Contextualizing A Process Model in terms of philosophy of science

 

I found this 2000 article by Gendlin this morning entitled "The 'Mind'/'Body' Problem and First-Person Process: Three Types of Concepts"

https://focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2104.html

Now this is the kind of contextualization for APM I've been looking for! I wish a bit more of this was included in an introduction. In any case, I think the discussion about reductionism at the end is important. Sounds like Gendlin did have a sophisticated understanding, though he still doesn't give a lot of references to the philosophy of science literature. How well does chemistry reduce to physics? How well does biology reduce to chemistry? I think people tend to think the reduction is complete. And yet, philosophers who look at these questions find that the answer is more subtle than that.

 

Thinking about this, I do question Gendlin's characterization of the majority of natural science as "unit model". What I think he's getting at with this unit model discussion is the idea of reductionism itself: that biology should reduce to chemistry and that chemistry should reduce to physics. Then we assume that a biological concept, say "the endocrine system" should be describable in the terms of a "lower" level science like physics in terms of its concepts like electrons, protons, electric fields, motion, etc. This is the claim of reductionism, and it needs to be examined carefully to see where it succeeds and where it doesn't. The philosopher Nancy Cartwright is someone I've learned a lot from on this account (see e.g. "The Dappled World"). Another good book on this topic is William Wimsatt's "Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality". Gendlin does point here to the concept of multiple-realizability, so it shows he's familiar with some of the arguments.

 

So I'm not sure one could characterize the specific sciences such as biology and physiology or even physics as including only unit concepts. The physics concepts of energy, light, fields, Hamiltonians and maps, coherence... are these unit concepts? Not really.

 

Having said all this, I do think that Gendlin is breaking new ground in APM and this "first person science" is sorely needed. And just like Gendlin points out that "unit science" gets put into a larger context via ecology, we can equally well say that "process science" or first person science needs to also get put into the larger context of the other sciences.

Turning 50, week three at Emily Griffiths, keeping physics going, etc

 

Well, I turned 50 on Monday. Ugh. Thanks for all the kind birthday messages! I went on a hike on the Anne White trail with my brother Andrew and my neighbors Jeff and Lynn. Then I had some friends and neighbors over to my place. (Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos...) I always like bringing people together from different parts of my life. It's part of community building for me. I really enjoyed it, and appreciated Andrew visiting me and helping me prepare for the party.

 

Combined with starting this new job, and tracking the battle over democracy in the US, I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed. I've been feeling like I don't quite have the energy to meet this moment. But I'm also trying to remember to be kind to myself and appreciate that I am doing a lot. I had 1.5 years without a job and settled into a life style where my time was my own. I've also never enjoyed engaging with all these complex systems such as health care and financial systems. And with the new job, even though getting benefits is great, I'm really putting off figuring it out and enrolling. I'll try to be more proactive in asking for help from people at work and beyond in these parts of my life that have never been easy for me.

 

On the physics front, I've been trying to keep my collaborations and connection to accelerator physics alive while also moving into the quantum technology domain. It feels good that a PhD student at Cornell is continuing my work on intrabeam scattering and finally implementing the diffusion and damping coefficients in one of the major modeling codes- BMAD. And I've been trying to learn about space time algebra of David Hestenes and connect that to the Dirac equation. I'm hoping to think through what it means to do quantum mechanics with photons. What is really meant by the wave-function of the photon? Somehow it is E+iB where E is the electric field and B the magnetic field. In geometric algebra, B is actually a bivector. All this is still a bit vague for me, but my hope is that I can keep my grounding in physics as I get some lab equipment to play with and use for teaching and training students. I'll have to take this course at CNM to make sure I actually understand how to use it all. In addition to the quantum optics kit, we'll also have an ultrahigh vacuum system from Edwards. Lots to learn about that...

 

At the same time, I learn about Career Technical Education (CTE) and meet people in the community colleges of Colorado as well as the Universities. Next week I meet someone from Google quantum and also will visit Vescent in Golden. I hope to meet people from Quantinuum and some of the other quantum computing companies. Still, I get pulled into this sense that there's a lot of hype in the quantum computing world, and they love to tie it in with AI, which I'm still struggling with.

 

What I most enjoyed about my 1.5 years off was reading about the philosophy of quantum mechanics and what it says about our world. I came to understand that we are sorely lacking a bridge between mind and body in the western world. Reading about all the different theories of consciousness together with all the different theories of quantum mechanics made me feel that there may be a bridge to be built in that territory. My hope with working in the field of quantum technology is that my passion for this question could be motivational in terms of teaching and building this lab. How that fits in with the quantum technology domain remains to be seen. I do think I can help with bridge building here if I can keep coming back to myself and my humanity.

 

I feel like we are at such an important time in history and there's so much hype and disinformation, we need to slow down and make careful choices. But life seems to be pushing me to go faster and faster! I guess that's what the weekend is for... time to slow down a bit and get my feet underneath me.