Hey Rog,
A quick reply. I leave the matter on the emergence-issue as it is. I
feel I have nothing new to add to what I (painstakingly) have tried to
explain before. Moreover, with Platt I talked about emergence as applied
to 'experience' and not the sense of purpose. So who am I arguing
against?!
> PAT:
> Anyhow, to cut things short; the concept of 'purpose' is per
> definition
> non-scientific. Yes?
>
> ROG:
> I don't see why it should be non-scientific. If biology can't explain
> where
> goal-directed behavior exhibited by life comes from, then it wouldn't
> be much
> of a theory, would it?
Science is a method to illuminate causes and effects in nature. a sense
of 'purpose' from the human viewpoint means that things happen for a
reason. But that reason is subjective, it must mean something for OUR
experience of things. Science is about the objective; things happen for
no reason, it's just a matter of 'dead' cause and effect changes. Thus,
purpose has quality, is a feature of experience. Science can't measure
experience. No matter how hard you try, you can't smuggle in a feature
of experience (purpose) into an objective, scientific worldview.
Pirsig with his Q before the subject object split is supposed to solve
the dillemma between these two 'constructs'. I (as a subject) still find
it difficult to reason from and with this perspective....
Take care, Pat.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes
http://finance.yahoo.com
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 25 2002 - 16:06:30 BST