The Human Question

The principle of parsimony is better served if the religious sense is regarded as related to science/philosophy/poetry as a whole is to many parts.

...or does a materialist recognize "states"?  And if s/he does, isn't that opening the door to energeia/form?

Anti-reductionism can start with beings that are complex but not living (e.g., atoms), and go from there to the investigation of organisms.

Append a discussion of biotechnology to the discussion of evolution.  Once you have the hierarchy / aperture theory established, you can   allow for biotechnological stuff, even life synthesis, while denying mechanism.

In disproving mechanism, I am not proving the existence of immateriality, but showing that there is more to matter than which can be conceived of mechanistically.

The Companion to the Philosophy of Biology  discusses the "hallmarks" of life: that is, characteristics that are, for the most part, found in living things, but which are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for life. I propose instead to look at these characteristics as found in humans and to explore how they are interrelated in us--especially how there might be a necessary/sufficient/contributing relation between these characteristics as they are found in us.  Next I would look at other species in comparison to humans, and in many ways as diminished examples of life as found humans, so that it might not be so surprising to see that some of those characteristics or hallmarks do not show up in some cases.

As one gets to lower levels of being, one finds greater fluctuation: it is hard to see how a genuine stability and continuity at the higher level could be in any way the result of the these lower level fluctuations.  And if it's illusory, it's hard to see how even an illusion could have the requisite stability.

Before discussing what went wrong with the reductionist's notion of the scientific method, I need to discuss holism--especially Polanyi's hierarchy of operations and the same notion as found in Aristotle.  This chapter would be concerned holism broadly enough so that it could be applied to inorganic wholes as well: it would not carry on as if organisms were the only kind of legitimate whole (even if that's the case); nor would it bank on coming up with a perfect list of necessary and sufficient conditions for life. The heart of this holistic position will be that it is the same I who desires, intends, tries to move, perceives, reasons, understands, etc.

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2013/07/21/being-and-goodness-in-contemporary-cosmology-pt-2/

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/mark-shea/interesting-conversation-with-an-atheist-about-the-moral-law-and-you-know-w

Ask a computer to give a first-person account of what it's like to know that p is true.

That phrase appeared in The Companion to the Philosophy of Biology.   Lovely description of how Aristotle saw organisms.

In a machine, the desire that directs the operation of the machine is something other than the impetus that moves it.  In an animal, the two are at some level the same. 

  Kurt Goldstein 's  The organism: A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man  in 1934 (mentioned in Wikipedia)

For the past few days I've been unable to write the second chapter.  Once I had begun, I figured out that  it was hard for my position NOT to seem like vitalism, AND that seeming to defend vitalism makes one the instant target of lots of criticism by mechanists. It's really hard to say what vitalism is, as it seems to be many different things to many different people.   Some would place Aristotle with vitalists simply because he's not a mechanists.  Some would say vitalists think that there's an immaterial force--but they are probably reading vitalistic claims from a positivistic perspective, which assumes all material forces are measurable in the way that psi is measurable.  Some think that vitalism implies that the artificial synthesis of organic compounds is impossible.  But urea and other organic compounds can be made artificially.

What if there is something that every possible rational being would accept as desirable, no matter how evolved? I don't really know what to make of this question, but it seems to point to moral principles that would have a special kind of objectivity, something akin to the moral principles in natural moral law.  For the goals you seek would be desirable to you, not because of the specific way in which you have evolved, but because what you presently are: a rational being.

Yes, that was a joke...:)

cognizing self-identity (through time) is a necessary condition for cognizing other-identity.

It just occurred to me that "openness" a perfect metaphor for my modification of the scientific method (adding that one is always open to supernatural) given the fact that elsewhere I talk about the aperture metaphor, i.e., I talk of person as letting light come in so that one can know all there is to know about a subject.

Well, it means something different in the case of animals than it means in the case of plants. If perception is something over and above the chemical reactions going on in the perceiver, and the object perceived is desired or hated by the perceiver, then being moved by this perceptual object is something over and above being affected by the chemical process concomitant with perception...and the animal, in being so attracted and repulsed by this object that it engages in pursuit or avoidance...is in such a case, engaging in what could be called (from the perspective in which what plants do is the null hypothesis) self-movement. Something analogous could be said about human self-movement: it is really about our being moved by the desire for the universal good.  And it is precisely because THIS sort of good is infinite that humans are able to be creative.

It's possible that an animal might a least momentarily hesitate when confronted with two desirable things that are present or between two ways to the same desirable thing without deliberating in the proper sense of the word.  Searching for what one craves sometimes involves hesitation while trying to get an adequate perception of the more likely path to that which will satisfy. What is much more interesting, however, is the fact that humans pull up two different goals, at least one of which is not presently actionable.  For example, one might compare going to medical school with studying to become an accountant (we'll assume that the one comparing these two would find both options highly satisfying and not just as means toward an end).  Those two alternatives are quite different than two paths that might lead a predator to its prey. The very act of recalling two such alternatives would require a sense of self as being one and the same in both situations (accountant vs...

Affirming that an animal's many parts as seen under the microscope belong to one whole:  this may seem analogous to affirming action at a distance.  For that perspective shows us how each part interacts with other parts, but it doesn't show why these components are parts of one whole.  Any grasping of that unity is to be had by reflection on one's own actions; this unity of the parts eludes a third-person perspective. It is worth pointing out that there is a lot that one can figure out about planetary movement while accepting action at a distance--even if that assumption is wrong.

Just some meanderings re evolution that I'd like to discuss with a science buff. Let's say that there are two mutually exclusive traits that can be had: V and R. Persons with trait V are more likely to survive but less likely to reproduce, while persons with trait R are more likely to reproduce; raise offspring (IF they survive) but are less likely to survive (because they are willing to engage in risky behavior). Let's quantify that.  Some other time. Depending on how the numbers work out, there could be a way of exploring the degree to which the Rs are likely to outstrip the Vs after a sufficient number of generations. Most interesting would be to show an inherent connection between R and ~V (and between V and ~R as well). I can't work this out, but the gist of the expected results would be that sexual selection might naturally  outpace mere survival as a determining factor in natural selection.  And in this case, altruistic behavior (at least the sort dis...