Hi Dave
I agree with much of what you say but it's still very important to
remember that DNA-based life is no more than one possible way for life
to exist and that it involves an environment and a context. Not having
experienced something (or maybe mis-interpreting something that we do
experience) should not blind us to the probability that it exists. Isn't
this part of the 'Cleveland Harbor Effect'?
"Then he remembered the little “discrepancies” he had seen on the chart
when he came in. When a buoy had a “wrong” number on it he presumed it
had been changed since the chart was made. When a certain wall appeared
that was not shown, he assumed it had been built recently or maybe he
hadn’t come to it yet and he wasn’t quite where he thought he was. It
never occurred to him to think he was in a whole different harbor!
It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the
chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and
followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had
built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all
information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious.
But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We
build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past “facts”
which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not
fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A
contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering,
sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And
then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time
before they see it too." Pisig, Lila, Ch.26
This isn't to say that we should believe any old nonsense, but that we
remain open to DQ and by sticking rigidly to a definition as the only
possibility (because that is all we appear to have experienced) then
there is very real likelihood that new experience is inadvertently rejected.
The MoQ simply states that biological patterns evolve from inorganic
patterns - not that DNA-based life evolves from RNA or other specific
complex molecules. Remaining open to other possibilities is one way of
following DQ.
Cheers
Horse
On 02/02/2014 16:03, david wrote:
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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