Bob --
>Hi Stan - once again I enjoyed your remarks amplifying your original
>comment. I would like to add that science only deals with formal cause and
>not final cause. Final cause is for philosophers, social critics and
>theologians.
S: Well, Bob, I will disagree with this. I think finalities have been
subrosa AS such. It seems to me that variational principles erect
finalities, in two senses.
(1) Where some value must increase or decrease with any transaction, as
with increase in entropy, or positive entropy production, in accordance
with the Second Law of thermodynamics, or, in evolutionary biology,
increase in fitness in Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection.
(I will leave out certain interpretations of QM, because I don't understand
them well enough.)
To see in a stonger sense why the Second Law is finalistic, we place
it in the context of the Big Bang. This ongoing event has created a
thermodynamically nonequilibrium world (for this view we need the plausible
supposition that the universe is an isolated system). Its tendency to gain
equilibrium is the Second Law. This allows us to view the spontaneous
dissipation of energy gradients as finalistic. Next, in order to see how
dissipative structures, including the living, are involved in this
finality, we note the critical fact of the poor energy efficiency of
natural work with effective work loads -- somewhere around 50%. That is,
work serving the creation and maintenance of such systems is about equally
in the service of the Second Law. Thus, as I type this message, I try to
communicate, but I am also contributing my share to Universal
equilibration. Thus, two facts: the manifest disequilibrium partout, and
the poor energy efficiency of work, allow us to find finality in the Second
Law..
(2) Where some equation descriptive of a system cannot be solved unless a
parameter is minimized or maximized. Here the finality is erected by the
observer, but the observed could not be known without it. It is therefore
only known by way of a portal through final cause, which in this case might
be said to be virtual in Nature as known through science. It needs to be
realized that Nature is known ONLY through its observers. That is to say,
the observer's properties mingle with Nature's.
STAN
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