A Flickering Light: An Unconventional View of Western Science

ISBN-13: 9781491741047 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 248 str.

Miguel Ochoa

Opis

It is a generally accepted notion that science is a cool dispassionate human endeavor which explicit purpose is to unravel the secrets of Creation, so events could be predicted, manipulated and harness for the betterment of Man and society. To this effect it is necessary to resort to our 'Reason', that is, the use of the intellect to discern the hidden components that need to be sorted out to achieve our purpose.

It is common in our culture the belief that the process of 'ratiocination' need to avail itself of notions like 'causality', which we assumed to be deeply enmeshed in the dynamics of events, so 'explanations' could be afforded and predictions made, frequently after 'models' for the given subjects of our enquires are designed based in concepts like 'particles' and 'waves'.

The author, tracing historically the roots of these premises of our understanding and after offering some notorious examples, attempts to provide evidence, based in Neuroanatomical and Neurophysiological facts, that those taken for granted categories of our reasoning mind are deeply rooted in the internal organization of our relational apparatus: The Brain. He then concludes that our cherish notions and concepts might not be valid at far removed universal horizons, but instead be a hindrance to the true understanding of these remote realms. Man, he believes, should divest himself from taken for granted concepts and adopt a pre-suppositional frame of mind in his future quests of the Cosmo. The book closes with a review of epistemological problems specific to the Medical Sciences.