[lit-ideas] Re: This is a post in which I am not even going to mention Popper
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:38:44 +0100 (BST)
--- On Tue, 19/10/10, Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Physicalist explanations are essentially materialist
> explanations with energy thrown in, to allow the speaker to
> be appear to be more precise and make a big hit at cocktail
> parties, line dances, and shotgun weddings. It's another,
> better, term for materialism, especially after the old E = m
> times and a constant discovery.
> However, exactly what physicalist explanations seem to
> consist of also seems to change, given the slightly more
> recent and stunning stuff like Bell's Theorem, which capped
> the EPR-Bohr debate.
Popper might agree that physicalism shares with materialism a 'reductive'
approach to explanation of the universe, and emphasise that this kind of
reductive explanation is commendable where it produces more falsifiable
theories in science but is not so commendable when posited as metaphysics which
reduces falsifiability by reducing the range of entities we need to understand
in order to understand the universe [e.g. by saying the only entities we need
consider are matter or physical]. As he argues it, 'scientific reductionism' is
a methodological position that is inextricably linked with the advantages of
increasing falsifiability; whereas, outside of this, 'reductionism' is a
metaphysical position that logically does the opposite by decreasing
falsifiability.
But, in terms of the history of ideas, Popper is explicit that materialism has
been most important and beneficial, for example as a research programme; and
while he thinks materialism [i.e. the view all entities are matter (perhaps in
the void)] is prone to undermine a humanist ethics, the great materialists were
often great humanists where their opponents sadly often were not.
The shift from materialism to physicalism is linked, Popper suggests, to the
fact "Materialism transcends itself" (see P's "The Self and Its Brain"): that
is, the initial programme to explain all as matter broke down as its pursuit
revealed a need to posit the existence of physical forces, such as gravity,
which are invisible and are not 'matter' in the sense of the initial programme.
We might observe that "atomism" has transcended itself also, with the atom no
longer the indivisible end-stop of matter but a product of sub-atomic
activities. This kind of transcendence is the result of a breakdown in the
pursuit of a kind of reductive explanation and furnishes an intuitive, albeit
inconclusive, argument against dogmatic forms of reductionism.
For Popper, the history of the universe (as we presently guess it) refutes the
idea that 'There is nothing new under the sun'. From physics emerges chemistry,
later biology [all in World 1]; then from the biology of nervous systems and
proto-cognition emerges the World 2 of human conscious and unconscious mental
states; and from this World 2 emerges the World 3 of cultural artefacts, of
'thought-contents' considered in the abstract. These World 3 entities in turn
causally can affect World 1 through the development of theories and their
implementation [via World 2] that lead, for example, to the building of cities
or to their obliteration [Hiroshima]. It is the 'downward causation' exerted by
these emergent entities on the physical world that provides one of the
strongest arguments for their reality: the destruction of Hiroshima is no more
comprehensible without positing a World 3 theory about 'splitting the atom'
than a Mozart symphony is comprehensible
as merely an arrangement of noises or marks on a score that be understood
using only the laws of physics.
Donal
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