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That there is something unsatisfying about the scientific concept of nature has for long been recognized, and not least by scientists themselves. Of course there have been some remarkable changes in the foundations of science during the present century, and these have lessened the previously ‘mechanistic’ character of scientific theory; but it still remains true that physical science finds no place in its scheme of things for life and consciousness. “The ancients,” wrote Paul Valéry, “set their philosophy to peopling the universe as ardently as we, in our time, have set ours to emptying it of all life.” And similarly A.N. Whitehead has spoken of the opening up, since Descartes, of a deep division between two distinct and incompatible attitudes of mind; we seek to believe simultaneously in the mechanical theory of nature and in the self-determining or creative character of living things. Hence there is a radical inconsistency, he says, at the basis of modern thought.
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- Copyright © 1975 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 A.N. Whitehead, Science and The Modern World, p. 94, Cambridge, 1932; Nature and Life, p. 56, Cambridge, 1934.
2 These issues are dealt with more fully in my book, An Inventive Universe, Hutchinson, 1975.
3 Gerald Holton, "The Mainsprings of Discovery," Encounter, April 1974.
4 Anatol Rapoport has similarly remarked that the dualism of ‘mind' and ‘matter'—the tendency to regard ‘mind' as a substantive set over against ‘matter'—may have originated with the long-established requirement of European languages for every action to be attributed to an agent. (Theories of the Mind, ed. J.M. Scher, Glencoe Ill., Free Press, 1962).
5 Several presentations of this concept have used a question-begging termino logy. What I believe is the most rigorous presentation is that of Adolph Grünbaum, Philosophical Problems of Space and Time, Ch. 8 and 9, New York, Knopf, 1963.
6 H. Mehlberg in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science, ed. H. Feigl and G. Maxwell, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1961.
7 It may be remarked that in this instance we are dealing with a ‘law' far more than with a theory. The Second Law of Thermodynamics does not require an idealization, an abstraction from the actual state-of-affairs, to anything like the same extent as the various theories.
8 Rather convincing arguments can be brought forward to the effect that life, and hence the possibility of observation, would be impossible under the conditions of a reserved world where there would be diminishing entropy.
9 Nevertheless there are other natural phenomena, such as the outward movement of radiation from a source and the supposed expansion of the universe as a whole, which also support the idea of temporal asymmetry. The relationship of the thermodynamic, the electromagnetic and the cosmological ‘arrows of time' has not yet been properly cleared up and is one of the outstanding scientific problems awaiting solution.
10 There are other theories which suppose that the universe oscillates eternally between one such boundary condition and its converse. Yet these are theories which, in my view, do not indicate at all satisfactorily how a meaningful time direction could be assigned such that a supposed ‘reverse phase' of the universe would be deemed as being indeed a reverse phase.
11 E. Meyerson, Identité et Realité. English edition, Identity and Reality, transl. K. Loewenberg, London, Allen and Unwin, 1930.
12 An analogy may be helpful to the reader at this point. Actuaries know the average expectation of life in a population of a given age with very great accuracy; yet the actual future life span of any one individual in the age group remains quite unpredictable.
13 D. Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957. Although Bohm is often regarded as having aimed at establishing a new basis for determinism in science, this is not at all inconsistent with his more general philosophical outlook as described in this book.
14 When one speaks of ‘creation', rather than of ‘annihilation', it is, of course, the time direction of consciousness which is implicitly referred to. In one of his more popular expositions of the theory, Hoyle estimates the required rate of creation as being about one atom per year in a volume equal to the interior volume of St. Paul's Cathedral.
15 Relative to the competing ‘big bang' theory which effectively assumes a beginning of the universe.
16 Although chance is essential, too much would be harmful. The life processes must surely require an optimum point of balance between necessity and chance, between order and disorder, and this is discussed more fully in my book An Inventive Universe.
17 I am speaking here of what C.S. Peirce and William Kneale have called ‘absolute chance' as meaning the negation of determinism. But of course one can also speak of a chance event in a much weaker sense as meaning a type of event which cannot be accounted for causally in one particular context, but may be so accounted for in a different and more appropriate context.
18 P. Oppenheim and H. Putnam, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume II, University of Minnesota, 1958.
19 As is well known there are certain grounds for thinking that life may be not at all rare, and indeed that there may be intelligent beings elsewhere in the Milky Way. But this is still entirely speculative.