Skip to main content

Active energy (kind of like energeia) and mechanism

I've covered this theme before... while searching for a way to apply the notion of primitive impetus/energy to that of the first mover.  This time, however, I am attempting to use it to demonstrate the existence of soul (form that animates living matter).  Seems appropriate to discover substantial form before looking for a first mover.

Mechanism as we initially encounter it is always found in something that serves as a machine/device FOR someone (maybe that's not the relevant point for this context, but I just wanted to point it out).

More relevant point about machines/devices:  They always make use of fuel or energy that they have not produced.  E.g., a waterwheel.  And this fuel/energy aims at something on its own: humans at most trigger or direct the energy release.  This source of what I'll call impetus is not itself mechanically driven  Otherwise an infinite regress of mechanistic parts.                                                                                      

Conclusion:  there is no such thing as a purely mechanistic system: each one of them has an energy source that is not itself pushs.                                                                                                                             

The question that is compelled to ask after such points have been granted, however, is whether the only entities that supply such an impetus are the microscopic ones, or whether a human being can supply a kind of impetus.

Furthermore, doesn't our very notion of such impetus come FROM human agency?

Comments

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

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

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more