[DonQuichotte (OP)]

When Nature Came To Life Again :



Followers of the Enlightenment put their faith in mechanistic science, reason and human progress.
“Enlightened” ideas or values still have a major influence on our educational, social and political
systems today. But from around 1780 to 1830 in the Romantic movement there was a widespread
reaction against the Enlightenment faith, expressed mainly in the arts and literature. Romantics
emphasized emotions and aesthetics, as opposed to reason. They saw nature as alive, rather than
mechanical. The most explicit application of these ideas to science was by the German philosopher
Friedrich von Schelling, whose book Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (1797) portrayed nature as a
dynamic interplay of opposed forces and polarities through which matter is “brought to life.”31
A central feature of Romanticism was the rejection of mechanical metaphors and their replacement
with imagery of nature as alive, organic and in a process of gestation or development.32 The first
evolutionary theories arose in this context.
Some scientists, poets and philosophers linked their philosophy of living nature to a God who
imbued Nature with life and left her to develop spontaneously, more like the God of Genesis than the
designer God of mechanistic theology. Others proclaimed themselves atheists, like the English poet
Percy Shelley (1792–1822), but they had no doubt about a living power in nature, which Shelley called
the Soul of the universe, or the all-sufficing Power, or the Spirit of Nature. He was also a pioneering
campaigner for vegetarianism because he valued animals as sentient beings.33
These different worldviews can be summarized as follows:
Worldview
Traditional Christian
God
Interactive
Nature
Living organism
Worldview
Early mechanistic
God
Interactive
Nature
Machine
Worldview
Enlightenment deism
God
Creator only
Nature
Machine
Worldview
Romantic deism
God
Creator only
Nature
Living organism
Worldview
Romantic atheism
God
No God
Nature
Living organism
Worldview
Materialism
God
No God
Nature
Machine
The Romantic movement created an enduring split in Western culture. Among educated people, in the
world of work, business and politics, nature is mechanistic, an inanimate source of natural resources,
exploitable for economic development. Modern economies are built on these foundations. On the
other hand, children are often brought up in an animistic atmosphere of fairy tales, talking animals
and magical transformations. The living world is celebrated in poems and songs and in works of art.
Nature is most strongly identified with the countryside, as opposed to cities, and especially by
unspoiled wilderness. Many urban people dream of moving to the country, or having a weekend home
in rural surroundings. On Friday evenings, cities of the Western world are clogged with traffic as
millions of people try to get back to nature in a car.
Our private relationship with nature presupposes that nature is alive. For a mechanistic scientist, or
technocrat, or economist, or developer, nature is neuter and inanimate. It needs developing as part of
human progress. But often the very same people have different attitudes in private. In Western Europe
and North America, many people get rich by exploiting nature so that they can buy a place in the
countryside to “get away from it all.”
This division between public rationalism and private romanticism has been part of the Western way
of life for generations, but is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Our economic activities are not
separate from nature, but affect the entire planet. Our private and public lives are increasingly
intertwined. This new consciousness is expressed through a revived public awareness of Gaia, Mother
Earth. But goddesses were not far below the surface of scientific thought even in its most materialist
forms.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

The Goddesses of Evolution :



One of the pioneers of evolutionary theory was Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who
wanted to increase the importance of nature and reduce the role of God.34 The spontaneous evolution
of plants and animals struck at the root of natural theology and the doctrine of God as designer. If new
forms of life were brought forth by Nature herself, there was no need for God to design them. Erasmus
Darwin suggested that God endued life or nature with an inherent creative capacity in the first place
that was thereafter expressed without the need for divine guidance or intervention. In his book
Zoönomia (1794), he asked rhetorically:
Would it be too bold to imagine that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living
filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new
parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions and
associations, and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent
activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity, world without
end!35
For Erasmus Darwin, living beings were self-improving, and the results of the efforts of parents were
inherited by their offspring. Likewise, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in his Zoological Philosophy (1809)
suggested that animals developed new habits in response to their environment, and their adaptations
were passed on to their descendants. The giraffe, inhabiting arid regions of Africa,
is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and make constant efforts to reach them. From this
habit long maintained in all its race, it has resulted that the animal’s fore-legs have become
longer than its hind legs, and its neck is lengthened to such a degree that the giraffe attains a
height of six metres.36
In addition, a power inherent in life produced increasingly complex organisms, moving them up a
ladder of progress. Lamarck attributed the origin of the power of life to “the Supreme Author,” who
created “an order of things which gave existence successively to all that we see.”37 Like Erasmus
Darwin, he was a romantic deist. So was Robert Chambers, who popularized the idea of progressive
evolution in his bestselling Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation , published anonymously in
1844. He argued that everything in nature is progressing to a higher state as a result of a God-given
“law of creation.”38 His work was controversial both from a religious and scientific point of view but,
like Lamarck’s theory, it was attractive to atheists because it removed the need for a divine designer.
But Chambers, Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin not only undermined mechanistic theology, they also,
perhaps unwittingly, undermined the mechanistic theory of life. No inanimate machinery contained
within it a power of life, capacity for self-improvement or creativity. Their theories of progressive
evolution demystified the creativity of God by mystifying evolution.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s theory of evolution by natural selection (1858)
attempted to demystify evolution. Natural selection was blind and impersonal, and required no divine
agency. It weeded out organisms that were not fit to survive, and favored those that were better
adapted. The subtitle of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was The Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life. The source of creativity was within animals and plants themselves: they varied
spontaneously and adapted to new circumstances.
Darwin gave no explanation for this creative power. In effect, he rejected the designing God of
mechanistic theology, and attributed all creativity to Nature, just as his grandfather had done. For
Darwin, Nature herself gave rise to the Tree of Life. Through her prodigious fertility, her spontaneous
variability and her powers of selection, she could do everything that Paley thought God did. But
Nature was not an inanimate, mechanical system like the clockwork of celestial physics. She was
Nature with a capital N. Darwin even apologized for his language: “For brevity’s sake I sometimes
speak of natural selection as an intelligent power … I have, also, often personified the word Nature;
for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity.”39
Darwin advised his readers to ignore the implications of his turns of phrase. If, instead, we pay
attention to their implications, Nature is the Mother from whose womb all life comes forth, and to
whom all life returns. She is prodigiously fertile, but she is also cruel and terrible, the devourer of her
own offspring. She is creative, but she is also destructive, like the Indian goddess Kali. For Darwin,
natural selection was “a power incessantly ready for action,”40 and natural selection worked by
killing. The phrase “Nature red in tooth and claw” was the poet Tennyson’s rather than Darwin’s, but
sounds very like Kali, or the destructive Greek goddess Nemesis, or the vengeful Furies.
Charles Darwin, like his grandfather Erasmus and Lamarck, believed in the inheritance of habits.
His books give many examples of offspring inheriting the adaptations of their parents.41 The neo-
Darwinian theory of evolution, which developed from the 1940s onward, differed from Charles
Darwin’s theory in that it rejected the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Instead, organisms
inherited genes from their parents, passing them on unaltered to their offspring, unless there were
mutations, that is to say, random changes in the genes. The molecular biologist Jacques Monod
summarized this theory in the title of his book, Chance and Necessity (1972).
These seemingly abstract principles are the hidden goddesses of neo-Darwinism. Chance is the
goddess Fortuna, or Lady Luck. The turnings of her wheel confer both prosperity and misfortune.
Fortuna is blind, and was often portrayed in classical statues with a veil or blindfold. In Monod’s
words, “pure chance, absolutely free but blind, [is] at the very root of the stupendous edifice of
evolution.”42
Shelley called Necessity the “All-sufficing Power” and the “Mother of the world.” She is also Fate
or Destiny, who appears in classical European mythology as the Three Fates, who spin, allot and cut
the thread of life, dispensing to mortals their destiny at birth. In neo-Darwinism, the thread of life is
literal: helical DNA molecules in thread-like chromosomes dispense to mortals their destiny at birth.
Materialism is like an unconscious cult of the Great Mother. The word “matter” itself comes from
the same root as “mother”; in Latin the equivalent words are materia and mater.43 The Mother
archetype takes many forms, as in Mother Nature, or Ecology, or even the Economy, which feeds and
sustains us, working like a lactating breast on the basis of supply and demand. (The Greek root eco in
both of these words means family or household.) Archetypes are more powerful when they are
unconscious because they cannot be examined or discussed.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Life Breaks out of Mechanical Metaphors :


The theory of evolution destroyed the argument from mechanical design. A creator God could not
have designed the machinery of animals and plants in the beginning if they evolved progressively
through spontaneous variation and natural selection.
Living organisms, unlike machines, are themselves creative. Plants and animals vary
spontaneously, respond to genetic changes and adapt to new challenges from the environment. Some
vary more than others, and occasionally something really new appears. Creativity is inherent in living
organisms, or works through them.
No machine starts from small beginnings, grows, forms new structures within itself and then
reproduces itself. Yet plants and animals do this all the time. They can also regenerate after damage.
To see them as machines propelled only by ordinary physics and chemistry is an act of faith; to insist
that they are machines despite all appearances is dogmatic.
Within science itself, the machine theory of life was challenged continually throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by an alternative school of biology called vitalism. Vitalists
thought that organisms were more than machines: they were truly vital or alive. Over and above the
laws of physics and chemistry, organizing principles shaped the forms of living organisms, gave them
their purposive behavior, and underlay the instincts and intelligence of animals. In 1844, the chemist
Justus von Liebig made a typical statement of the vitalist position when he argued that although
chemists could analyze and synthesize organic chemicals that occurred in living organisms, they
would never be able to create an eye or a leaf. Besides the recognized physical forces, there was a
further kind of cause that “combines the elements in new forms so that they gain new qualities—
forms and qualities which do not appear except in the organism.”44
In many ways, vitalism was a survival of the older worldview that living organisms were organized
by souls. Vitalism was also in harmony with a romantic vision of living nature. Some vitalists, like the
German embryologist Hans Driesch (1867–1941), deliberately used the language of souls to
emphasize this continuity of thought. Driesch believed that a non-material organizing principle gave
plants and animals their forms and their goals. He called this organizing principle entelechy, adopting
a word that Aristotle had used for the aspect of the soul that has its end within itself (en = in, telos =
purpose). Embryos, Driesch argued, behave in a purposive way; if their development is disrupted, they
can still reach the form toward which they are developing. He showed by experiment that when seaurchin
embryos were cut in two, each half could give rise to a small but complete sea urchin, not half
a sea urchin. Their entelechy attracted the developing embryos—and even separated parts of embryos
—toward the form of the adult.
Vitalism was and still is the ultimate heresy within mechanistic biology. The orthodox view was
clearly expressed by the biologist T. H. Huxley in 1867:
Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions or actions of animals. It regards animal
bodies as machines impelled by various forces, and performing a certain amount of work which
can be expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is to
deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand, and those of ecology on the other, from the laws
of the molecular forces of matter.45
In these words, Huxley foreshadowed the spectacular development of molecular biology since the
1960s, the most powerful effort ever made to reduce the phenomena of life to physical and chemical
mechanisms. Francis Crick, who shared in a Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA,
made this agenda very explicit in his book Of Molecules and Men (1966). He denounced vitalism and
affirmed his belief that “the ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all
biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”
The mechanistic approach is essentially reductionist: it tries to explain wholes in terms of their
parts. That is why molecular biology has such a high status within the life sciences: molecules are
some of the smallest components of living organisms, the point at which biology crosses over into
chemistry. Hence molecular biology is at the leading edge of the attempt to explain the phenomena of
life in terms of “the laws of the molecular forces of matter.” In so far as biologists succeed in
reducing organisms to the molecular level, they will then hand the baton to chemists and physicists,
who will reduce the properties of molecules to those of atoms and subatomic particles.
Until the nineteenth century, most scientists thought that atoms were the solid, permanent, ultimate
basis of matter. But in the twentieth century it became clear that atoms are made up of parts, with
nuclei at the center and electrons in orbitals around them. The nuclei themselves are made up of
protons and neutrons, which in turn are composed of components called quarks, with three quarks
each. When nuclei are split up in particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider, at CERN, near
Geneva, a host of further particles appears. Hundreds have been identified so far, and some physicists
expect that with even larger particle accelerators, yet more will be found.
The bottom has dropped out of the atom, and a zoo of evanescent particles seems unlikely to
explain the shape of an orchid flower, or the leaping of a salmon, or the flight of a flock of starlings.
Reductionism no longer offers a solid atomic basis for the explanation of everything else. In any case,
however many subatomic particles there may be, organisms are wholes, and reducing them to their
parts by killing them and analyzing their chemical constituents simply destroys what makes them
organisms.
I was forced to think about the limitations of reductionism when I was a student at Cambridge. As
part of the final-year biochemistry course, my class did an experiment on enzymes in rat livers. First,
we each took a living rat and “sacrificed” it over the sink, decapitating it with a guillotine, then we cut
it open and removed its liver. We ground up the liver in a blender and centrifuged it, to remove
unwanted fractions of the cellular debris. Then we purified the aqueous fraction to isolate the enzymes
we wanted, and we put them in test tubes. Finally we added chemicals and studied the speeds at which
chemical reactions took place. We learned something about enzymes, but nothing about how rats live
and behave. In a corridor of the Biochemistry Department the bigger problem was summed up on a
wall chart showing the chemical details of Human Metabolic Pathways; across the top someone had
written in big blue letters, “KNOW THYSELF.”
Attempting to explain organisms in terms of their chemical constituents is rather like trying to
understand a computer by grinding it up and analyzing its component elements, such as copper,
germanium and silicon. Certainly it is possible to learn something about the computer in this way,
namely what it is made of. But in this process of reduction, the structure and the programmed activity
of the computer vanishes, and chemical analysis will never reveal the circuit diagrams; no amount of
mathematical modelling of interactions between its atomic constituents will reveal the computer’s
programs or the purposes they fulfilled.
Mechanists expel purposive vital factors from living animals and plants, but then they reinvent
them in molecular guises. One form of molecular vitalism is to treat the genes as purposive entities
with goals and powers that go far beyond those of a mere chemical like DNA. The genes become
molecular entelechies. In his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins endowed them with life and
intelligence. Living molecules, rather than God, are the designers of the machinery of life:
We are survival machines, but “we” does not mean just people. It embraces all animals, plants,
bacteria, and viruses … We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules
called DNA—but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the
replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine which
preserves genes up trees; a fish a machine which preserves genes in the water.46
In Dawkins’s words, “DNA moves in mysterious ways.” The DNA molecules are not only
intelligent, they are also selfish, ruthless and competitive, like “successful Chicago gangsters.” The
selfish genes “create form,” “mould matter” and engage in “evolutionary arms races”; they even
“aspire to immortality.” These genes are no longer mere molecules:
Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the
outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote
control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the
ultimate rationale for our existence … Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their
survival machines.47
The persuasive power of Dawkins’s rhetoric depended on anthropocentric language and his cartoonlike
imagery. He admits that his selfish-gene imagery is more like science fiction than science,48 but
he justifies it as a “powerful and illuminating” metaphor.49
The most popular use of a vitalistic metaphor in the name of mechanism is the “genetic program.”
Genetic programs are explicitly analogous to computer programs, which are intelligently designed by
human minds to achieve particular purposes. Programs are purposive, intelligent and goal-directed.
They are more like entelechies than mechanisms. The “genetic program” implies that plants and
animals are organized by purposive principles that are mind-like, or designed by minds. This is
another way of smuggling intelligent designs into chemical genes.
If challenged, most biologists will admit that genes merely specify the sequence of amino acids in
proteins, or are involved in the control of protein synthesis. They are not really programs; they are not
selfish, they do not mold matter, or shape form, or aspire to immortality. A gene is not “for” a
characteristic like a fish’s fin or the nest-building behavior of a weaver bird. But molecular vitalism
soon creeps back again. The mechanistic theory of life has degenerated into misleading metaphors and
rhetoric.
To many people, especially gardeners and people who keep dogs, cats, horses or other animals, it is
blindingly obvious that plants and animals are living organisms, not machines.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

The Philosophy of Organism :



Whereas the mechanistic and vitalist theories both date back to the seventeenth century, the
philosophy of organism, also called the holistic or organismic approach, has been developing only
since the 1920s. One of its proponents was the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947);
another was Jan Smuts, a South African statesman and scholar, whose book Holism and Evolution
(1926) focused attention on “the tendency of nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the
parts through creative evolution.”50 He saw holism as
the ultimate synthetic, ordering, organizing, regulative activity in the universe, which accounts
for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from the atom and the physico-chemical
structures, through the cell and organisms, through Mind in animals to Personality in man. The
all-pervading and ever-increasing character of synthetic unity or wholeness in these structures
leads to the concept of Holism as the fundamental activity underlying and co-ordinating all
others, and to the view of the universe as a Holistic Universe.51
The holistic or organismic philosophy agrees with the mechanistic theory in affirming the unity of
nature: the life of biological organisms is different in degree but not in kind from physical systems
like molecules and crystals. Organicism agrees with vitalism in stressing that organisms have their
organizing principles within themselves; organisms are unities that cannot be reduced to the physics
and chemistry of simpler systems.
The philosophy of organism in effect treats all nature as alive; in this respect it is an updated
version of pre-mechanistic animism. Even atoms, molecules and crystals are organisms. As Smuts put
it, “Both matter and life consist, in the atom and the cell, of unit structures whose ordered grouping
produces the natural wholes which we call bodies or organisms.”52 Atoms are not inert particles of
stuff, as in old-style atomism. Rather, as revealed by twentieth-century physics, they are structures of
activity, patterns of energetic vibration within fields. In Whitehead’s words, “Biology is the study of
the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.”53 In the light of modern
cosmology, physics is also the study of very large organisms, like planets, solar systems, galaxies and
the entire universe.
The philosophy of organism points out that everywhere we look in nature, at whatever level or
scale, we find wholes that are made up of parts that are themselves wholes at a lower level. This
pattern of organization can be represented diagrammatically as in Figure 1.1. The smallest circles
represent quarks, for example, within protons, within atomic nuclei, within atoms, within molecules,
within crystals. Or the smallest circles represent organelles, in cells, in tissues, in organs, in
organisms, in societies of organisms, in ecosystems. Or the smallest circles are planets, in solar
systems, in galaxies, in galactic clusters. Languages also show the same kind of organization, with
phonemes in syllables, in words, in phrases, in sentences.
FIGURE 1.1 A nested hierarchy of wholes or holons.
These organized systems are all nested hierarchies. At each level, the whole includes the parts; they
are literally within it. And at each level the whole is more than the sum of the parts, with properties
that cannot be predicted from the study of parts in isolation. For example, the structure and meaning
of this sentence could not be worked out by a chemical analysis of the paper and the ink, or deduced
from the quantities of letters that make it up (five as, one b, five cs, two ds, etc.). Knowing the
numbers of constituent parts is not enough: the structure of the whole depends on the way they are
combined together in words, and on the relationships between the words.
Arthur Koestler proposed the term holon for wholes made up of parts that are themselves wholes:
Every holon has a dual tendency to preserve and assert its individuality as a quasi-autonomous
whole; and to function as an integrated part of an (existing or evolving) larger whole. This
polarity between the Self-assertive and Integrative tendencies is inherent in the concept of
hierarchic order.54
For such nested hierarchies of holons, Koestler proposed the term holarchy.
Another way of thinking about wholes is through “systems theory,” which speaks of “a
configuration of parts joined together by a web of relationships.”55 Such wholes are also called
“complex systems,” and are the subject of a number of mathematical models, variously called
“complex systems theory,” “complexity theory” or “complexity science.”56
For a chemical example, think of benzene, a molecule with six carbon and six hydrogen atoms.
Each of these atoms is a holon consisting of a nucleus with electrons around it. In the benzene
molecule, the six carbon atoms are joined together in a six-sided ring, and electrons are shared
between the atoms to create a vibrating cloud of electrons around the entire molecule. The patterns of
vibration of the molecule affect the atoms within it, and since the electrons are electrically charged,
the atoms are in a vibrating electromagnetic field. Benzene is a liquid at room temperature, but below
5.5÷C it crystallizes, and as it does so, the molecules stack themselves together in a regular threedimensional
pattern, called the lattice structure. This crystal lattice also vibrates in harmonic
patterns,57 creating vibrating electromagnetic fields, which affect the molecules within them. There is
a nested hierarchy of levels of organization, interacting through a nested hierarchy of vibrating fields.
In the course of evolution, new holons arise that did not exist before: for example, the first amino
acid molecules, the first living cells, or the first flowers, or the first termite colonies. Since holons are
wholes, they must arise by sudden jumps. New levels of organization “emerge” and their “emergent
properties” go beyond those of the parts that were there before. The same is true of new ideas, or new
works of art.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

The Cosmos as a Developing Organism :

The philosopher David Hume (1711–76) is perhaps best known today for his skepticism about
religion. Yet he was equally skeptical about the mechanistic philosophy of nature. There was nothing
in the universe to prove that it was more like a machine than an organism; the organization we see in
nature was more analogous to plants and animals than to machines. Hume was against the idea of a
machine-designing God, and suggested instead that the world could have originated from something
like a seed or an egg. In Hume’s words, published posthumously in 1779,
There are other parts of the universe (besides the machines of human invention) which bear still a
greater resemblance to the fabric of the world, and which, therefore, afford a better conjecture
concerning the universal origin of the system. These parts are animals and plants. The world
plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom … And
does not a plant or an animal, which springs from vegetation or generation, bear a stronger
resemblance to the world, than does any artificial machine, which arises from reason and
design?58
Hume’s argument was surprisingly prescient in the light of modern cosmology. Until the 1960s, most
scientists still thought of the universe as a machine, and moreover as a machine that was running out
of steam, heading for its final heat death. According to the second law of thermodynamics,
promulgated in 1855, the universe would gradually lose the capacity to do work. It would eventually
freeze in “a state of universal rest and death,” as William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, put it.59
It was not until 1927 that Georges Lemaître, a cosmologist and Roman Catholic priest, advanced a
scientific hypothesis like Hume’s idea of the origin of the universe in an egg or seed. Lemaître
suggested that the universe began with a “creation-like event,” which he described as “the cosmic egg
exploding at the moment of creation.”60 Later called the Big Bang, this new cosmology echoed many
archaic stories of origins, like the Orphic creation myth of the Cosmic Egg in ancient Greece, or the
Indian myth of Hiranyagarbha, the primal Golden Egg.61 Significantly, in all these myths the egg is
both a primal unity and a primal polarity, since an egg is a unity composed of two parts, the yolk and
the white, an apt symbol of the emergence of “many” from “one.”
Lemaître’s theory predicted the expansion of the universe, and was supported by the discovery that
galaxies outside our own are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. In
1964, the discovery of a faint background glow everywhere in the universe, the cosmic microwave
background radiation, revealed what seemed to be fossil light left over from the early universe, soon
after the Big Bang. The evidence for an initial “creation-like event” became overwhelming, and by
1966 the Big Bang theory became orthodox.
Cosmology now tells a story of a universe that began extremely small, less than the size of a
pinhead, and very hot. It has been expanding ever since. As it grows, it cools down, and as it cools,
new forms and structures appear within it: atomic nuclei and electrons, stars, galaxies, planets,
molecules, crystals and biological life.
The machine metaphor has long outlived its usefulness, and holds back scientific thinking in
physics, biology and medicine. Our growing, evolving universe is much more like an organism, and so
is the earth, and so are oak trees, and so are dogs, and so are you.


What Difference does it Make? :

Can you really think of yourself as a genetically programmed machine in a mechanical universe?
Probably not. Probably even the most committed materialists cannot either. Most of us feel we are
truly alive in a living world—at least at weekends. But through loyalty to the mechanistic worldview,
mechanistic thinking takes over during working hours.
In recognizing the life of nature, we can allow ourselves to recognize what we already know, that
animals and plants are living organisms, with their own purposes and goals. Anyone who gardens or
keeps pets knows this, and recognizes that they have their own ways of responding creatively to their
circumstances. But instead of dismissing our own observations and insights to conform to mechanistic
dogma, we can pay attention to them and try to learn from them.
In relation to the living earth, we can see that the Gaia theory is not just an isolated poetic metaphor
in an otherwise mechanical universe. The recognition of the earth as a living organism is a major step
toward recognizing the wider life of the cosmos. If the earth is a living organism, what about the sun
and the solar system as a whole? If the solar system is a kind of organism, what about the galaxy?
Cosmology already portrays the entire universe as a kind of growing super-organism, born through the
hatching of the cosmic egg.
These differences in viewpoint do not immediately suggest a new range of technological products,
and in that sense they may not be economically useful. But they make a big difference in healing the
split created by the mechanistic theory—a split between our personal experiences of nature and the
mechanical explanations that science gives us. And they help heal the split between the sciences and
all traditional and indigenous cultures, none of which sees humans and animals as machines in a
mechanical world.
Finally, dispelling the belief that the universe is an inanimate machine opens up many new
questions, discussed in the following chapters.


Questions for Materialists

Is the mechanistic worldview a testable scientific theory, or a metaphor?
If it is a metaphor, why is the machine metaphor better in every respect than the organism metaphor?
If it is a scientific theory, how could it be tested or refuted?
Do you think that you yourself are nothing but a complex machine?
Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?
SUMMARY
The mechanistic theory is based on the metaphor of the machine. But it’s only a metaphor. Living
organisms provide better metaphors for organized systems at all levels of complexity, including
molecules, plants and societies of animals, all of which are organized in a series of inclusive levels, in
which the whole at each level is more than the sum of the parts, which are themselves wholes at a
lower level. Even the most ardent defenders of the mechanistic theory smuggle purposive organizing
principles into living organisms in the form of selfish genes or genetic programs. In the light of the
Big Bang theory, the entire universe is more like a growing, developing organism than a machine
slowly running out of steam.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Materialism looks to me like a bit of a straw man. Things that exist are material. Interactions between things that exist are not material, but they are mechanistic interactions. Materialism without mechanism is not going to get anywhere as a kind of science because it cannot handle interaction, and for that reason I don't think there's anyone out there in science doing pure materialism. There are places in science where mechanism is being ignored though, so those places need to be identified and the people who are making errors through ignoring mechanism need to be helped to see where they're going wrong.

That comment strikes me as disingenuous. I'm not familiar with any form of science, material or otherwise, that doesn't include mechanisms. That's the whole point, unless one envisions a static world in which nothing happens, and there is no causality.

Well, there can be no science without causation indeed : who said otherwise ?
Causation that requires time, and hence  requires change, movement ...action...  : there can be no science , no universe , no life ...without causation and time ( or space, time -space ...) .
(see how even atoms and their multiple sub-atomic components are in fact vibrations, waves , movement , energy ...= materialism has been superseded even by the most physical of all sciences = modern  physics .)
Not to mention the fact that the universe is evolutionary , and  must be approached as a whole in ways that must include the universe's mental side as well .
It's just that science might be able to reveal some deeper forms of causation that might turn out to be underlying the laws of physics themselves , when science will be free from materialism , and hence from its own mainstream materialist false "scientific world view "
Materialism that's just a false conception of nature : materialism that reduces reality as a whole to just the material and physical ,while pretending that the latter is all what there is to reality as a whole .
So, what has materialism ,and hence what has the materialist mainstream 'scientific world view " to do with ...causation or with mechanisms  then ?

I would also suggest that mechanisms alone are not sufficient. One could imagine or invent mechanisms, entire models, but unless they correspond to something that actually exists, they are just ideas, even if they are logically consistent ones.

Indeed :
That's 1 of the reasons why all physical sciences should change radically in order to include the missing part of reality which has been labeled by materialism as non-existent , or as  just  physical material .

There might be other deeper and more fundamental forms of causation underlying the laws of physics themselves thus , if all sciences would include the mental side of reality as a whole thus .

Someone from another world who saw a car for the first time could invent or imagine mechanisms that explain its movement, whether it's many squirrels in tiny wheels, or a  sophisticated, alternative engine design, but at some point, he'd actually have to look inside to be certain.

All physical sciences  do  " have to look inside " the missing part of reality , the mental or non-physical one thus , to "be certain " .
Science cannot just continue ignoring the mental side of reality , or continue behaving as if the latter does not exist as such : the mental that is irreducible to the physical .

Never the less, it's encouraging to see Don appropriating the word mechanism (as in "the mechanism of non-physical processes,") when previously "mechanistic" was only used derisively.

See above :
To try to describe or explain and therefore understand the whole reality just via physics and chemistry alone , is what i have been derisive of, simply because reality as a whole is not just material or physical ,as the materialist mainstream false 'scientific world view " has been assuming it to be, since the 19th century at least,thanks to materialism thus   .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Folks :
The hard problem of consciousness alone should have been  reason enough to make all sciences  question the false  mainstream materialist  "scientific world view " in fact .
Consciousness or the mental that are ,obviously , irreducible to the physical or to the material , biological .

[David Cooper]

Don. Posts 817 to 824 will simply not be read by anyone sane. That is not the way to argue or discuss anything.

[Pmb]

<reams of junk that nobody will ever read>

You've got to be kidding me! As David said, nobody is ever going to read all that boring nonsense. I can't believe how you just wasted this thread with long boring junk like that. What on earth ever gave you the idea that was going to be read by someone?

[David Cooper]

That comment strikes me as disingenuous. I'm not familiar with any form of science, material or otherwise, that doesn't include mechanisms.

When it comes to relativity, mechanism appears to be something that most physicists do not want to consider.

I would also suggest that mechanisms alone are not sufficient. One could imagine or invent mechanisms, entire models, but unless they correspond to something that actually exists, they are just ideas, even if they are logically consistent ones.

That's true - mechanism needs something to act on. The stuff that it acts on though is typically complex in nature and is held together by mechanisms, so it's very rare that you're dealing with anything fundamental, and I don't know if science has identified anything yet that can't be further divided.

Someone from another world who saw a car for the first time could invent or imagine mechanisms that explain its movement, whether it's many squirrels in tiny wheels, or a  sophisticated, alternative engine design, but at some point, he'd actually have to look inside to be certain.

Obviously it's best to look inside as that will help you to home in on the actual mechanisms involved, but you only need to come up with one viable mechanism that fits the known facts to show that whatever it is your looking at doesn't need to depend on magic. If you have a machine that can do arithmetic, for example, that is evidence that humans could do arithmetic mechanistically too and that they don't need to do it by magic. The same applies to reasoning - once a machine demonstrates that it can think as well as a human, Don's claims that the brain must think without using mechanisms will be shown to be false. He may not stick by those claims though anyway, but I wouldn't hold out any hope in that direction.

Never the less, it's encouraging to see Don appropriating the word mechanism (as in "the mechanism of non-physical processes,") when previously "mechanistic" was only used derisively.

Well, he may be getting the point that without mechanism he has only magic to fall back on, and that isn't very satisfying as an explanation as it's an utterly empty one.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

<reams of junk that nobody will ever read>

You've got to be kidding me! As David said, nobody is ever going to read all that boring nonsense. I can't believe how you just wasted this thread with long boring junk like that. What on earth ever gave you the idea that was going to be read by someone?

[/quote]

Talking about Sheldrake's excerpts ? They are very relevant to this discussion , you have no idea, concerning the fact that the materialist mainstream 'scientific world view " is false .
Take it or leave it .
Any non-dogmatic open -minded person cannot  a -priori  just dismiss ideas without reading them = that's even unscientific to reject ideas a priori .
That's no junk .
If you think it is , then, do not read it , and just speak for yourself instead .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Don. Posts 817 to 824 will simply not be read by anyone sane. That is not the way to argue or discuss anything.

[/quote]

Why not ? See above what i said to this guy here above on the subject .
You do not seem to be willing to listen to what i say so clearly , so , i could not but resort to posting those extremely relevant excerpts from Sheldrake's book on the subject ,regarding the simple fact that the mainstream materialist "scientific world view " is false ,so.
I could not do otherwise ,since no one is open-minded enough here to listen to what i have been stating so clearly .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

That comment strikes me as disingenuous. I'm not familiar with any form of science, material or otherwise, that doesn't include mechanisms.

When it comes to relativity, mechanism appears to be something that most physicists do not want to consider.

I would also suggest that mechanisms alone are not sufficient. One could imagine or invent mechanisms, entire models, but unless they correspond to something that actually exists, they are just ideas, even if they are logically consistent ones.

That's true - mechanism needs something to act on. The stuff that it acts on though is typically complex in nature and is held together by mechanisms, so it's very rare that you're dealing with anything fundamental, and I don't know if science has identified anything yet that can't be further divided.

Someone from another world who saw a car for the first time could invent or imagine mechanisms that explain its movement, whether it's many squirrels in tiny wheels, or a  sophisticated, alternative engine design, but at some point, he'd actually have to look inside to be certain.

Obviously it's best to look inside as that will help you to home in on the actual mechanisms involved, but you only need to come up with one viable mechanism that fits the known facts to show that whatever it is your looking at doesn't need to depend on magic. If you have a machine that can do arithmetic, for example, that is evidence that humans could do arithmetic mechanistically too and that they don't need to do it by magic. The same applies to reasoning - once a machine demonstrates that it can think as well as a human, Don's claims that the brain must think without using mechanisms will be shown to be false. He may not stick by those claims though anyway, but I wouldn't hold out any hope in that direction.

Never the less, it's encouraging to see Don appropriating the word mechanism (as in "the mechanism of non-physical processes,") when previously "mechanistic" was only used derisively.

Well, he may be getting the point that without mechanism he has only magic to fall back on, and that isn't very satisfying as an explanation as it's an utterly empty one.

[/quote]

Why don't you just read what i replied to Cheryl on this same page right at the top of it ,concerning her same post of hers you just replied to here above , instead of continuing to hold your same false assumptions regarding my own views then ? by distorting the latter ,unbelievable .
Weak .

[David Cooper]

An example of this is time dilation. When a rocket accelerates away from another rocket, it will either have its time slowed down or speeded up, but it can't do both of those things at the same time. Special Relativity studiously ignores this problem and bans anyone from addressing it, but it's actually a problem which invalidates the theory.

That’s not a problem in special relativity. The problem here is with your understanding of special relativity. I’ll explain your error to you: If two observers are moving relative to each other such that each measures the speed of the other to be v then each reckons the other’s clock to be running slow. That’s not a problem whatsoever. No true paradoxes or contradictions arise from this observed fact. By observed fact I mean that time dilation has actually been observed so we know that it’s true from an experimental point of view.

You're missing the point. Rocket A and Rocket B are sitting together in space. They may be stationary, or they may be moving - either description is equally valid according to SR. Now, A accelerates to 86.6 the speed of light (relative to B) and goes off on a long trip, then stops, turns round and comes back at the same speed before stopping next to B. Clocks on each rocket reveal that during this trip, one year has gone by on A and two years have gone by on B.

However, we can view the whole thing a different way. A and B are initially moving at 86.6% the speed of light to start with (relative to rocket C, which I'm only adding in to provide something specific to relate their speed to). In this scenario, rocket A suddenly stops (such that it is now stationary relative to C), then after a long time it suddenly accelerates to chase after B (at a speed which I won't bother to calculate), before decelerating to match the speed of B when it catches up with it.

These are just two of an infinite number of rival accounts as to what happened, and all of them are supposedly equally valid. It is impossible to pick out any one of those accounts and to say that it is right and that all the others are wrong - there is no experiment that can be done to determine that.

The problem comes in when you want to identify a mechanism for what has taken place. In the first account, rocket A accelerated and resulted in time slowing down for it for the first half of its trip, but in the second account rocket A decelerated and resulted in time speeding up for it for the first half of the trip. It cannot have both slowed down and speeded up at the same time.

Technically though, time doesn't work like that in SR. What really happens is that some things are able to take shortcuts into the future relative to other things by travelling through less time. Again though, in one account we have rocket A accelerating and taking a shortcut into the future compared with B, while in the other account A stops taking a shortcut into the future while B continues to do so.

That is where there is a mechanistic contradiction in SR which invalidates it. What happens though is that you all ignore the whole business of mechanism on the basis that you cannot detect whether A accelerates or decelerates, because all that counts from your point of view is that the total time elapsed works out correctly when the two rockets are reunited. You simply ignore the contradictions which necessarily come in as soon as you try to apply an actual mechanism to what has taken place.

There is a famous scenario called the Twin’s Paradox which is used to clarify the nature of time dilation. This subject came up recently in my science forum. We have a resident expert on general relativity there who sent me his article on the subject. If you’re really interested in learning the correct understanding of time dilation then you can download and read about it here – The twin paradox and principle of relativity – by Øyvind Grøn which can be found at http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.4154

That was interesting, but unless I'm missing something, I don't think it addresses the point I'm making. I would be happy to discover that I'm wrong though as it would be good to sort this out. I have another objection to relativity which appears to kill it by a different route (showing that the apparent chains of cause-and-effect events which appear to run through the universe cannot be cause-and-effect at all under SR but must exist by chance alone, at odds which render the word "astronomical" powerless to describe the degree of improbability involved), but we can get onto that later.

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

Folks :

Sorry, but  i do have to say the following : no insults , just facts, facts i cannot but deduce from your own stubborn attitudes here , in the very face of reality that stares at you via both of its eyes , via its  physical material and via its  mental eyes ,metaphorically speaking then  :
You're so dogmatic ,so narrow-minded ,so irrational ....and hopeless that science proper will be able to move on beyond your false materialist beliefs  and beyond you , guys , ,and leave you behind as a result , no doubt about that= inevitable = just a matter of ...time thus ,simply because materialism's end is nearer than ever  .
You cannot stop progress,seriously  .
You are just fighting against windmills ,as the fictitious  Don Quichot used to do .
That's 1 o the reasons why i did choose this nick of mine , in order to state the fact that we are all one or other relative forms of Don Quichot , in many ways , at some points of our own journeys,including myself thus  .
Don Quichot that applies to many situations ,false beliefs ,  states of mind , positions, attitudes ,dogmas , delusions, illusions,fairy tales  ...in many ways .
Don Quichot that's an endless and an ever-changing source of inspiration , and an endless source of irony , sarcasm, humor ......which can be applied to all peoples '  dogmas , false beliefs , delusions, states of mind , illusions , fairy tales ...

The dogmatic delusional illusory ...tragic-hilarious absurd implausible , inconsitent , incoherent ....pathetic ...you name it ....materialist mainstream false "scientific world view " is an unparalleled  major example of Don Quichotian Kafkaian pursuit and chasing of a mirage in the form of trying to explain "everything = nothing " just in terms of physics and chemistry , by assuming that reality is just material or physical , an absurd  surreal  false implausible dogmatic ideological  .....materialist version of reality ,that has been taken for granted as the "scientific world view " for so long now , at the expense of science , and hence at the expence of the truth, at the expense of humanity and humanity's progess -evolution ....= what a huge crime against humanity that has been , what an unparalleled ultimate con and scam , science will be able to reject and leave behind = science whose very nature is to dispell any dogmas , any untruths ,any half-truths even ,  any lies , any deceit , self-deceit , make-believe ....for that matter .

"The human will to believe is inexhaustible " indeed : very puzzling .

Nice week-end though , have fun , do not take yourselves too seriously as to ossify yourselves ,otherwise , we would be forced to put you in some sort of a museum haha , try to ridicule  yourselves if you wanna detect your intrinsic silly imperfect sides and your human, all too human , flaws .

Science is just a human activity , and hence just a reflection of all the highest and of all the lowest which are in all of us ,or as a great poet said :

"...But i say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each of you ,
So, the wicked and the weak cannot fall below the lowest which is in you also .."

Know thy self   then , i must add : science is nothing but ...you, as human beings , science is just a reflection of the highest and of the lowest which are in all of us thus .

Best wishes .

[DonQuichotte (OP)]

The loss is worth the gain, you have no idea ,folks .
All the best .
See ya in another life , maybe ,who know ?
We have been all sleeping in this life  all along  , death will wakes-up soon enough .
The "reality " of this mortal temporary world is just a...veil  over our own blinded eyes  .

Know thyself , and you will be able to wake up , prematurely then .
Science is just a human activity ,that's just a reflection of the  self's highest and lowest states ,and of what lies in between  as well .

Bye.

[RD]

... All the best ... See ya in another life , maybe ,who know ?

Don't despair "folks", my telepathic dog has just indicated to me that DonQuichotte will be coming back [] ...

 [ Invalid Attachment ]

[ I didn't mock-up that book cover : it's a real book by Don's idol  ]

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Rupert_Sheldrake

[dlorde]

Don't despair "folks", my telepathic dog has just indicated to me that DonQuichotte will be coming back [] ...

He promises to leave, then comes back to accuse others of dishonesty, he makes assertions he can't or won't explain then accuses others of dogmatism, he proposes radical changes to how science is done, but has no idea what they are, how they'd work, or what practical difference they'd make, he tilts at materialist windmills that are just mirages, and refuses to argue his case while accusing others of being close-minded. Not to mention pointlessly posting whole chapters of publications that go way beyond fair use, in breach of copyright. He's pure entertainment []

[I didn't mock-up that book cover : it's a real book by Don's idol  ]

Yes, that's another one that has failed several attempts at replication and been thoroughly debunked.

Sheldrake has become seriously flakey of late, and is now claiming there's a grand conspiracy of skeptics out to suppress the publication of paranormal  and psychic articles on Wikipedia, etc.: Sheldrake's Skeptical Conspiracy, Sheldrake's 'Gallileo Syndrome', Guerrilla Skeptics mock Sheldrake’s paranoia.

[RD]

[I didn't mock-up that book cover : it's a real book by Don's idol  ]

Yes, that's another one that has failed several attempts at replication and been thoroughly debunked.

If dogs could read their owner's mind could any be led calmly to the vet to be made "two stones lighter"  []

Sheldrake has become seriously flakey of late, and is now claiming there's a grand conspiracy of skeptics out to suppress the publication of paranormal  and psychic articles on Wikipedia, etc.: Sheldrake's Skeptical Conspiracy ...

David Ike , or his management , have demonstrated that worryingly there's a market for this anti-science conspiracy-theory stuff , so there's market-pressure to come up with increasingly nutso paranoid nonsense, at £10-£15 a copy.

[David Cooper]

If that's you away, Don, fare thee well and good luck with whatever you turn to next.