When I stumbled upon category theory during my doctoral years (around 2015), I had sensed something extra-ordinary about it. But it was only in the last few months after glancing through works of Bohm, Sheldrake and others as mentioned in the Galileo commission report i suddenly had an aha moment (which are nothing but some sort of intuitive flashes of understanding) that Category theory potentially is the mathematics that underlies a Science with an enlarged or altered set of background assumptions and wider methodological principles. It is what Galileo commission calls as a more enlightened or post-materialist or spiritually-informed Science 3 in its report.
By acknowledging consciousness in its own reality – without presuming any idealist or dualist ontology, but simply taking it as fundamental together with matter – one opens up a separate route to understanding through radical or direct introspection. It leads to a science where consciousness will have its own access route to reality, through contemplative, meditative or introspective procedures widening the scientific outlook. In other words, integrating consciousness into the scientific agenda, or perhaps more precisely, divesting science from its unconscious link to philosophical and ideological materialism will help to create a more diverse culture, a more inventive and human type of science.
The report persuasively argues why we need an enlarged set of background assumptions that allows the study of consciousness, direct introspection and the inter-subjective scrutiny of first-person accounts of direct experiences of reality. Many seemingly irreconcilable opposites would then dissolve, for instance the opposition between economy and ecology, growth and sustainability, freedom and peace, taking care of oneself and being responsible for others.
Our contemporary science which the report terms as science 2 has unreflected absolute presuppositions where “scientific world view” is taken to be materialistic in ontology, empiricist and reductionist in method, and tied to a restrictive type of rationality to recap only the most important elements. Works of many scientists point to the evidence that the purely reductionist approach does not do justice to the full
phenomenology of reality.
In my view category theory can offer a change in the world-view of existing scientific models provided we have the necessary intuition to interpret it in that way. In contrast to set-theory which caters to purely reductionist and analytic approach, category theory can provide the required support and the complementarity of the holistic mode required for the enlightened Science. This I believe is possible because of the power of arrow, composition and universality and interconnections offered by category theory.
One example is my thesis where I have worked out a completely radical way of viewing signal as opposed to conventional one which I call functorial way of looking at signal. The functor can serve as potential link between the consciousness of an artist to the actual signal represented in material world. The work hints at the structure of consciousness being an abstract category indirectly.
Thomas Kuhn in his famous book talked about the structures of scientific revolutions. His enumerated the stages as 1. Normal Science 2. Puzzle solving 3. Paradigm 4. Anomaly 5. Crisis 6. Revolution.
My intuition senses that we are already in a period of crisis (science 2 stuck on materialistic ontology) and the coming scientific revolution will be offered by a new world-view of an enlightened science (aka Occult science throughout ages in secret societies) modelled through correct Category theory !!
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