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Author
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Topic: Etiological Epicureanism and Intelligent Design
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Bryan Cross
Member
Member # 51
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posted 01. March 2002 01:41
Marcus,
quote:
Originally posted by marcus:
I think we're definitely having a communication problem, and that makes it difficult to say for sure if we disagree. What I can't understand is how we can give up on finding a cause for gravity and reduce it to a primitive and still not have a non-arbitrary way of determining false primitives.
Let's just use X. First we think X needs a cause. Then we discover that X is uncaused, and is therefore a primitive. In your view, if I understand you correctly, this transition from treating X as a non-primitive to treating X as a primitive implies that we only have arbitrary ways of distinguishing genuine primitives from false primitives. I don't see how that conclusion follows. If at some point in time I mistake a poisonous snake for a non-poisonous snake, that does not make all my future judgments about the poison-status of any snake arbitrary. Likewise, mistakes in judgment about the nature of primitives do not per se imply or entail that all our judgments about primitives are arbitrary.
quote:
So I accept the validity of a paradigm transcendent standard. But when you get to specific causes or the need for specific causes that seems to me to be a paradigm-based issue.
You're trying to mix realism and antirealism, and this leads to a problem of arbitrariness. If you accept paradigm-transcendent standards to evaluate paradigms, then you have no non-arbitrary reason to exclude paradigm-transcendent standards to evaluate descriptions and explanations of specific causes and specific primitives. quote:
Yet primitivism and mysterianism are related to causes and whether or not they are needed. I think that's why you interpret my position as anti-realist.
Your position is antirealist when you say that whether X needs a cause or not is paradigm-based. That's not my interpretation of your position; that is just what antirealism is. The realist position is that X's need for a cause is due solely to X's intrinsic inability to account for its own existence. X's need for a cause does not change as soon as the observer switches paradigms. If X needed a cause before the observer switched paradigms, then X still needs a cause. If X did not need a cause before the observer switched paradigms, then X still does not need a cause. According to the realist, thinking differently about reality does not change reality. According to the antirealist, we have no access to some objective reality; we only have access to what's in our minds. That's why thinking differently about X changes X, because for the antirealist, X exists only in the mind.
quote:
I just can't see how the need for a causal explanation in a specific case relates to a paradigm transcendent position.
Imagine you're a detective. You come upon a crime scene. The victim has been murdered and mutilated. Would you say, "I can't see how the need for a causal explanation in this specific case relates to a paradigm transcendent position. Determining whether this victim's state requires an explanation is wholly paradigm-based."? Of course not. The paradigm-transcendent position is simply truth. Is it merely in your paradigm that the victim's state requires an explanation? Or is it simply true (paradigm-transcendent) that the victim's state requires an explanation? Anyone in a paradigm, who thinks the victim's state does not require an explanation is not being rational. Therefore, millions of times every day, all over the world, we relate the need for a causal explanation in a specific case to a paradigm-transcendent position, i.e. the truth. To deny this is to embrace antirealism, and claim that either we have no access to reality and truth, or that reality and truth have no bearing upon our daily inferences. Both of these claims are patently false, self-contradictory, and unjustifiable. Global sketicism is incompatible with the entire scientific and philosophical endeavor.
- Bryan [ 01 March 2002: Message edited by: Bryan Cross ]
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James A. Barham
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Member # 50
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posted 28. March 2002 16:49
Bryan:
In your first post on this thread, you say that it is possible to run a computer simulation starting with just the properties of oxygen and hydrogen and to show algorithmically how the properties of liquid water arise from them.
Could you point me to some literature where this is discussed? I am curious, because most of the condensed matter literature I have looked at uses precisely this example to deny that a knowledge of the properties of individual atoms and molecules alone is sufficient to predict the properties of condensed matter arising from them.
I am not a physicist, so I am not saying you are wrong. I am only saying that that is a very strong claim that is rather surprising to me, so if you could direct me to the literature where I could read further about this, I would very much appreciate it.
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Bryan Cross
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Member # 51
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posted 30. March 2002 13:08
James,
The example is intended to be a theoretical example of weak emergence, and I don't wish to side-track my argument by debating about one particular example. There are thousands of examples of weak emergence: all the properties of an axe, for example, can be deduced from the properties of the axe handle, the axe head, and the relation between them. The same is true of a water molecule. The mass, the size, the shape, the polarity, the center of mass, the degrees of symmetry, heat capacity, etc. of the individual water molecule can all be determined if one knows the complete natures of H and O. This is basic p-chem. Concerning the relation between water molecules, the natures of the water molecules determines the relations between them, i.e. the arrangement which they take at different temperatures, the affinity they have for one another, and therefore the density, the boiling point, the freezing point, tension at the surface (causing drops to form spheres apart from the effects of gravity). If you don't think this is an example of weak emergence, then pick another example like the axe, or like a triangle. The properties of the triangle can be deduced from the properties and relations of each of its legs. My argument does not hang on water being an example of weak emergence; it depends only on there being such a thing as weak emergence, and there is no end of examples of weak emergence.
- Bryan
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James A. Barham
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Member # 50
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posted 31. March 2002 23:01
Bryan:
I agree with you that it is better not to get hung up on any particular example. It is general principles we are after. But "emergence" is such a vague concept, and used in so many different ways, that only with some sort of concrete examples can we be sure we are talking about the same thing.
I think maybe it would have been better for me to challenge your original distinction between "weak" and "strong" emergence, and state my own conception.
I, too, have made a "weak" / "strong" distinction in print, mainly to distinguish my idea of emergence from the older frankly anti-naturalistic "elan vital" idea. But I don't view the distinction in the same way that you do.
You define "weak" emergence as "deducibility from constituent parts plus relations," or words to that effect. But how is that different from plain, old-fashioned reductionism?
Here is my definition of "weak emergence," borrowed from Mark Bedau:
"(1) Emergent phenomena are somehow constituted by, and generated from, underlying processes.
(2) Emergent phenomena are somehow autonomous from underlying processes."
(Mark A. Bedau, "Weak Emergence," in James E. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 11, Blackwell, 1997, pp. 375--399; citation is on p. 375)
So, there is both a real physical connection and also irreducibility. The "autonomy" that Bedau refers to is the well-nigh ubiquitous phenomenon of robustness or stability of one level with respect to the lower level. What robustness and stability mean is that the focal-level phenomenon is stable to perturbations at the lower level. It is the inherent nonlinearity in the causal relation between levels that creates stability, and in so doing makes reducibility in principle impossible.
Now, I don't know if you'll accept this as a definition of emergence, but it is the way that the majority of condensed-matter physicists view matters (see the Batterman book I have cited many times on Brainstorms). This is all that I mean by it, as well. Whether it is called "weak" or "strong" is less important to me than the fact that (a) it is a real, empirically observable phenomenon, and (b) it stands in flagrant contradiction to the widespread philosophical doctrine of Laplacian determinism.
It is my impression that this sort of emergent relation is already manifest at the level of the water molecule, and that you are simply factually mistaken when you maintain that water is fully reducible to hydrogen and oxygen. But however that may be, it is what I have in mind for trying to understand the emergence of life.
This is all by way of clarification more than argument. Perhaps we can go foreward from here?
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Bryan Cross
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Member # 51
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posted 03. April 2002 01:03
James,
Reductionism is one form of weak emergentism, (as I have defined it). One of my points is that there is no theoretical space between weak emergentism on the one hand, and strong emergence on the other. This is because a theory either abides by the ENNF principle or it does not. Logically, there are no other alternatives. Your definition of ‘weak emergence’ is in my view actually a form of strong emergence, since it violates the ENNF principle. Strong emergence qua strong emergence is not an empirically observable phenomenon, since there is no way of observing or confirming that something came from nothing.
- Bryan
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James A. Barham
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Member # 50
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posted 03. April 2002 17:26
Bryan:
I don't wish to argue just about terminology, so I won't quarrel further with your distinction between strong and weak emergence.
So, just to be clear, you are claiming to have "proved" Laplacian determinism and universal reductionism by simply appealing to the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit? (I guess you could also appeal to Leibniz's "principle of sufficient reason" in the same spirit.)
I have a much more empirical approach. To me, the problem of teleology consists primarily in the fact that it ill accords with the rest of science. I have tried to identify areas of contemporary science that may potentially help to bridge the gap.
If I can reduce the gap between nonequilibrium self-organizing systems and life to a width comparable to that between molecules and condensed matter, I will consider that a great success, even if according to your metaphysical principle, we fail to understand anything at all in natural science (since on the modern QFT account, every symmetry breaking phase transition from the Big Bang forward violates your ENNF principle, and hence remains unexplained).
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Bryan Cross
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Member # 51
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posted 05. April 2002 00:48
James,
quote:
So, just to be clear, you are claiming to have "proved" Laplacian determinism and universal reductionism by simply appealing to the principle of ex nihilo nihil fit?
No, I'm not claiming to have proved any kind of determinism. Nor do I think that the inviolability of the ENNF principle entails determinism. At least one form of agent causation, for example, is quite compatible with the truth of the ENNF principle.
I read the first installment of your article "Back to the Stoics". It looks very interesting, and I agree with much of what you say. I look forward to reading the rest of it.
- Bryan
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James A. Barham
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Member # 50
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posted 05. April 2002 09:01
Bryan:
Your last post made me think I have completely misunderstood what you are saying.
Could you fill out a little how you square agent causation with ENNF?
I am very much in favor of agent causation---indeed, it is at the center of my whole approach. But I can't see how to make sense of it except in the context of a more general ontology of emergent levels.
I will be very curious to hear your reaction to "Back to the Stoics."
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, and for your willingness to delve deeply into these controversial and confusing but very important matters.
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Bryan Cross
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Member # 51
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posted 08. April 2002 01:39
James,
According to the ENNF principle, every contingent thing has a cause, and no cause can give what it does not (in some sense) already have. Where an agent can freely choose between two possible effects, then if the ENNF principle is true, the agent must (in some sense) already have both of those effects. The effects of any agent come not from nothing, but from the agent. Moreover, since the agent cannot give what it does not already have, any effect of the agent and possible effect of the agent must in some sense pre-exist in the agent. This is one form of agent causation that is compatible with the truth of the ENNF principle but also not deterministic.
- Bryan
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