Reply #97: FYI [View All]

[tama]

Science is subfield of philosophy, historically, generatively and evolutionarily. No scientific theory is "non-ideological", ie. having no philosophical(/metaphysical) presuppositions/belief systems. Conscious presuppositions are open to thinking and rethinking whereas unconscious presuppositions are less so, so one of the main tasks of philosophy is to bring unconsciouss presuppositions into light, as part of more general task of developing sound thinking skills.

From wikipedia:
"Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understand the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.<1> This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. Reductionism is strongly related to a certain perspective on causality. In a reductionist framework, phenomena that can be explained completely in terms of other, more fundamental phenomena, are called epiphenomena. Often there is an implication that the epiphenomenon exerts no causal agency on the fundamental phenomena that explain it."

"Holism recognizes the idea that things can have properties as a whole that are not explainable from the sum of their parts (emergent properties). The principle of holism was concisely summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: "The whole is more than the sum of its parts"."

Reductionistic metaphysics has been logically and empirically falsified. That does not mean that good thinking skills wouldn't and couldn't entail both holistic and reductionistic (or rather, analytical) approaches and their dialectics.

So, for sake of dialectics and all that jazz lets ask: what is the reductionistic atom (gr. for undivisible)/universal building block that quantum theory and hence also classical mechanics and biology reduce to? Hint: there is 'one' candidate that I might take seriously!


"No one's justifying selfishness.

Plenty are justifying selfishness, from Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko to even many DUers. And the supposed selfish nature of humans (and or, genes) is often used as justification.

"You're projecting an is-ought problem where it doesn't exist. Saying that something is a certain way doesn't mean that's how it ought to be. Dawkins doesn't argue that we ought to be selfish because it's part of nature and biology. In fact, he argues the opposite in several of his books--that our intellect gives us the opportunity to rise above the selfishness of nature and we should do so."

Thanks for the Hume-challenge :). Hume pointed out the logical fallacy of ought from is - but not vice versa. Each 'ought' *is,* and especially ethically so in a holomorphic, dynamic and participatory approach to evolution and nature.

A more blatant logical fallacy, at least when subsribing to monistic ontology instead of dualistic ontology (which I'm now just presuming re Dawkins), is when participant of nature(/physis/physical world) tries to rise above nature - as if "intellect" would not be also part of natural world but something supernatural. Is Dawkins really a proponent of "supernatural intellect"? ;)

Is there any logically consistent way out of this conundrum? Probably more than one, but the easiest that comes to mind is that the picture of gene/nature as selfish that Dawkins presents is just wrong or more kindly, too narrow. And that when Dawking feels alltruistic feelings and thinks alltruistic thoughts, those are fully natural processes and not something supernatural, whether holistic and/or reducing to some quantum-atom. :)