Re: Your article in ECO
9/13/06
Damian,
Damian,
Not sure if this will get to you.  I’m an American, so some of what you had to say about the European philosophy of complexity went right over my head.  In my philosophy of knowledge the fact that I’m “out of the loop” with regard to some of the things you were saying, is both an observation about philosophical disconnects I observed while reading, and an observation physical loops of conversation that I can observe you are part of, and know I am not part of.
If you were to take the above principle, and extend it, you’d see that the mistakes of modern science in trying to represent nature with simple equations is just a mistake, not a fault of learning from observation.  You might say representing nature with simple equations is a BIG mistake, perhaps, and be entirely correct in the sense of what big mistakes will result in… but, to me, it’s just a mistake.   I have a different, fairly successful, way of correcting that mistake, that also does directly open toward the kind of Husserlian vision you rightly single out as refreshing and inspiring.
I began making headway when I began to look at what ‘approximation’ leaves out. It leaves out all the connecting processes, for example, those ‘messy bits’, which on closer inspection all turn out to be unstable processes.  The magic of nature is in it’s instabilities.   I’m actually less interested in nature’s statistics, it’s what’s really happening that I find intriguing.   But it’s not the use of approximation that leaves out that dance of time, it’s the representation of nature with approximation that kills the patient.    So I crafted a method of looking directly at what approximation ignores.   Â
I’m definitely a theoretician, but my method also definitely relies on careful direct observation.  That’s where the music is!
Phil Henshaw                      ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸