I wrote:
"Your use of the term 'philosophical quagmire' appears to be a
pejorative. Maybe you don't mean it that way though. Do you eschew all
philosophical discussions?"
No of course not. But philosphy excells when it deals with subjects that
have no basis in physical reality. Remember the "pink elephant"
syllogism?
It goes:
All elephants are pink;
Nellie is an elephant,
Therefore Nellie is pink.
If you tell this to a philosopher, he would ask you to defend your
premise
that all elephants are pink. If you can do that, then he will accept it,
even though there is no such thing as pink elephants. If, however, if
you
tell this to a scientist, he would ask you to provide evidence that pink
elephants exist. If you can't, he won't accept it no matter how
flawlessly
logical your argument is; if you try to use philosophical arguments he
will
reject them. The reason is very simple: pink elephants do not exist in
reality. Science can only deal with what can be tested against physical,
whereas philosophy routinely deals with what cannot be tested against
physical reality. As such, whenever philosophy tries to describe
physical
reality the results are often more comical then enlightening. The pink
elephant syllogism is one example of this..."
Amazing. Logic, of course, is a necessary part of philosophy, but hardly
he most interesting part.
I'll leave it for someone who is in the "philosophy business" to answer
you, if they wish.
----------------------------------
You go on to say:
"Therefore both
historical abiogenesis (what you call abiogenesis(1)) and abiogenetic
mechanisms (what you call abiogenesis(2)) will be verified or refuted by
science, not philosophy."
I am glad you can now see the difference.
Abiogenesis(1) having been a process that (possibly) operated in the past
can, of course, never be either verified or refuted by science.
Abiogenesis(2) may, indeed, someday be verified; it can never be refuted.
That's sort of basic to the science I know. (1) You cannot prove a
negative and (2) you really cannot "prove" a theory -- although you can
falsify one, and you can establish one well enough to call it a "fact,"
(such as the sun will rise again tomorrow morning).
-----------------------------------------
When I wrote:
"Do I understand, then, that a 'biological chemical' is
of absolutely no use in a non-biological environment?"
You replied:
"That is basically correct; otherwise we would see biomolecules being
used
routinely by non-biological systems, which we do not."
This answer tells me rather more about your mindset than about
biomolecules.
However, I'll let that thread drop.
----------------------
I wrote:
"And if we define the word abiogenesis differently, using
it to refer to, explicitly, the assumed process which operated to develop
life from non life, then the two experiments may, or may not, have
anything
to do with it."
And you, mysteriously, answered:
"And as I have already pointed numerous times, this is not a valid
scientific
definition of abiogenesis."
Well, you don't accept my definition even for the sake of discussion,
even though it is used that way in many places, and you don't accept
Brian Harper's offer to use other terminology. So it appears there is not
much more to talk about here.
------------------------
Finally, you wrote:
"Whether you accept the label (Vitalist) or not, if you believe that life
cannot be
explained in material terems alone (_The Oxford Companion to Philosophy_)
then you are a vitalist. And you have made that belief abundantly
clear."
As I pointed out once before, I consider it rude and uncivil to affix a
label to anyone who does not claim it. You have done this to me twice.
There are three possibilities wrt this particular label.
(1) a person claims to be a vitalist.
(2) a person claims to be a non-vitalist, or "anti-vitalist. You,
apparently, would accept this term.
(3) a person neither claims, nor disclaims, the term "vitalist."
Since the ending "ist" usually means someone who goes about lobbying for
whatever is in front of the "ist," I continue to describe my position as
#3.
------------
>From your second message...
"Let me quote again
from _The Oxford Companion to Philosophy_ under the entry for life (this
comes from the essay "What is life?" by JBS Haldane..."
Thank you for the definition. It does not have anything much to do with
our
disagreement, IMHO, but it is tangentially interesting none the less.
-----------
I wrote:
"In my discussion with Joseph, I was deliberately using the word
'abiogenesis' in the way Huxley defined it in 1870, to mean that process
which we assume (scientifically) to have taken place long ago, a process
which we hold (scientifically) to have led from non-life to life."
You answered:
"Note how old that definition is, older even than most of what we would
learn
about metabolic processes. It is hopelessly obsolete. Were Huxley alive
today I'm sure he would reword it in keeping with modern biological
knowledge."
It is apparent to me that you have 0 interest in exploring a subject from
any POV than your own. That means we are about done.
----------------------------
"You want to hang onto an obsolete definition because it allows you
to avoid scientific reality."
That's both a "silly" statement as well as a pejorative.
---------------------------
And lastly, I wrote, trying one more time to "hook your adult:"
"That is why I carefully defined 'abiogenesis(1) and abiogenesis(2)'.
They
refer to different things. The first to one or more presumably historical
processes, the second to a multitude of present day lab procedures, both
real and speculative."
And you came back with:
"Both of which we now know from biological science are one and the
same,..."
My friend, you doth claim far too much in that statement.
Burgy
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