James Heartfield:
> But that's just bizarre. Who would try to describe 'the world' in its
> entirety. Science is incapable of any such conceptualisation. Only
> religious thought could aspire to such absolute sweep.
Well, if you say so. I observe what appear to me to be fairly aggressive attempts to describe very large sets of phenomena, and enthusiasms about the establishment of links between one set of statements and another (for example, the growing coherence of physics, chemistry and biology) which appear to me to (in)tend toward grand theories of everything. And why not? Agreed, one shouldn't bite off more than one can chew, but each successful bite makes the biter bigger.
> I'm not sure what you mean when you say that 'the world is not
> mindless'. Do you mean that there are thinking people in it, or that it
> is the idea of God? Taking the less grandiose to be the case I would
> suggest:
>
> Any scientific approach would isolate those aspects of the world that it
> was investigating. So, when studying the chemical properties of a
> substance, you would set to one side its physical properties, or its
> property as an element of the biology of an organism. An experiment of
> course includes a laboratory, a scientist, some technicians, white coats
> etc.. But it is not an investigation of those things. Similarly it is
> not an investigation of mind. That is set aside in the experiment (into,
> say, lung cancer in beagles). When studying mind, by contrast, you would
> wish to set aside the merely peripheral questions, like cranial bumps.
Right -- unless mental states appeared to be related to physical phenomena in some way, a situation which does pop up here and there from time to time..
Gordon Fitch
> >The gratuitous assumption of a mindless predecessor of the
> >present world produces all sorts of difficulties, like the
> >mind-body problem and the appearance of consciousness _ex_
> >_nihilo_, which seem superfluous to me. Why bother? Unless
> >you like that sort of thing, of course.
James Heartfield:
> What you call the gratuitous assumption of a mindless predecessor is
> simply an act of abstraction, by which we can isolate one aspect of the
> world, i.e. the bits that are not mental.
>
> As to the 'problems' that arise. 1. Mind-body problem plainly does not
> arise, it is set aside. 2. Appearance of consciousness 'ex nihilo': Big
> deal. All things appear ex nihilo. The human species, every other
> species, the Earth, the solar system. All things have a beginning.
No, they don't. Everything comes from something else, or they were supposed to until virtual particles came along. By and large, causation and genealogy, rather than spontaneous generation, have been what scientists have looked for, for obvious reasons. Hence, prevailing Big Bang theory is rather annoying aesthetically -- everything is traced back by the most careful logical connections to a point where suddenly nothing makes sense at all. It seems like someone's playing a dumb joke.
> Your 'it seems superfluous to me' and 'why bother' or 'only if you like
> that sort of thing' are fakes. You really disapprove of this operation,
> but want to pretend indifference. So what if it seems superfluous to
> you, might be the proper answer. The act of abstraction is the basis of
> advance in the sciences. If you want to opt out of that - though I
> suppose you will not opt out of its gifts - that's your loss. It is not
> Yoshie's subjective predilection to look at things in isolation, it is
> the first move in the development of the natural sciences.
Yoshie seemed to think that a mindless universe was _necessary_, whereas I see it as an optional idea which produces not very interesting difficulties. Some abstractions are interesting, some aren't. What's your problem?
-- Gordon