Nature's Imagination: Frontiers of Scientific Vision

Year 1995

ISBN No. 9780198517757

No.of pages 212

Subject Science and Technology

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Scientific reductionism, often defined as a method of understanding the whole by examining the parts, has had some spectacular success since the early 19th century, and is deemed to impose a deterministic non-anthropocentric immutable nature on the Universe. In the later 20th century, many discoveries and hypotheses in both biological and cosmological systems have forced a re-evaluation of the scientist's traditional mind set. Eminent scientists come together in this volume to examine and discuss these issues, and to give illuminating examples.

Table of contents

Freeman Dyson: . 1: Introduction: the Scientist as rebel. Roger Penrose: . 2: Must mathematical physics be reductionist. Gregory J. Chaitin: . 3: Randomness in arithmetic and the decline and fall of reductionism in pure mathematics. John Barrow: . 4: Theories of Everything. Pat and Paul Churchland: . 5: Intertheoretic reduction: a neuroscientist's field-guide. Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi: . 6: Neural Darwinism: The brain as a selectional system. Oliver Sacks: . 7: A new vision of the mind. Peter Atkins: . 8: The limitless power of science. Mary Midgley: . 9: Reductive megalomania. Margaret Boden: . 10: Artificial intelligence and human dignity. Hao Wang: . 11: On computabilism and physicalism: some sub-problems. William Clocksin: . 12: Knowledge representation and myth. Gerald M. Edelman: . 13: Memory and the individual soul: against silly reductionism