The (Almost) Impossible Task of Interdisciplinarity

Abstract

While physics and physics-based disciplines adequately describe the non-living, there is a need for a complementary perspective that captures the essence of life. Biology and neuroscience could provide such a perspective, provided that they are not practiced as yet another form of physics. Of course, an authentic and effective complementary perspective can only reaffirm materiality and the associated dynamics that physics, or for that matter biology, explores. But it has to also account for the specific causality characteristic of life by integrating past, present, and future. Experimental evidence and empirical knowledge attest that there is no intentionality in the realm covered by physics and physics-associated disciplines. In contradistinction, the living is always characterized by what an observer could only describe as goal-oriented behavior. Current biology and neuroscience either end up explaining this behavior in terms specific to physical determinism, or simply leave anticipation out of the larger picture.