Describing not the world but our own minds

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers start out their classic Order Out of Chaos with a quote of Roger Hausheer in Isaiah Berlin’s Against the Current: “They sought all-embracing schemas, universal unifying frameworks, within which everything that exists could be shown to be systematically—i.e., logically or causally—interconnected, vast structures in which there should be no gaps left open for spontaneous, unattended developments, where everything that occurs should be, at least in principle, wholly explicable in terms of immutable general laws.” It strikes me in reading this that these classic scientists were instead unwittingly describing how they wanted their minds to be: systematic, logical, causal, with no gaps left for anything outside their own grasp and control. And yet over the three centuries and a quarter we have found that our minds grow beyond easy frameworks, particularly in their aspects which are inexplicable, spontaneous, and unattended.

:- Doug.

Published in: Conversations | on August 26th, 2013 | No Comments »

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