The Human Question

Galileo had thought experiments whose conclusion was that -- absent force -- a thing will move in a straight line without ever stopping. Might it not be better to plug in the consideration of gravity to thought experiments about momentum.  And in such a case, wouldn't be end up thing of movement as naturally moving in an ellipsis?  I throw something in the air and it returns in an apparently parabolic path.  Well, maybe it's really a really small part of an ellipsis.  And that ellipsis is cut short by the fact that the projectile hit the earth.  But if the projectile had been flying in the same direction with respect to the center of the earth while the earth itself was thousands of times denser, then the earth's surface would be so much closer to the earth's center that the projectile would not end up hitting the earth at all.  Rather, it would fly in an ellipsis, like other satellites.   One might object that we are better off abstracting from...

We can abstract from teleology in our description of movement by plotting x and y coordinates where y is displacement and x is time.  But if time itself is the measure of motion, then the very way in which we plot movement in a sense presupposes it at a more basic level.  And it presupposes a human who measures.  So if our ability to propose a plausible mechanistic view of human action requires our imagining that human activity, being only a more complicated version of the sort of activity found in non-living things, can be graphed on Cartesian charts, ... if all that is presumed, then this mechanistic proposal likewise presupposes that which it would eliminate.  It uses a feature of humans that cannot be reduced to the mechanistic without acknowledging that it is doing so, precisely at the time that it claims to be reducing the human to the mechanical. Note also that Cartesian-coordinate description of the human act of counting movement is impossible.  For th...