Exactly, Alamo-Girl! I don't know why the insufficiency of this type of answer goes so unnoticed and unremarked. It addresses only surface or outward appearances, or incidental "accidents" pertaining to an entity (for lack of a better word).
When in the Gorgias, Socrates asks Chaerephon what question he would ask of the renowned Sophist, a puzzled Chaerephon asks Socrates, "What shall I ask him?" To which Socrates replies, "Ask him who he is."
That is not the same as asking what does a person do for a living, or what family connections he has, (or to put it crudely, who or what he can successfully breed with), etc. The question goes to the essential nature of the person, to the quality (or "whatness") of his being, if we can put it that way. Gorgias, with Polus' help, manages to duck it. And shortly thereafter Gorgias falls silent for the remainder of the dialogue.
We are to conclude that this type of question is repugnant to a Sophist.... It seems many neo-Darwinists try to avoid this question of "what is," too, on the grounds that it's not "a scientific question." The focus is, as I suggested, in the way things appear, not on what they actually are.
I think it's true that, as Niels Bohr points out, science is about making descriptions of nature, not about "explaining" the how or why of nature. Still scientific descriptions are of appearances that necessarily arise from the "essence" of what a thing really is. I don't see how anyone can pretend there is no "essence"....
You see the epistemological problem as well as I do, A-G. I can't express how glad I am for your good company here.
Thank you for your kind words of encouragement, dear Alamo-Girl, and for writing!
Nonsense.
Piling up facts is not science--science is facts-and-theories. Facts alone have limited use and lack meaning: a valid theory organizes them into far greater usefulness.
A powerful theory not only embraces old facts and new but also discloses unsuspected facts [Heinlein 1980:480-481].
Scientists don't deny there is an essence. All they can say is what they know and what that means. That means they might be able to partially describe an essence.
"as Niels Bohr points out, science is about making descriptions of nature, not about "explaining" the how or why of nature."
Nature is self consistent, so the how and the why can be answered. Those answers just won't be satisfactory for some, because they're after the answer to the question, "why is nature". Science can only say that it is, because nature screams, I am.
But this too is part of the “observer problem” though I suspect tortoise disagrees that there is such a thing.
Nevertheless, once the observer has supposed a domain or system, he has lost objectivity – particularly so if he is part of the domain or system.
And once he has made an observation, he has further constrained the domain or system to the limits of his subjective encoding/decoding (syntax, language, consciousness and so on).
For such reasons I aver that only God is objective; God is Truth.
That is not to say we should throw up our hands and give up trying to understand things. Not at all. But concerning issues of reality, we should always remember that we are like the ten blind men trying to describe the elephant.
One may grab the trunk and say the elephant is like a rope, another the ear and say it is like a fan, another the leg and say it is like a tree and so on. All are partly right and all are clearly wrong. We must realize our blindness – quit insisting our view is the only view - and dig deeper for a better understanding of the elephant.
Which brings me full circle to the original point which seems to be flying overhead like geese in this sidebar: the issue is not what a thing such as life (or an elephant) looks like but what it “is”.