Audio Issue 3 - Understanding Change

 

Audio Issue 3 of the SHAPE Journal

This selection of tapes looks at how we try and understand the dynamics of change. Science fails to understand change in any meaningful way. It can analyse quantitative change well enough, but how things emerge and evolve is much less well understood. Jim Schofield’s latest philosophical research attempts to address qualitative change, and begins to devise new experimental approaches and methods for capturing and understanding these crucial changes as they happen.

Start by watching the video below, in which I interview Jim about his new research, and the change in direction and focus that it represents. Below that you will find three raw recordings of Jim's recent tapes, in which the new theory is being currently developed. 

Audio Issue 2 - Impossibility Space

 

Audio Issue 2 of SHAPE Journal 

This edition collects together several recent recordings by Jim Schofield on the philosophy of science, continuing his recent questioning of the nature of reality and how we study it. 

The main hypothesis presented here is that reality is somehow organised into emergent levels. We cannot predict when a new level will emerge, and we can't understand what it is and how it works, merely by studying the levels below it (reductionism). This is because a new level actually changes the levels below, creating new subordinate levels that make up its key components and contentions.

In this new work Jim Schofield moves away from looking at levels in terms of scale and physical spaces (the vast difference between sub-atomic physics and human biology, for example) and instead reimagines levels as possibility spaces.

The discussion draws on Buddhist philosophy, Dialectical Materialism, Mathematics and Evolution.

The first Audio Issue of the SHAPE Journal - The Nature of Reality

 

Audio Issue 1 - The Nature of Reality

This is the first Audio Issue of the SHAPE Journal. This new form of publishing will feature podcast-like content alongside lectures, videos and some written-word content, transcribed from audio recordings.

Philosopher Jim Schofield's eyesight has deteriorated rapidly in the last year, making traditional writing and editing impossible for him. This new format for the journal should allow him to continue working and communicating his ideas via this website. 

It is also an opportunity to investigate new ways of disseminating content and finding new audiences for the work. Some of our most successful outputs have been YouTube videos in the past, and this shift will place focus on that kind of content over traditional academic papers. 

In the first of these new editions Jim Schofield goes back to basics, looking at how previous work on the Substrate Theory of Subatomic Physics and the recent series on Systems Theory might affect how we see the nature of reality...

Use the link above to access the full issue. You can also listen to the main discussion on YouTube: