This led Whitehead to remark that when the poets sing the praises of beautiful nature, according to science they really should be patting themselves on the back, as it is the subjective human mind which adds any beauty they may perceive to a world from which it is distinctly absent.Īccording to this view, nature, Whitehead said, is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” Alfred North WhiteheadĪ later development of Galileo’s “bifurcation” is the “fact/value” divide recognised by the social scientist Max Weber in the early 20 th century. According to this view, nature, Whitehead said, is “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.” 2 Alfred North Whitehead. Subjective reality-the one most of us spend most of our time in-was concerned with beauty, awe, wonder, and the other qualities that make up the world of value which cannot be measured. Real, “objective” reality, was concerned with measurable wavelengths. In Science and the Modern World the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked that when Galileo made this distinction, reality “bifurcated,” that is, it split in two. Hence, from the perspective of primary characteristics, the awe I feel is not “real,” or at least it is purely “subjective.” Why we are made in such a way that we do not blandly record electromagnetic wavelengths but instead see fiery reds and glorious yellows that we discover to our chagrin are not real, is a question yet to be answered. A recording device has no subjectivity, that is to say, it has no organ or means to register value. A recording device can measure wavelengths but it cannot feel awe, nor can it measure it. When a scientist measures the electromagnetic waves emitted by the sun and which make up the “really real” aspect of the sunset, he is interested in the primary characteristics, to which we are generally oblivious. So, when I look at a blazing sunset and am awestruck, that is subjective I am responding to secondary characteristics which, technically are not in the sunset itself but in me. When Galileo dropped his spheres from the Leaning Tower of Pisa in order to test his theory that their different masses would not affect the speed of their descent, it made no difference what colour they were, how they felt to his touch, or, if he had bothered to find out, how they tasted. Secondary characteristics are all the “purely subjective” aspects of phenomena, the sensual side of reality: colour, smell, taste, etc. Primary characteristics can be measured with certainty and will remain constant, regardless of who is observing them speed, position, and mass are examples here. ![]() This excising of the purely human or subjective from scientific study was most clearly expressed in the 15 th century in the differentiation Galileo made between what he called primary and secondary characteristics, which, for convenience’s sake, we can call the quantitative and the qualitative aspects of our experience. What I’d like to do here is to explore what I mean by this, to see where the “reality” behind this dictum has led the human mind and to look at a possible alternative to the methodology that such a view argues is unavoidable. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2003. In a book I wrote some years ago- A Secret History of Consciousness-a reader can find this statement: “We can characterize the advance of science as the sole arbiter of truth by seeing in it the gradual expulsion of human consciousness from its object of study.” 1 Gary Lachman. Simulations show that the list completed by the algorithm can reduce the slew time consumption of the observation process, improve the quality of observation data, and reduce the burden of scientists on the arrangement of the observation list.In the following essay Gary Lachman critiques the scientific doctrine of objective observation, traces its origins in Galileo’s thought and considers Goethe’s heretical approach to observation-“active seeing.” Objectivity: Qualia vs. The greedy algorithm is used to make a plan of pulsar TOA (Time of Arrival) observation of the Nanshan 26 m telescope in Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In this work, for the project of short-period and multi-objective observation, we consider the effects of slew time between two objectives and observation elevation of the telescope, and model the problem. However, because of the different requirements of various science projects, the scheduling process of the telescope is very complicated. ![]() The telescope scheduling is a key component of telescope operation, which is used to assist scientists to make reasonable observation plans, improve the operation efficiency of telescopes, and get high-quality data from observations.
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