David Zaig:
Insofar as I understand what you are saying, I disagree. I think what you are
saying is
that in an absolute sense, everything there is to know about reality is embodied
in
the ways in which things interact, and these things are defined exclusively by
their
interactions. There simply is nothing there when you try to consider something
apart
from its interactions with other things.
Interactions are experimentally convenient and provide a good way of ordering
our
knowledge of the world. We detect and observe things in laboratories by way of
their effects on other things, i.e. their interactions. Science is nicely
layered: the
/things/ at one level are realized or instantiated by the /interactions/ at
another. In this
way, for example, sociology supervenes on psychology, which supervenes on
biochemistry, which supervenes on physics. At each level, there are lawlike
regularities
in the behavior of the things under consideration, but the things themselves are
complex constructs involving lots of interactions when looked at from the level
below. If you think of chemistry as being realized by the interactions of things
at
the physical level, all of chemistry could remain valid under a completely
different
physics, as long as the new physics realized the same interactions. By just
focusing on the interactions and denegrating the stuff doing the interacting,
you
allow yourself this neat layering, this way of abstracting different branches of
science from each other.
This is how most science is practiced, and obviously science works pretty well
(men on the moon, microwave ovens and all that). So yes, the 20th century
is a vindication of sorts of this relationalist idea. But I balk at annointing
it the
One True Way of looking at reality.
Everything comes down to physics, ultimately. Physics, at the lowest (quantum)
level
is articulated by a pretty tricky purely mathematical formalism. Apparently
there
is nothing more to be known about, say, an electron than this formalism. This
formalism describes the behavior of an electron perfectly - it has been
confirmed
in countless labs over most of this century. But the formalism only describes
the
electron insofar as it intereacts with things that we can detect. I do not
accept that
all there is to an electron is this empty formalism, and that nothing at all
actually
instantiates the formalism. I think there is some /stuff/ there, whose
/behavior/
is perfectly described by the formalism.
<warning: here's where I get loopy> Moreover, I think that the only way to
know what this stuff is, is to /be/ it. This could be a jumping-off point for a
discussion of consciousness and qualia (which I believe are not explainable
reductively, i.e. in terms of relations among lower-level entities). They are,
rather, in-your-face examples of inherent qualities. Maybe some other time . . .
-John Gregg, salamandra@mindspring.com
David Zaig wrote:
> Dear List members:
> I hope you enjoyed your Christmas and New Year break. And in the spirit of
> new beginnings, I would like to introduce an excerpted interview with Lee
> Smolin (for those who are not familiar with his work) published in THE THIRD
> CULTURE: BEYOND THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION BY JOHN BROCKMAN (SIMON &
> SCHUSTER, 1995) where, among other things, he puts forward the idea, "that
> the properties of things arise from relationships." On the face of it this
> might sound funny, but for me the idea that elementary particles arise from
> relationships is most fascinating; it is most fascinating because the
> concept is so abstract and so elusive. One is reminded (as I imagine) of
> that moment in which a creative work materializes. In addition, Smolin
> believes that since the elementary particles comprising all matter in the
> universe are inextricably interrelated, then we are not at all separated
> from anything else-a point that should be taken by anyone, including
> artists, who are curious about the nature of reality.
>
> As a result, I believe that in order to get a more complete picture of
> reality, we must connect with all fields of knowledge.
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