on 17.09.2010 14:33 1Z said the following:
On 26 Aug, 17:37, David Nyman<[email protected]> wrote:
...
Whatever composite categories we might be tempted to have recourse
to - you know: molecules, cells, bodies, planets, ideas,
explanations, theories, the whole ball of wax - none of these are
available from this perspective. Don't need them. More
rigorously, they *must not be invoked* because they *do not exist*.
They don't need to exist, because the machine doesn't need them to
carry all the load and do all the work.
OTOH, they must exist because if you have two hydrogens and an
oxygen, you inevitably have the compound H2O. You also have many
other compounds which are not dreamt of in our philosophy. the set of
compounds is basically the powerset of the set of basic entities.
there may not be any objective facts about what is a "true" compound,
but the powerset unproblematically includes everything we
conventionally regard as a compound as a powerset
The next citation by Robert B. Laughlin (Nobel laureate in physics)
could be of interest here:
http://blog.rudnyi.ru/2010/08/matter-and-little-ghosts.html
"By the most important effect of phase organisation is to cause objects
to exist. This point is subtle and easily overlooked, since we are
accustomed to thinking about solidification in terms of packing of
Newtonian spheres. Atoms are not Newtonian spheres, however, but
ethereal quantum-mechanical entities lacking that most central of all
properties of an object – an identifiable position. This is why attempts
to describe free atoms in Newtonian terms always result in nonsense
statements such as their being neither here nor there but simultaneously
everywhere. It is aggregation into large objects that makes a Newtonian
description of the atoms meaningful, not the reverse. One might compare
this phenomenon with a yet-to-be-filmed Stephen Spilberg movie in which
a huge number of little ghosts lock arms and, in doing so, become
corporeal."
Evgenii
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