Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science - Hardcover

by Harald Atmanspacher (Editor), Hans Primas (Editor)

1 2 Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas 1 Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology, Freiburg, Germany, haa@igpp.de 2 ETH Zurich, Switzerland, primas@phys.chem.ethz.ch Thenotionofrealityisofsupremesigni?canceforourunderstandingofnature, the world around us, and ourselves. As the history of philosophy shows, it has been under permanent discussion at all times. Traditional discourse about - ality covers the full range from basic metaphysical foundations to operational approaches concerning human kinds of gathering and utilizing knowledge, broadly speaking epistemic approaches. However, no period in time has ex- rienced a number of moves changing and, particularly, restraining traditional concepts of reality that is comparable to the 20th century. Early in the 20th century, quite an in?uential move of such a kind was due to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, laid out essentially by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Pauli in the mid 1920s. Bohr's dictum, quoted by Petersen (1963, p.12), was that "it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to ?nd out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." Although this standpoint was not left unopposed - Einstein, Schr] odinger, and others were convinced that it is the task of science to ?nd out about nature itself - epistemic, operational attitudes have set the fashion for many discussions in the philosophy of physics (and of science in general) until today.

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Wolfgang Pauli was not only one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century: His huge correspondence and unpublished manuscripts also demonstrate his deep interest in questions beyond physics.

This volume explores the relevance of Pauli's visionary ideas with respect to several topics in science and philosophy that are if great contemporary interest: the role of symmetries in theoretical science; dual-aspect approaches to the mind-brain problem; the tension between psychological and physical time; the nature of creative activity and the origin of mathematical insight; and adaptive mutations and epigenetics in biology. Today we are in a position to appreciate how relevant Pauli's work and speculations have turned out to be. This book, authored by a team of internationally renowned experts, provides material and suggests directions for future studies of a variety of deep-seated and open problems, in particular concerning the relation between mind and matter.