After I explained that the "vital force" of the 18th century used to "explain" life (in the way that the "train force" explains the motion of trains) was not scientific in the way that gravitational force was, the exchange started to get lengthy. So, he did was all pursuers of the Truth do: he closed comments.
And this isn't the first time for Callahan to use argumentum ad closum: in a previous exchange where "TokyoTom" was the critic, he did the same thing, and TokyoTom recounts the pre-cutoff (and pre-coverup!) exchange on his blog.
So, since I can't post on Callahan's blog for that discussion, I decided to post my response to his latest comment here. So, take a gander at the discussion thus far, and read my response below. Let's hope it's just a "blog malfunction" this time, too!
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Now, of course, this is not an explanation, just like Newton's force laws do not "explain anything," as the Cartesians ceaselessly pointed out.
And the Cartesians were dead wrong to argue this. Generating a model that correctly predicts the paths of celestial bodies (and bodies in vacuums, and falling bodies on earch with a high mass/drag ratio, etc.) is an explanation. The alternative -- your alternative -- results in such absurdities as "Okay, okay, sure, you were able to accurately predict celestial motions, material strengths, rocket propulsion capabilities, air properties, blah blah blah ... but you don't truly understand what it means to fly to the moon and return safely. Yeah, you have a 'model' that accurately predicts all that stuff, but you didn't truly [*suggestive emphasis*] explain it."
What else could you want from an explanation? The satisfaction of Gene Callahan's personal aesthetic standards? Or your presuppositions about things that have to be there?
Descartes and other mechanists developed models showing how gravity and magnetism could be reduced to the motion of particles alone -- Descartes, for instance, posited a flow of little screw shaped particles drawing iron to magnets.
And that would be a *different* explanation. It may be a better or worse explanation. But "reducing to particle motions" is not a requirement for an explanation, especially if it's wrong or unnecessarily long. Newton's model remains an explanation in that it constrains our expectations.
At the time, vitalism was a sound scientific hypothesis, and the vitalists expected to find good force laws just like for gravity, etc.
And they had no basis for such an expectation, even before an experiment, since "the vital force" is an "explanation" for everything, and therefore nothing. No matter what experiment they performed, it would be consistent with a "vital force". That was how they actually used the term.
me:"Your claim was stronger because you are saying that now, even given all the scientific knowledge we have, there still remains hope for the vital force "hypothesis"..."
you:All sorts of scientific hypotheses get revived after being "soundly rousted" earlier.
Right, but about the issue we were discussing: My claim, the one you're responding to here, is that the position you do endorse ("Vitalism may turn out to be a fruitful hypothesis") is a stronger claim than the one you excused earlier vitalists for believing (that it's reasonable given the limited evidence so far).
Yes, theories do get revived after being discarded. But as for the point that I was actually discussing there, it's irrelevant; the fact remains that you are making a stronger claim.
Now, with that said, scientists are indeed looking for causal phenomena and more general laws they may not have noticed before. But they keep a *broad* outlook. There are many, many shorter hypotheses to rule out before positing an additional, ontologically-fundamental "vital force" -- if in fact the "hypothesis" claims anything at all.
Oh, and what do you think about the complete overthrow of reductionism in quantum mechanics, where the behaviour of "atomic" particles turns out to be not atomic at all, but dependent instantaneously on the state of all other particles they have interacted with throughout their entire history, so that ultimately their state depends on the state of the entire universe?
Now you're just showing more ignorance of science on top of ignorance of reductionism. It was the philosophers, not physicists, who fell into the trap of thinking of particles, rather than an amplitude distribution over configurations, as being ontologically fundamental entities, and so were seduced to believe, "hah, I can say that you can never prove two electrons are identical, because that's an issue of epistemology, which I'm an expert in, rather than physics", which is wrong.
Reductionism of the kind I (and Drescher and Pearl and Jaynes and Hofstadter) endorse was never predicated on the existence of "atomic particles". Rather, it identifies where such hidden assumptions come in.
What modern quantum physics shows is that the wave equation is deterministic, and each point need only look at its immediate neighbors to iterate to the next state. See the excellent work of Gary Drescher in Good and Real: Demystifying Paradoxes from Physics to Ethics, or, for an online source, Eliezer Yudkowsky's quantum physics sequence.
2 comments:
Particle interdependence is correct, by RQT (Relative Quantum Topological) physics, atoms are standing overtone wavenodes of the U4 universe of total mass and energy. This approach develops the RQT atomic model function based on wave mechanics.
The atom's RQT (relative quantum topological) data point imaging function is built by combination of the relativistic Einstein-Lorenz transform functions for time, mass, and energy with the workon quantized electromagnetic wave equations for frequency and wavelength. The atom labeled psi (Z) pulsates at the frequency {Nhu=e/h} by cycles of {e=m(c^2)} transformation of nuclear surface mass to forcons with joule values, followed by nuclear force absorption. This radiation process is limited only by spacetime boundaries of {Gravity-Time}, where gravity is the force binding space to psi, forming the GT integral atomic wavefunction. The expression is defined as the series expansion differential of nuclear output rates with quantum symmetry numbers assigned along the progression to give topology to the solutions.
Next, the correlation function for the manifold of internal heat capacity particle 3D functions condensed due to radial force dilution is extracted; by rearranging the total internal momentum function to the photon gain rule and integrating it for GT limits. This produces a series of 26 topological waveparticle functions of five classes; {+Positron, Workon, Thermon, -Electromagneton, Magnemedon}, each the 3D data image of a type of energy intermedon of the 5/2 kT J internal energy cloud, accounting for all of them.
Those values intersect the sizes of the fundamental physical constants: h, h-bar, delta, nuclear magneton, beta magneton, k (series). They quantize nuclear dynamics by acting as fulcrum particles. The result is the picoyoctometric, 3D, interactive video atomic model data imaging function, responsive to keyboard input of virtual photon gain events by relativistic, quantized shifts of electron, force, and energy field states and positions.
Now the interdependent particle network of the U4 may be defined as a supersymmetric spacetime waveset!
Images of the h-bar magnetic energy waveparticle of ~175 picoyoctometers are available online at http://www.symmecon.com with the complete RQT atomic modeling guide titled The Crystalon Door, copyright TXu1-266-788. TCD conforms to the unopposed motion of disclosure in U.S. District (NM) Court of 04/02/2001 titled The Solution to the Equation of Schrodinger.
(C) 2009, Dale B. Ritter, B.A.
Hello nice post.
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