The Human Question

Even though Aristotle thought that the heart is the seat of consciousness, later ancient thinkers and medieval Aristotelians realized that it is the brain that is aware. Looking at Aquinas's attempt to divide the brain into four organs, it is noticeable that he has no place for motor functions or kiniaesthesis.... more later, maybe.

Stephen Barr talks about macro symmetries being the result and partial manifestation of micro symmetries that are of a superior kind. His everyday example of this principle of physics is the way marbles (superior symmetry) when shaken together, form hexagonal pattern (inferior symmetry). Something analogous may be true of DNA the organization of a multi-cellular organism. The macro organization, if you will is the result and partial manifetation of the organization found in each cell, thanks to dna.

Loveliness is the new teleology. By lovelienss I mean the sort of beauty recognized by mathematicians, for this beauty serves as a kind of compass to natural sceintists who seek solutions to nature's puzzles.

By form I mean what accounts for the identify of a being through time and its structural unity. Form, or that in virtue of which a type of being is one and the same being through time, is also that in virtue of which different beings at different times can be the same sort of being. Form, or that in virtue of which the different parts of a type of being are parts of the same structural whole, is also that in virtue of which different beings at different places can be of the same kind. Without form, the identity and structural unity that we recognize in nature would be replaced by an infinite number of infinitely small parts, each of which has infinitely short duration...which would be more like nothing than something.

Some might argue that there cannot be a first moment of the universe, because every moment, by definition has a past from which it comes (as well as a future toward which...). Here is a counter-argument. Every adult human being has, whenever he or she makes an observation, a present that has a past (and is the at least partially fulfilling future of that now gone-by past). So that human might generalize and say that experiences of the present includes, as a component of that present, the past. But if we treat this generalization as a necessary truth, then no human can have an experience of the present that does not include its having come from the past. In such a case, no human being could have a finite age. Each must have an infinite series of presents, each of which has a past. Which seems pretty absurd. The move from experiencing the present as having a past to assigning a necessity to this relationship is unwarranted, both in this case and in the previous one.

Both physics and metaphysics rely on a combination of analogies and disanalogies to describe the unfamiliar reality that is hidden yet present in the familiar. The more fantastic the language used to describe the sub-atomic world, the less embarrassed the metaphysician needs to feel for the descriptions he uses to describe realities that we cannot experience.

Teleological statements are more intuitive to us but can be broken down into "under conditions X, Y happens until Z happens," or probably into conditional that interrelates X, Y and Z.

A field is akin to power inasmuch as a principle of change is present throughout a whole simultaneously.