Guy Hoelzer  wrote:

> Dear Wirt,
> 
> I am responding to a wonderful post of yours.  You and I are in extremely
> close agreement on these issues, in general, but I want to "pick
one nit"
> out of your post.  You and I have discovered our disagreement on this
> particular issue before, but I thought it might be useful to lay it out for
> discussion in sbe.
> 
> in article c79l1b$11bb$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org, Wirt Atmar at
> wirtatmar{at}aol.com wrote on 5/4/04 7:54 PM:
> 
> > Whenever emergent properties are introduced into a philosophy of
> > evolutionary design, a higher-order mysteriousness is simultaneously
> > introduced into the process that treads dangerously close to vitalism.
> 
> I often see the term "vitalism" used in this way (the way I
think you are
> using it), as a rhetorical punishment for perceived false logic, or warning
> to avoid this direction in our modeling of nature.  I don't understand this
> position.  I see vitalism as something to be explained by science, rather
> than avoided as if it must represent a falsehood.  I suspect that the term
> "vitalism" connotes different things for us.  To me it
connotes an actively
> driven system that behaves in ways that maximize its functional
> effectiveness and persistence.  Life certainly does this, as well as any
> dissipative system (sensu Prigogine).

Vital fluids, interior molds, elan vital, entelechies and the like
postulate an occult force as an explanation. When the mechanisms of
reproduction, growth and metabolism were unknown, it might have been
worthwhile to postulate them, but now it is merely mysticism. "Vitalism"
is the theory that there is something qualitatively different *at every
level* between life and nonlife - the vital force must explain why cells
divide, why organisms grow, why they react to stimuli. But we know why
they do these things, and there is no non-physical remainder left over
to explain. I think you are anachronistically interpreting "vitalism"
the term.

Wirt is exactly right about emergentism. It is a claim that a property
occurs at a physical level or scale which cannot be reduced to the
properties of the components. Hence, for example, consciousness is the
paradigmatic case of an emergent property, because it is supposed to
have features that cannot be explained as the vector sum of all the
dynamics of neurons and their environmental inputs. But each new
discovery shows this to be false. Likewise with evolution. Each emergent
property turns out to be either a cause for a research program to
decompose it into its substrate, or can already be explained that way.
People who rest satisfied with emergent properties do, indeed, tread
close to mysticism and vitalism.
> 
> I also take issue with your assertion that when "emergent properties are
> introduced into a philosophy of evolutionary design, a higher-order
> mysteriousness is simultaneously introduced."  Mysteries are almost always
> parts of our models, especially in the study of such high-order phenomena as
> evolutionary biology.  That is what assumptions are all about.  Even our
> assumptions are usually about very high-order phenomena, which themselves
> would require hefty assumption sets to explain.  I do not see the
> introduction of emergent properties [note that this is VERY different from
> the notion of emergent systems] as introducing either mystery or vitalism
> into theory.  Pressure, for example, is an emergent property of a collection
> of atoms, which is not definable for a single atom in isolation.  Would you
> say that introducing the concept of pressure into physical theory invoked
> additional mystery and "treads close to vitalism?"

The primary claim made by emergentism is that you cannot account for the
property in terms of its parts without remainder. Pressure can indeed be
so accounted for - there is no emergence here. The classical example,
introduced by Mill in his 1837 System of Logic, is the liquid properties
of water, which he said could not be deduced from the properties of
hydrogen and oxygen. But we do exactly that these days - you can model
wuite accurately the dynamics and microproperties of water on a computer
using only the known properties of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. It only
took a computer that was more powerful than Mill had to hand.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Guy


-- 
Dr John S. Wilkins, www.wilkins.id.au
"I never meet anyone who is not perplexed what to do with their
 children" --Charles Darwin to Syms Covington, February 22, 1857
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 5/8/04 12:00:10 PM