A crucial field for understanding thinking – and for making the results of studying thinking practically relevant - are the unresolved foundational issues in science, especially in physics, biology and cognition research. Many members of the foundation continue to work and publish on foundational issues within their academic “home turf”.
For this reason, and in order to systematically utilize emergent synergies between their works, it has been decided to organize these ongoing activities in a specific organizational unit, the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundation of Science. The Center is headed by Eörs Szathmáry and will be built up during 2011 and 2012.
Background
Many of the most fascinating issues in today’s science seem to be characterized by the fact that further progress requires a new combination between searching for new empirical evidence and reflecting the conceptual frameworks in which the respective phenomena are addressed. In many cases it is even necessary to make the very categorical foundations - that shape the way in which we perceive and think about an issue in the first place - part of our theories.
This holds true for the study of matter/energy in quantum and relativistic physics, and especially for the huge challenge of understanding the relation between the two. It holds equally true for understanding what constitutes life and how the phenomenon of life could emerge out of matter. And it holds true again for the question what constitutes the phenomena of mind and consciousness and how they could emerge out of life and, thus, indirectly also out of matter.
Central Idea
Much of today’s top notch research activities are under a constant pressure to quickly produce results that can be published in high-impact journals. While indeed fostering fast advances in already well-established directions, this attitude has the down-side of an increasing marginalization of the other component of real progress in science, the “slow and lonely work” of deep thinking (Heidegger).
By explicitly focusing on the conceptual foundations, the Center should create an opportunity to focus on these foundational issues in an appropriate way. Interestingly enough, the big unresolved issues in all the three mentioned areas (matter/energy, life and mind/consciousness) seem to have some common denominators. For example, the structure of strong self-referentiality – anathema to classical approaches that assume comprehensive well-definedness and causal closure – seems to play a crucial role in all three fields. Likewise, a concept of temporality that doesn’t reduce time to its linear-sequential footprint in local space-time seems pivotal.
These points of convergence strengthen the argument for focusing on the categorial foundations of research. If we are getting something wrong already “down there”, it must necessarily pop up again in the format of inherently insurmountable problems in all the concerned areas of research.
The central idea of the Center is, therefore to provide a framework in which (a) these foundational, categorial issues can be studied thoroughly for each of the mentioned fields, but where (b) the respective finding can also be exchanged and discussed across disciplinary boundaries, thus enabling to look for cross-cutting patters and identifying the deep, structural issues in the very way we are used to address reality.
Implementation
The work of the Center will consist of four, closely interrelated components:
- a small team of 3-4 permanently employed scientist representing the key areas of interest; their task would be to specify and elaborate the crucial issues, to select themes and participants for workshops and a related sabbatical program, to contribute to high-level teaching in special, relevant courses and, in addition, to function as an institutional memory,
- a series of small workshops and seminars for which well-selected participants are invited to contribute commissioned papers,
- a small sabbatical program in which workshop participants that contributed most substantially are offered to focus for a few months on the foundational issues within their own field of expertise,
- dedicated, specifically designed high-level courses for selected participants in various frameworks in the related fields.
