Posted on 06/12/2005 7:27:56 PM PDT by betty boop
I'm so looking forward to your comments, Alamo-Girl. Whitehead is a tremendously influential thinker. I've been thinking through his theology, and have come across some striking insights. All the same, so far I think I much prefer Wolfhart Pannenberg's theological "suggestions": Where Whitehead is "dualist," Pannenberg is "trinitarian."
Be speaking with you soon, dear sister!
No, not even close. What Russell's paradox actually shows is that informal usage of "set membership" doesn't work. This states nothing about the human mind, only about the problam of correct specification.
Likewise for the Heisenberg relations; they have nothing to do with what can be known; only with what can be measured, by a human or otherwise.
Cantorian placemarker
Greene mentions that we can see, with the Hubble, only 10-30 of the whole universe. I don't know why somebody else can't even mention this now and then. The universe is not 14 billion light years in radius. That is only the minuscule part that we can see. It ought to be important in our mental image of the universe that we can see only such a small piece of it and the rest is forever out of sight due to the limitation of the speed of light.
Ahem...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1366057/posts?page=1#1
Are you denying our unalienable right to change the meaning of words in midsentence?
I liked the Elegant Universe alot. Good read. Does that make me an advanced amateur?
Well good grief, Doc -- how could the problem of "correct specification" come up in the first place, absent the a priori existence of a "specifying" human mind? And supposing (for the sake of argument) that hurdle could be successfully crossed; then absent a human mind, what would be left to appreciate the problem in the first place, not even to mention your (hypothetically) successful resolution of it?
So which came first: the chicken or the egg? Who is "putting the cart before the horse" here, you or me? I think the final point is, there is no "science" capable of addressing a question like this, of being able to "correctly" decide (predict) what would be the true outcome of actual events in reality under constantly changing "environmental" conditions at any particular (specified)"point" in time.
Everytime I ask you to look with me at the forest, you keep drawing my attention back to the minute study of an individual tree....
Still, I am truly always glad when you write, dear Doc.
Okay. If a few more believers show up we could claim a trend, maybe a movement.
I feel your pain.
The solution will elude us until people writing about cosmology become more precise in their use of terminology. At present, they use "universe" interchangeably to mean both the "universe at large" (everything that exists) as well as "the observeable universe." Thus the confusion.
If I had my druthers, I'd reserve "Universe" to mean everything, and "Hubble volume" for the "observable portion of the universe." An alternative would be to reserve the CAPITAL U "Universe" for everything that exists, and the small u "universe" for the observable portion of the Universe, but I think my original proposal is less likely to confuse.
Hubble volume is good. We can go with that as it has been used elsewhere and is apparently easy to understand.
That's true in that mathematics is entirely a product of the human mind; however, Russell's paradox shows that the mind is rich enough to create falsehoods.
I'm not pointing to trees; I pointing out that we're not even a forest.
Frege was taken aback, but his invention proved very useful after all even if internally conflicted. Russell got paradoxicated in his turn and died unhappy and frustrated.
Replace "barber" with "statement" and "shave" with "prove" and you're close to Goedel's result.
Each and every one of the eminent, world-class scientists cited in this article was also a world-class philosopher, consciously or unconsciously."
__Uh-uh. Theoretical assertions do not constitute "doing philosophy."
Goedel's problem is that he didn't do any more lab experimentation than did Einstein. What a pair. We'll get past their dilemmas and paradoces and get some useful stuff done anyway.
Notwithtanding, I still see the forest, Doc. And you're in it and so am I and all our friends and strangers. Does that make me "crazy???"
they are generally related (though each is specifically different)*
It's been shown through brain scans that the senses split things up to do analysis (e.g., for vision, color is processed one place and shape another) and then construct a perception. So there is a deconstructive process and a constructive process.
Conscious thought, however, seems different. People love to deconstruct (splitting problems into smaller pieces, division of labor), but we seem to be very bad at the constructive part.
Some are better than others - some are trying harder than others - but we're none of us big picture thinkers, in the same way that we're big picture see-ers or big picture hear-ers. (I can't quantify constructive ability, so I'm just calling it a feeling.) For example, despite all the analysis we do of human affairs, we can't answer a simple question like what will be the state of the world in 100 years? What are we moving towards?
What do you think about that?
* This exchange reminds me of a description in Wired Magazine of the difference between program designers and program developers. Designers are usually female, talkative, vegetarian and live in lofts. Developers are always male, eat only fast food, live at work and don't speak at all except to say, You're wrong about that.
For Lurkers: Whitehead was raised on the Experts won’t back Dover thread in trying to negotiate the difference between “scientific materialism” and “methodological naturalism”. Since Whitehead coined the term “scientific materialism”, he is the one I turned to for a definition. betty boop investigated his thinking more thoroughly and posted the results here.
Whitehead's philosophy seems to view the physical realm (at least) as an organism – where the material things within it are not the point, but rather the processes or events.
His complaints about “scientific materialism” remind me of the physician who was all astir over another physician who had prescribed over 20 medications to my mother – one treating a symptom caused by another – all the while completely ignoring, not even asking, what the underlying disease was. To that extent, I certainly agree with him. But I am a bit "off" with his philosophy (as I understand it).
However, he’s not that far afield of the quantum world. Most of us probably think of particles as “real” or “substantive” when of a truth, the surest statements we can make are concerning the fields themselves – and that illusive “carrier” mechanism remains yet undetected – the Higgs boson/field which would account for ordinary matter. The smallest portion of matter in the universe is “ordinary” – the largest, dark energy, is even more illusive – as is dark matter.
IOW, Whitehead would be underscoring the importance of the fields over the particles. But this is where we start parting company, because Whitehead puts the burden on the process itself whereas I put the burden on the geometry. It's as if he would rather subordinate the geometry (space/time) to the process.
Whitehead’s “prehensions” and “actual occasions” are part of his construing “reality” as a exercise of free-will (on steroids in my view). It has been suggested on prior threads that man is a “co-creator” – but Whitehead seems to take this further, as if God could not exist without man’s free will. On that point I sharply disagree.
Whitehead may indeed be a “dualist” – and I would love to see you do a comparison between him and Pannenburg.
The trend I am gathering from various sources is that some will entertain the concept of a whole willfulness which is greater than the sum of the wills of its parts. In that view, the will, mind, consciousness, autonomy, object or form of the man actually exists as a "thing" although it transcends to all of the component wills of his body. Thus, there is no Cartesian Split as the whole exists in the parts, and is also greater than the sum.
The interesting point is that when all the parts are taken away from the whole, since the whole is greater, then what remains yet exists. This would be consistent with most Judeo/Christian theologies known to me.
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