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Undermining Dennett's Democratean point of Departure (part 1.)

Dennett begins Freedom Evolves by proposing Conway's game of life as a allegory for how what seems to us to be irreducible could be constructed from mechanical parts following the laws of nature.  He admits that his allegory presupposes a Democratean view of nature; or rather, he brags that his Democratean approach, being "sophisticated" (would that I had a dollar for every time he uses that word!), is able to yield interesting results.

In order to problematize the Democratean approach to nature presupposed in Dennett's use of Conway's game of life, I am constructing the following thought experiment:

Like CGL, this thought experiment is of a game that starts with a grid representing a definite arrangement of particles.  But whereas CGL allows the player to stipulate the rules for interaction (i.e., a kind of analog to laws of nature) which, when combined with one's knowledge of the initial positions yield a deduction of the arrangements at later phases, my alternative game does not allow one to stipulate the rules in advance.  Instead, you get to stipulate how the particles behave and are then tasked with giving an account, in terms of rules, for the behavior that you've stipulated.  You might say that instead of getting to prescribe rules and being required to deduce behaviors (as one does with CGL), you get to describe behaviors, whose cause you you are then required to postulate.

To me this result is already interesting inasmuch as it illustrates the truism that laws of nature, inasmuch as they are an explanation and not just a combined description of how things have behaved in the past are expected to behave in the future, must be postulated rather than be perceived, abstracted, intuited or deduced.

To summarize the point made so far: if laws of nature are prescriptive, then they are postulates; if they are derived from observation, then they are merely descriptive.

To be continued...

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