On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > By your post, it seems you do not believe in a primary biological reality > or even a chemical universe. >
I don't know, give me some examples of "a primary biological reality" and "a chemical universe" and I'll be able to tell you if I believe in them or not. And remember I don't want definitions I want examples. > It seems that you believe that chemistry can be reduced conceptually to > physics. > Obviously. > > This means that we don't need to assume some vital or chemical > principles. > As a practical matter when you get to the level of chemistry and biology you do have to assume some approximations and statistical laws; even in physics we'd be lost without statistical ideas like pressure and temperature. > > Physical entities and physical laws can explain the chemical laws, which > can explain the biological laws. > Obviously. > >Here the physical entities and laws are primary and the chemical and > biological are not. > I would agree that physical laws come before biological laws in a objective chain of cause and effect, but "primary" means highest rank in importance and so there is some subjectivity thrown into the mix, and so I wouldn't necessarily agree that the laws of physics are more important than the laws of chemistry or biology. > My question can be put in this way: do you think we necessarily need to > assume physical entities, or are you open to the idea that the physical > itself can be reduced to another field (like perhaps number theory, or > mathematics, or some abstract psychology, or theology, of computer science, > etc.)? Sure I'm open to the idea, but as to which came first physics or mathematics I don't know. I am a physics agnostic, but as I understand it you are a atheist. > The fact that a book in physics use mathematical notions does not imply > that the mathematical notions are physical. > True, but it does not imply that the mathematics is not physical.either. > Book on gastronomy use english does not make the use of english an object > of gastronomy. English can describe food but food came before English. You seem to be implying that mathematics is just a language that can describe physics. I don't know if that's true but if it is then physics came before mathematics. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
