The Human Question

This is a tentative proposal. Perhaps we can use a the metaphor of a lens letting in light to describe the relation between the aspects of nature that can be grasped via a mathematised description and the aspects that are apparent in our experience.  This analogy might be helpful, especially with evolution-related discussions, inasmuch as it underscores the disproportion between nature is often conceived  as a kind of mathematics in motion and nature as given in experience.  That is, the mathematical conception leaves something crucial out that is nevertheless apparent in our everyday, non-scientific engagements.  That something extra has to do with formal and final causality (even efficient causality, rightly understood, cannot be comprehended by a purely mathematical description, for the expemplary case of efficient causality is a human agent--all other efficient causes are understood as either exceeding or falling short of human agency).   We'll call that s...

Doesn't reductionism require a combination of naivete and presumption? Naivete about the lower level entities to which one reduces the higher level: one employes common sense notions of the nano entity being a whole of a certain kind and of it acting in accordance with the kind of thing that it is... an assumption similar to that which we make in our everyday practices, with the exception being that these nano entities have exotic and paradoxical combinations of characteristics. Presumption inasmuch as one assumes that a glimpse of the nano-technology, as it were, of life, suffices over-turn the common sense notions of part and whole through a Copernican revolution. I object to this presumption, for its seems arguable that every theory relies upon common sense: if we overturned ALL of common sense in one fell swoop, science would disappear entirely, like the snake swallowing its tail. It is more reasonable, in my opinion, for the scientist to think of themself as clarifying ...