On enchantment and disenchantment, Mammon, "Thomism," capitalism, Christian socialism, Ruskin and Morris and Tawney, Marxism, transhumanism, Romanticism, universalism...inter alia...
Thank you for putting this out. I’m increasingly excited for the eventual book on Christian politics/economics that I believe (maybe mistakenly) was alluded to in your recent speech about the future of Christianity.
I was wondering if you could point me to a book or two in addition to "life itself" that would expand upon what you said about the sciences not being reducible to physics and/or math. I can understand this with regard to biology. As a chemist myself though, I don't see how this applies. Everything in chemistry seems to be straightforwardardly just physics. As for this reducing all physics to math, I'm not so sure, but to me I sort of glimpse something beautiful here in the idea that mind is so transparent to world that math is just another language describing fundamental structures of reality. But like Socrates in Gorgias I'd love to be refuted. Excellent discussion, I'd love to see more with him!
Chemistry isn’t just physics all the way down, surely. If it were, one could directly deduce the laws of chemistry from the laws of physics, but that’s not the case. Once one knows the laws of chemistry, one can reduce their lawfulness to the physical laws underlying them; but that’s very different.
Of course physics is describable by mathematical quantification. But mathematics does not allow one to deduce the existence and nature of the physical realm. At each stage, there are laws that constitute the limit-conditions of any supervenient reality. But that isn’t the same thing as reductionism.
"If it were, one could directly deduce the laws of chemistry from the laws of physics, but that’s not the case"
I think most chemists would say this is not because it's fundamentally impossible, but merely because ab initio quantum chemistry requires enormous amounts of computing power for more complex molecules, while it has been quite successful for the simpler molecules where we do have sufficient computing power. I don't think there are examples where it seems on theoretical grounds that we have enough computing power to get an accurate solution to the Schrodinger equation for a given type of molecule, but it predicts behavior that disagrees with empirical observations. So isn't it reasonable to make the inductive leap that more and more of chemical behavior will prove to be directly derivable from physics as computing power expands?
No. It is in fact logically impossible that the laws of physics could yield the laws of chemistry by mere calculation or computation, because those laws are structurally supervenient. But the laws of chemistry are much closer to those of physics than the laws of biology are to those of chemistry. Life entails a hermeneutic layer of structure (in actual coding) which has no physical existence at all. When an RNA polymerase reads out the templates recorded in DNA, it is engaged in a process that has a totally non-physical level of operation.
"It is in fact logically impossible that the laws of physics could yield the laws of chemistry by mere calculation or computation, because those laws are structurally supervenient."
When I refer to calculative reductionism I am not referring to any conceptual notion of higher level laws, simply to the physical motions that these laws are intended to predict. For example, say an ab initio simulation can accurately predict the motions of all the component parts of all the molecules in the simulation as they interact (positions of individual particles or their wavefunctions over time)--are you saying that itself is impossible a priori on purely logical grounds, or are you just making the point that even if we could reproduce those motions in a physics-based simulation, that would itself be insufficient to give us higher level chemical laws at a conceptual, ontological etc. level?
OK, I would say that in that sense the higher level rules of glider behavior (that they continually move diagonally unless blocked etc.) in the Game of Life would also not be reducible to the underlying laws governing cell behavior in a conceptual sense, even if they are reducible in this purely calculative sense of how their component parts change over time (I'll leave aside the question of the ontological status of higher-level 'laws' in a cellular automaton). Also, when it comes to living organisms going about their daily business, do you have any strong philosophical or scientific objections to the idea that the motions of all their component particles might in principle be derivable from physics in this purely calculative sense?
I think I see. Your saying that once we know certain things about chemistry like le chateliers principle, the nernst equation, beer's law, VSEPR and molecular orbital theory, once we know we can see how they came about from physics but could never have straightforwardly deduced them given only the laws of physics? I can sort of see that, but at a certain point I think it gets blurry. For instance physics and chemistry majors both took physical chemistry together at my school since quantum mechanics seems to be part of both disciplines. I still have a hard time seeing how it isn't all just one thing that we put sort of arbitrary boundaries around out of convenience which we see more obviously in the case of something like quantum mechanics. I know in general it's probably not possible or desirable to make hard and fast, rigid boundaries around each discipline, but under your formulation I think one would have to make some sort of attempt at doing so, for it to be coherent. Do you recommend any book length treatments of this? Thank you for your answer by the way.
What’s wrong with the books I already mentioned, by Robert Rosen?
Not exactly. I mean that there are concepts in chemistry not reducible to physics, but merely constrained by the laws of physics. Physics is part of all sciences, at every level, as is mathematics. Every supervenient reality is constrained by its subvenient basis. But that doesn’t mean that one simply sees how the higher level of organization “came from” the lower.
Freeman Dyson: “But the reduction of other sciences to physics does not work. Chemistry has its own concepts, not reducible to physics. Biology and neurology have their own concepts not reducible to physics or to chemistry. The way to understand a living cell or a living brain is not to consider it as a collection of atoms. Chemistry and biology and neurology will continue to advance and to make new fundamental discoveries, no matter what happens to physics. The territory of new sciences, outside the narrow domain of theoretical physics, will continue to expand.”
Thank you. I will check out Robert Rosen's work. I appreciate the Freeman Dyson quote. That clears it up more. So to make sure I understand tell me if I have this correct. Crudely, mathematics is subvenient to physics which is subvenient to chemistry which is subvenient to biology, but subvenience doesn't mean reducible to.
Does this mean top down and bottom up views carry equal weight?
Yes. Or, as Aristotle would say, each level of subvenience is a material cause to the immediately supervenient, and each level of supervenience is a formal cause to the immediately subvenient.
The neo-Aristotelian movements in biology and in dispositional metaphysics all come from this problem of irreducibility on the one hand and the incoherence of strong emergence on the other.
And even for physics and maths, this is sensible—after all, while physical models are described using mathematics, they themselves are not derivable *from* mathematics. We use mathematics as a tool to model the relations between things, but try as you might, you will never pull a Lagrangian out of the top hat, as its fundamentally a result of bringing mathematics to understand nature.
I might stand with you with chemistry, though, if only because of the remarkable success of ab inito methods (which aren’t perfect, of course, as the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation is not the end all be all), and I haven’t run into anything in chemistry I’d call truly irreducible.
There’s nothing in chemistry that’s irreducible. That’s not the issue. The laws of chemistry are not simply reducible to the lawfulness of physics. I recommend the work of Robin Hendry.
I think it's useful to distinguish a purely calculative notion of "reductionism" from other versions of reductionism like conceptual reductionism, ontological reductionism, or methodological reductionism. For example in an address at https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~yymao/misc/Einstein_PlanckBirthday.html Einstein said:
"But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?
"In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle."
A modern way of stating this view would be in terms of computer simulations. A calculative reductionist would believe that *in principle* if we had a giant computer capable of calculating the evolution of a very complicated physical system (say, the entire solar system) using the laws of physics alone, it would accurately reproduce all the characteristic physical behaviors of the real thing, including living organisms on planet Earth. But even when studying the output of such a simulation, which we know was generated by a computer that was calculating everything based on the laws of physics and nothing else, we might still see it as conceptually important to refer to higher-level categories and laws that aren't part of physics, like laws of biology or geology, and to say that anyone ignorant of such laws lacked sufficient understanding of what they were seeing. Daniel Dennett has a good discussion of the need for higher level categories in his book Freedom Evolves, where he uses the example of cellular automata like "the Game of Life" which evolve according to very simple underlying rules, but which show emergent higher-level patterns like "gliders" that observers find it conceptually useful to come up with distinct names for.
No. I believe all of this to be absolutely false. Sorry. It sounds right, but it has proved logically and empirically sterile to assume the possibility of deducing system-level complexity from basic physical laws. In fact, the issue is largely a dead one.
The Game of Life shows nothing at all in the way of emergent laws of higher-level patterns. It occurs within a quarantined topology governed by arbitrary rules which produce patterns of contiguous cells in repeating--not replicating--complexity. But that tells us nothing at all about actual integrations of systems, organized processes of replication, systems that exist genuinely far from equilibrium, or anything remotely analogous to, say, life or mind.
What does any of this tell us, other than that we can affix terms like “evolution” and “reproduction” both to structural amplifications of geometric patterns of contiguous squares in a controlled, unchanging virtual space and also to actual adaptive and replicating organisms in constantly changing environments, sustaining themselves metabolically and reproducing their own ontogenies in subsequent generations of distinct organisms? The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals. Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments. Crystals are internally inert, in a state very near equilibrium indeed. And infinitely more inert than crystals are patterns of squares on a grid, not integrated with one another internally but merely juxtaposed to one another extrinsically by artificial protocols in a sterile stochastic arena with a bounded topology. That’s a model not so much of life as of metastasis.
I also regard Freedom Evolves as an absolute mess of a book.
By "logically and empirically sterile" are you referring to philosophical objections or scientific ones? It seems to me that the idea of the in-principle possibility of calculative reductionism has been a very successful working assumption in all the natural sciences. In my other comment I noted the continual expansion of how many chemical properties can be deduced from physics alone--for example, in an interview at https://www.webofstories.com/play/ernst.mayr/140 Ernst Mayr used the example of the behavior of water molecules to support his own anti-reductionism, but in the years since most of the behavior of small collections of water molecules has been successfully reproduced in physics-based simulations, as at https://www1.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2007/mar/water030207.html and https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14358
Of course as I noted there are still plenty of more complex molecules whose behavior can't be derived from physics, but there's no good scientific argument that this is a matter of fundamental principle rather than current lack of sufficient computing power. And at each level of nature we seem to see a similar pattern of expanding partial reductions, for increasing amounts of the behavior of cells being explainable in terms of chemical interactions of biomolecules, more of the formation of patterns in early stages of embryological growth being explainable in terms of chemical and mechanical interactions between cells, etc.
"The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals."
Sure, I'm not claiming otherwise, but even crystals are an example where we would still find it useful conceptually to refer to higher-level structures and laws of growth even if we successfully derived their behavior entirely from physics; I brought up cellular automata solely to illustrate the point about calculative reductionism being distinct from conceptual reductionism, not to suggest they exhibit anything close to the richness of our world and its own laws (this was how I understood Dennett's point as well).
"Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments."
Yes, but far from equilibrium systems and their environments can be simulated using physics as well (this was why in my thought-experiment I imagined simulating the whole solar system rather than just the Earth, so that we could imagine simulated life on Earth was being sustained by light from a simulated sun). Also note that Schrodinger's "What is Life?" was perhaps the first work to analyze life in thermodynamic terms as systems that maintain low entropy by "feeding" on low-entropy sources (like visible light) and dissipating higher-entropy waste products (like waste heat dissipated partially as infrared light of the same frequency as a 'blackbody' at equilibrium at the same temperature), but from various comments of his I gather he would have endorsed the same sort of calculative reductionism as Einstein, so he apparently saw no conflict.
Rich conversation indeed. I put the quote below together with your name and a lovely image of some stars. It’s generating some consternation:
“Dante got it right. The love that moves the sun and all the other stars is actually not a pious claim. It's not a metaphysical claim. It's actually a claim about physics.“
Dr. Hart, if I understand your comments on love towards the end correctly, are you suggesting that love could be a basic causal power binding causal relations (even those in basic physics) together? I have often speculated along these lines myself. Might it be that pleasure and pain didn't emerge out of nothingness during the course of animal evolution, but are actually fundamental properties of the world that were later co-opted by natural selection to motivate new fitness improving behaviours?
Wonderful interview! Thank you for sharing. I suppose there's something apropos about discussing re-enchantment and the fragility of the terrestrial biome with a voice made hoarse by wildfire smoke, but all the same, I hope you feel better soon.
There is indeed some resemblance to Ronald Colman, but would say that Mr McCarraher looks more like Charles Dance. All in all, not a bad-looking group of lookalikes.
Interesting conversation on Marxism. FWIW, I’m a student of Fred Jameson, and he holds there to be a perpetual relation between base and superstructure, but not a determination, and he certainly still considers himself to be a Marxist. I suppose it comes down to this label meaning different things to different people. Anyway he knows far more about this than either you or I do.
Yeah, Engels is mostly to blame for the reductive base/superstructure concept, though even he qualifies it severely. It's a very outdated idea from mostly discredited orthodox Marxism. If you read Jameson or Raymond Williams or Adorno or any of the newer value theorists, you won't find this concept presented in such a deterministic fashion. For Jameson, for instance, in The Political Unconscious, the *entire* mode of production in its system of relations has to be considered—far from narrowly economic, this includes education, politics, culture, etc. And that's in 1981. More recently, theorists like Postone or Heinrich or the Endnotes collective have shown just how far from the vulgar "base/superstructure" model Marx in Capital actually is. Marx was interpreted badly for decades. He has been interpreted much more astutely since—starting with, perhaps, Rubin & the Frankfurt School, Mandel, then the neue Marx lekture, etc. Not to engage with this stuff is just not to engage with Marxism. It's like talking about physics as if the field stopped at relativity.
Thank you for putting this out. I’m increasingly excited for the eventual book on Christian politics/economics that I believe (maybe mistakenly) was alluded to in your recent speech about the future of Christianity.
This is the interview I’ve been waiting for - can’t wait to listen!
I was wondering if you could point me to a book or two in addition to "life itself" that would expand upon what you said about the sciences not being reducible to physics and/or math. I can understand this with regard to biology. As a chemist myself though, I don't see how this applies. Everything in chemistry seems to be straightforwardardly just physics. As for this reducing all physics to math, I'm not so sure, but to me I sort of glimpse something beautiful here in the idea that mind is so transparent to world that math is just another language describing fundamental structures of reality. But like Socrates in Gorgias I'd love to be refuted. Excellent discussion, I'd love to see more with him!
Chemistry isn’t just physics all the way down, surely. If it were, one could directly deduce the laws of chemistry from the laws of physics, but that’s not the case. Once one knows the laws of chemistry, one can reduce their lawfulness to the physical laws underlying them; but that’s very different.
Of course physics is describable by mathematical quantification. But mathematics does not allow one to deduce the existence and nature of the physical realm. At each stage, there are laws that constitute the limit-conditions of any supervenient reality. But that isn’t the same thing as reductionism.
"If it were, one could directly deduce the laws of chemistry from the laws of physics, but that’s not the case"
I think most chemists would say this is not because it's fundamentally impossible, but merely because ab initio quantum chemistry requires enormous amounts of computing power for more complex molecules, while it has been quite successful for the simpler molecules where we do have sufficient computing power. I don't think there are examples where it seems on theoretical grounds that we have enough computing power to get an accurate solution to the Schrodinger equation for a given type of molecule, but it predicts behavior that disagrees with empirical observations. So isn't it reasonable to make the inductive leap that more and more of chemical behavior will prove to be directly derivable from physics as computing power expands?
No. It is in fact logically impossible that the laws of physics could yield the laws of chemistry by mere calculation or computation, because those laws are structurally supervenient. But the laws of chemistry are much closer to those of physics than the laws of biology are to those of chemistry. Life entails a hermeneutic layer of structure (in actual coding) which has no physical existence at all. When an RNA polymerase reads out the templates recorded in DNA, it is engaged in a process that has a totally non-physical level of operation.
"It is in fact logically impossible that the laws of physics could yield the laws of chemistry by mere calculation or computation, because those laws are structurally supervenient."
When I refer to calculative reductionism I am not referring to any conceptual notion of higher level laws, simply to the physical motions that these laws are intended to predict. For example, say an ab initio simulation can accurately predict the motions of all the component parts of all the molecules in the simulation as they interact (positions of individual particles or their wavefunctions over time)--are you saying that itself is impossible a priori on purely logical grounds, or are you just making the point that even if we could reproduce those motions in a physics-based simulation, that would itself be insufficient to give us higher level chemical laws at a conceptual, ontological etc. level?
The latter.
OK, I would say that in that sense the higher level rules of glider behavior (that they continually move diagonally unless blocked etc.) in the Game of Life would also not be reducible to the underlying laws governing cell behavior in a conceptual sense, even if they are reducible in this purely calculative sense of how their component parts change over time (I'll leave aside the question of the ontological status of higher-level 'laws' in a cellular automaton). Also, when it comes to living organisms going about their daily business, do you have any strong philosophical or scientific objections to the idea that the motions of all their component particles might in principle be derivable from physics in this purely calculative sense?
I think I see. Your saying that once we know certain things about chemistry like le chateliers principle, the nernst equation, beer's law, VSEPR and molecular orbital theory, once we know we can see how they came about from physics but could never have straightforwardly deduced them given only the laws of physics? I can sort of see that, but at a certain point I think it gets blurry. For instance physics and chemistry majors both took physical chemistry together at my school since quantum mechanics seems to be part of both disciplines. I still have a hard time seeing how it isn't all just one thing that we put sort of arbitrary boundaries around out of convenience which we see more obviously in the case of something like quantum mechanics. I know in general it's probably not possible or desirable to make hard and fast, rigid boundaries around each discipline, but under your formulation I think one would have to make some sort of attempt at doing so, for it to be coherent. Do you recommend any book length treatments of this? Thank you for your answer by the way.
What’s wrong with the books I already mentioned, by Robert Rosen?
Not exactly. I mean that there are concepts in chemistry not reducible to physics, but merely constrained by the laws of physics. Physics is part of all sciences, at every level, as is mathematics. Every supervenient reality is constrained by its subvenient basis. But that doesn’t mean that one simply sees how the higher level of organization “came from” the lower.
Freeman Dyson: “But the reduction of other sciences to physics does not work. Chemistry has its own concepts, not reducible to physics. Biology and neurology have their own concepts not reducible to physics or to chemistry. The way to understand a living cell or a living brain is not to consider it as a collection of atoms. Chemistry and biology and neurology will continue to advance and to make new fundamental discoveries, no matter what happens to physics. The territory of new sciences, outside the narrow domain of theoretical physics, will continue to expand.”
Thank you. I will check out Robert Rosen's work. I appreciate the Freeman Dyson quote. That clears it up more. So to make sure I understand tell me if I have this correct. Crudely, mathematics is subvenient to physics which is subvenient to chemistry which is subvenient to biology, but subvenience doesn't mean reducible to.
Does this mean top down and bottom up views carry equal weight?
Yes. Or, as Aristotle would say, each level of subvenience is a material cause to the immediately supervenient, and each level of supervenience is a formal cause to the immediately subvenient.
The neo-Aristotelian movements in biology and in dispositional metaphysics all come from this problem of irreducibility on the one hand and the incoherence of strong emergence on the other.
And even for physics and maths, this is sensible—after all, while physical models are described using mathematics, they themselves are not derivable *from* mathematics. We use mathematics as a tool to model the relations between things, but try as you might, you will never pull a Lagrangian out of the top hat, as its fundamentally a result of bringing mathematics to understand nature.
I might stand with you with chemistry, though, if only because of the remarkable success of ab inito methods (which aren’t perfect, of course, as the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation is not the end all be all), and I haven’t run into anything in chemistry I’d call truly irreducible.
There’s nothing in chemistry that’s irreducible. That’s not the issue. The laws of chemistry are not simply reducible to the lawfulness of physics. I recommend the work of Robin Hendry.
I think it's useful to distinguish a purely calculative notion of "reductionism" from other versions of reductionism like conceptual reductionism, ontological reductionism, or methodological reductionism. For example in an address at https://www.site.uottawa.ca/~yymao/misc/Einstein_PlanckBirthday.html Einstein said:
"But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?
"In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle."
A modern way of stating this view would be in terms of computer simulations. A calculative reductionist would believe that *in principle* if we had a giant computer capable of calculating the evolution of a very complicated physical system (say, the entire solar system) using the laws of physics alone, it would accurately reproduce all the characteristic physical behaviors of the real thing, including living organisms on planet Earth. But even when studying the output of such a simulation, which we know was generated by a computer that was calculating everything based on the laws of physics and nothing else, we might still see it as conceptually important to refer to higher-level categories and laws that aren't part of physics, like laws of biology or geology, and to say that anyone ignorant of such laws lacked sufficient understanding of what they were seeing. Daniel Dennett has a good discussion of the need for higher level categories in his book Freedom Evolves, where he uses the example of cellular automata like "the Game of Life" which evolve according to very simple underlying rules, but which show emergent higher-level patterns like "gliders" that observers find it conceptually useful to come up with distinct names for.
No. I believe all of this to be absolutely false. Sorry. It sounds right, but it has proved logically and empirically sterile to assume the possibility of deducing system-level complexity from basic physical laws. In fact, the issue is largely a dead one.
The Game of Life shows nothing at all in the way of emergent laws of higher-level patterns. It occurs within a quarantined topology governed by arbitrary rules which produce patterns of contiguous cells in repeating--not replicating--complexity. But that tells us nothing at all about actual integrations of systems, organized processes of replication, systems that exist genuinely far from equilibrium, or anything remotely analogous to, say, life or mind.
What does any of this tell us, other than that we can affix terms like “evolution” and “reproduction” both to structural amplifications of geometric patterns of contiguous squares in a controlled, unchanging virtual space and also to actual adaptive and replicating organisms in constantly changing environments, sustaining themselves metabolically and reproducing their own ontogenies in subsequent generations of distinct organisms? The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals. Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments. Crystals are internally inert, in a state very near equilibrium indeed. And infinitely more inert than crystals are patterns of squares on a grid, not integrated with one another internally but merely juxtaposed to one another extrinsically by artificial protocols in a sterile stochastic arena with a bounded topology. That’s a model not so much of life as of metastasis.
I also regard Freedom Evolves as an absolute mess of a book.
By "logically and empirically sterile" are you referring to philosophical objections or scientific ones? It seems to me that the idea of the in-principle possibility of calculative reductionism has been a very successful working assumption in all the natural sciences. In my other comment I noted the continual expansion of how many chemical properties can be deduced from physics alone--for example, in an interview at https://www.webofstories.com/play/ernst.mayr/140 Ernst Mayr used the example of the behavior of water molecules to support his own anti-reductionism, but in the years since most of the behavior of small collections of water molecules has been successfully reproduced in physics-based simulations, as at https://www1.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2007/mar/water030207.html and https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14358
Of course as I noted there are still plenty of more complex molecules whose behavior can't be derived from physics, but there's no good scientific argument that this is a matter of fundamental principle rather than current lack of sufficient computing power. And at each level of nature we seem to see a similar pattern of expanding partial reductions, for increasing amounts of the behavior of cells being explainable in terms of chemical interactions of biomolecules, more of the formation of patterns in early stages of embryological growth being explainable in terms of chemical and mechanical interactions between cells, etc.
"The actual analogy, though, is less than tenuous. Again, I can’t see anything in cellular automata more interesting than the geometries of growing crystals."
Sure, I'm not claiming otherwise, but even crystals are an example where we would still find it useful conceptually to refer to higher-level structures and laws of growth even if we successfully derived their behavior entirely from physics; I brought up cellular automata solely to illustrate the point about calculative reductionism being distinct from conceptual reductionism, not to suggest they exhibit anything close to the richness of our world and its own laws (this was how I understood Dennett's point as well).
"Organisms are open systems that exist far from equilibrium, constantly internally converting materials into energy metabolically in dynamic relation to their environments."
Yes, but far from equilibrium systems and their environments can be simulated using physics as well (this was why in my thought-experiment I imagined simulating the whole solar system rather than just the Earth, so that we could imagine simulated life on Earth was being sustained by light from a simulated sun). Also note that Schrodinger's "What is Life?" was perhaps the first work to analyze life in thermodynamic terms as systems that maintain low entropy by "feeding" on low-entropy sources (like visible light) and dissipating higher-entropy waste products (like waste heat dissipated partially as infrared light of the same frequency as a 'blackbody' at equilibrium at the same temperature), but from various comments of his I gather he would have endorsed the same sort of calculative reductionism as Einstein, so he apparently saw no conflict.
I believe there’s a good Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the issue.
The comments on love near the end remind me very much of Solovyov's _The Meaning of Love_ (with its introduction by Owen Barfield).
I've long wanted Dr. Hart to bring in solovyov into his conversations. I actually learned about him through a book on Justice and mercy.
Rich conversation indeed. I put the quote below together with your name and a lovely image of some stars. It’s generating some consternation:
“Dante got it right. The love that moves the sun and all the other stars is actually not a pious claim. It's not a metaphysical claim. It's actually a claim about physics.“
Thank you for this great conversation. Especially the absurdity of the integralist endeavor.
You have great friends Dr. Hart. I learn a lot from your conversations with them.
Dr. Hart, if I understand your comments on love towards the end correctly, are you suggesting that love could be a basic causal power binding causal relations (even those in basic physics) together? I have often speculated along these lines myself. Might it be that pleasure and pain didn't emerge out of nothingness during the course of animal evolution, but are actually fundamental properties of the world that were later co-opted by natural selection to motivate new fitness improving behaviours?
Wonderful interview! Thank you for sharing. I suppose there's something apropos about discussing re-enchantment and the fragility of the terrestrial biome with a voice made hoarse by wildfire smoke, but all the same, I hope you feel better soon.
There is indeed some resemblance to Ronald Colman, but would say that Mr McCarraher looks more like Charles Dance. All in all, not a bad-looking group of lookalikes.
Interesting conversation on Marxism. FWIW, I’m a student of Fred Jameson, and he holds there to be a perpetual relation between base and superstructure, but not a determination, and he certainly still considers himself to be a Marxist. I suppose it comes down to this label meaning different things to different people. Anyway he knows far more about this than either you or I do.
Yeah, Engels is mostly to blame for the reductive base/superstructure concept, though even he qualifies it severely. It's a very outdated idea from mostly discredited orthodox Marxism. If you read Jameson or Raymond Williams or Adorno or any of the newer value theorists, you won't find this concept presented in such a deterministic fashion. For Jameson, for instance, in The Political Unconscious, the *entire* mode of production in its system of relations has to be considered—far from narrowly economic, this includes education, politics, culture, etc. And that's in 1981. More recently, theorists like Postone or Heinrich or the Endnotes collective have shown just how far from the vulgar "base/superstructure" model Marx in Capital actually is. Marx was interpreted badly for decades. He has been interpreted much more astutely since—starting with, perhaps, Rubin & the Frankfurt School, Mandel, then the neue Marx lekture, etc. Not to engage with this stuff is just not to engage with Marxism. It's like talking about physics as if the field stopped at relativity.