Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ideas—whose truth concerning an invisible, mathematicized world could
only be guaranteed by a benevolent god, the now-notorious “god of the
philosophers”—failed to heal the embarrassing rift between mind and
nature even before this ridiculous deity unceremoniously fled the scene.
What eventually followed was the predictable flowering of positivism
and various reductionistic and scientistic tendencies, all of which merely
added to the alarm over the survival of freedom in a mechanistic uni-
verse and further heightened the need for an enduring metaphysical solu-
tion that took into account the new scientific realities. For beyond the
epistemological quandary of the status of John Locke's secondary qual-
ities (color, sound, odor, and so on) lay the more serious danger of a
modern kind of moral solipsism and its logical denial of a world shared
in common. The ensuing debate over whether the human mind is actu-
ally able to make contact with an objective world beyond itself—as if
consciousness were a box in which representations come and go with
no apparent relation to what we intuitively know, and feel no need to
prove, to be the world “out there”—was a sure sign of something seri-
ously gone awry.
And so it was out of this bizarre epistemological and metaphysical cul-
de-sac that the so-called real world, the world of matter-in-motion quan-
tifiable in functionally dependent laws, was believed to be less a reality
that is given to us and more a mental construct that we can be certain
of knowing only because we have produced it in some mysterious
fashion. It was Galileo's genius to have seen that the tool for such a con-
struction was mathematics, itself a construction of the human mind. As
David Hume was later to grasp, the ancient standard of truth, still quite
visible in Descartes, had in fact shifted from intuitive seeing and logical
demonstration to the instrumental ability to predict natural occurrences
by conceiving of them as a coherence of forces calculable in advance—
that is, as causal events whose necessary connections can only be
explained by attributing them to the power of the human imagination.
It was then but one more step—though a sizable one, at that—to the
Kantian realization that we can and do know the world, not in spite of,
but precisely because we are deeply implicated in the creation of its
causal structure and of the language of mathematics through which it is
expressed. And if any doubt remains concerning our central role in
constructing such a world, we need only to trace this epistemology to its
