Ulrich Blau (Marburg, Germany). Eternal Riddles and Future Mathematics. This
lecture introduces the categorical trichotomy between the physical-concrete,.
Harald Atmanspacher (Freiburg, Germany) Contextual Emergence The concept of contextual emergence has been proposed as a non-reductive, yet well-defined relation between different levels of description of physical and other systems. It is illustrated for the transition from statistical mechanics to thermodynamical properties such as temperature. Stability conditions are shown to be crucial for a rigorous implementation of contingent contexts that are required to understand temperature as an emergent property. Are such stability conditions meaningful for contextual emergence beyond physics as well? An affirmative example from cognitive neuroscience addresses the relation between neurobiological and mental levels of description. For a particular class of partitions of the underlying neurobiological phase space, so-called generating partitions, the emergent mental states are stable under the dynamics. In this case, mental descriptions are (i) faithful representations of the neurodynamics and (ii) compatible with one another. Atmanspacher, H. 2009. Contextual emergence. Scholarpedia 4(3): 7997.
Ulrich Blau (Marburg, Germany) Eternal Riddles and Future Mathematics This lecture introduces the categorical trichotomy between the physical-concrete, the psychological mental and the merely formal. For understanding certain classical mathematical/logical/philosophical riddles and paradoxes (such as Zenon’s paradoxes), it is essential to consider this trichotomy. Doing this has led to number theory which is sketched in the lecture and can be used to partly solve those riddles. Philosophical as well as mathematical considerations had to be taken into account for developing this new approach; proceeding thus has often been neglected: “[...] to me, mathematicians seem to be similarly blind philosophically as philosophers seem to be blind mathematically.”
Thomas Filk (Freiburg, Germany) Aspects of Self-Reference The term self-reference is used in various contexts and often refers to different scientific concepts: self-interaction in dynamical systems, synergetics in the theory of coupled or open systems, feedback or recurrence in network dynamics and models of algorithms, diagonalizers in relational spaces and logics. In addition, it is closely related to other “self”-concepts such as self-similarity or self-affinity in mathematics or self-organization in systems theory. In many cases, self-reference is considered as the root of paradoxa. I will discuss many examples of what usually is called self-referential, as a preliminary step toward a (not yet available) classification scheme or even measure of self-reference. Furthermore it is emphasized that paradoxical situations require the logical NOT in addition to self-reference, leading to the picture of a “logical Moebius strip”.
Domenico Giulini (Hannover, Germany) Is Spacetime Merely in the Eye of the Beholder? “Spacetime” is one of the most fundamental notions in modern physics. Its existence is not tight to that of ordinary matter and in this sense it is absolute; more absolute, in fact, than Einstein ever wanted it to be. It can become singular, even in the absence of all matter, it may support gravitational waves that transport energy and momentum, and, last not least, it is mathematically thought of as a set. On the other hand, the local validity of Special Relativity implies that it cannot be thought of as a substance in the ordinary sense, since it cannot be endowed with the usual kinematical attributes. So, what is it? Are we likely to run into contradictions from self-referentiality in taking the mental image of spacetime as physically real?
Stephan Hartmann (Tillburg, Netherlands) Who’s Afraid of Nagelian Reduction? We reconsider the Nagelian theory of reduction and argue that, contrary to a widely held view, it is the right analysis of intertheoretic reduction, since the alleged difficulties of the theory either vanish upon closer inspection or turn out to be substantive philosophical questions rather than knock-down arguments. Dizadji-Bahmani, F., Frigg, R., Hartmann, S. 2010. Who’s afraid of Nagelian reduction? Erkenntnis 73, 393–412.
J¨ urgen Hennig (Giessen, Germany) Psychological and Biological Self: Synergism and Conflicts Several disciplines tried hard to define the human self. For example in philosophy the self constitutes a persons uniqueness with a strong reference to his/her conscientiousness. Psychology, more technically refers to cognitive and affective representations of identity. However, besides these more or less conscious aspects of the “self” – usually believed to be mediated by neuronal functioning – it is often neglected that a different bodily system close to perfectly represents and maintains our biological self: the immune system. In the field of neuroimmunology it became obvious that both the central nervous system and the immune system share many common features and mechanisms of action. Moreover, they influence each other in a very effective and basically adaptive fashion. Some examples will be given. There is only one exception in which conflicts are more frequent than synergistic effects, and this concerns the area of transplantations. The experience of the reception of an organ transplant, which usually results in an improved quality of life, can most often be integrated into our episodic memory without any personal difficulties and, therefore, adds to the development of our psychological self. In contrast, the immune system, maintaining our biological self, is characterized by an absolute and persistent behavior of rejection, irrespective of whether the subjective experience results in an increased quality or duration of life. This dichotomy in both aspects of self-regulation will be discussed with respect to aspects of self-reference from a neuroimmunological point of view.
Aloisius H. Louie (Ottawa, Canada) Closure to Efficient Causation in Relational Biology My lecture is an introduction to the Rashevsky-Rosen school of relational biology. The crux of relational biology is “Throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization.” This is an emphatic statement that we take the view of ‘function dictates structure’ over ‘structure implies function’. Thus relational biology is the operational description of our endeavour, the characteristic name of our approach to mathematical biology. Biology, then, is a subject concerned with organization of relations. Life is not characterized by its underlying physicochemical structures, but by its entailment relations: what they do, and to what end. In other words, life is not about its material cause, but it is intimately linked to the other three Aristotelian causes, formal, efficient, and final. The answer to the question “What are the defining characteristics of a natural system for us to perceive it as being alive?” is, in a nutshell, that a living system admits a certain kind of closure that makes it self-sufficient in a relational sense. This is “closure to efficient causation”, and I shall be explaining what it means.
Alan C. Love (Minneapolis, USA) Revisiting Evolutionary Emergence in Contemporary Biology In an often overlooked section of his famous discussion of theory reduction in the sciences, Ernest Nagel briefly discussed the idea of evolutionary emergence: “the doctrine of emergent evolution maintains that the variety of individuals and their properties that existed in the past or occur in the present is not complete, and that qualities, structure, and modes of behavior come into existence from time to time the like of which has never been previously manifested anywhere in the universe” (Nagel 1961, 374). Philosophers have not explored this conception of emergence adequately, in part because it is logically distinct from emergence understood in terms of the inability to predict higher-level properties from lower-level ones. But evolutionary emergence is quite relevant to contemporary biology. In particular, Nagels characterization bears a remarkable similarity to the problem of evolutionary innovation and novelty, as discussed by researchers in Evo-devo (Love 2008). In this paper I revisit Nagel’s explication of evolutionary emergence, which involves an explicit appeal to temporality (“the question of whether any properties are ‘emergents’ in the sense of being temporally novel is a problem of a different order”), and argue that philosophers have largely ignored it because it appears to be an empirical rather than philosophical problem. Numerous conceptual issues surround evolutionary emergence, including whether causal explanations of the origin of novelties are sometimes impossible and how some researchers attempt to circumvent this difficulty by suspending the principle of actualism (i.e., evolutionary processes operated differently in the past than they do today). These conceptual issues are not merely philosophical because they impinge on the foundations of ongoing empirical investigation, and therefore suggest a fruitful nexus for a collaborative endeavor between philosophy and the sciences. Love, A.C. 2008. Explaining evolutionary innovation and novelty: criteria of explanatory adequacy and epistemological prerequisites. Philosophy of Science 75, 874–886. Nagel, E. 1961. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
William Seager (Toronto, Canada) Emergentist Panpsychism Recent revivals of interest in panpsychism stem from worries about the cogency of emergentism. Although it seems natural to regard consciousness as some kind of emergent phenomenon, exactly how the physical world can “generate” consciousness is deeply mysterious. If consciousness cannot emerge from the physical, then it must be relatively fundamental, from which panpsychism follows quite straightforwardly. However, some of the more attractive forms of panpsychism end up facing their own problem of emergence. This is the problem of how nature “combines” the primitive, fundamental psychic elements into more complex forms of consciousness, such as those we are introspectively aware of. I aim to discuss this problem and present some possible models for a solution that preserves what is distinctive about panpsychism and without lapsing back into physicalism.
E¨ ors Szathm´ ary (Budapest, Hungary) Tibor G´ anti’s Work on the Principles of Life – “und dar¨ uber hinaus” Without the slightest doubt, Tibor G´anti has been the deepest thinker in the past decades on the conceptual foundations for the understanding of life as rooted in chemistry. He has established a verbal but strict set of criteria that any living system must obey. He pointed out that the organizational principles cannot be investigated in general since multicellular organisms consist of units that are themselves alive. Regarding unicellular life, he postulated that it rests on three qualitatively different autocatalytic systems: metabolism, templates and membrane. This triple forms the basis of chemoton theory. I shall elaborate on the chemical, biological and philosophical significance of his findings, to pay tribute to one of the most outstanding scientists I have ever met.
Dieter Vaitl (Giessen, Germany) Altered States of Consciousness Consciousness can be altered ba a multitude of factors ranging from structurally and functionally compromised brain activity to spontaneously occurring or experimentally induced changes in cortical arousal, sensory stimulation cognitive processes, and self-control. Here, we will focus on Buddhist meditative practices as a canonical sample. They involve present-moment sensory awareness with an equanimous and non-reactive mental set which, as neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies have demonstrated, results in attention modulation, emotion regulation and, finally, in decentring of the self. In addition meditative practices enable long-term meditators to shift voluntarily and quickly from a categorial way of information processing to an a-categorial, purely experiential one.
Albrecht von M¨ uller (M¨ unchen, Germany) Crucial Pitfalls in the Categorial Foundations of Modern Science – What They Are, Where They Come From and How They Might Be Overcome Since decades, and despite most serious and protraced efforts modern science is incapable of coping with some of its most foundational questions. What are respectively how constitute and work (a) matter, (b) life and (c) mind? There is an explosive expansion of knowledge about many fascinating details in all three fields. But the foundational questions remain essentially unanswered. In principle this could have two reasons. One is that this kind of foundational questions are inherently unanswerable. The other is that we are tackling them by inadequate means. Probably, both reasons are partially correct. All thinking and all theories rest on categorial foundations that could be defined as the starting point of all further considerations, so to speak “right at the interface between reality and cognition”. Categories enable, but by enabling also constrain our thinking. Based on findings regarding the non-independence of these most basic underpinnings of our thoughts a structural one-sidedness in the way we are used to frame reality is unveiled. It is a bias towards the factual aspect of reality – marginalizing the actual taking place of reality that occurs in the time-space of the present. In modern science we have forgotten how to think the present – and with it the actual taking place of reality. The resulting “facticity imprisonment”, it is argued, makes it impossible to understand (a) the state reduction in quantum physics and its relation to classic relativistic physics, (b) the phylo- and onto-genesis of life and (c) the self-constitution of consciousness and mind. Characteristic for all three issues are the phenomena of strong self-referentiality and autogenesis. Exactely these, however, become conceptually inaccessible in a categorial framework that is tuned to and appropriate for the factual aspect of reality. It is shown that and how these foundational pitfalls can be overcome by a richer categorial framework and how this allows for a “modest ToE”, i.e. a coherent account of reality that recognizes, however, its inherent and irreducible wonderfulness.
Jiri Wackermann (Freiburg, Germany) Spontaneity, Continuity and Necessity: Speculations on Time and Life Two models of time have been dominating European thought of time: absolute time, containing events and having its measure in itself, and relational time, generated by events and measured only on an instrumental/conventional basis. The relational model avoids metaphysical assumptions and fits well with the operationalist fashion of modern science, but it leaves the question of the ground of change or motion open to speculation. We propose to consider the phenomenon of life, which is essentially characterised by spontaneous motion or change, as the basis for a time measure. Living beings then appear as proto-clocks operating on their own timescales, out of which the common world-time as well as the “subjective” time are obtained post hoc by abstraction. Taking the life phenomenon for an “absolute”, i.e. unconditional and unmotivated ground for other phenomenal domains is the high price of this move. However, its philosophical comfort and also its implications for special sciences (psychology) make this view an interesting option worth that price. For example, theoretical constructs such as “internal clocks” timing actions of organisms are eliminated.
Dan Zakay (Tel Aviv, Israel) Time-Awareness Space: A Framework for Understanding the Relationship between Subjective and Objective Reality It is argued that ones’mind is actually wondering within a subjective TimeAwareness Space . The Time-Awareness space is defined by a time-orientation (past-present-future) dimension and by the level of awareness (low-medium-high) to the inner or the outer world. At any moment in objective time one is located in a certain loacation in the Time-Awareness space. This location determines how one is perceiving reality at that certain moment and how he/she will act accordingly. For example, when one is located in the past and all of his/her awareness is focused on the past by retrieval of memories, etc., one is loosing contact with objective reality and will not respond to objective demands of reality. Being adjusted to one’s environment requires that one is located in the present and is, at least, partially awaer of the outer world. The location of the mind in the Time-Awareness space is dynamic and shifts from one point to another. The importance of understanding the notion of the Time-Awareness space and its implications for understanding the relationship between the subjective and objective realities will be discussed.
