Welcome to the second Audio Issue of the 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.