I did not suggest that "studying biology" will teach you "astrophysics, or metallurgy, or plate tectonics." We were "merely" entertaining the idea that a change in the initial premise of science from the materialist, mechanistic, "building blocks" presupposition to a presupposition of a living universe might enable us to end what appears to be a stalemate or road block in the conduct of the life sciences, and might even shed some light on plate techtonics. Plate techtonics, after all, involves a process unfolding in time. You can't "explain" that process on the basis of materialist presuppositions, which claim that everything that happens in the universe is the result of material and efficient causes only. It seems to me that anything which exhibits the nature of a process cannot be fully understood without the reintroduction of formal and final causes.
But it seems to me the entire point of materialism is to avoid having to deal with formal and final cause, to utterly deny their relevance in scientific investigation.
You asked if I "knew" anybody who rejects the materialist premise, in favor of the premise of a living universe. As a matter of fact, I do. In fact, several.
Let's start out with Aristotle, the "father of the natural sciences." As David Bohm reminds us (in Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980):
...Aristotle considered the universe as a single organism in which each part grows and develops in its relationship to the whole and in which it has its proper place and function.Aristotle distinguished four kinds of causes that operate in the world: Formal, Material, Efficient, and Final. As already pointed out, modern science has expunged two of these causes from its assumptions and practice.
But I wouldn't know how to understand plate techtonics as a sustained process absent the notions of formal and final cause.
To Aristotle,
the word form means, in the first instance, an inner forming activity which is the cause of the growth of things, and of the development and differentiation of their various essential forms. For example, in the case of an oak tree, what is indicated by the term "formal cause" is the whole inner movement of sap, cell growth, articulation of branches, leaves, etc., which is characteristic of that kind of tree and different from that taking place in other kinds of trees. In more modern language, it would be better to describe this as a formative cause, to emphasize that what is involved is not a mere form imposed from without, but rather an ordered and structured inner movement that is essential to what things are.Go figure.
Any such formative cause must evidently have an end or product which is at least implicit. Thus, it is not possible to refer to the inner movement from the acorn to the oak tree, without simultaneously referring to the oak tree that is going to result from this movement. So formative cause always implies final cause.
Nevertheless, in most of the work that is being done in physics today the notions of formative and final cause are not regarded as having primary significance. Rather, law is still generally conceived as a self-determined system of efficient causes operating in an ultimate set of material constituents of the universe (e.g. elementary particles subject to forces of interaction between them). These constituents are not regarded as formed in an overall process, and thus they are not considered to be anything like organs adapted to their place and function in the whole (i.e. to the ends which they would serve in this whole). Rather, they tend to be conceived as separately existent mechanical elements of a fixed nature. The prevailing trend in modern physics is thus much against any sort of view giving primacy to formative activity in undivided wholeness of flowing movement. Indeed, those aspects of relativity theory and quantum theory which do suggest the need for such a view tend to be de-emphasized and in fact hardly noticed by most physicists, because they are regarded largely as features of the mathematical calculus and not as indications of the real nature of things. When it comes to the informal language and mode of thought in physics, which infuses the imagination and provokes the sense of what is real and substantial, most physicists still speak and think, with an utter conviction of truth, in terms of the traditional atomistic notion that the universe is constituted of elementary particles which are "basic building blocks" out of which everything is made. In other sciences, such as biology, the strength of this conviction is even greater, because among workers in these fields there is little awareness of the revolutionary character of development in modern physics. For example, modern molecular biologists generally believe that the whole of life and mind can ultimately be understood in more or less mechanical terms, through some kind of extension of the work that has been done on the structure and function of DNA molecules.... Thus we arrive at the very odd result that in the study of life and mind, which are just the fields in which formative cause is acting in undivided and unbroken flowing movement is most evident to experience and observation, there is now the strongest belief in the fragmentary atomistic approach to reality. — ibid.
Anyhoot, besides Aristotle, other scientists working on something like the "living universe" model include for example Menas Kafatos; Robert Rosen; Attila Grandpierre; Rupert Sheldrake — and David Bohm himself.
Thank you so much for writing, dear tacticalogic!
P.S.: I think it was I who originally pinged you to this thread. I did so because you are a long-time friend here at FR who is interested in science. It certainly wasn't because I was building a trap for you.... It wasn't because I want to make you look like a fool, or whatever other nefarious motive you care to impute to me.
Lighten up, my friend!
I thought the object was to "understand the world around us", and that we were entertaining the idea the "what is life?" was a better question than "what is reality?".
You say that you are not limiting the range of your query by changing the question to "what is life?". There appears to be much in reality that "what is life?" does not cover, and at the same time nothing in life that "what is reality?" does not cover. I see nothing to be gained by changing the question, and much to be lost.
Thanks dear for bringing the thread back on track.
I do not believe if we want to discuss the issue in a scientific form we can make the mistake of pre-supposing some kind of causality.
In fact it seems like it is a very short leap from the start to determining that SOME KIND of causality exists, it is an element that is more part of our (living humans) nature than any type of raw force in physics or cosmology.
And that to me is ultimately the question!
We have discussed in the past the idea that life has at least a few properties that plain old physics or math does not recognize, such as stimulus-response.
We all agree that man is dust. We would all agree that there is no way two pile of dust could ever, under the current understanding of physics, do something like send an email to each other!
That’s a pretty astounding though when you reflect on it.
So if man and life itself is the C, atoms and quarks and energy is the A, then what is the B? A+B=C
Whatever would prompt one pile of dust to send an email to another pile, that is the essence, THAT PART is the causality we are searching for.
And I cannot see anything in regular physics or math that explains it.
It’s interesting because I watched a BBC vid on Youtube about cells. Very informative.
The cells have a certain construction, and have millions (or even billions) of these little molecular machines that wander around. Building things up, tearing things down, transporting items from one place to another.
And not a single one of these machines, NOT ONE, can be said to have anything resembling “an intent” or “a purpose” or “self awareness”!