William Morse  wrote:

> john_SPAM{at}wilkins.id.au (John Wilkins) wrote in
> news:c7o7jc$2jp9$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 
> 
> > Perplexed in Peoria  wrote:
> > 
> >> "John Wilkins" 
wrote in message
> >> news:c7hmdk$hu9$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> 
> >> Let us look at John's example of the emergent wetness of water as an
> >> example of what I have just expounded.  A reductionist explanation of
> >> liquid water might postulate a "fluid mosaic"
model, with small
> >> domains of crystaline water separated by boundary regions of gaseous
> >> water.  The dynamics is that water molecules are continually moving
> >> from the crystaline phase to the gas phase and back.  That is, we
> >> have a three-level description - molecules, crystaline domains, and
> >> the liquid system as a whole.  And, there is just no way to collapse
> >> this to a two-level description and throw out the properties -
> >> emergent and otherwise - of the middle level.  Similarly, it would be
> >> impossible to do a hydrodynamic model of stream flow at the molecular
> >> level, because emergent properties of liquid water (viscosity,
> >> surface tension, etc.) have been lost.
>  
> > is the "no way" here a matter of computational
limitations, or are you
> > claiming that there is no substrate-based explanation of liquidity
> > even for God?
> 
> James Gleick, in Chaos, relates:
> 
> There was a story about the quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg, on his
> deathbed, declaring that he will have two questions for God: why 
> relativity, and why turbulence. Heisenberg says, "I really think He may
> have an answer to the first question."

Just like a theoretical physicist, to think his own conceptual
limitations must be the same as a God's...

-- 
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
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