Thank you for your beautiful “homily,” RWP. I’m truly grateful for it. In it you said many things which sounded the ring of truth to my ear. I’d like to offer a few comments, FWTW.
First of all, in the interest of full and fair disclosure, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever held myself out to be such. In all likelihood, I was born a philosopher, and will die a philosopher; a leopard cannot change his spots. But that is not to say that I undervalue science. On the contrary, even though in my formal academic career I tried to avoid the sciences wherever possible, later in life I have found science, especially physics, to be irresistibly attractive, compelling in terms of the usages of my personal time. I have tried to correct the deficiencies of my formal education at every opportunity since. Still, there are gaps, I admit. But gaps are there to fill, and that’s what I’m about.
Having said that, with my philosopher’s hat on here, it seems to me that the sciences face daunting epistemological challenges these days. One is the sheer fact of the proliferation of specialties, and the concomitant enormous proliferation of increasingly detailed knowledge within specialties. The second derives from the first: It becomes increasingly difficult for specialists to integrate the body of their work into more integrated wholes, for that would require a familiarity with all the other specialties, and there is not enough time in a life to do that anymore (if there ever was). I don’t know whether you would agree with me, but I think that’s a serious problem.
I gather Bohr’s answer was simply to say that science was only about making good descriptions of nature, not about “explaining” nature. And actually I admire that attitude. But that still leaves a whole lot of “’splaining to do.” Or so it seems to me. You cited the on-point case of your colloquium speaker, who seemed to intimate that there must be a “ghost in the machine.” Personally, I don’t think there is a ghost in the scientific sense – for there are no ghosts in science. The point is, your atheist ghost-seeker is probably looking, not for some kind of Deus ex machina operation in nature, but an ultimate principle that ties absolutely everything together. As you wrote,
… the question is, when you've described all this vast clockwork, is there more to it than just the details? He thought there should be; he wanted some great insight, some ghost in the machine (oddly enough, he's a fairly rabid atheist.)
I don’t find this at all remarkable. There is something about human nature that just demands there should be some ultimate principle to explain and validate the physical laws and the evolution of the universe, and then demands to know what it is. The great interest in developing a GUT or a TOE demonstrates this.
And so you have this weirdo philosopher out here, “speculating.” (That would be me.)
In the italics at the top, you mentioned you have strong doubts that QM could have little to contribute to the solution of the problem of life, and that entropy is an expression given in some kind of a quasi-mystical terms. (My interpretation, times two; correct me please if I’ve “gone off the reservation” here).
Well, I don’t know about QM per se, which places everything in terms of a probability distribution. (BTW, does such a probability distribution contain only those terms which are knowable to the human mind, or might such a distribution contain yet-unknown or possibly unknowable elements?) But for me the great attraction of quantum theory is its penchant for reducing all the operative terms of the universal process into discrete items; e.g., space as Planck length, time as Planck time; the photon as discrete particle (although we know it also has a waveform under certain conditions); the Lorenz transformability of mass and energy, gravity in terms of graviton, etc.). Now it seems that information theory also has a “discrete particle,” the bit. So I wonder whether we might have the beginnings of a “common language” here capable of associating like terms in fruitful, meaningful ways?
And I do wonder about entropy, whether it has, as you say, a “mystical property.” You wrote: “To mystify the entropy is to give credence to the specious arguments that somehow the Second Law says something about evolution.” I dunno, RWP; but it seems to me that, absent entropy, no evolution of the universe itself, nor of any of its constituent systems, living or non-living, could occur in the first place.
If entropy seems to have a quasi mystical quality, perhaps that might be due to the fact that it specifies a “negative quantity.” Maybe science can take such abstractions quite in stride in the formulation of its equations, but to a philosopher, a “negative quantity” is noteworthy in principle. Especially since what entropy is usually taken to mean is the amount of thermal energy not available to perform useful work. Thus in living systems, which seemingly must perform a whole heck of an amount of useful work just to stay living, this would seem to be an important quantity.
As you noted, there seems to be little interest in the scientific community at the present time in trying to quantify entropy in living systems. And yet it seems that a very loose consortium of scientists of many different disciplines have come together in recent times trying to explicate the role of entropy in living systems. Unfortunately, I know of no scientist of note of American extraction who is participating in this effort, which seems to largely come from the national academies of science of such countries as Hungary, Israel, India, and China. The lack of American participation in this project (as informal as it is, since I imagine that each of the scientists involved has his own theory in view, yet the common thread tying them all together is the methods used) is deeply distressing to me. For whatever that is worth!
Well I’ve ranted enough by now for an evening. Thanks for listening, RWP.
More importantly than that, however, thank you ever so much for sharing your thoughts with me. I am in your debt.
I think this is where you are missing the big picture.
I’m curious if a Law or Process could actually be called a ‘Law’ or a ‘Process’ if one attributes either to mindlessness? I realize this question is simplistic on the surface but so are the naturalistic answers… i.e.… “They are natural ‘laws’ and ‘processes’ because they are from nature”… “They are just a result of a mindless universe and ‘laws’ and ‘processes’ must emerge regardless”… or… “What a stupid question because you cannot relate ‘laws’ or ‘processes’ from intelligence to the natural”… (This is the common answer)
Honestly, if someone used our pre-existing laws and processes to make some novel design – what would this prove other than the laws and processes we live under allow novel designs? Must we still assume that they ultimately came from mindlessness and assume that the purely mindless mechanisms resulted and caused – the universe, DNA, consciousness, and our own (somewhat) intelligently designed laws and processes that we use to govern ourselves…
Now although; selection, survival, fitness, etc. can be anthropomorphized – I do not believe the same can be said of natural ‘laws and processes’ because they ‘must’ be used initially and regardless to set things in motion… I would actually go on the record as saying that both a law and a process invoke teleology as I do not see how either could ‘ultimately’ be a result of mindlessness and still be observed. A law and a process require information transfer and instructions to be carried out toward an end and from a beginning.
If someone asserts a TOE without a teleological shoe, it will be stubbed.
– Heartlander’s Law