Unmaking Sense

Episode 10.08: Reconceptualising human life by remaking our sense of the world and human thriving.

The previous episode used the need to remove infinities from our inherited physics to avoid singularities by a process called renormalisation. What are the equivalent shifts in our understanding necessary if life is to be intelligible and sustainable under a new conception of human thriving?

Episode 10.07: That we have evolved and emerged with inadequate ways of making sense is forgivable.

It’s futile to conjecture whether the human species could have evolved with a different, better conceptual system, a better way of making sense of the world. And it is not reprehensible that we have emerged as we have, believing in the necessity of leaders and gods and universal absolute moral and scientific rules and laws. But just as with the inadequacies of Newtonian physics and Aristotelian biology we needed to change the basis of our understanding and move on and could not move on unless and until we changed the basis of our understanding, so it is now incumbent upon us, in the light of the unsustainable way we think of human prosperity and thriving, to change how we make sense not only of biology and physics, but of life itself.

Episode 10.06: Consistency - being led by the hand to unavoidable logical conclusions has its price.

The fundamental assumptions we make force certain conclusions upon us, which is one of the things that led particle physics to conjecture that there were fundamental particles as yet un observed and undiscovered. But is consistency all it seems?

Episode 10.05: Changing the basis of our understanding; reconceptualising; changing our minds.

We consider Søren Kierkegaard’s beloved Aristotle quote “metabasis eis allo genos”: changing the basis of our world-view to something different. In other words, how we change our minds.

Episode 10.04: Understanding as linkage to the evolving web of ideas expressed through language.

More aspects of understanding.

Episode 10.03: Unmaking our sense of what is involved in understanding understanding.

We use some of the challenging conceptual aspects of physics to rethink our understanding of understanding.

Episode 10.02: The Weak Interaction as an example the need to unmake our sense of what makes sense.

The weak interaction is used as an example of how our conventional understanding of what makes sense may not be adequate despite being the most natural way we have emerged and evolved to make sense of the world. Note that I am not a physicist and these episodes should not be regarded as a reliable guide to particle physics; they are, rather, examples of how ideas from other fields can trigger philosophical thoughts.

Episode 10.01: Stumbling towards a new way of making sense of life with a bit of help from physics.

A veritable smorgasbord of ideas in search of coherence as we try to piece together the contents of over 375 episodes aided and abetted by some inept readings in particle physics, unlikely as it may seem.

Episode 9.33: Truth as representational fiction as exemplified by “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”.

If truth is an optimally effective fiction which points us to what we do best to attend to, listen to, act on, live by and believe, then it tells us something very important about language and all other forms of representation: that they are just ways to enable us to think and talk about things that matter to us including life, death and our place in the universe.

Episode 9.32: Isn’t another deflationary account of truth the very last thing we need right now?

Why treating truth as if it is established eternally and so can be relied upon to speak for itself and fight its own battles is the real enemy and danger, not a remaking of our sense of truth that forces us to create and fight for it as what we believe is best for us.