Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Pressure… in a vacuum?

I am greatly intrigued by the concept of natural selection (NS). In this post I would like to consider three aspects of the theory which I think place it in a proper metaphysical setting and, as a consequence, complicate the appearance of its scientific hegemony.

My first claim concerns the logical vs. empirical status of NS. Is NS logically necessary? Are logical axioms falsifiable and, therefore, are they properly scientific? Is NS a 'first principle' of reason? (Also, every 150 years or so in the hx of science….)

My second line of inquiry concerns the coherence (or incoherence) of cosmological NS à la Lee Smolin, Max Tegmark, i.a. What sort of pressure can a quantum vacuum put on its decoherent universes? If the quantum vacuum is all that there is ab initio, what conceivable "environment" is there with and "in" which it can interact in a thermodynamically irreversible way (i.e., instance a wave function collapse)? If they are causally impermeable to each other, what sort of selection pressure can "competing cosmoi" put on each other? Is Being as such a potentially "scarce resource" that limits ontic proliferation?

My third point concerns the metaphysical presuppositions of NS. If "irreducible complexity" is to have any bearing on design and order vis-à-vis NS, it must be a metaphysical principle of nature as such, and, as Ray Michuga has argued, not merely a quantitative principle of material complexity. (Cf. Klee on "ordered diversity".)

WORK IN PROGRESS…

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