To ppl, and all:
> Karl Popper talked about the dubiousness of the notion that the universe was
> governed by "push causality" - where 'cause' precedes 'effect' (temporally).
> And certainly, for a quite significant component of the universe - organic
> life- this model is inadequate, in the sense that for many organisms, much
> of the time, 'effect' does precede 'cause'; and that's what is meant by
> "prefer", I venture to offer.
: nods
the concept of cause/effect was broadly used until relativity was thrown
into the game, and used to explain electromagnetic radiation, where the
mathematics provides the two cases: one of them is where effect occurs
before the cause (cf next paragraph about mathematics)
> NObody has yet been able to "prove" the existence of ANY absolute, whether
> thinking of time, space, matter, energy, 'exact' measurements, and so on.
> Actually, to be fair, this is cheating a bit; as Popper pointed out,
> 'science' does not 'prove' at all; it is an instrument designed to test by
> DISproving. Science does not even propoese the hypotheses it strives to
> disprove (though admittedly scient -ists generally do, but that's not the
> same thing)
exactly, I can't talk about science in general, but in physics, all
theories are models: nothing less nothing more. They never prove anything,
but become a "commonly approved" theory by the community if it cannot be
disaproved by any experiments or when successfully integrated it to
existing theories (for instance when approximation on QM, links to a
classical approach). If it's not possible, the theory has to be either
thrown away or revised to fit existing data.
> And this is why Animism still echoed down the ages as far as Newton's
> "force" of gravity - because describing the universe in terms of 'beings'
> who 'prefer' actually works fairly well because it's an open-ended scheme,
> in that it incorporates the possibility of the unpredictable (un-knowable)
> without the scheme ( :cosmology) falling apart - it doesn't actually need
> 'proofs'.
what is Animism?
One has to be careful with gravity. It has been first modeled by Newton,
using his concepts of forces due to mass, then revised by Einstein
introducing rather energy as a cause instead of mass. However, gravity is
still something very badly understood: we still have no idea how gravity
is being transfered (graviton have not yet been observed I think), and how
it exactly works.
Aloha,
-rv,
---------------
herve@hawaii.edu
"Il vaudrait mieux pour dieu qu'il n'existe pas" Albert Camus
so... get MOOed! @ KccMOO http://moo.kcc.hawaii.edu:9999
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