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I pulled the section on Metaphysics (at the bottom of this
post) off the Principia Cybernetica Web site (http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/METAPHI.html)
because Ayten's post inspired me to revisit my father's discussion of the
difference between physics and metaphysics. It is clear to me that
much must have changed in science if the word "metaphysics" is no
longer a slanderous insult. If the word now means only "areas of science
above and beyond physics"-- that's PROGRESS. The rest of this post will
explain why I say that:
Metaphysics, as a concept, used to be lumped in
with telos/teleos (teleology), in the scientific world that my father grew up
in. All such terms, including "metaphysics" were associated with
Aristotle, who in turn was associated with religion/God after the Scholastic
movement of Thomas Aquinas. "Vitalism" (the assertion that whatever makes
living things alive is outside natural/physical causes) came in there,
somewhere, too, along the way. Therefore, to call a scientist a "meta" ANYTHING,
as in "engaging in metaphysics" was tantamount to saying he was not a
scientist at all. To put it another way: Them were fightin' words! And
people did try to pin that designation on my father-- many, many times. That's
where the famous/infamous Robert Rosen line;"Contemporary physics is too
impoverished to answer questions in biology," comes from. "Impoverished" was his
way of saying what he meant, but also of flinging "metaphysics" right back in
their faces.
The definition of metaphysics that I learned from my father was
full of connotations: He said, "It refers to speculative
philosophy, in particular the philosophy of how we
came to be or how all of material reality came to be." He saw metaphysic as
being the preoccupation with ontology (origin of the universe), whereas his main
concern was with epistemology (knowledge of how the universe works). Indeed, one
of his discoveries regarding complex systems is that their
epistemology tells us nothing much about their ontology. When it came
to the connotations of "metaphysics" as an accusation, however, I think it was
the word "speculative" that most irritated my father. He said there was nothing
"speculative" about theory, if you are doing it right. Philosophy has the
freedom to speculate, but science is based on entailment. "It's a causal world,"
he used to say. In natural systems, we talk about causal
entailment and in formal systems (models or mathematics, etc) we are
dealing with inferential entailment. He believed that entailment in the
natural world is logical, consistent, and therefore knowable via
science.
The aspects of complexity that drew my father to reject the
contemporary matter-based foundations in science and redevelop the
foundations around organization were, indeed "outside physics". But only
because physics had limited itself to the study of a very narrow band of
material phenomena within the universe. In other words, physics was being
artificially limited to that narrow band and yet still wanted to call itself the
"general science" or the science of general principles.
I guess it might be fair to characterize my father's attitude as
being one of preserving physics rather than one of tearing it down. He
felt there should be a science of general principles and he was willing
to call it physics, but only if it really was what it purported to be. In order
for that to be so, physics needs to enlarge beyond matter-based foundations and
the concommitant reductionist approaches. I think it's important
to reiterate that my father did not advocate getting rid of reductionist
approaches or ignoring what the study of matter (of "pieces" and "parts")
can teach us. He was advocating removing such things from the foundations, and
putting them somewhere on the main floor. Organization itself has a context in
that there is no organization unless there is something which is organized. It
may be matter-based like a solar system, or it may be a system made up of
thoughts such as consciousness. Both exist and both require further study, but
an organization-based foundation allows the scientific study of BOTH, whereas
the current paradigm does not-- it wants to study the brain in order to learn
about thought. But it wants to study the brain by studying the parts, the
pieces, the subsystems... and so it goes.
Studying the biochemistry of memory encoding, for example, would be
a necessary aspect of understanding consciousness in an organization-based
approach, but the mindset is different: memory is one subsystem of consciousness
and the biochemistry is one subsystem of memory. If you are studying
biochemistry with a fully developed notion of function and the self-entailment
of complex system organization at the root of the thought process involved in
study, you will be doing things very differently than what has been done in the
past and what is being done now.
Here's the website excerpt from the Principia Cybernetical website,
which I think requires some analysis... but I'll do that in a separate
post:
Metaphysics, introductionSuch a theory would obviously be priceless for judging and constructing more specific physical theories. When we understand language as a hierarchical model of reality, i.e. a device which produces predictions, and not as a true static picture of the world, metaphysics is understood as much more valuable than just the "free fantasy" of philosophers. To say that the real nature of the world is a certain way means to propose the construction of a model of the world along those lines. Metaphysics creates a linguistic model (logical or conceptual structure) to serve as a basis for further refinements. Even though a mature physical theory fastidiously distinguishes itself from metaphysics by formalizing its basic notions and introducing verifiable criteria, metaphysics, in a very important sense, is physics. Philosophies traditionally start with an ontology or metaphysics: a theory of being in itself, of the essence of things, of the fundamental principles of existence and reality. In a traditional systemic philosophy, "organization" might be seen as the fundamental principle of being, rather than God, matter, or the laws of nature. However this still begs the question of where this organization comes from. In a constructive systemic philosophy, on the other hand, the essence is the process through which this organization is created. This is an intelligent and articulate piece of work, with a lot of good ideas. However, there are many aspects to these ideas, as defined here, that my father would take issue with. I'll try to get a quick analysis done and post it later. Judith
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