MY BOOKS
The Grand March of the Intellect
Abstract
This book proposes that the new science of chaos and complexity, which owes its development to the digital computer, has something important to tell us about the nature of reality. Chaos and complexity theory amounts to a third avalanche in the evolution of knowledge, as important as the discovery that the earth is a rotating ball orbiting the sun, or that mankind evolved out of earlier animal forms. It has implications for our understanding of the nature of the universe, of the nature of God, and of the nature of mind and free will. As such, it has enormous implications for the Arts as well as for Science.
The author came to the study of cosmology through the study of the English Romantics. Many of the insights of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, and other Romantics prove to be substantiated by the science of complexity. This book attempts to demonstrate the importance of myth and metaphor in our understanding of the world, and to relate this to what Stephen Hawking calls "model dependent realism". It also draws together insights from writers of the Romantic Period and from other authors of similar mind, with insights from the new science, in support of a Humanist philosophy of life, and to offer a system of secular values evolved from such sources.
This book can be purchased on line from the Blurb Inc. Bookstore for a modest price.
The Block Universe Delusion
Andrew T. Seaman (2020)
Abstract
Kurt Vonnegut understood that human beings are capable of absurd behavior and absurd belief. Through satire, he attempted to help us see that absurdity for what it is. In Slaughterhouse Five, he attacked not only the absurdity of war, but of the philosophical and scientific theory of hard determinism, which would absolve mankind of responsibility for its atrocities and myopia, as well as rob us of any credit for kindness and creativity. Unhappily, Albert Einstein believed that his discoveries implied that past, present and future are equally real, necessitating a doctrine of hard determinism, and he is quoted as declaring that he did not believe in free will. There is a long history of deterministic conviction in philosophy, but since Einstein it has been bolstered by "block universe theory", which, as Brian Greene puts it, incorporates a single, physical reality which includes "all of the universe throughout all time". Though this theory has a remarkable number of scientific supporters, not all reputable scientists agree. Recently an American Harvard graduate physicist now living and teaching in Canada, Lee Smolin, along with other scientific writers such as Zeeya Merali, have been attempting to promote a view of time which denies the physical reality of past and future, and focuses on an ongoing present characterized by motion and change as the only reality. It is my view that these approaches, coupled with insights provided by the "new science" of chaos and complexity, offer a convincing alternative. Moreover, I think that Hawking and Mlodinow hit upon an important insight when they articulated the idea of "model dependent realism". It states that we "interpret the input of our sensory organs by making a model of the world" which we tend to mistake for reality. It occurs to me that this is fundamentally related to what I, as an Artsman, have come to understand as "metaphorical thought". The "block universe" is just such an abstract model, understood as being directly equivalent to reality by scientists who fail to understand model dependent realism. Metaphor works by setting up a model which parallels reality in certain specific aspects only. It enhances our understanding by illuminating those aspects. However, when we take a metaphor literally, we apply all aspects of the model to the reality with absurd results. Understanding block universe theory to imply that reality incorporates all past and future realities in a frozen, predetermined, block universe, in which motion is an illusion, is an absurd conclusion resulting from taking a model, or metaphor, literally. We should have left it behind with Parmenides two and a half millennia ago. This book attempts to trace how we came to make this mistake, and suggests how to fix it.
