theoretical incompleteness

• That the human mind does not perceive what is “there”, but what it believes should be “there”. H. von Foerster   
• “The Theory is only proposing a more detached view of the place in which our Consciousness is spacing; it is meant to be a more holistic kind of Physics. On the other hand, we must accept the fact that all theories, including the present one, are only approximations of the Truth. Only if Man had an infinite mind he/she would be able to grasp Total Reality. By just verbalizing something, we have already approximated it. Math comes closer, but it is still an approximation, because Nature has too many domains from which it emanates. The fact that it is open-ended at its outer edge doesn’t allow us to take seriously any Theory of Everything.”R. Lampis
• Thus it is most likely the case that no human endeavor is immune to theoretical incompleteness. This would then imply that any idea or concept cannot be completely defined, axiomatized or contextualized. It would also mean that a general correspondence theory of truth is unattainable and, moreover, that the notion of truth, itself, is undefinable. J.Mathen  
• Vasubandhu writes “Thought involves a transformation of consciousness. For that reason, what has been thought does not exist. Therefore, all this is mere concept.” There is no denial of an object here. What is denied is the existence of a real object that is reflected “as it is” in consciousness. The fact that consciousness, while reflecting the object, has passed through several transformations makes it impossible for the object to be known “as it is.” For this reason, all that is available is a “concept” (vijnapti), not an ultimate reality or substance, either in oneself or in the world of experience. D.J. Kalupahana
• Basic reality, i.e., reality which exists independently of the observer, is in principle not accessible in any DIRECT WAY. Rather, it is observable or describable by means of pictures on different levels, i.e., levels of reality. W. Schommers
•  Everything is located in the head, not only the products of fantasy and scientific laws, but those things which we understand as “hard” objects. This is because we do not have the “hard” objects actually in front of us but “only” their pictures. W. Schommers The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment. B. d ‘Espagnat
• When we reflect we abstract, that is, we divert attention from all that does not concern our purpose, and we generalize and construct in reflection only under the logical conceptions which are appropriate from our standpoint.       Thus we study a living being from one or another outlook. It is sheer fallacy to assume that because one of those views is itself justified the others are therefore false.       Reality is more than what in each case it has taken by abstraction to be, and if it is so no single order of conceptions is adequate to complete explanation. Viscount Haldane
• “The entire universe has to be understood as a single, undivided whole, in which analysis into separately and independently existent parts has no fundamental status.” Bohm
• The reason we see our world as we do is because of what we use to observe it. The human body is a just barely adequate measuring device. Quantum mechanics does not always wash itself out, but to observe its effects for larger and larger objects we would need more and more accurate measurement devices. We just do not have the sensitivity to observe the quantum effects around us. In essence we do create the classical world we perceive, and as Brukner said, There could be other classical worlds completely different from ours. Brukner and Kofler
• There must exist, beyond mere appearances (…) a ‘veiled reality’ that science does not describe but only glimpses uncertainly. In turn, contrary to those who claim that matter is the only reality, the possibility that other means, including spirituality, may also provide a window on ultimate reality cannot be ruled out, even by cogent scientific arguments.” B.d’Espagnat
• David H. Wolpert, a physics-trained computer scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center, has chimed in with his version of a knowledge limit. Because of it, he concludes, the universe lies beyond the grasp of any intellect, no matter how powerful, that could exist within the universe. Specifically, during the past two years, he has been refining a proof that no matter what laws of physics govern a universe, there are inevitably facts about the universe that its inhabitants cannot learn by experiment or predict with a computation.
• Continuous time then appears epistemologically as a heuristic abstraction just as are ALL concepts describing reality. H.D.Zeh
• As Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, puts it: “That your predictions about the universe are fundamentally constrained by you yourself being part of the universe you’re predicting, always seemed pretty obvious to me.”
• According to classical physics, the universe consists of bodies in space. We are tempted to assume, therefore, that we live in a physical world consisting of bodies in space and that what we perceive consists of objects in space. But this is very dubious. J.J.Gibson  
• The objective reality of the universe, if such can be supposed to exist, must forever be unknowable to Man as to Microbe. Wei Wu Wei We are only aware of that aspect of the universe of which the senses we possess are able to inform us. Wei Wu Wei  
• A man has six senses – as oriental psychology has always understood – for he is aware of that aspect of the universe which is his mind. If we had further senses we may suppose that we should become aware of further aspects of the universe. To imagine that the universe is restricted to that of which we are aware is probably as ill-founded in our case as in that of the insect. Wei Wu Wei  
• In this post-modern world we must update the old positivistic, reductionist, deterministic, non-duality paradigms. Rodger   
• Bohm termed the world of the “implicate order”. While the explicate order deals with seperateness and independence, the implicate order is holistic and mutually enfolding. To lapse into “explicate language” for a moment, the implicate order is much vaster than the explicate. It is like a great ocean reaching below the surface of the explicate. The fact that our world appears stable is not so much that objects remain static in our world, but that the same patterns are constantly being born again only to die away as fast as thought.Only limited aspects of the implicate order can be made explicit, one at a time. Thus the entire implicate can never be totally accounted for. F. David Peat 
•   …all knowledge in the conscious content is a differentiated system that cannot by definition articulate the universal principle of order.  M Kafatos, R Nadeau
• The observer as an observer necessarily always remains in a descriptive domain, that is, in a relative cognitive domain. No description of an absolute reality is possible. Such a description would require an interaction with the  absolute to be described, but the representation which would arise from such an interaction would necessarily be determined by the autopoietic organization of the observer, not by the deforming agent; hence, the cognitive reality that it would generate would unavoidably be relative to the knower. H.R. Maturana
• Somewhat ironically, science, having set out to know the ultimate nature of reality, is discovering that not only is this world beyond any direct experience, it may also be inherently unknowable P. Russell
• Human thinking can only imagine reality, just as a portrait represents a person. And as a portrait is not “the person” it represents, likewise any theory is not “the reality” it describes. We then must humbly recognize that our minds’ coherence and logic do not necessarily match the consistency of reality. And that also entails that reality does “occur” and that we cannot conclude it is an “illusion of our minds” simply because we cannot make sense of it. Henri Salles 
• If the thing and the thought about it have their ground in the one undefinable and unknown totality of flux, then the attempt to explain their relationship by supposing that the thought is in reflective correspondence with the thing has no meaning, for both thought and thing are forms abstracted from the total process. The reason why these forms are related could only be in the ground form from which they arise, but there can be no way of discussing reflective correspondence in this ground, because reflective correspondence implies knowledge, while the ground is beyond what can be assimilated in the context of knowledge. D. Bohm
• “When you  perceive intelligently, you always perceive a function, never an object in the physical sense. Cameras always register objects, but human perception  is always the perception of functional roles. The two processes could not  be more different…. Stanislaw Ulum
• The primary source of our confusion in analyzing the results of the experiments testing Bell’s inequality is that we have committed what Whitehead termed “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”. We have accepted abstract theoritical statements about concrete material results in terms of single categories and limited points of view as totally explanatory. The fallacy is particulary obvious in our dealings with the results of the Aspen and Gisin experiments. Although the results infer wholeness in the sense that they show that the conditions for these experiments constitute an unanalyzable and undissectible whole, the abstract theory that helps us to coordinate the results cannot in principle disclose this wholeness. Since the abstract theory can only deal in complementary aspects of the complete reality disclosed in the act of measurement, that reality is not itself, in fact or in principle, disclosed…. With the discovery of nonlocality, it seems clear that the whole is not identical to the sum of its parts and that no collection of parts, no matter how arbitrarily large, can fully disclose or define the whole. R. Nadeau,M.Kafatos
• …WE ARE LED TO UNDERSTAND NATURE IN TERMS OF AN INEXHAUSTIBLE DIVERSITY AND MULTIPLICITY OF THINGS, ALL OF THEM RECIPROCALLY RELATED AND ALL OF THEM NECESSARILY TAKING PART IN THE PROCESS OF BECOMING, IN WHICH EXIST AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF RELATIVELY AUTONOMOUS AND CONTRSDICTORY KINDS OF MOTIONS. AS A RESULT NO PARTICULAR KIND OF THING CAN BE MORE THAN AN ABSTRACTION FROM THIS PROCESS, AN ABSTRACTION THAT IS VALID WITHIN A CERTAIN DEGREE OF APPROXIMATIONS, IN DEFINATE RANGES OF CONDITIONS, WITHIN A LIMITED CONTEXT, AND OVER A CHARACTERISTIC PERIOD OF TIME. SUCH AN ABSTRACTION EVIDENTLY CANNOT REPRESENT AN ABSOLUTE TRUTH; FOR TO DO THIS IT WOULD HAVE TO BE VALID WITHOUT APPROXIMATIONS, UNCONDITIONALLY, IN ALL POSSIBLE CONTEXTS, AND FOR ALL TIME. HENCE, ANY PARTICULAR THEORY WILL CONSTITUTE AN APPROXIMATE, CONDITIONAL, AND RELATIVE TRUTH….(NATURAL) LAWS HAVE AN OBJECTIVE CONTENT, IN THE SENSE THAT THEY REPRESENT SOME KIND OF NECESSITY THAT IS INDEPENDENT OF OUR WILLS AND OF THE WAY IN WHICH WE THINK ABOUT THINGS. D.BOHM

Tags: B. d 'Espagnat, Brukner and Kofler, D.J. Kalupahana, David Bohm, F. David Peat, J.J.Gibson, J.Mathen, R. Lampis, W. Schommers