Galileo replaced concern with the nature of movement with concern with the measurable characteristics of movement (first of all, velocity). But when we say something moved so many miles/Km an hour, we are talking, in a sense about a kind of disposition. Not the sort of disposition to act that exists when something is inactive. But the disposition to continue to act a certain way. It seems to me that Galileo, in focusing on the measurement, took this disposition as a given, whereas Aristotle, in defining motion as the act of a potency as such, is much more interested in the nature of this disposition.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
Comments