an organ for cooling the blood. I suppose at least qualitatively to understand brain function, he should be able to perform the dissection experiments on live animals. As discussed
forward, talking about physics, Aristotle was not an investigator in the proper sense, but an acute observer of nature. In fact, he never set in place a real experimental setup is intended to prove or disprove a hypothesis, but pushed his remark as deep as he could.
The Aristotelian science of the earth is found in his treatise on Meteorology , a term in this case much wider than the modern meaning, including "all the phenomena common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth , and the phenomena of its parts. " In this paper he discusses the nature of the land and oceans, and describes Among others, the hydrological cycle in exceptionally modern terms: "Why is the sun in its movement, sets in motion processes of change and becoming and decay, and for its action and pure fresh water every day is brought in dissolved air and steam, and thus increases in the higher regions where it condenses back to the cold, and thus returns to the earth. " In the same text he discusses wind and earthquakes (which he believed caused by winds underground), thunder, lightning, rainbows, meteors, comets and the Milky Way (which groups all under the category of weather phenomena).
Moreover, his vision of the history of the planet also has some very modern ideas: "The various parties Earth has not always been dry or dried, but they change, the changing of the rivers that run and dry. And likewise the relationship between land and sea changes, and where there was dry land comes the sea, and where it has the sea one day you will land. But we must assume that these changes follow a certain order and a certain cycle. The principle and the cause of these changes is that the interior of the earth grows and decays as the body of plants and animals [...] But the whole process of life on earth is happening gradually and in periods of time so huge in comparison the duration of our lives, that these changes may not be observed, and before their course can be documented from the beginning in the end, nations perish and are destroyed. "
Aristotle's observation that the circular nature of celestial motion is evidence of the limited space of the universe is much deeper than it may appear. It contains in fact the intuition a conservation principle (what we call in modern terms angular momentum of the universe) that sounds very modern physics. We must be careful in the discussion of Aristotelian thought, to keep separate his claims based on at least one element of observation, from those based on pure speculation. And even among the observations, his and his contemporaries, we must take into account the limited capabilities experimental era, such as the inability to sufficiently accurately measured intervals of time (not until the eighteenth century, and Christian Huygens for a quantum leap). For example, one of the arguments put forward by Aristotle to prove the eternity of the universe was the constancy of the speed of motion of the stars (in his formulation, the motion of the ether). Today we know that the universe as a whole is slowing , and this is one of the important evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, but this slowdown can not be measured with instruments that ecezionalmente refined.
Aristotle's belief in a universe without beginning or end of law would place him among the forerunners of theory of ' stationary universe, (re) formulated in the '30s by British cosmologists Roger Hoyle and Hermann Bondi, and repudiated the late 60s by the discovery of cosmic background radiation, estimated residual of the Big Bang. Or perhaps better, the theory of 'balance universe of Einstein, the solution of relativistic equations with nonzero cosmological constant, which was essentially put into crisis by the evidence of the universe (Einstein said here that this was the His most serious mistake). This view, though debatable, but certainly original and modern, however, led to an interpretation of Aristotle necessarily cyclical phenomena, to ensure the condition stationary as immutable reality. While this was necessary for Aristotle, on the one hand to avoid the logical paradoxes of the Eleatic school system and to strictly comply with its teleological view of nature, such a request to modern ears is not required to provide a possible solution to the stationary or equilibrium for a model of universe based on general relativity. For us today it is a plausible universe "open" time without end, though in constant evolution and change (for example, you could read the fine article by Freeman J. Dyson popular "Time without end: physics and biology in an open universe ", in Reviews of Modern Physics of 1979). Although the difference fundamental between Aristotle and modern theories of the universe, expanding and "inflationary", and the presence of a singularity, or Big Bang, which emerges from the fabric of space-time relativity, I think I have reason to suspect that If Aristotle were alive today he might have appreciated such a possibility, change in eternity, because the absence of a final time limit ensures that all possibilities are actually co-present between potency and act, and therefore immutable, even if we we perceive as apparent flux.
Personally, aspects of scientific thought of Aristotle that leave me colder it is precisely those who would falsely appear more modern in today's lean times of reductionism in favor of a diverse squad of holistic approaches. Yes, the theory of the organic universe, the dual identification of microcosm and macrocosm, which seem so close to the visions of a certain para-environmentalism that reaches Bateson & C. But sometimes paradoxical conclusions of Aristotelian physics, the non-role of mathematics in his thought (the importance of absences, sometimes), and its vision of the universe as purposeful living organism (here we go again with the 'Gaia Hypothesis of ecologists to Ray Lovelock?) will talk next time ...
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