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Hi John M.
From my point of view, this was one of your best posts.
(Mind you, I'm assuming that I'm understanding what you're saying!
Could be dangerous.... But, as James Thurber wrote; "There is no safety in
numbers, or in anything else.")
Some comments and a few ideas...
JM: You really believe that "we can find out" how the U
works? I agree that there would be no way to know ALL the
entailments, given human finite limitations and the infinite nature of the
entailments. But I do think we are capable of learning about some of the
patterns (insofar as they are discernable in our little neighborhood of the
universe and we train ourselves how to "see"). I suspect that the
patterns we learn about will likely be a very small subset of the
universe's total entailment patterns... and that's OK. It's still worth doing,
isn't it? Aside from the fact that our own survival is dependent on our
ability to use our intelligence to augment our rather defenseless physical
selves... Learning is FUN.
JM: Explanations of observed elements
is not better than the slanted tests. They are within the reductionist mode framwork allowances. That depends on how you look at it-- both literally and
figuratively. How one observes and what one observes are obviously going to be
critical, as are the observational capabilities of the one observing. The
value of any subsequent explanations are also going to
be dependant on our observational capabilities and then they will
be equally dependent on how we think about what we
observe. In other words, mindset. My example, from birth, was a man
whose mind was his most powerful tool and his ability to look at things
(concepts, ideas, objects, behaviors, etc.) from many perspectives at once
was one of his talents. Is it still a limited, human view? Yeah. What can
I say-- It's a package deal. However, I do think that your definitions of "not
better than" and "slanted" are different from mine. Observation, in all its
various forms, combined with thinking will always be our best means for
learning (unless we evolve some sort of telepathic capability in the future and
can "mindmeld" with the universe to know it). I think of Copernicus and wonder
how the heck he was able to come up with a conceptualization of the solar system
that was so profoundly different from the flat-Earth belief structure he was
raised in: It sounds insane to suggest that we are living on a spinning ball,
which is moving in several different ways through space, one of which is
to orbit the sun... I don't feel like I'm moving! So, how were his
observations different when he was looking at the same view as everyone
else?
Regarding reductionism...RR didn't view all reductions or
reductionism as a single entity-- and therefore there's nothing inherently bad
about reduction, per se. The bad comes from
inappropriate applications. So, while it is true that all human
perception is going to be a reduction, in some sense, compared to the
full nature of the things we are perceiving, there are ways of
conceptualizing that do great harm when applications are developed from
it and ways that minimize the potential for that kind of harm. In a complex
universe, RR felt that the safest (and the quote about safety being "relative",
above, is more appropriate here than ever!) conceptualization was a
relational one. Reductive applications derived from a relational
conceptualization are far more likely to be appropriate to the task at hand
than a blind commitment to blanket reductionISM. We still may do some
harm to ourselves and our world via science, even if it is based on a
relational paradigm, but the harm is likely to be lesser, whilst the
benefits we achieve are likely to be far greater. Therefore, we should have a
much healthier balance overall than we do now.
Interestingly, my father saw gradations of different types of
reduction from the history of science. Some reductions were actually
relational in nature. Mendel was one example. On page 258 of Life,
Itself, there is an interesting discussion about the difference between
Mendel and August Weismann. Mendel, in RR's view, was a relational thinker
whereas Weismann more or less equated everything about organisms to
genetics. I think I'll take the time to type that into a separate post for
the list, because it's very instructive in lots of different ways. However,
one of the worst sins that reductionist science commits, in my
father's view, is the tendency to assume/conclude that if we can mimic the
behaviors of a system "accurately" enough, we will also have achieved the
corresponding underlying entailment patterns responsible for the behaviors.
Common sense ought to throw that conclusion right out; There are numerous ways
to achieve any given effect. But somehow, this tendency persists in
science.
JM: Water you
pour - as H2O? no hydrogen, no oxygen not even the H2O labeled molecule in it, but a liquid with surface tension and bulk 'physical' behavior which in a very special destruction arrives at data representing H and O (maybe). This is so true. And yet the truth of it continues to go ignored in science, to this day. I just don't GET that. Water is one of the most studied "things" in the history of science. It's important to just about everything we do and everything we are, on this planet. Clearly, the many phases (solid, liquid, gaseous...) of water are radically different from one another just as hydrogen and oxygen, two flammable elements, are radically different from H2O. All of these differences are relational, it seems to me. The fact that relational aspects can have such a radical impact on the behavior and properties of a system is the critical point-- the very same point that continues to be ignored by most of the foundational theories of science. It's bizarre to me. Judith
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