Skip to main content

presumption, naivete and absurdity

Doesn't reductionism require a combination of naivete and presumption?

Naivete about the lower level entities to which one reduces the higher level: one employes common sense notions of the nano entity being a whole of a certain kind and of it acting in accordance with the kind of thing that it is... an assumption similar to that which we make in our everyday practices, with the exception being that these nano entities have exotic and paradoxical combinations of characteristics.

Presumption inasmuch as one assumes that a glimpse of the nano-technology, as it were, of life, suffices over-turn the common sense notions of part and whole through a Copernican revolution. I object to this presumption, for its seems arguable that every theory relies upon common sense: if we overturned ALL of common sense in one fell swoop, science would disappear entirely, like the snake swallowing its tail. It is more reasonable, in my opinion, for the scientist to think of themself as clarifying confusions had by those who rely solely on common sense.

One can avoid the naivete by refusing to make the assumption that nano entities are wholes: they are instead composites of their parts, and those parts are composites; etc. ad infinitum until you have infinite numbers of infinitely small entities in each finitely small part of the universe: a reductio ad absurdam.
Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Very insightful. It's almost as though reductionism tries to explain away purpose/mystery by making it an accident of an non-mysterious unseen world. But then the unseen world (i.e. the atomic world) turns out to be even more complex then the everyday world - beauty gets more and more complex as we go deeper, like Barr said.
11:52 AM
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