(November 5, 2019 at 4:33 am)Grandizer Wrote: I have no question that ultimately quantum mechanics can fit well within the Aristotelian framework (with some modifications, I'm guessing).
In the book I'm reading on Plotinus, there's an indirect reference to how the patterns or tendencies in the universe "point" in certain directions. It's put in such poetic language that it doesn't sound sciency, but I think this is about the same thing.
The author takes a long quote from Thoreau:
Quote:When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in
the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes
bursting out through the snow and overwhelming it where no sand was
to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace with
one another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which exhibits halfway
the law of currents, and halfway that of vegetation. As it flows it
takes the form of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a
foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the
laciniated, lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are
reminded of coral, of leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or
bowels and excrements of all kinds. . . . You find thus in the very sands
an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses
itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms
have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it.16
Emphasis added.
The author glosses this:
Quote:patterns of the sort that we associate with living forms are also to be found
elsewhere— evidence of a different sort of living, or evidence that the cosmos
is prepared for life.17
Again, the language is poetic, but I think it is philosophically sound.
We've all seen the extreme close-up photos of minerals or whatever contrasted with satellite photos of the earth, where the patterns seem identical. The way that river deltas or blood vessels branch in similar ways show that there are inherent tendencies in nature, that things don't behave randomly but follow regularities or "laws." In the old-fashioned language that Thomists use, these tendencies are "causes" of the way things work out and evolve. Science, relying on the same idea, seeks to explain and mathematize these tendencies to show what the results will be -- or explain why the results are as they are. Thoreau's trope is more emotionally satisfying, I think -- the world is pregnant with certain things, already determined though not yet visible to us.
(The history of science shows that it was the commitment to these universal and knowable tendencies by the Thomists that gave early impetus to what later became science. Without mathematizable regularities, scientific knowing is impossible. I don't expect our ideologue religion-haters to acknowledge this fact of history.)
