Horse said to dmb:
At the risk of misinterpreting what Ian's saying, I think what he means is
that, as a generalisation, 'life' is the next step up from 'matter'! What we
know as life is based around the double helix and involves DNA, genes,
proteins etc. but this is only one possible way that life may have emerged.
It's a big universe and we only have a sample of one at the present time so to
say that life = DNA is a big step in the wrong direction cos we just don't know
about other ways in which life may come about. ...A metaphysics needs to be a
generalisation that can be applied to all situations and contexts regardless of
specifics - the specifics should conform to the general theory of what
constitutes what is and isn't 'real'.
dmb says:
Right, we just don't know about other ways in which life may come about. That's
what I was getting at when I said, "DNA-based life isn't just the most obvious
kind, I think, but rather the only kind we know of." As I understand it, the
MOQ's radical empiricism says that philosophers have no business talking about
things outside of experience, no business talking about what James called
"trans-experiential" entities and "metaphysical fictions". And this is not an
arbitrary rule but rather an assertion about what we can rightly consider to be
"real". (If it is known in experience, then it must be included in the
philosophers account and, by the same token, if it is not known in experience
philosophers should keep it out of their accounts.) I think life that is NOT
based on DNA would qualify as something that is outside of experience. One can
imagine or speculate but nothing more.
When we adopt the radical insight that Man is a participant in the creation of
all things, every last bit of it, then the universe is not a separate reality
to be discovered but rather a heap of analogies based on experience. Analytic
philosophers like to talk about what true and false in all possible worlds but
I think the radical empiricism just kind of shakes his head at that kind of
hypothetical abstraction.
"Abstraction, functioning in this way, becomes a means of arrest far more than
a means of advance in thought. It mutilates things; it creates difficulties and
finds impossibilities; and more than half the trouble that metaphysicians and
logicians give themselves over the paradoxes and dialectic puzzles of the
universe may, I am convinced, be traced to this relatively simple source. THE
VICIOUSLY PRIVATIVE EMPLOYMENT OF ABSTRACT CHARACTERS AND CLASS NAMES is, I am
persuaded, one of the great original sins of the rationalistic mind." --
William James (Emphasis is James's)
As Charlene Seigfried puts it, paraphrasing William James, "abstractionism had
become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified conceptualization
and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus forgetting and
falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed extracts from the
temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, 379.)
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