Hi Glenn, and all interested in the creation of patterns;
Glenn, thank you too for your reply. I have tried to make my position clearer in this
post - and I think I'm near to the best I can
do. I hope this message will let my opinions through - and then we can of course agree
that we disagree. I shall adress existence of
laws and forces as a first thing, in a rather narrow way, and then address the
"creation" of forces. In doing the latter thing, I have
tried to give the more comprehensive picture I could.
First, on the existence of laws and forces. My problem with your points about laws and
forces may be one of a syntactical nature. I
think that, as in many other cases, the word "exist" is probably the real subject of
discussion or a relevant part thereof.
If you say that "gravitation pulls apples" to the ground according to the law of
gravitation, it seems you are saying that gravitation
exists and apples exists and the former does something to the latter. Now, assume you
have an object, and a behavior. A dog that
barks. Now here comes an ethologist and, for the purpose of writing his papers,
invents the term "barking attitude", referred to dogs.
The expression, by chance, begins to be used over and over by his colleagues. Then
someone comes out and says that "the barking
attitude makes dog bark". Is it ok? Maybe. Fact is, now that we magically have a new
noun, this thing by itself may begin its evil
activity of generating (what I see as) pseudoproblems:
A: "was there barking attitude in the universe before the first dog was born?"
B: "No. Or something stronger than no. It makes no sense to say that the barking
attitude was there, because there is no empirical way
of finding out if the barking attitude exists in a universe without dogs. So this is a
false problem"
A: "actually, you cannot be sure it wasn't there for the same reason you can't be sure
it was. Maybe there was barking attitude, but
since this is something that makes *dogs* bark, it was not perceivable. Then the first
dog came and the barking attitude found
something to operate upon and made the dog bark."
For how silly, I don't think the problem underlying this discussion is trivial. To
decide who's right, we really need to go and do
some serious philosophy of science. No serious scientist, on the other hand, will ever
take a *scientific* position in the debate. For
the scientist, B's observation does it. It makes no difference if the barking attitude
does or does not exist in a universe without
dogs. Science is not interested in discovering the truth of supposed "facts" that make
no empirical difference.
My point with respect to laws and forces was, mainly, that it is *not* a scientifical
question whether a "force" exist. I have
considered your argument that you feel it, and made a mistake in discussing it in
terms of counter-forces and so on (that was a
comment a latere, rather than my counter argument). What I really mean is that you
don't feel the force, but its effects. You feel a
pressure to the ground, not the "force" that pushes you. This is trivial - and exactly
what I really meant. To me, the force is a more
abstract concept, and when you claim it "exists" (it "pulls" apples), you must be
meaning that we could have gravitation prior of, or
independent of, any mass in the universe. Note that, without any mass in the universe,
we certainly couldn't have the "effects" of
gravitation, that is what you actually have empirical evidence for. If we could have
gravitation even in a situation where it would
have no effect, is an open problem, but one that looks suspiciously like a
pseudoproblem to me. Surely not a scientific problem.
Part of my problems were probably raised, as well, by your antropomorphizing
expressions "nature decides" etc. I genuinely took them
as metaphors in the beginning. Then, the "analog computer" thing (appeared before in
this thread) as well as elephant's remarks made
me think that you actually thought that nature did some kind of calculation/decision
making before pulling apples. These remarks seem
in that line:
> If someone asked me "Does nature work by abiding to laws?" I would be flat out lying
>to myself if I said "no". I'm not saying
> Newton's or Einstein's are the exact ones nature uses, but surely these are on the
>right track. You need to explain to me how I
> deluded myself into thinking this way. If all you can say is "this is the behaviour
>of things" and be done with it, then you really
> haven't said much.
All I can say is that if you want to believe that nature is something that calculates
the trajectory of falling apples and then makes
them fall in that trajectory, or to hold any other belief about nature having a mind
in a less than metaphorical sense, I can only
regard it as a religious rather than a philosophical position. Philosophically, you
seem to be proliferating "entities" without need:
to retain the belief in barking attitude as something that exist and makes dogs bark.
Also philosophically, I'm not sure what it
means: I could even be in perfect agreement with you, depending on the meaning of that
term "exist"...
(I guess we could have footnotes in e-mail message. This would be a footnote to the
"mind of nature" thing: you may broaden the sense
of the term "mind" and then have me on your side when you say that nature has a mind;
possibly in some Batesonian sense).
> The point is you feel *something*. It amuses me that you and others seem to be in
>some kind of denial about this force on your feet,
> trying to explain it away with a technical argument, so that you won't have to admit
>to the *direct, empirical evidence* for a
> feeling we attribute to gravity. This is the very thing that MOQ says is more real
>that anything.
A repetition: I agree that you have a direct empirical evidence (a feeling) of
something (being pushed towards the ground), not of
something pushing you to the ground. This is, again, trivial, a minor modification of
your position, but that's the point I wanted to
make.
I find it more complex to reply about the problem of the creation of gravitation,
because in part my position follows from the above,
but, as you remark, all that follows from what I said above is that Newton created a
concept (the barking attitude), which is obvious,
but actually less than I wanted to express.
Just like "exist" before, the villan word that generates pseudoproblems or
misconceptions, here, is "create". When we use this word in
common language, we think of a creation as en event where some object enters the
physical world that wasn't previously there. In this
perspective, it is absurd to imagine that scientists created spiral galaxies. Just to
narrow the domain of discussion, let me clearly
state that my position is coherent with any good common sense idea on the physical
world. I do believe that if a rocketship was sent a
long time ago to a corner of the universe where we now found a spiral galaxy, it would
have met the galaxy. I do not believe Mr.
Astronomer makes things pop out of nothing billion light years away from his
superpowered brain.
My position actually has more to do with a mysthic conception of reality. When you say
that if birds and rocks belong to the static
quality reality we create, there has to be something very close to them in the "true"
reality, I agree, in part. As I said, I think we
filter and abstract reality, and what we abstract most is probably something that may
be vaguely termed "interconnection". Our main
delusion is the subject/object dichotomy, as well as object/object distinctions.
Rather than seeing things in a way different than
they are, or seeing different things than there really are, the problem is just that
we see "things" (no pun). We discretize the
continuous flux into objects to which we attribute independent existence. This is when
we create the word "exist" to refer to
something (versus something that doesn't exist). As a consequence we create the word
"create" to refer to the event of coming into
existence of a new "thing".
Whatever things you see in the world, it's you human that created the boundaries that
cut reality into pieces and you human that gave
names to the pieces. A different cutter could have cut the continuous world in a
different way. Our "brain" has been designed by
evolution (does it exist?), of course, to do this cutting in ways that are most useful
for certain surviving purposes. It's useful to
be able to detect something as a tiger before it bites. But you never directly
experience the absolute tiger, detached from all
context. Another conscious life form might not be able to understand what you mean by
a tiger if its brain was designed for different
purposes. (To survive on earth, that would had to be a conscious life form that did
not run the risk of being eaten, of course).
So does it makes sense to say that we create spiral galaxies? Yes, insofar as spiral
galaxies are "things", a slice of continuous
reality that we cut with our intellect and our scientific theories and that does not
exist as a separate thing per se. It appears that
a good metaphor here is if you create a slice of cake with your knife. Yes. Was the
dish empty before you created the slices? No.
If you think about it in this perspective, I think it should make sense of Mr.
Astronomer creates something that existed billion of
years before his birth. It's a paradox where both "exist" and "create" do their part.
He creates it in the sense that it creates a
concept, a new slice of reality that no one had cut before. The spiral galaxy *is*
this slice of reality. In this sense, it did not
exist before the astonomer himself. But this does not mean that something popped out
in outer space. When talking about outer space,
you are already taking the good old "objective view" - that the universe is made up of
things. In that world view, spiral galaxies
were already there and were discovered, as any good man on the street would tell you.
But, saying that they existed before they were
discovered means, in more philosophical terms, that we know that our newly created
cutting pattern, that shaped the concept of spiral
galaxies, *could* have been used in the past and receive empirical evidence in its
support if someone managed to create it before.
Something similar occurs with time. Time has to do with change, motion, etc:: a bird
moving across the sky. This happens to make any
sense only when you have cut the bird slice out of continuous reality. *Then* you can
say something changes some of its attributes
(position, shape). It is a fortunate event, I think, that science ultimately
progressed enough to understand that most of the tools we
used, throughout human history, to cut the universe, were not perfect. At subatomic
level it gets very hard to say what is a seagull
and what it is not, what is time, and what is the seagull's position in a certain
moment. These findings don't make philosophy
dissolve into science - science, in my humble opinion, just rejected her traditional
cutting tools in favor of new, hi-tech others.
Nevertheless, these discoveries are a good occasion to have some insight of the
general flavor of human never-ending mistake.
Satori - enlightnement - is the discovery that All is One. If you dissolve all
boundaries between things, you get Dynamic Quality, the
Tao, God, your favorite name for It. This is part my own opinion, and I am quite sure
this is also in good part RMP's vision. It's the
good old mystic view of reality. And it *is* coherent with the idea of creation of
patterns, where this thread began. Creation of
patterns, not creation of objects.
I hope that does shed more light on my previous postings.
Yours,
Andrea
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