Deva Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 "I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha, The best of teachers, who taught that Whatever is dependently arisen is Unceasing, unborn, Unannihilated, not permanent, Not coming, not going, Without distinction, without identity, And free from conceptual construction." Nagarjuna "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaiser01 Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 Hans thanks for coming in here. This is really frustrating for me. You see, I was educated within the same set of confinements of reductionstic science as you guys were. And I'm now trying to escape that prison. And I've got fellow prisoners here saying, "what's the problem?" I really must make a concerted effort to see organization itself, in the raw, divorced from its particular material embodiment. And biology is not about evolution. It's about organism. Anyway... Kaiser, Hans, VacuumFlux I will try to return to your posts in more detail later. I need some time away. Haha i hope i dont cause you any discord. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Legion Posted June 10, 2012 Author Share Posted June 10, 2012 Haha i hope i dont cause you any discord. Man, I don't see how you and VacuumFlux can sit there and deny that the heart exists in order to pump blood. You're both using classic reductionistic appeals to evolution to account for it. It's extremely frustrating. How am I supposed to learn more for myself, from people who are themselves confused? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kaiser01 Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 Haha i hope i dont cause you any discord. Man, I don't see how you and VacuumFlux can sit there and deny that the heart exists in order to pump blood. You're both using classic reductionistic appeals to evolution to account for it. It's extremely frustrating. How am I supposed to learn more for myself, from people who are themselves confused? I think we have here a crisis of language, we need to set terms correct or communication is imposible. What is your definition of purpose and function. I dont think anyone here is confused, just diferent views of the same world. I see your view point as an illusion which has no real world application, i mean i dont see how to think the heart has some kind of purpose beyond our human perception, i mean it isnt "supposed" to be doing anything, its just the product of cause and effect. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Valk0010 Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 Alright Kaiser and Valk, this strikes me as an important juncture in this thread. I suspect I will not be able to do it justice, because we've reached the outer limits of my understanding. But I'm going to give it a shot. It seems to me that what is required here is for us to try and objectify the concept of function. We're examining organized natural systems and we're effectively trying to see the organization. This is the essence of a relational approach in science (as contrasted with a reductionistic approach). Hmm. I believe I'm going to need a bit more time to sort this out. I'm going to look through my resources here, see what I can piece together, and try to return to this thread later today. (I still haven't finished my morning coffee.) The heart pumps blood cause its there. It evolved to due that. And apparently we need not worry about it being any different because, it is as it is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Valk0010 Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 Since when, does a car, have any significance unless its used and cherished and taken care of. I think the universe is like that. As far as purpose, unless you looking for something more then just the base mechanistic aspect of nature, you can't really say. "X is for B" If your talking about mechanistic causes, then we are really just in a situation of ignorance. Are we to find anything mystical to it? Does it really matter? Does the sun only have significance if i apreciate its warmth? I think the car is significant to us in our human subjectivity but ultimatly the car is a product of material causes and effects that are instigated by humans but can we really say that the car has a reason for existance other than what we subscribe. The heart does not exist to pump blood, there is simply the illusion that its origional purpose was to do so rather than just being the product of cause and effect. I think we may agree,you got my point on humanity perfectly. Its just mental masturbation. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VacuumFlux Posted June 10, 2012 Share Posted June 10, 2012 Haha i hope i dont cause you any discord. Man, I don't see how you and VacuumFlux can sit there and deny that the heart exists in order to pump blood. You're both using classic reductionistic appeals to evolution to account for it. It's extremely frustrating. How am I supposed to learn more for myself, from people who are themselves confused? It may be a communication issue, but I have a hard time seeing your point of view as anything other than intelligent design. I don't think that there is some ideal "out there somewhere" that matter arranges itself to fit into (Platonic ideals?), and if that's not what you're arguing I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that it's rather pointless to use something like chemistry to try to describe a human heart and how it fits in to the rest of the body, there I might agree with you. The biochemistry is low level details, bits and pieces, but the jump from there to an organ is a huge change, and a different set of language is more useful at that scale. If you're arguing that we're using the wrong branches of math to talk about organism-level functions, I could easily accept that. To put it into physics terms, it sounds like you're saying we'd get more useful details about biology if we switched reference frames. I'm just not sure what use your reference frame is, because it sounds similar to a lot of naive views I've had about nature that I had to get past in order to really understand what's going on. The branch of mathematics that I feel (in a totally non-scientific sense of the word) best describes my understanding of biology is fractals and a bit of chaos mathematics. It's got lots of organic patterns that are built up from simple starting points and rules, but the end result is highly complex. You can't start with something that complex and reverse engineer it very easily. The end result is also very sensitive to the starting inputs. There was a comment upthread about life, and what would happen if the periodic table were different. To me, the core of the definition of life is anything that can replicate. If the laws of the universe were different I would not be surprised if life of some sort still existed, because (as fractals show) it is really fairly "easy" for complexity to arise out of a simple set of rules applied to a starting point over and over. I don't think that the universe is fine tuned for us at all; I think we're just a particular type of organization that our particular universe's periodic table and our particular planet's chemistry has been able to support. A lot of the particular form of the ideas I'm describing came from Wolfram's book. I never read the whole thing, or even a significant portion of it, but I stumbled the intro and flipped through a lot of pretty patterns. What are your thoughts on how this related to your ideas about complexity? http://www.wolframscience.com/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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