Hi Struan, LilaQs
Struan commented on my essay at
http://indycc1.agri.huji.ac.il/~marder/Science_Philosophy/Causality.htm
>
>I found it impossible to contradict any of this Jonathan. Your, 'The
Cause of Change,' paragraph
>could use some clarification of your reasons for putting 'almost' in
brackets. Is there an argument
>for replacing (in this context) 'objective cause' with 'external cause'
and for leaving out
>'subjective cause' in favour of its elaboration, 'inherent tendency?'
I don't see the advantage in
>putting it the way you do and the bracketed 'almost' suggests you
aren't quite sure yourself.
I take your the point about the bracketed 'almost' looking like a
copout. But if you look earlier in the paper I equate scientific "cause"
with the objective concept of "driving force", as distinct from the
subjective concept of "quest". I go on to state that this distinction is
not of any particular use once we start to define the thermodynamic
behaviour of a system. Obviously, this latter point is one I will have
to make much more forcefully.
>In
>addition I hope your last paragraph will receive some further
elaboration to illustrate the point
>more fully. Any thoughts?
The obvious example is evolution. The argument rages between the
Darwinist position that evolution just happens "randomly" (inherent
tendency) and the counterposition that evolution is guided by forces we
don't know and don't understand. The serious proponents of the latter
position include a significant number of respectable physicists who find
the idea of man evolving by chance as incredible. I basically take the
Darwinist position. I'm re-reading "Origins ..." right now, and I am
mightily impressed by Darwin's insight.
Pirsig wrote somewhere in Lila
"The idea that life is progressing towards something has been explored,
but has anyone taken up the idea that life is evolving away from
something?"
As I once pointed out, Pirsig presents this as a new idea, but I think
this was exactly Darwin's idea. Random changes (e.g. mutations, genetic
recombinations etc.) move organisms AWAY from being direct clones of
previous generations. Natural selection is the result of circumstances
favouring certain directions of change above others. Thus, one can say
that populations tend to evolve to more favoured forms! Alternatively,
the survivors are the ones whose survival is favoured by circumstance!
All this sounds highly tautological to me, just like my statement in the
essay "Chemical reactions tend to move the system from a less likely to
a more likely state". I rather like reducing things to tautologies. They
mean that the statements are expressions of underlying axioms.
The axioms may be simple, but the complexity that can arise is immense,
and emergent properties of the system can reveal themselves quite
unexpectedly. These appear to us as tendencies driven by "forces we
don't know and don't understand" (quoted from 3 paragraphs back). I
think the whole argument about evolution stems from incorrectly
considering these tendencies as reflections of an external "objective"
cause.
Jonathan
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