faculties of the human mind depend directly on the requirements posed by evolutionary adaptation. Our brains are the way they are only because they have apparently prevailed in the evolutionary contest. Their task in the rainforest and savanna was never to obtain completely objective knowledge of the world, so it is no wonder that they are not optimally tailored to this task.
Assuming that human consciousness was not developed according to the criterion of absolute objectivity, man can grasp onlywhat the cognitive apparatus that arose in the evolutionary contest enables him to grasp. Our understanding of science is subject to our cognitive constraints. If it were not, there would be no need for progress, opposition, or revisions in the sciences. The prerequisites for research, such as freedom to contest existing views, repeatability, and validity, are not autonomous criteria; they reflect the human cognitive faculty at a given time in a specific situation in which knowledge is presented. Information that scientists considered indisputable a century ago is now dismissed out of hand, and this pattern is likely to carry into the next century.
For philosophers, it still makes sense to proceed from the thinking ‘I,’ which deciphers the world one step at a time. In this regard, Descartes remains just as modern as he was nearly four hundred years ago. But of course, philosophers should realize that they are not thinking independently of and unaided by the brain. The brain thinks, and it also produces the self, which thinks that it thinks. Was Descartes right to have used the word ‘I’? Shouldn’t he have said: if it is indisputable that doubting requires thinking, thinking must occur? Instead of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ shouldn’t it have been ‘There are thoughts’? How did this ‘I’ get slipped in?
VIENNA
Mach’s Momentous Experience
Who Is ‘I’?
Once-in-a-lifetime experiences sometimes get buried in footnotes, as was literally the case back in 1855, when Ernst Mach, then a seventeen-year-old student of physics, went for a stroll on the outskirts of Vienna and had an epiphany:
On a bright summer day under the open heaven, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view.
The student was unaware of it at the time, but this moment was tantamount to the insight of the century. Fifty years after the fact, it was relegated to a footnote in his Analysis of the Sensations .
Ernst Mach was born in 1838 (six years before Nietzsche) in Chrlice, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic. His family was in the German-speaking minority. Mach’s father was a farmer and tutor who educated his son at home. At the same time, the young Mach completed anapprenticeship in carpentry. At the age of fifteen, this highly gifted teenager finally enrolled in high school, and then breezed through his college entrance examinations. He studied mathematics and science in Vienna and wrote his dissertation on electricity. A year later he became a professor and moved from Graz to Prague, and later to Vienna. His interests were wide-ranging; indeed, he was interested in just about everything. He taught physics and mathematics, philosophy and psychology. As a physicist he calculated the speed of sound, which was later named after him; supersonic aircraft fly at ‘Mach 2’ speed.
Mach enjoyed great renown in Prague and Vienna. He experimented with rocket projectiles and explored the dynamics of gases. His criticisms of Newtonian physics became Einstein’s inspiration for the theory of relativity. Einstein liked to refer to himself as Mach’s student, although Mach had never been his instructor. Politically Mach was a liberal who was increasingly drawn to the Social Democratic Party, which was then
Assuming that human consciousness was not developed according to the criterion of absolute objectivity, man can grasp onlywhat the cognitive apparatus that arose in the evolutionary contest enables him to grasp. Our understanding of science is subject to our cognitive constraints. If it were not, there would be no need for progress, opposition, or revisions in the sciences. The prerequisites for research, such as freedom to contest existing views, repeatability, and validity, are not autonomous criteria; they reflect the human cognitive faculty at a given time in a specific situation in which knowledge is presented. Information that scientists considered indisputable a century ago is now dismissed out of hand, and this pattern is likely to carry into the next century.
For philosophers, it still makes sense to proceed from the thinking ‘I,’ which deciphers the world one step at a time. In this regard, Descartes remains just as modern as he was nearly four hundred years ago. But of course, philosophers should realize that they are not thinking independently of and unaided by the brain. The brain thinks, and it also produces the self, which thinks that it thinks. Was Descartes right to have used the word ‘I’? Shouldn’t he have said: if it is indisputable that doubting requires thinking, thinking must occur? Instead of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ shouldn’t it have been ‘There are thoughts’? How did this ‘I’ get slipped in?
VIENNA
Mach’s Momentous Experience
Who Is ‘I’?
Once-in-a-lifetime experiences sometimes get buried in footnotes, as was literally the case back in 1855, when Ernst Mach, then a seventeen-year-old student of physics, went for a stroll on the outskirts of Vienna and had an epiphany:
On a bright summer day under the open heaven, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period, yet this moment was decisive for my whole view.
The student was unaware of it at the time, but this moment was tantamount to the insight of the century. Fifty years after the fact, it was relegated to a footnote in his Analysis of the Sensations .
Ernst Mach was born in 1838 (six years before Nietzsche) in Chrlice, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now in the Czech Republic. His family was in the German-speaking minority. Mach’s father was a farmer and tutor who educated his son at home. At the same time, the young Mach completed anapprenticeship in carpentry. At the age of fifteen, this highly gifted teenager finally enrolled in high school, and then breezed through his college entrance examinations. He studied mathematics and science in Vienna and wrote his dissertation on electricity. A year later he became a professor and moved from Graz to Prague, and later to Vienna. His interests were wide-ranging; indeed, he was interested in just about everything. He taught physics and mathematics, philosophy and psychology. As a physicist he calculated the speed of sound, which was later named after him; supersonic aircraft fly at ‘Mach 2’ speed.
Mach enjoyed great renown in Prague and Vienna. He experimented with rocket projectiles and explored the dynamics of gases. His criticisms of Newtonian physics became Einstein’s inspiration for the theory of relativity. Einstein liked to refer to himself as Mach’s student, although Mach had never been his instructor. Politically Mach was a liberal who was increasingly drawn to the Social Democratic Party, which was then
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