On 10/2/2012 5:57 PM, John Mikes wrote:
Stephen (and Bruno?)
What I called The Aris - Total- meaning Aristotle's maxim that /the
'whole' is bigger than the sum of its parts/ - means something else in
MY agnosticism. Originally I included only the fact what Bruno pointed
out now: that the PARTS (as accounted for) develop relations (qualia)
adding to the totality they participate in. Lately, however, I added
to my view that beyond the accountable *_parts _*(forget now the
relations) there are participant 'inconnu'-s from outside our
(inventoried) model knowable as of yesterday. So whatever we take
inventory of is an (accountable) *_partial_* only.
Beyond that - of course - Aristotle's 'total' (/_"material parts
only")_/ of his inventory was truly smaller than the above *_TOTAL_*
in its entire complexity.
The fact that complexity-parts extracted, or replaced may not
discontinue the function of the 'total' is my problem with death: how
to identify THOSE important components which are inevitable for
maintaining the function as was?
(Comes back to my negative attitude towards transport - hype (to
Moscow, or another planet/universe) - complexity has uncountable
connections in the infinite relations. How much could we possibly
include (in our wildest fantasy) into the tele-transporting of a
"person" (or whatever) so that the original functionality should be
still detectable?)
Heavenly afterlife anybody?
John Mikes
Hi John,
"Aris", I like it! One question is how much of one's sense of self
and memories can be carried across. Function does not seem to do this
alone as it is completely independent of the physical "body".
On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 11:57 PM, Stephen P. King
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 10/1/2012 1:00 PM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Physiological realities are mechanistic. Biologists and
doctors are
mechanists. Even if you claim that "the whole is greater
than the sum
of its parts" that does not mean that if yoyu replace the
parts the
whole will stop working.
Yes. Anti-mechanist often refer to "the whole is bigger than
the parts", but nowhere else than in computer and engineering
is it more true that the whole is bigger than the part, if
only because the whole put some specific structure on the
relation between parts.
We might simplify this by saying that the whole *structural
complexity* grows like an exponential (or more) when the whole
cardinality grows linearly.
H Bruno,
Could you source some further discussions of this idea? From
my own study of Cantor's tower of infinities, I have found the
opposite, complexity goes to zero as the cardinals lose the
ability to be named.
--
--
Onward!
Stephen
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