Skip to main content

Lorenz's water wheel and Aristotle's mixed bodies and transistors

Warning: This may be waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay off base.

I see an analogy between the behavior of Lorenz's water-wheel and mixed bodies as understood by Aristotelians. The latter are able to act in new ways when the elements are balanced. This balance gives new forms of responsiveness to the environment, and this newness is not predetermined by the properties of the elements alone, nor by a mechanical combination thereof (think of sense organs as examples). Compare with Lorenz's water-wheel, which under some circumstances seems to act chaotically. BUT What seems like CHAOS when interpreted in terms of the lower level laws is itself an orderly response to some part of the environment. The water-wheel may be analogous to a transistor. But that is not to argue reductively, but only to point out the material substrate of higher level activities. Higher level acts are such because they unite, in ONE act, the many diverse lower level acts.

***
later criticism: the above confuses, I think, chaos and randomness.  Chaos is non-random.  But maybe chaos is lawful in a way that cannot be articulated at a certain "level" and hence seems random at that level, even though lawful at a higher level.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

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...
6 comments
Read more

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...
13 comments
Read more

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