Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
From: ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk (Oliver Sparrow)
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Subject: Re: Large-scale quantum effects (Was Re: Penrose's new book)
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Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 07:26:34 +0000
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Michael Jam[pel] makes sensible points. I have no problem with scientific
method: if I did, I should have wasted a certain amount of my life. Neither
do I dispute the utility or homology of what is doscovered within particular
scientific shubberies. What I do dispute is that there is a natural pecking
order between these academic groves, such that what is true for one is 
axioatically superordinate over all of the others, in descending order of
closeness to some concept of elementarity.

There are, I suggest, pecking orders, but these are actually plural. You
understand why atoms are hurtling up and down freeways in one fashion if you
are an economist, another if you are a physicist, yet another if you are 
concerned with cognition. None of these forms of ordering are "right" in some 
sense that they are necessary superordinate at all times. The source of a
reductionist hierarchy is to do with degrees of freedom: where do I have to go 
to perceive the roots of the properties of a gas, properties which I capture as 
a model with degres of freedom which span a space of N dimensions, such as 
pressure and temperature? Molecules, thermodynamics, stuff. (Note that 
statistical properties of emsembles of molecules takes one off down a branch 
which is different from the branch which captures the reasons why individual 
molecules display the properties which they do. Even at this level, things are 
insucceptible to unification.) None of this will tell you why an oil company is 
concerned with the actual properties of this reaction: not what happens, but 
why it has been brought about. It is a different set of order, different 
degrees of freedom. 

Any model has a grammar of order: one can hitch up the component parts in 
various configurations and get different outcomes. A good model is homologous 
with what is, and the outcome of such manipulations creates the expected result.
That is to say, the internal dynamics of processes in which cognition does not 
enter are open to random or dynamic interactions which create results, 
outcomes which are explicable only in their own terms of reference because it 
is from the parsing of those terms of reference that these results stem. The 
highly non-linear behaviour of predator-prey systems, for example, can drive an 
entire ecosystem and with it, all of the atoms which happen to be embedded 
within it. When you see the sky dark with pests over a cotton field in the 
Peruvian desert - and three days later, the same sky dark with their predators 
- this tells you about more than the validity of integrated pest control: it 
tells you that here is an unpredictable system which is driving everything from 
the coastal economy to the home life of a local carbon atom.




_________________________________________________

  Oliver Sparrow
  ohgs@chatham.demon.co.uk
