Introduced by: RICHARD J.KOSCIEJEW
After severe adaptive evolutionary changes in brain and muscle-skeletal transformations and the resolving conquest of bipedalism, that the hominids made it possible for modern humans to construct a symbolic universe using complex language systems, something entirely enticing, fascinating and wholly unprecedented occurred. We began to perceive the world through the lenses of symbolic categories, to construct similarities and differences in terms of categorical oppositions, and to organize our lives according to themes and narratives. Living in this new symbolic universe, modern humans had a large irresistible impulse to cryptanalyze and unravel and find the key by its re-coding experiences, to translate everything into representation, and to seek out the deeper hidden logic that eliminates inconsistencies and ambiguities.
The mega-narrative or frame tale that served to legitimate and rationalize the categorical oppositions and terms of relation between the myriad number of constructs in the symbolic universe of modern humans were religion. The use of religious thought for these purposes is quite apparent in the artifacts found in the fossil remains of people living in France and Spain forty thousand years ago. And these artifacts provided the first concrete evidence that a fully developed language system had given birth to an intricate and complex social order.
Both religious and scientific thought seeks to frame or construct reality in terms of origins, primary oppositions, and underlying causes, and this partially explains why fundamental assumptions in the Western metaphysical tradition were eventually incorporated into a view of reality that would later be called scientific. The history of scientific thought reveals that the dialogue between assumptions about the character of spiritual reality in ordinary language and the character of physical reality in mathematical language was intimate and ongoing from the early Greek philosophers to the first scientific revolution in the seventeenth-century. But this dialogue did not conclude, as many have argued, with the emergence of positivism in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. It was perpetuated in a disguised form in the hidden ontology of classical epistemology - the central issue in the Bohr-Einstein debate.
The speculative assumption was to assert of there being to exist of a one-to-one correspondence between every element of physical reality and physical theory may serve to bridge the gap between mind and world for those who use physical theories. But it also suggests that the Cartesian division is real and insurmountable in constructions of physical reality based on ordinary language. This explains in no small part why the radical separation between mind and world sanctioned by classical physics and formalized by Descartes remains, as philosophical postmodernism attests, one of the most pervasive features of Western intellectual life.
The history of science reveals that scientific knowledge and method did not advance from the minds of the ancient Greeks any more than language and culture emerged fully formed in the minds of Homo sapiens sapient. Scientific knowledge is an extension of ordinary language into greater levels of abstraction and precision through reliance upon geometric and numerical relationships. We speculate that the seeds of the scientific imagination were planted in ancient Greece, as opposed to Chinese or Babylonian culture, partly because the social, political, and an economic climate in Greece was more open to the pursuit of knowledge with marginal cultural utility. Another important factor was that the special character of Homeric religion allowed the Greeks to invent a conceptual framework that would prove useful in future scientific investigation. But it was only after this inheritance from Greek philosophy was wedded to some essential features of Judeo-Christian beliefs about the origin of the cosmos that the paradigm for classical physics emerged.
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