Philosophy and perspective

Perspective is one of the most important terms in philosophy, but unfortunately it is underestimated. If this term were used consistently, many problems would solve themselves. Let’s take an example: The mind-body problem already appears in ancient Greece. Plato believed that the soul is immortal and pre-exists in the body. After death, it returns to the world of ideas. Descartes took this idea to the extreme and subjectivized it. For him there were two substances, the body and the soul. Even today, this dualism can be found everywhere, even among those who think they have overcome it. If you ask a physicalist about the soul, the mind, or the consciousness, he gets rid of this problem by claiming that they do not exist. The psychological reason for this dualism may be the fact that one perceives not only a biological organism, but also a mind. Since it is difficult to explain biologically, it is assumed that it does not exist, is immaterial or supervenes over the material brain. If the concept of perspective is brought into play, the problem dissolves. The body (in this case the brain) is a concept from physiology, the mind is a concept from philosophy/psychology. Both describe the same object from two different perspectives with two different conceptual systems. It’s like translating a sentence from one language to another. The problem is that there are hardly any terms for the same subject area in both languages. In physiology, for example, there is no term for what psychology calls consciousness. It’s better in applied neuroscience. There, for example, the firing of certain neurons is correlated with a certain behavior. So you describe the same thing from two perspectives.

Another example: the debate between determinism and indeterminism is a complex topic that has been discussed for centuries. Determinism and indeterminism are two opposing philosophical positions on the question of free will and the future.

Determinism states that all events are predetermined and inevitably occur through a chain of cause and effect. Therefore, there is no free will.

Indeterminism, on the other hand, holds that there are events that are not determined by causal relationships and occur by chance. In this sense, free willpower is possible because people have the ability to make free decisions that are not determined by previous events.

Here, too, the term perspective helps. Let’s take the deterministic event of the Big Bang and trace its evolution up to its heat death. From this perspective, we have a clear determinism. But if we look at events that are many powers of ten smaller, e.g. a walker in a park at 2:00 p.m., then from the point of view of the universe, the events down there are completely indeterministic for us, because an infinite number of trajectories overlap and it looks as if there is no causality at all.

It looks completely different when we go to the level of the walker and see how he is jostled by another person and falls. We see the deterministic event and thus a causality. The situation is similar when we ‘look down’ into the quantum world from this perspective. There, too, an infinite number of trajectories overlap and the scenario appears indeterministic. If we were as small as an electron, we would be able to know causalities and we would call the world determinsistic.

With the quantum level, we have already described the next example here. Our classical physics describes the mesoscopic world and ontologizes it by establishing laws. We can’t do that for the quantum level. Here we cannot ontologize the phenomena because the scales do not allow for the formulation of causal laws.

Another term is time. Time comes in three different meanings, which unfortunately are labeled with the same term. Einstein’s physical time is linked to space. Relativistic time dilation, on the other hand, describes the effect that time passes more slowly for an observer as it moves relative to another observer. The faster the movement, the greater the time dilation.

Then there is the proper time of a dynamical system. Natural time can be defined as the time it takes for the system itself to change its state.

Subjective time, on the other hand, is the time we experience. It is the individual perception of the passage of time. It can be very different from the objective time measured by clocks. Our subjective perception of time is influenced by a variety of factors, such as attention, emotions, stress, novelty and many more.

So there is not a single time, but it depends on the perspective under which I perceive time.

And finally, perspective is also central to epistemology. When we ask what we can recognize, the first thing that is relevant is the level of cognition. So is it about operational knowledge for the construction of a machine, for example, or is it about principles that underlie some phenomena, or is it about metaphysical questions of knowledge? Here, too, perspective is crucial. If you mix the perspectives, confusion arises. Physicists often tend to understand their research results as the basis for metaphysical insight. Physics, on the other hand, is science and produces operational or methodological results, but not metaphysical ones.

This means that a metaphysics has to do without science at its beginnings, it has to create constructs that are as inductive as possible and describe the world metaphysically and logically. Only then can scientific findings be integrated. I have attempted such an epistemology by saying that we transform the world into a modal form that suits us. Accordingly, there is no such thing as an objective world, it is subjective from the outset, but as such can be recognized operationally and methodologically.

Here, the levels of knowledge are clearly differentiated and thus the question can be easily answered, which perspective do I want to take in the knowledge process?