Skip to main content

methodological openness, models, equations, naturalism as dreaming, closed system, agency as model of causality equations

Natural science involves equations and models. Equations involve an apparent completeness that imitates the completeness of mathematics: 2+2=4 doesn't seem to need any clarification. There doesn't seem to be some new truth that will undermine it either: in fact it really seems necessarily true. Models, however, are analogies with the sort of causal relations that we find in the prescientific lifeworld. And in that life world, human agency is, as it were, the prime instance of causality. Billiard balls are not.  But inasmuch as the models used in science are parasitic of human agency(albeit in a good way), they include some characteristics that look quite different from equations. They don't even seem to have the sort of clarity that equations at least seem to have. And they involve dependence on other, unmentioned factors, a dependence that can be forgotten when staring at equations. And of course, they involve striving, purpose, satisfaction. Such characteristics are indispensable to scientific models: we say, for example, that atoms "try" to fill their outermost shell. Such characteristics, inasmuch as they involve incompleteness and striving, also involve an openness to more. And (making a logical leap--but I hope not an altogether ungraceful one) so should the scientist: he should never think his theory is a complete explanation anymore than he might think that this or that human being is complete. Nor should metascientific statements suggest that nature is a closed system. One who issues such a statement is focusing on the mathematical side of the study of nature. He is, as it were, squinting his eyes a certain way so that he does see some features of nature while leaving out others. And the one who is so thoroughly leaves out some factors that he is convinced of naturalism might be described as dreaming, for his eyes seem closed.

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