Bertvan:
Hi Kevin. I remember when Freudians proved that traumatic childhoods
produced "damaged" adults. Psychiatrists invariably found what they were
looking for. I accept that bacteria and protists *generally* respond to
external environmental signals. I wonder if those measurements are precise
enough to eliminate all possibility of spontaneity. Science has discovered
general causal relationships. Are those relationships absolute? How does
science explain the exceptions?
Kevin:
>That's just the point, though. Chris' protocol is theoretically feasible;
whether it >will ever be practically feasible is another matter. Being
theoretically feasible, >however, there is no _a priori_ reason why we should
not expect it to work.
Bertvan:
There is no _a priori_ reason to expect determinism to be true--or false.
Martialists apparently believe every event has a direct, material,
measurable, predictable cause. Nothing happens with out a cause. Am I
correct? Is that a law of nature or a law articulated by man in order to
condense nature into something comprehensible to the human mind? Or is it a
claim by science that nothing shall exist which science can't explain.
Kevin:
>Again, that's just the point. Science is defined by the method it uses,
which is in >turn defined by its underlying assumptions. One of those
assumptions is >methodological determinism. No scientist is required to
believe in philosophical >determinism (I certainly do not), but to be a
working scientist he must accept that >one of the assumptions of science is
that specific physical events have specific >physical causes that can in
principle be investigated and eventually understood. >To reject this is in
essence to reject the scientific method.
Bertvan:
I thought methodological naturalism meant that measurable, physical causes
were all science could address. To state that
" specific physical events have specific physical causes that can in
principle be investigated and eventually understood."
is philosophical naturalism. You say it is merely an assumption scientists
must make in order to do science. Why should scientists be forced to make a
possibly false assumption? Perhaps scientists could be more productive if
they weren't forced to make this assumption. I hope there are some
scientists who assume there is more to nature than simplistic formulas which
appear to explain everything, and who are more interested in the exceptions.
A scientist who is satisfied with "random mutation and natural selection"
isn't likely to exert much energy looking for other explanations, is he?
Bertvan