Re: Status of theories
Posted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 8:26 am
I don't know why you refer to Newton as my restrictive vision here. I include time and the limited speed of light. You don't agree with any view without accepting both Newton as well as factors of Relativity here since you don't accept space as real. [/quote]Obvious Leo wrote:No it doesn't, Scott, that's just your own Newtonian reductionist slant on things. It is perfectly logical to model our planetary biosphere as being alive without having to attribute the notion of purposeful behaviour to it, as the creationists insist on doing. The central point about applying the Gaia hypothesis to evolutionary theory is that we need to regard the entire biosphere as evolving holistically instead of merely considering the status of individual species evolving within it. In my philosophy I extend this model to the entire universe. The entire universe is evolving from the simple to the complex but it does so without any sort of a blueprint whatsoever because this is simply what non-linear dynamic systems do.Scott Mayers wrote: Yet, this hypothesis suggests a type of awareness (conscious-like) by its behavior.
I'm well aware of it. You make no distinction between linear and non-linear determinism and I regard the importance of this distinction as the single most important question in both philosophy and science. Reality conforms to EITHER one OR the other but it cannot conform to both.Scott Mayers wrote: Just remember that much of what we may appear to disagree on here is mostly about our particular language background only.
Why are you holding back on telling me just what you mean by "linear and non-linear determinism"? I can only guess that you imply linear to represent a one-way timeline going forward to which the present itself defines the fixed past and an exception for all things beyond the present into the future as being variable ('non-linear' as in having multiple options going forward.) What you ignore is the difference between the things that are defined as doing the "determining" have distinctly different meanings since the word in context requires ownership. That is, one definition of "determining" is how we as humans can rationally find a closed practical means to predict something in the future. A second definition of "determining" is the way an unthinking universe applies its laws in a strict and orderly fashion upon our local reality: a consistency.
I pointed out elsewhere that "consistency" derives its meaning from meaning, "with sameness". But if you only define any concept with only this factor alone, it is incomplete because it doesn't recognize its dependency of its members to have a common principle of difference. This is the genus/species way of providing a complete definition. Otherwise, any incomplete definition is considered circular, or Tautologous, since it doesn't add more information already implied with the symbol.
Example: If you defined a pie as a food, it maps the idea of "pie" to "food" as being the same but doesn't differentiate it as being only one of many things defined as "food". Thus it doesn't add information and appears to only beg that each thing is the exact same thing. That is, in this definition above, a person can reasonably exchange the word "pie" with "food" or vice versa.
Therefore you need to declare how a pie is also different from other kinds of things that mean "food" too.
Here's a better definition:
A pie is a food that consists of a crust layer foundation in which some other food is placed in, sealed with a top layer of crust, and then baked. This extension demonstrates how it belongs to the class, "food", but is a unique type of member that differs from all others by the details expressed in this last definition.