[net.religion] Emergent Phenomena

ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis) (08/03/85)

(continued) 	> >>> [Rich Rosen]	>> >>>> [me]

>Furthermore, whether or not science is able to describe "everything",
>does it mean that, if science cannot describe something, someone's wishful
>speculation have a bearing on the truth?

    I do not know how we can postulate any reality whatsoever without
    speculation, wishful or otherwise.
    
>Unfortunately, my "wishful thinking" is backed up by evidence. 

    Why `unfortunately'? Your worldview appears to work for you.

>With that sort of track record for subjectivity, I don't think it worthwhile
>as a descriptor of the real world in a realistic physical sense.  It works
>for you as the way you experience the world, and in that sense it is real,
>but beyond that it does not accurately (necessarily) describe the real
>world.

    Subjective INTERPRETATIONS are to be doubted. Agreed.

>>    Sorry, most subjective terms like {purpose, meaning, awareness} are very
>>    difficult to define. Notice that interest in these ideas is not
>>    restricted to religion, mysticism, metaphysics, philosophy, etc., but
>>    also encompasses modern disciplines like artificial intelligence,
>>    cognitive psychology, linguistics, etc. Apparently I'm not alone in
>>    attributing great importance to such chimaera.
>      
>Attribute all the personal importance to them that you like.  That doesn't
>mean that such things describe the physical world outside the mind.

    Frankly, I doubt that any satisfactory definition of `exist' exists,
    except in mathematical logic, wherein a `Universal Set' is explicitly
    assumed as an axiom prior to subsequent discourse.
    
    In the wider context of human discourse, phrases that grammatically can
    appear as the subjects of verbs are candidates for existence, and here
    language causes immense confusion, as Frege, Russell, etc, point out.
    
    But unless one takes refuge in solipsism, there are billions of
    instances of `meaning' and `purpose' out there -- in the minds of other
    people, and these `things' are apparently having effect on those
    people's behavior. 
    
    Since these words have spontaneously appeared in all languages, and have
    maintained themselves even in YOUR language, I can only assume they
    reflect something real and very deep about the internal nature of human
    beings. Consequently, and in knowledge of the problems entailed thereby,
    I call such things `existent' -- emergent phenomena -- much as rocks,
    atoms, vortices, or frogs, although `really' arbitrary collections of
    bizarre low-level worldstuff, somehow manifest behavior with a cohesive
    unity that causes our minds to somehow attribute `thingness' to them.

    SMASH CAUSALITY!!!

-michael