>>In article <48c93406$0$56791$edfadb0f@dtext02.news.tele.dk> "thomas p."
yahoo.com> writes:>>>
>>> "Damien Valentine"
gmail.com> skrev i en meddelelse
>>> news:1433408c-2124-479a-9193-6ae270a4f4b2@i76g2000hsf.googlegroups.com...
>>> On Sep 11, 12:13 am, "thomas p." yahoo.com> wrote:>>>>
>>>> He expressed his religious beliefs. The fact that he is also a scientist
>>>> does nothing to support the validity of those beliefs.
>>>
>>> I'm not even sure how these beliefs are particularly religious. As
>>> far as I can tell, he's just swapping the vague word "God" for the
>>> technical term "emergence", and hoping that makes everything better
>>> somehow, all by itself.
>>> ______________________________________________________-
>>>
>>> I think the hope is that nobody will notice that it is pseudoscientific
>>> garbage.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>Well, not really. I'm currently halfway through the actual book (Kaffuman
>>is never a page-turner) and the science is not at all questionable. And
>>insofar as the God here being one any Christian would care to claim,
>>Kauffman's "God" makes the god of the Enlightenment Deists look like a
>>tribal idol. Kauffman's god is purely what he sees as the restless,
>>endlessly self-organizing nature of the material universe -- and nothing
>>else. Nothing else.
>>
>>Kauffman's real target is not the materialist viewpoint at all, but rather
>>the reductionist stance -- the idea that everything can (in principle at
>>least) explained from the bottom up, that one could start with atoms --
>>or with the Big Bang -- and explain tadpoles and ant societies and human
>>brains by working your way upward.
>>
>>Kauffman disagrees -- again, NOT for anything like goddidit, and not as a
>>rejection of the naturalist, materialist position -- but simply out of a
>>conviction that at each new level, there are emergent properties and
>>principles that cannot be derived from the level below. When you get to
>>crystals of chemical compounds, there are principles at work that could not
>>(even in theory) be derived from quantum mechanics. At the level of
>>biochemistry, chemistry no longer suffices to explain everything. Living
>>organisms cannot be adequately described by biochemistry. Brains cannot be
>>explained solely by in terms of cytology. Economic systems cannot be
>>derived from psychology. Convincing you of this point of view is the
>>motivation of "Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and
>>Religion."
>>
>>This is nothing more -- or less -- than a thesis that our traditional
>>scientific goal, pure reductionism, is not sufficient to get us all the way
>>there, that the existence of emergent principles are also required. There
>>is nothing here for the hopeful believer who, on hearing "God" and "noted
>>scientist" in the same book review, would think find anything at all
>>compatible with his religious convictions.
>>
>>
>>-- cary
>
> Based upon what you said, having not read the book, "the level below" is
> erroneous as a general assumption. (The term building reinforces the envisioning
> of a hierarchy rather than a set of states being stepped through that could be
> bi-directional and/or cyclic). Evolution does not produce higher levels of
> life, it produces what survives the best for the pressures exerted on the
> organism. So it is possible that a multicellular organism could evolve ("back")
> to a unicellular one. Regarding the cytology/brain example, it fails to
> recognize that a combination of available states and properties have been
> selected by evolutionary pressure. In this case it is a particular type of cell
> and properties of logic, which was failed to be something available at the
> previous step. Various properties exist whether or not they have been utilized.
> It is quite possible that there are many other properties just waiting to be
> stumbled on and selected by evolution to be employed in new species, or by a
> scientist to be employed in a theory.
I've probably done a poor job of trying to express Kauffman's thesis.
He wasn't talking about some putative directionality to evolution; in
fact -- thinking back, and off the top of my head -- he was not
talking about evolution at all.
Rather he was flogging the idea that at each ... new level
of complexity, the next systems-level up -- that properties
emerge that cannot, even in principle, be derived from the
level of complexity immediately below it.
This concept is independent of, and not limited to, biological
systems. Temperature, color, and entropy have no meaning
when talking about individual atoms (poor examples, but
the best I can make up in a hurry).
In the end, he's pushing a (I cannot believe I am about
to type this) paradigm shift. A new way of doing science,
of giving up on the three-centuries old goal of reducing
all phenomena to their isolated components, and looking
at things from a systems level instead.
A bit similar, in my sketchily-informed opinion, to
what raving genius Stephen Wolfram was pushing in
his you've-been-doing-it-all-wrong book, "A New
Kind of Science" (which I have not read).
Incidentally, I myself am not particularly convniced
of Stuart Kauffman's basic idea; I'm just trying as best
I can to represent it here.
-- cary
