Skip to main content

Thoughts about breaking laws

The following analogy occurred to me as plausible but also greatly in need of clarification: it is between organism/mineral, animal/organism and human/animal.

Regarding organism/mineral: the law of entropy is nowhere to be broken. But the following non-exception to this law is, after a fashion, exceptional. That is the fact that plants increase the amount of order that is going on within a small scale. One can point out correctly that the whole constituted by organism/environment is in accordance with entropy. But only organisms seem to increase the amount of order per unit of space as it were.

The second point regards animal/organism: Here two are laws that admit of no exception (i.e., the laws of inertia and gravitation), yet animals do seem exceptional in this regard. If one were to look at the relations of force between parts, MF=A and similar laws would obtain. Yet the animal as a whole doesn't rest/move in the same way that simpler, more basic beings do. If it were a simpler kind of being,

The third regards passions. Suppose there is a general law that animals move (qua animals) only inasmuch as they are moved by appetite. This law applies to humans and other animals. Yet humans can withstand the pull of those kinds of passions that they share in common with brutes. And in doing so they are exceptional. But they do so only inasmuch as moved by the desire for goods that are not strictly imaginable.

All of this is much too fuzzy, but I think it's promising...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dembski's "specified compexity" semiotics and teleology (both ad intra and ad extra)

Integral to Dembski's idea of specified complexity (SC) is the notion that something extrinsic to evolution is the source of the specification in how it develops. He compares SC to the message sent by space aliens in the movie "Contact." In that movie, earthbound scientists determine that radio waves originating in from somewhere in our galaxy are actually a signal being sent by space aliens. The scientists determine that these waves are a signal is the fact that they indicate prime numbers in a way that a random occurrence would not. What is interesting to me is the fact that Dembski relies upon an analogy with a sign rather than a machine. Like a machine, signs are produced by an intelligent being for the sake of something beyond themselves. Machines, if you will, have a meaning. Signs, if you will, produce knowledge. But the meaning/knowledge is in both cases something other than the machine/sign itself. Both signs and machines are purposeful or teleological...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more