[lit-ideas] Mineral Philosophy
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 19 Dec 2013 10:03:12 -0500 (EST)
McEvoy was extending the use of 'know' to plants (notably trees as they
extend their roots, but stop when they find a table of water). However, he
refuses the extend the use of 'know' to 'minerals'.
His reasons below (in ps).
I wonder, however, if the arguments he offers against those who would NOT
extend the use of 'know' to a tree may not be applied to his own arguments
against the use of 'know' as applied to minerals.
McEvoy had previously said:
"To rebut this by stipulation as what 'knowledge' means is facile and
beside the point: and will amount, perhaps unwittingly, to substituting a
verbal
problem for a substantive one."
It seems McEvoy is relying on a semantic argument to disallow minerals to
hold 'knowledge'. Or not. I should revise his cases.
Keywords here should be:
PANPSYCHISM
and of course
DAWKINS
Oddly, one note in the Grice Collection, now at UC/Berkeley (Bancroft
Library), written on an airlplane, reads, "Read Dawkins". And I would not be
surprised if Grice would end up agreeing (or, for that case, disagreeing) with
Dawkins.
We have had on previous discussions covered with McEvoy the idea of a
mechanist vs. a teleological (or as he might prefer, 'adaptive') explanation,
and I appreciate his examples of 'mineral' or inorganic matter as displaying
what McEvoy sees as 'pseudo-adaptive'.
Panpsychism seems the right keyword. Animism, too, perhaps -- which we know
is a feature of primitive thinking (so-called -- not by me). Grice for
example noted that some uses of 'mean' still carry this feature of animism:
Smoke means fire.
Surely smoke cannot 'mean'. "Mean" is cognate with "mind", which is the
Anglo-Saxon way to express the idea of a 'soul' (hence McEvoy's Hellenistic
term, 'Panpsychism', from psyche, Greek for soul, or my Animism, from Latin
Anima, and animus).
R. Paul wonders:
>What do sticks and stones know, if anything?
and goes on to
>thank [McEvoy] for this [his post on pseudo-adaptive strategies in
minerals].
from which I gather the implicature:
>what do sticks and stones know, if anything?
is
"Nichts",
as the Austrian engineer would say.
I'm glad to hear from A. Palma that he admires G. Kreisel, of the former
Habsburg Empire, too.
Cheers,
Speranza
In a message dated 12/19/2013 3:31:21 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
For a number of reasons, I do take this disagreement seriously but find
the examples unconvincing. ... No, the point at which no more sugar is
soluble is purely a matter of physics and chemistry: there is no strategy to
it,
no purposeful activity. Of course, a panpsychist may disagree, and we can
have this argument, but no. The same with volcanic eruption: no purposeful
strategy, simply the physics and chemistry. However, there is an issue here
where physical and chemical states and reactions may appear to be
'adaptive' in that they have features that ensure their own stability or
continued
existence. But this appearance is deceptive. It is true that we could use
talk of 'adaptive strategy' to explain many things within physics and
chemistry - for example, that if steam is put in a container with ice the two
will
react until an equilibrium state is reached which may (depending on the
variables involved) mean that eventually the container holds neither steam
nor ice but liquid water. And we may say that water molecules owe their
'survival' to this kind of adaptive strategy and so on. We may say steam is
water's adaptive strategy to high temperature or that ice is water's adaptive
strategy to low temperature, and so on. But we are simply taking a Darwinian
kind of logic too far (Dawkins does so near the outset of "The Selfish
Gene" and it is one of his mis-steps, which ties in with Dawkins mistaking
natural selection for a kind of tautology that applies to everything). For the
ice/steam/water interaction is not a product of natural selection, still
less of purposeful behaviour. We do not trace the evolution of different
kinds of water molecule from a common ancestor, and explain how the different
kinds evolved different adaptive strategies for the physical and chemical
challenges of their existence. The behaviour of any water molecule will be
identical to any other identical molecule and its behaviour involves no
activity or selection from within a possible repertoire of behaviour: nor is
there any possiblity of a water molecule mutation that changes, for better or
worse, its adaptivity. There is much that notions like 'equilibrium' can
explain in terms of physics and chemistry and biology. We may say the tree
searching for water is trying to maintain its 'equilibrium'. But only in the
case of living things can we say the organism itself has knowledge built
in by 'natural selection': atoms and molecules do not. Only the organism may
have adaptive strategies tied in with this built-in 'knowledge', atoms and
molecules do not. So tea and volcanoes may be explained in terms of
'equilibrium' states and even adaptive strategies, but this talk of 'adaptive
strategies' is here a mistake: a transfer of ideas from where they belong in
the case of entities that are products of and subject to 'natural selection'
to entities that are not. A more interesting example perhaps is the memory
that appears to be shown by some inanimate matter. This may be linked to
panpsychism. There is a worthwhile discussion of this in TSAIB: "Steel
'remembers' that it has been magnetized. A growing crystal 'remembers' a fault
in its structure. But this is something new, something emergent: atoms and
elementary particles do not 'remember', if present physical theory is
correct." But, as indicated, this is not enough to bring even those
memory-like
cases within cases of adaptive strategy via natural selection.
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