Levels of Reality in Science and Philosophy

This book offers a unique perspective on one of the deepest questions about the world we live in: is reality multi-leveled, or can everything be reduced to some fundamental ‘flat’ level? 

 

This deep philosophical issue has widespread implications in philosophy, since it is fundamental to how we understand the world and the basic entities in it. Both the notion of ‘levels’ within science and their ontological implications are issues that are underexplored in the philosophical literature. The volume reconsiders the view that reality contains many levels and opens new ways to understand the ontological status of the special sciences. The book focuses on major open questions that arise at the foundations of cognitive science, cognitive psychology, brain science and other special sciences, in particular with respect to the physical foundations of these sciences. For example: Is the mental computational? Do brains compute? How can the special sciences be autonomous from physics, grounded in, or based on, physics and at the same time irreducible to physics? 

 

The book is an important read for scientists and philosophers alike. It is of interest to philosophers of science, philosophers of mind and biology interested in the notion of levels, but also to psychologists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists investigating such issues as the precise relation of the mental to the underlying neural structures and the appropriate approach to study it.

Stavros Ioannidis is Assistant Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Bristol (2012). He is the co-author (with Stathis Psillos) of Mechanisms in Science: Method or Metaphysics? (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and the principal investigator of the project MECHANISM, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation. His research focuses on topics in the philosophy of biology (especially the concept of mechanism and mechanistic explanation, evolutionary and developmental biology) and in the metaphysics of science.

 

Gal Vishne is a graduate student for computational neuroscience in the international PhD program at the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences of the Hebrew University, working under the supervision of Prof. Leon Deouell and Prof. Ayelet Landau. She started her academic journey studying mathematics, but (to paraphrase David Chalmers) the mind was always occupying her thoughts where mathematics should have been, and she turned to neuroscience. Her research is aimed at distilling the neural underpinnings of conscious experience, trying to integrate mathematical and philosophical insights with cognitive and neuroscientific tools, to solve this age-old problem.

 

Meir Hemmo is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Haifa working mainly in philosophy of physics and philosophy of mind. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy of physics from the University of Cambridge in 1996. He co-authored (with Orly Shenker) the book The Road to Maxwell’s Demon: Conceptual Foundations of Statistical Mechanics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and published on the foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics, classical and quantum statistical mechanics, the concept of probability in physics and reductive physicalism in physics, in the special sciences and in philosophy of mind.

 

Orly Shenker is a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and holds the Eleanor Roosevelt Chair in History and Philosophy of Science. Her research is mainly in the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind. In the philosophy of physics she published (with Meir Hemmo) the book The Road to Maxwell's Demon (Cambridge University Press 2012), which offers a new conceptual foundation for statistical mechanics, and which proves that the second law of thermodynamics is not a universal theorem of physics. The book points out that in the foundations of physics there is an unavoidable role for an observer, which is essential for understanding the concept of macrostates, which - in turn - underlies the concepts of entropy and of probability. To understand the notion of an observer she developed (with Hemmo) a theory of strong reductive physicalism concerning the mind, called Flat Physicalism, proving that it is a coherent and viable approach, which best explains the empirical observations concerning all the special sciences and in particular psychology, and defending it against the currently dominant view called non-reductive physicalism, showing the computational theory of mind is not physicalist at all, but is rather a contemporary form of mind-body dualism.