> Your point is what?
Wordworth's point was partly the obvious one that if you rip a rabbit to bits you kill it. In relation to the science at issue, however, he also attributed motive.
The materialism in question can't explain life. Without pulling a rabbit from a hat, you can't get something possessing the characteristics that define a living thing from bits of dead matter. The argument demonstrating this is summarized in the Whitehead material I mentioned.
Latour himself misunderstands Whitehead. He thinks Whitehead's idea of transforming "matters of fact" into "matters of concern" is illustrated by the following claim of Turing about what's involved in bringing a machine to life.
> "In attempting to construct such machines we should not be
> irreverently usurping [God's] power of creating souls, any more than
> we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case,
> instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He
> creates" ("CM," p. 443).
The rabbit from a hat problem alone makes this an impossible phantasy. Strangelove indeed.
This mistake about about "concern" is connected to the following mistaken claim about what Whitehead means by a "society":
> the word the latter used in Process and Reality to describe "actual
> occasions," his word for my matters of concern, is the word societies
Whitehead uses the word "society" to designate a set of internally related "actual occasions."
"The point of a 'society' as the term is here used, is that it is self-sustaining; in other words, that it is its own reason. Thus a society is more than a set of [actual] entities to which the same class-name applies: that is to say, it involves more than a merely mathematical conception of 'order.' To constitute a society, the class-name has got to apply to each member, by reason of genetic derivation from other members of that same society. The members of the society are alike because, by reason of their common character, they impose on other members of the society the conditions which lead to that likeness." (Process and Reality, p. 89)
This is an "internal relations" view of essence. It matches the view of essence set out in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach. This is the ontological underpinning of the idea that the degree of enlightenment characteristic of individual self-consciousness is the product of the social relations within which individuals develop and live.
I pointed sometime ago to Bion's psychoanalytic explanation of the kind of self-consciousness to which the various features of the materialist ontology would appear self-evident and for which Whitehead's ideas about "feelings," "internal relations" and "self-determination" would be incomprehensible. The post containing this explanation is at:
http://squawk.ca/lbo-talk/0208/0953.html
Ted