The Map and the Territory - Exploring the Foundations of Science, Thought and Reality

This volume presents essays by pioneering thinkers including Tyler Burge, Gregory Chaitin, Daniel Dennett, Barry Mazur, Nicholas Humphrey, John Searle and Ian Stewart. Together they illuminate the very foundations of science and the scientific enterprise. The authors examine, from various perspectives, the complex relations between reality per se and our human descriptions of the world, as deduced in the process of scientific discovery. Are we living in Plato's Cave? If not, how far have we emerged from it? And what are the various layers of description we can apply to objects and phenomena? A simple apple, for example, can be analyzed from several viewpoints beginning with evolution and biology, all the way down its microscopic quantum mechanical components. Together, the cast of eminent scientists and philosophers shed light on how our various theories and constructs co-exist in a patchwork to produce a seemingly coherent reality. All aficionados of philosophy as well as budding researchers will find here much food for thought as well as new and stimulating perspectives.

The book also includes a foreword by Sir Roger Penrose and an afterword by Dagfinn Follesdal

Shyam Wuppuluri is working as a research associate for R. N. Podar institute. A computer science graduate, he has a long-standing interest in various areas of philosophy, theoretical physics, mathematics and cognitive science. Prior to this, he edited the volume 'Space, time and limits of human understanding, foreword by John Stachel, afterword by Noam Chomsky', which was published in Springer's Frontiers Collection, 2016. 
 E-mail: shyam.wuppuluri@gmail.com

  
Francisco Antonio Doria is a Brazilian physicist. Doria is a Professor Emeritus at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where he currently teaches on the foundations of economic theory at the graduate School of Engineering (UFRJ COPPE). Doria has a B. Sc. in chemical engineering and a PhD in mathematical physics (under the guidance of Leopoldo Nachbin). He has made contributions to the gauge field copy problem in quantum field theory and proved with Newton da Costa several incompleteness theorems in mathematics, physics and mathematical economics, including the undecidability of chaos theory. Doria is a member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University, 1989-1990, and a visiting researcher at the mathematics department, University of Rochester, 1979-1981. He thinks of himself as a philosopher and literary scholar with a humanist education, and has had as students Marcelo Gleiser and José Acacio de Barros, among other noted researchers. He likes to trace his interdisciplinary interests to a 17th century relative, the noted Portuguese writer Father Antonio Vieira (1608-1697). 
 Email: fadoria63@gmail.com