I was amazed to see Jaroslav Pelikan's summary about Heraclitus's heritage
in John Wheeler's work. Although I am not familiar with any details of
pre-Socratian texts (the bibliography will be helpful!), I quote Anaxagoras'
doctrine in my chapter (to be circulated soon). I copied this doctrine from
Max Jammer, who used it in his Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics to
characterize the collapse of the wave function. I feel it is much better
suited for the many-minds interpretation, a variant of the Everett-Wheeler
interpretation, as it speaks of Mind separating "the warm from the cold" and
other distinguishing properties.I also feel that Anaximander's concept of the Apeiron (which is here
separated by "Mind") comes at least as close to the modern idea of a
"simple" and symmetric initial state of the universe (mentioned by William
Phillips) as Democritus's atoms come close to their modern counterparts. (In
fact, the Apeiron would even require a time-symmetric big crunch.) Of
course, I do not claim that pure thought can replace empirical science
(there is a lot of conceptual structure in "simplicity"), but it is amazing
how successful "big concepts" (which are evidently not empty!) may become
after two and a half millennia.
Dieter Zeh
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