SCIENCE!
I'm supposed to be doing my homework, but I'd rather not (c'mon, you guys, I have a Chinese midterm, give me a break :P), so instead, I'm going to write about evolution. One of my classes this year is an upper-division biology class, Experimental Ecology & Evolution (E3, for short, and I love it more than any class ever), which is giving me uppity ( Read more... )
On gravity: again, you encounter the same problem. So my layman terminology was imprecise. Gravity is "the measurable effect of the curvature of spacetime that occurs in the presence of matter". Alright, those are some pretty words. But it still doesn't answer the question. What is gravity? If it is not a "thing" per se, then you are effectively saying it has no "being" per se. It does not exist per se. It is a transcendent concept. It is an abstraction of an abstraction.
On explanatory power, the point of truth is still valid, because by saying a new theory has greater explanatory power, you must ask: greater explanatory power of what? Of reality. The very act of explanation presumes one can explain. It presumes there is something to explain. Thus the scientist presumes they can explain the way things really are to someone who is ignorant of the way things really are in order to enlighten that individual.
I apologize for the mix-up between Heisenberg and the observer effect, but the one is really just a demonstration of the other on a micro scale.
Which brings me to the complicated bit I warned you about. Here I am going to give the alternative to cause and effect. Just as you premise determinism, I will premise the opposite. I will premise free will. If one premises free will in humans, then free will must also exist as a latent necessity in pre-human organic life. (Humanists are delusional to think otherwise.) Furthermore, if free will exists either manifest or latent in organic life, it must exist latent in pre-organic existence/matter. It must exist latent in absolutely everything. This comes very close to a theory of animism of nature. There's a reason many aboriginal cultures, without notions of abstraction, practice religions of animism. This is very different from cause and effect, because to presume free will means that possibility is latent. What you call the 'effect' in a scientific discourse exists a priori to the 'cause' in latent form. Cause and effect have no external relationship, as there is no 'cause' per se. There is only effect. And the micro is merely a reduction of the macro. It fascinates me that science is continually reducing existence to smaller and smaller bits. This seems like an infinite progression inward to me. I don't think there is a bottom. We thought the atom was the smallest, then we found protons, electrons, neutrons etc. Then further still until we reached quarks and bosons etc. And I've heard that scientists are proposing something smaller still. And then of course there is string theory. But I don't think science is ever going to find a bottom, as i already said. Just as one can go forever out, one can go forever in. Free will then exists, to use a biology metaphor, latent in the 'DNA' of reality. Something external does not cause its existence. It always existed. Just as any effect is not caused. It was always there. The existence of 'effect' is not dependent. or, to put it even more simply, existence is not dependent. Existence is independent. Existence is. (Or, as Hegel puts it, Being is.)
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Scientific discourse says "Being is because..."
Science is the study of the "because". Ironically, monotheistic religion also says "Being is because..." but it goes on to conclude that "Being is because of God."
The existential alternative is "Being is."
And this is not as simple a statement as it may seem. Thousands upon thousands of books have been written elaborating upon that single statement "Being is."
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