This is a tentative proposal.
Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience. This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience. That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements. That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency). We'll call that something extra the "splendor of form." The quantifiable aspect of nature, then, is like a lens that lets in the splendor of form or accompanies it, but does not generate it.
This way of regarding nature is neo-Platonic in spirit inasmuch as uses an analogy with light coming from the sun to describe how beings that we experience participate in Being Itself.
Now for some more on the relevance of this metaphor to questions of reductionism and evolution. Given this "aperture" view of nature, biochemistry/biophysics no more explains away or reduces the splendor of form to its quantitative aspects than does the changing in the opening of the aperture explain away the light that shines through it or reduce that light to the aperture itself. And the science of evolution, seen as a kind of extension of natural sciences that are properly directed toward mathematical descriptions of nature (okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but I think it can be argued), is not merely the chronicle of more complex mathematical descriptions of nature, but rather it is the story of the gradual opening of the aperture to the light of being.
Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience. This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience. That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements. That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency). We'll call that something extra the "splendor of form." The quantifiable aspect of nature, then, is like a lens that lets in the splendor of form or accompanies it, but does not generate it.
This way of regarding nature is neo-Platonic in spirit inasmuch as uses an analogy with light coming from the sun to describe how beings that we experience participate in Being Itself.
Two of the key benefits of this approach to nature are as follows:
1. that it is not in any way embarrassed by evolution, and
2. that it totally undermines arguments for reductionism.
Unlike the typically Aristotelian account of nature, it does not presume or require the stability of form from generation to generation. Instead, it allows for the mutations that that bring about evolution just as a camera allows for the opening of its aperture. The metaphysics of light/aperture are focused not so much on the stability of form through time as it is on how nature, at each moment transcends "geometry in motion." Yet it also treats the geometry that characterizes nature as integral to nature itself.
1. that it is not in any way embarrassed by evolution, and
2. that it totally undermines arguments for reductionism.
Unlike the typically Aristotelian account of nature, it does not presume or require the stability of form from generation to generation. Instead, it allows for the mutations that that bring about evolution just as a camera allows for the opening of its aperture. The metaphysics of light/aperture are focused not so much on the stability of form through time as it is on how nature, at each moment transcends "geometry in motion." Yet it also treats the geometry that characterizes nature as integral to nature itself.
Now for some more on the relevance of this metaphor to questions of reductionism and evolution. Given this "aperture" view of nature, biochemistry/biophysics no more explains away or reduces the splendor of form to its quantitative aspects than does the changing in the opening of the aperture explain away the light that shines through it or reduce that light to the aperture itself. And the science of evolution, seen as a kind of extension of natural sciences that are properly directed toward mathematical descriptions of nature (okay, that's a bit of a stretch, but I think it can be argued), is not merely the chronicle of more complex mathematical descriptions of nature, but rather it is the story of the gradual opening of the aperture to the light of being.
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