Journal: Foundations of Science

Abbreviation

Found Sci

Publisher

Springer

Journal Volumes

ISSN

1572-8471
1233-1821

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2022 - 20243
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Publications 1 - 3 of 3
  • Epistemic Functions of Replicability in Experimental Sciences: Defending the Orthodox View
    Item type: Journal Article
    Sikorski, Michał; Andreoletti, Mattia (2024)
    Foundations of Science
    Replicability is widely regarded as one of the defining features of science and its pursuit is one of the main postulates of meta-research, a discipline emerging in response to the replicability crisis. At the same time, replicability is typically treated with caution by philosophers of science. In this paper, we reassess the value of replicability from an epistemic perspective. We defend the orthodox view, according to which replications are always epistemically useful, against the more prudent view that claims that it is useful in very limited circumstances. Additionally, we argue that we can learn more about the original experiment and the limits of the discovered effect from replications at different levels. We hold that replicability is a crucial feature of experimental results and scientists should continue to strive to secure it.
  • Why Physics Does Not Inform the Human Condition, But Its Boundaries Do
    Item type: Journal Article
    Atmanspacher, Harald (2024)
    Foundations of Science
    The science of physics has been extremely successful over the last four centuries, mainly for one reason: It does everything it can to disregard anything that has to do with non-physical parts of reality. Although the human body is a physical body, large parts of what distinguishes human beings, sometimes briefly called the human condition, does not belong to the physical domain. This implies that physics (and other sciences of the material universe) offers nothing more than self-imposed helplessness when it comes to questions as to what it means to be human. Yet it is possible to scrutinize the way in which physics (and other sciences) is delineated from the rest of reality: to reconsider its boundaries as they were set about four centuries ago. In other words, it is possible to look for features within the physical that are related to something outside the physical which physics itself ignores. The key concept to do so is proposed to be meaning, in its two variants of reference and sense. Meaning provides a viable perspective to illuminate the deep structure of reality as it extends beyond physics and across its boundaries.
  • Bernhard Riemann, the Ear, and an Atom of Consciousness
    Item type: Journal Article
    Bell, Andrew; Davies, Bryn; Ammari, Habib (2022)
    Foundations of Science
    Why did Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the "poetry of hypothesis". He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of "mind-masses" and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner's law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness-drawing on Riemann's mind-masses and the similar "psychons" proposed by Eccles-is put forward.
Publications 1 - 3 of 3