Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Time Began in a Garden



"In order to attain an adequate conceptual grasp of the unitary nature of physical reality, it is necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension of the image of the world derived from perceptual intuition. In other words, physical theory has to effect a rigorously mathematical circumvention of those imaginative limitations inherent in the physiologically rooted cognitive apparatus with which an aleatory evolutionary history has saddled us. Thus, the chief obstacle standing in the way of a proper scientific understanding of the physical world would seem to be that of our species’ inbuilt tendency to process information via epistemic mechanisms which invariably involve an operation of subtraction from the imperceptible physical whole. Phenomenology remains a function of physiology. Perhaps not least among the many startling philosophical consequences of superstring theory is the way in which it seems to provide a rigorously physicalist vindication of Plato: phenomenological perception would seem to be akin to that of the prisoner in the cave who mistakes flickering shadows for ‘the things themselves’." - Ray Brassier, Alien Theory

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