An overall - maybe residual - tendency? Life itself does not seem to be, to manifest, 'a "desire" to entropify.' That is, while I understand the tendency to disorder, I don't think it's quite all that simple. Do you care to assay a quick and simple definition of entropy, for present purpose? — tim wood
How do you address the objection that because no two things are ever the same, that there is no pattern except in abstraction, which is a process of the mind of the one perceiving - creating, as it were - the pattern. — tim wood
As to A's four causes, I'm having some trouble identifying the final and formal causes. And until corrected, I'm thinking that those two do not occur in nature, except in the minds that entertain them. On thinking about it, none of the four in nature. We can describe in such terms, but in as much as the causes are really answers to questions, and nature asks no questions, then how can there be causes in this Aristotelian sense in nature? — tim wood
Which of his books talk about points and quantity? — Gregory
For the rest, it appears to me that you read into nature whatever works for you. As practical science that seems about right. — tim wood
Now, however, I must ask you for a rigorous - and short - definition of pattern. — tim wood
Can you supply me with a single example of a pattern in nature for which it is scientifically accepted it has no generating process? — apokrisis
I'll be upfront. I don't like Aristotelians. — Gregory
Anyway, you proposed a generator. That word means a person who generates. — Gregory
You need desperately to put down the Aristotle and read some Freud on religion — Gregory
In a general way, we are talking about a form or state of organisation that somehow looks habitual, repetitive, meaningful, deliberate, pervasive, ordered. And thus not the opposite of being patternless - chaotic, accidental, arbitrary, lacking predictable structure.
The presence of a pattern implies a pattern generator. A finality. There is some larger process that is placing constraints on irregularity or uncertainty.
Thus a pattern does not simply exist as a result of meaningless accident as you seem to want to suggest. It has to be generated by constraints imposed on otherwise free possibility
Where modern statistical mechanics gets us to is the realisation that even the random and chaotic patterns of nature are also the product of exactly this kind of causal set-up - an Aristotelean or systems causal story. So there is nothing in nature that escapes this causal ontology as even “raw chance” is being shaped into its completely predictable patterns - if you check my citation.
There is always finality present in this sense. Even the random decay of a particle has a (Quantum) generator by virtue of the fact that we can observe its predictable statistical pattern.
If we are merely reading patterns into nature, then there would be no pattern generation machinery for science to discover and model. And really, what else defines nature than it is a pattern - a structure, a process, a system of dynamical generation or becoming?
If you want to argue this is not the case, how does science manage to extract universal strength laws of nature? What is going on there? — apokrisis
Unless I'm missing something, this settles the question. Pattern is read into nature. — tim wood
For clarity I'm taking nature as that that is at the instant, and from one instant to the next is never the same. — tim wood
No. The underlying patterns of information are the same for everyone. It's the "icons", mental constructs, that differ among observers. That's why Science is an attempt to remove the personal bias from our observations. And mathematical models (equations) are about as close as we can get to the fundamental Information patterns of reality. Unfortunately, bird concepts, translated into abstract math, would not mean much to the average human. :smile:Is Hoffman claiming that the way a bird sees the world could not be translated into a form that we could understand? — Banno
I shall now give a definition of nature, in the hopes that you will endorse it or improve on it. Nature is that which underlies perception and understanding, describable in terms of perception and understanding and reasoning thereon, but not itself knowable (in the Kantian sense). In the practical sense, (again Kantian), as the matter that is perceived, reasoned upon, and understood, eminently knowable. — tim wood
How do you address the objection that because no two things are ever the same, that there is no pattern except in abstraction, which is a process of the mind of the one perceiving - creating, as it were - the pattern. That is, sez I, no mind, no pattern. No similarities anywhere anytime anyway, except in the mind of those who pick them out. — tim wood
And mathematical models (equations) are about as close as we can get to the fundamental Information patterns of reality. — Gnomon
Any information can be encoded as a string of bits. We can then calculate the entropy of that string. — Banno
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