On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
