Understanding all causes as collusion-like, & the explanatory ideal as deduction from deterministic laws, are 2 ex of a trend that has characterized the history of philo for over 2,000 yrs: the progressive elimination of time & context from metaphysics & epistemology. #Juarrero
-
-
Prikaži ovu nit
-
Since time & context play a central role in all living things,including human beings & their behaviour,action theory is thus an excllnt prism that refracts & separates two key problems in the history of Western Philo(cause & explanation)lays bare role time & context play in each.
Prikaži ovu nit -
Behaviourist analyses have tried to reduce the flexibility and appropriateness characteristic of human action to stimulus-response patterns.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
What went largely unrecognized until recently was the fact that the classical thermodynamics of the 19th century treats all systems as if they are closed, isolated & near equilibrium - which living things are not.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Over the last few decades a new branch of thermodynamics has been developed, variously called the theory of complex adaptive systems, complexity theory, & similar names, that deals w systems far from equilibrium & open in the sense that they exchange matter & energy w their envt.
Prikaži ovu nit -
Interactions among certain dynamical processes can create a systems-level organization with new properties that are not the simple sum of the components that constitute the higher level.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
The causal mechanism at work between levels of hierarchical organizations can be best understood as the operations of constraints.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
When organized into a complex, integral whole, parts become correlated as a function of context-dependent constraints imposed on them by the newly organized system in which they are now embedded.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
The more complex a system, the more states & properties it can manifest: novel charctrtcs & laws emerge w the organization of the higher level. Ex, when amino acids self-organize into a protein, the protein can carry out enzymatic functns that the amino acids on their own cannot.
Prikaži ovu nit -
Constraints work by modifying either a system’s phase space or the probability distribution of events and movements within that space.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
There is ample evidence that the human brain is a self-organized, complex adaptive system that encodes stimuli with context-sensitive constraints.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Far from representing messy, noisy complications that can be safely ignored, time and context are as central to the identity and behaviour of dynamic processes as they are to human beings.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Unlike the processes described by classical thermodynamics, which in their relentless march toward equilibrium forget their past, complex adaptive systems are essentially historical.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
If human beings and their behaviour are complex adaptive phenomena, the precise pathway that their actions will take is simply unpredictable.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Historical, interpretive stories might not allow us to predict future behaviour, but they do allow us to understand why it is unpredictable.
#Juarreropic.twitter.com/DUPCS8FQgv
Prikaži ovu nit -
Even after the advent of the theories of evolution and thermodynamics, modern science continued to restrict itself to closed linear systems abstracted from their historical and spatial context.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Only with the recent development of complexity theory have openness, nonlinearity, time, and context come to the forefront.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
-
-
How the Modern Understanding of Cause Came to Be “... philosophers are unable to conceptualize and explain either voluntary self-motion or an agent's purposive actions. As is often the case in philosophy, it all goes back to Aristotle.”
#Juarreropic.twitter.com/RD1Ji8U85K
Prikaži ovu nit -
In a universe where only point masses and forces are considered real, qualities that are a function of the relation between atoms, or between organisms and the world, were dismissed as subjective.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
By the end of the 17th century, all relational properties, such as temperature and colour, that did not fit into this scheme were relegated to the inferior status of “secondary” qualities.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Galileo's ability to set aside the interference of friction from the equations governing the motion of bodies also suggested that context contributes nothing to reality.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Once atomism became the ruling conceptual framework, context environment were left without a role to play in either science or philosophy. Indexicals such as here & there, this & that, now & then, lost their claim on reality as situatedness and point of view became unimportant.
Prikaži ovu nit -
Newtonian atomism reduced the universe to the relations between single material points whose movements from one position to another are time-reversible.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
With this principle of time-reversibility, Newton’s heirs dealt the final blow to Aristotle’s concept of final cause by dismissing as illusory the apparent unidirectionality displayed both in the devlmnt of organic forms & by the aimed-for goal-directedness of intentional behvr.
Prikaži ovu nit -
True self-cause would involve localized parts interacting so as to produce wholes that in turn, as distributed wholes, could influence their components: interlevel causality between parts and wholes. ~>
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
<~ But by following Aristotle in rejecting this possibility, philosophy closed off any avenue for explaining action in that fashion.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
Whether in dualist or materialist guise, and suitably identified as an intention, volition, want-and-belief complex, and the like, cause of action, following Aristotle, have been assumed to be events entirely inside the agent but other than the behaviour itself.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit -
A worldview with a strobelike understanding of time (as well as a gunshot view of cause) has no way of determining when “now” ends and “then” begins.
#JuarreroPrikaži ovu nit - Još 288 drugih odgovora
Novi razgovor -
Čini se da učitavanje traje već neko vrijeme.
Twitter je možda preopterećen ili ima kratkotrajnih poteškoća u radu. Pokušajte ponovno ili potražite dodatne informacije u odjeljku Status Twittera.