Inselhalle

Conference Room 2

Both Nobel Laureates and Young Scientists are kindly invited.

Science presently makes two key errors, the hypothesized existence of a ‘theory of everything’ and the need for life to involve DNA. Our alternative can be expected to revolutionize our understanding of the natural world, as did the discovery of the atom and its constituents. The details involve disciplines such as those of biosemiotics (the study of meaning in the biological context), coordination dynamics, scheme theory, systemic linguistics, and Deacon’s analyses of symbolic-sign origins, jointly giving an account of how nature works, including for example the hierarchic functionality of the metastable structures known as synergies, and the way the flowchart aspect of Eckblad’s schemes constrains what structures are possible.

A key point in our understanding is the fact that mechanisms exist whereby details of a language can propagate within a community, with such a shared language further enabling the propagation of ideas. This ‘propagation of ideas’ we see as giving support to Wheeler’s ‘observer-participancy’ hypothesis, which he suggests is responsible for the emergence of the observed laws of nature. The remarkably successful computer simulation of natural language due to Winograd, based upon the concepts of systemic linguistics, responds correctly (in an appropriate context) to complicated questions such as ‘is there anything which is bigger than every pyramid but is not as wide as the thing that supports it?’, demonstrating the way specific models can be created to test ideas such as those presented here. This kind of activity forms an important aspect of the scientific process, and in this connection we already have tentative explanations for how electromagnetism and gravitation arise.

References: Coordination Dynamics (Kelso), The Symbolic Species (Deacon), Biosemiotics: A New understanding of Life (Barbieri), Understanding Natural Language (Winograd), Systemic Functional Linguistics (Wikipedia), Clearing a Way (Griffiths), and Scheme Theory (Eckblad)