> Ben Kaufman pobox.com>

>>
>> On Thu, 11 Sep 2008 17:53:46 +0000 (UTC), cary@afone.as.arizona.edu (Cary
>> Kittrell) wrote:
>>

>>>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