philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 04, 2018, 14:20 (2271 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The article discusses function and meaning from a medieval philosophic point of view:

dhw: I don’t care what point of view it’s from. I like to see a bit of coherence in an argument, and I don’t find it here!

QUOTE: "The core reason for the aimlessness is because the building blocks of science are inert. They are like Legos in a box. You cannot shake the box of Legos and expect a spaceship to fall out. In the same way, mathematical proof and physical evidence cannot explain their own reason for being. Science cannot explain meaning. At the same time, the very inability of science to speak for itself says something of interest.

dhw: Of course science can’t explain meaning. That is the province of philosophy, and there is no scientific or philosophical basis for the assumption that black holes and colliding solar systems and living forms extant and extinct have any “meaning” whatsoever. It is absurd to say that science can’t speak for itself when it is constantly informing us of how it fulfils or tries to fulfil its self-imposed purpose of explaining how things function. That is an end in itself.

QUOTE: "In medieval language this missing meaning is called function. Function cannot emerge from atoms in motion. It cannot emerge from shaking the Lego box. This claim can be proven mathematically. In information theory, function is a kind of mutual information. Mutual information is subject to the law of information non-increase, which means mutual information and thus function cannot be created by natural processes. Thus, without an organizing force, matter is functionless and void, and there is no meaning."

dhw: What sort of reasoning is this? if matter produces systems that FUNCTION (e.g. our solar system), it is just as feasible to claim that the organizing force is natural laws as it is to say that there is an unknown sourceless mastermind which organizes matter. (There may be. I am an agnostic.) But obviously if there is no God, there is no meaning. That doesn’t mean there must be a God and there must be a meaning!

And the author and I might ask who created the natural laws? Not chance.

dhw: Let’s ignore all the business about values/worth and human prosperity, and skip to David’s comments, which lead to a similar conclusion.

DAVID’s comment: The material cannot create information. The information that runs the universe must have a mental source.

dhw: The material contains information which we humans analyse. Analysis requires a mental source. We can perhaps agree that the first cause is energy turning into materials, but it requires faith to believe that the energy knew what it was doing.

The information is not just here for analysis. The information runs the universe and life and must have a source..

DAVID: Ah, there is the difference in views. The presence of an organized universe with humans is highly suggestive that the energy was a mind that knew what it was doing.

dhw: I shan’t oppose that argument, except to say it is equally suggestive that materials follow natural laws of self-organization, and faith in the laws of nature is no less reasonable or unreasonable than faith in an unknown, unknowable, sourceless mastermind.

And the natural laws appeared by magic in the analysis by the Agnostic mind?