[MD] What is SOM?

[David M]

Hi Krim

Yes, where I question the use of the mechanical metaphor to understand
the behaviour of inorganic patterns and suggest you may just as well
use agency or experience (even if this behaviour can be very repetitive)
you seem to generally say 'chance' instead. That's not all bad, it's better
than mechanism and law as metaphors/analogies. But I'd press this
and say that all patterns have behaviour and who is to say what forms
of experience, or feeling as Whitehead says, is involved. Even machine
rebel and don't always obey the laws they are meant to follow.
And experiments are endlessly repeated to reach acceptable levels
of conformity. And even crystals seem to speed up how quickly they
form the more practise they have. There may be some cut off of
inner capacities somewhere between chance and the consciousness
of life, but where is it? I just suspect that a clear cutting line between
the organic and inorganic is perhaps more blurred than we assume.
Is there a proto-level of choice required in inorganic patterns. I wonder,
and Shimon Malin the physicist agrees, what kind of act is occurring when
wave functions collapse and a number of possibilities cease to interfere 
with
each other and actualise as a single event? Process requires act/events.
I don't think these decision points only occur when someone observes
them, so is there something else that tips the process into realisation?
Is it something inner-active in the inorganic patterns that makes them
respond in one way rather than another. Something like being attracted
or repelled by certain vibrations? That's what I mean by inorganic 
experience.
Here smoke this and you'll dig it man!









> [David M]
> I understand your concern with overly romantic attacks on science
> and agree we should keep sight of sciences many benefits. But
> there is a case against scientism and reductionism and essentialism
> to be made against some approachs to science that I think inprove
> our understanding of science. I also think there is a non supernatural
> case against a type of naturalism, see this for explanation:
>
> http://www.philosophers.co.uk/cafe/phil_may2003.htm
>
> [Krimel]
> Your reading suggests while not always welcome are usually interesting and
> eventually appreciated. But here the argument is not naturalism as opposed
> to supernaturalism. I think Ham and dmb and Platt each in their own way
> wants to embrace the supernatural while hiding in their respective 
> closets.
>
> [David M]
> I also agree that the aim of MOQ is to recontextualise the modern
> world and offer a better context for understanding life, science and
> society than SOM does. For me, we need to have an understanding of
> how we base our knowledge on lived experience. Lived experience is
> our context, this is a context of qualities, values, change, patterns, and
> the potential for change and action. Given experience as it is and
> understood (described) in terms like these we can go on to understand
> how we can have scientific, personal, emotional, sexual, aesthetic, 
> social,
> political, etc forms of knowledge. Experience is a larger category that
> contains 'objects' of knowledge that exceed those that science wants to, 
> or
> can, address.
>
> [Krimel]
> I have no problem with any of that with the possible exception of your 
> move
> toward imbuing the inorganic with "experience." Even there I suspect the
> disagreement is mainly semantic. I would add that all I think science does
> is formalize the most natural process we have available to us for gaining
> knowledge which is to check things out, mess with them and see what 
> happens.
>
>
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