Call for participation: The Stockholm academy for extraordinary philosophy and science will have its first “walk and talk” Wednesday, May 31, 2023. I’ll walk from The National Museum at 14.00, heading over the bridge to Skeppsholmen. Then I’ll walk around it and head back to the National Museum.

This is an up to date list of planned walks and talks:

• Wednesday, May 31, 2023. Report: Nice walk. Found kind of a short cut through the Modern Museum. Lost some philosophers perhaps. Three more walks already planned!
• Wednesday, June 7, 2023
• Wednesday, June 14, 2023
• Wednesday, June 21, 2023

With “extraordinary” I simply mean “founded on new premises”. I have offered solutions to old questions within the field of philosophy-science. See especially my 2017 and 2021. These solutions build on unpublished material that I want to discuss. The idea is to gather people that want to work with very deep questions from the starting point of my findings. The unpublished material is an axiomatization of the natural laws. The axiomatization is not complicated but is founded on new premises. “The Stockholm academy for extraordinary philosophy and science”, thus, is positioned outside what is usually dealt with within academia. An example of what is “outside” is found in 2023 (preprint).

References

Gamper, J. On a Loophole in Causal Closure. Philosophia 45, 631–636 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9791-y

Gamper, J. Biological Energy and the Experiencing Subject. Axiomathes 31, 497–506 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-020-09494-8

Johan Gamper. (2023). On a Loophole in Causal Closure: Reply to Berber & Đorđević. Qeios. https://www.qeios.com/read/SDCNHA.2

Best,

Johan Gamper

Independent scholar

Email: johan.gamper@karlpu.org

The Flaw

“When it comes to science and the explanatory system explaining focuses epistemological atoms; the things that are to be explained are measurable entities. Modern science is simply based on concepts that are defined by how they are measured. These operational definitions have the advantage that you always know what you are talking about. It is not for the scientist to understand the concepts.

Concerning consciousness it is interesting to see the operational definition for what it is, an operational definition (sic!). An operational definition is what it is. If you operationally define consciousness you do not define something else operationally. Consciousness would be defined according to the operational definition. It would neither be right, nor wrong. If consciousness is defined operationally the definition is what you are working with. Your own conception of what consciousness is, is bypassed. In the explanatory setting based on operational definitions, the intuitive understanding of consciousness and the experienced consciousness are omitted.

While this permits the machinery of the natural sciences to work with consciousness there is a flaw in the fundamental approach. The flaw does not directly concern consciousness in itself. If we define consciousness operationally with the definition X, we work with the premise that a certain subject in the experimental setting is conscious if X. This “either/or” scenario, though, becomes interesting only when we pair X with some contents. The subject, e.g., is conscious about this or that visual stimulus. Or, the subjects is conscious about this or that tactile stimulus. In the experimental setting we do not ask the subject if it sees or feels this or that. We expose the stimulus operationally, for example by putting the light on or by stroking the subjects arm. Whether or not the subject is conscious about the light or the stroking we determine via X. Without X, we conclude that the subject was not conscious about the stimulus.

The flaw is identified when we consider self-consciousness. We cannot present the self to the subject. Accordingly, if the subject is self-conscious or not we cannot determine via X. We could ask the subject but then we have already missed the target. For one thing we then must assume that subjects that do not answer are not self-conscious. Another thing is that we then miss the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness. The subject logically cannot report that it is conscious about something without being self-conscious about it. In conclusion a reasonable valid operational definition X of consciousness would not cover self-consciousness.” (Revised excerpt from Gamper, 2021.)

Reference

Gamper, J (2021). Rebooting Science 1.0. BoD. Stockholm, Sweden. https://philpapers.org/rec/GAMRS-2 (Link to the ebook on Amazon and Apple).

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00708653

Physics and the explanation of life

• Eugene P. Wigner 

Foundations of Physics volume 1, pages 35–45 (1970)

Abstract

It is proposed to consider present-day physics as dealing with a special situation, the situation in which the phenomena of life and consciousness play no role. It is pointed out that physical theory has often dealt, in the past, with similarly special situations. Planetary theory neglects all but gravitational forces, macroscopic physics neglects fluctuations due to the atomic structure of matter, nuclear physics disregards weak and gravitational interactions. In some of these cases, physicists were well aware of dealing with special situations, or limiting cases as they are called in the article; in other cases, they were not. It is pointed out that, even if it were true that present-day physics accurately describes the motion of the physical constituents of living bodies, it would not give the whole story. Arguments are adduced, however, to show that the laws of physics, applicable for inanimate matter, will have to be modified when dealing with the more general situation in which life and consciousness play significant roles.