From: Robin Faichney (robin@mmmi.org)
Date: Fri 28 Oct 2005 - 13:04:23 GMT
Thursday, October 27, 2005, 10:35:14 PM, Dace wrote:
>> From: Derek Gatherer <d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk>
>> Subject: Re: The evolution of "evolution"
>>
>> Reductionism is about cause and effect, that's all.
> Reductionism is a particular view of causation that promotes one type above
> all others. This despite the fact that field theory abolished the monopoly
> of reductionistic causation. In a solar system, it's the whole (the
> gravitational field) that causes the parts (the sun and planets) to move in
> their characteristic ways.
Rubbish. The gravitational field of the solar system is simply the sum
of the fields of its components. More generally, the whole of a system
cannot influence the parts, and the parts cannot influence the whole,
simply because the whole is the parts, aggregated, and one thing
cannot influence itself. I've gone into this rather deeply, and if
you're interested you can read my conclusions here:
http://www.mmmi.org/causation.html
-- Best regards, Robin mailto:robin@mmmi.org =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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