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Natural laws are perhaps better thought of as natural dominances |
How Holistic nature of reality both maintains Stabilities
yet also enables Real Qualitative Change, via Emergences
The initial choice, historically, by a Mankind finally beginning to emerge as an intellectual interpreter of both its World, and of its own existence, was naturally to assume the absolute generality of the Principle of Plurality, rather than the seemingly totally opposite, and much more difficult to implement Principle of Holism. It was, at that crucially emergent moment, a completely unavoidable step, if any sort of progress was then to be made.
But Plurality also simplifyingly insisted upon the fixed, or qualitatively-unchanging-nature of all elemental things and laws, whilst Holism instead rested upon the inevitability of precisely such Qualitative Changes in absolutely everything!
NOTE: Of course, Mankind's initial, primitive Reasoning had also, long before that emergent moment, subscribed to the very same premise, as a basis for beginning to cope with Reality.
And, of course, most things certainly didn't seem to change in their apparently-evident, essential-natures, "all-the-time", but, on the contrary, only in their contributing amounts (their quantities): so the assumption of qualitative constancy was the only place for an initial intellectual study to even begin. Even these could account for some "qualitative changes" in certain circumstances, assumed to be caused by many different contributory things (that were themselves merely changing purely-quantitaively), yet still enoughfor a balance of simultaneous contributions to be changed sufficiently, so that a different involved component, could move into so-called Dominance and flip a situation over into a different mode.
But, it now finally seems likely that the assumption of a Pluralist World may need to be wholly dispensed with, and the alternative assumption of a Holist World, be imported into Science to replace it, in order to tackle its increasingly numerous anomalies and contradictions, generated by that initial premise.
Now, both of these Basic Principles are clearly enabling simplifications, so a mere switch between them cannot alone solve the many epistemological difficulties that have accrued over many millennia.
Some sort of detailed review of what we mean by these apparent alternatives, must be instituted to reveal just in what ways, and how profound, the real differences are.
Plurality, the philosophical assumption underpinning Science, deals solely with qualitatively-fixed relations only, which are usually achieved by extensive and detailed farming of given situations, to remove as many simultaneously acting factors as possible, so as to ideally leave only one, and, thereafter, to continue to hold things "still" - so rigorously, in fact, that only a single relational Law would ideally remain, making its extraction, and subsequent effective use possible.
Holism rejects this conception for its unavoidable distorting of any athus-found Law, always artificially made into an eternally fixed abstraction, which never, as such, occurs naturally in Reality-as-is! The Holist alternative considers that, in every natural situation, there will always be a reasonably extensive set of different contributory factors, all acting together, and, in spite of this, seemingly indefinable complexity, does end up delivering something as an overall end-result, due to all of them doing what they do, BUT together producing a single outcome. And such results can turn out to be very different in totally unconstrained conditions.
The commonest case, in all school science experiments, was always an "overall law", which normally varied along with its multiple component factors.
Another, and different case, could be a kind of
naturally self-maintaining Stability, within which any variation tending to distiurb that Stability, would be immediately countered by an opposing reaction of another, having the very same cause - but always returning the situation back to Stability.
And, in any overall resultant Law, considered holistically, factor changes could flip it from its previous Dominant result to the opposite Sub Dominant outcome - now become the New Dominant.
NOTE: this last point is referred to somewhat early... A long and necessary diversion in establishuing a wholly New Stance, will later in this paper, reveal in full how and why this occurs!
So, the usual result by Mankind was that conditions would be increasingly controlled, enabling a reasonable approximation to an artificial wholesale Stability to be implemented, to purposely facilitate a given required use: so such careful farming of conditions, rapidly became the norm, when both revealing and then applying, assumed-to-be-eternal Laws: but NOT, it must be emphasized, to stop it varying, but, on the contrary, and mistakenly, to supposedly eliminate the effects of other simultaneously-acting laws cumulatively affecting the result by mere quantitative changes in their various contributions.
And, of course the age-old pragmatic tenet still ruled the roost ultimately, with, "If it works, it is right!"
Enabling
Technological Use rather than
Increased Understanding totally dominated Science.
So, Science developed with that always-distorting premise - that of Plurality, and, therefore, a necessary Use-Methodology, had to be involved to initially rigidly farm the conditions "to ensure that the targeted Law would be-artificially-fixed, and couldn't be "variously-affected", as it would be when occurring in Reality-as-is.
[In addition, it was also wrongly assumed that this fixed version also behaved in exactly the same way in Reality-as-is, and that the differences there were simply due to the summation of all the other, also present and similarly fixed, Laws! Whereas, holistically, all simultaneously present Laws actually modified one another: it wasn't just a simple summed Complication!]
It meant, of course, that the Pragmatic Objectives could always be the sole, aimed-for intension, so the consequent Explanatory Theory, derived from the farmed data so-obtained, was therefore wrong- and not just because of the farmed conditions (as explained above), but also, and crucially, because a Pure Form, from strictly Pluralist Mathematics, was then carefully tailored-to-fit that same already distorted data, so that the achieved formal law, as an Equation, was
doubly modified: for it was, in addition, idealist, rather than truly materialist!
And whilever it was only
pragmatic results that were required, the Technology involved could indeed deliver the required results, and so the ubiquitous method largely went unquestioned.
Nevertheless, any consequent Theory associated with that equation, would be incorrectly taken as being the required general, natural relation: the Theory, and hence the Explanatory Science so derived would necessarily be incorrect!
And, of course, as physicists delved ever deeper into Reality, the consequent inaccuracies became ever more unavoidable, and increasingly delivered debilitating anomalies in Theory via the assumed premises of Science, which inevitably began to deliver ever more contradictory results.
In addition, the devised solutions, all of which are unavoidably constrained by their basic assumptions, were forced ever deeper into the idealistic hinterlands of Pure Mathematics, in order to seek for the Perfect Forms that could be persuaded to fit!
[Isn't that exactly what Einstein did with Relativity?]
And, that could only lead away from Reality and ever deeper into Ideality, a domain of Pure Form alone, and hence the only true realm of Mathematics, and NOT in the domain of Concrete Reality- which should be the realm of Science!
NOTE: The problem was also that Mathematics had soundly started by merely being a direct Reflection of Reality: so it did contain something of that source. But, it was a distorting mirror because of its in-built and generally-and-intrinsically assumed Plurality.
NOTE: Reality has only three dimensions we can legitimately abstract, while Mathematics can have as many as you like, as long as you maintain the exact "geometric relations" between them all, that had previously been the case for the original three Spatial Dimensions alone, but could even be "philosophically" adjusted to even allow-in the admixture of Probabilities and Wave Theory - as in Copenhagen.....it appears!
And, that infers that the extra Dimensions must concretely exist, for the relations carried over from the Spatial Dimensions have to still hold in exactly the same way: and paradoxically to also NOT exist in our real space, but unseeably elsewhere, yet maintaining the very same inter-Dimensional geometrical relations both with the usual real three, and each other!
Now, as is well known in some areas of academia, ever since Zeno of Elea, certain Dichotomous Pairs of contradictory concepts, namely those of Continuity and Descreteness, could lead to nonsense when applied to certain Real World Movements, but his revelations were largely ignored, by using the pragmatic excuse of "If it works, it is right!", and it wasn't until Hegel found a solution, 2,300 years later, in the necessary modifications of their defining premises that many of these were removed.
But, of course, the ongoing problem was Plurality! For, it prohibited qualitative changes from ever occurring in such concepts. Hegel realised that such change had to be included in Reasoning, involving Dialectics as a new Science of Logic.
Now that, of course, is much easier said than done. And also this was being attempted by an idealist, who was exclusively concerned with philosophy as Human Thinking, and arguing! Whereas the required changes were even more important, essential in rescuing all the sciences, from the very same affliction.
Indeed, how would multi-factor situations actually behave, when affected by all their simultaneous and varying contributions, and even more confusingly, mutually modifying one another, as is the main premise of Holism? Just how far would the actual modifications precipitate one another, into ever more changes? Would it not be an infinite process? NO, it would not!
In Plurality, though properties would be fixed, quantitative changes would indeed be potentially infinite! But, changes, in a Holist World, would NOT be merely quantitative, but also qualitative, and such could be in any direction, so they could be either conducive or contending with respect to others - and in a multi-factor system, delivering both kinds of variation - balances at some points would become inevitable... And, never as a fixed and final result, either!
Indeed, the contending and conducive factors would be delivering a Dynamic Balance, wherein constant changes would still be involved, but changes in one could, in such a balance, be countered by opposing changes in other factors! The same disturbing factor could affect different internal factors in opposite ways.
In other words self-maintaining Stabilities, would be the most likely outcomes, some persisting so long as to appear eternal to our timescale. Stabilities which would require very significant disturbances to be fatally undermined, and which would, in such rare circumstances, ultimately totally dissociate the Stability completely.
NOTICE how far we have been transported in this endeavour, away from Pluralist Formal Logic into the dynamism of Holist Reality!
And, even at this most basic level the importance of "opposites" begins to become ever clearer.
AN IMPORTANT ASIDE:
The significance of the above ideas was demonstrated to this researcher, when theoretically investigating Pre-Life simultaneous Chemical Reactions, in particularly conducive circumstances on the early Earth.
Interestingly, I did not initally identify any individual chemical processes, with a view to defining-in-detail the ascent to the Origin of Life, via what qualities were involved at each and every step. For, I knew that such a journey would be strewn with unpredictable Emergences, and hence well beyond any theoretical means I could muster to re-construct that long trajectory.
So, I was much more interested in the dynamics involved in a proliferation of different processes, affecting one another, either conducively or contendingly, to produce ever higher levels of sub-systems, systems and super-systems via such creative events always delivering the entirely New, which would never be delivered by the usual pluralist Chemistry, as no chemical process is ever conceived-of in that way: they are all straight-forward processes with logical outcomes confined within Pluralist Science.
So, to consider such situations, holistically, would therefore involve dumping the usual pluralist methods, along with their severely constrained circumstances, producing only the revelation of single pluralist laws as the required outcomes - so, instead, considering whole collections of many simultaneous processes, all acting together, and producing a variety of products, which then, in turn, immediately became actively inolved in the overall system of processes, as a consequently constantly changimg mix, and also changing all the contributing processes, and so, importantly, changing the Contextin which all the involved processes are performing, and all of them changing somewhat along with such a varying Context.
Now, you can see why the outcomes of individual processes - all previously carried out separately in individual farmed pluralistic experiments, would certainly never suffice in determining what happens in these holist and multi-factor circumstances! So, the required focus must consider things very differently, primarily as delivering a Classical Dynamic Holistic Interlude (see The Theory of Emergences (2010) by this author), which will usually end up in a temporary, if long-lasting, Balanced Stability, with measureable overall characteristics, which can all be determined experimentally, (in the old-fashioned "Equilibrium" type experiments of the School Lab), and which will involve ongoing inter-process effects, in process-chains or even process-cycles, and with self-selected and evident Dominances, usually caused by the presence of certain resource abundances, due to current local conditions.
But, the most likely change, thereafter, without too much of a variation in the overall Stability, is usually a seemingly dramatic Switch to deliver an Opposite to the prevailing Dominance. And, believe it or not, such a switch can be explained, and with it the significance of Opposites in Holistic Dialectical situations generally.
Very different this Holist Science malarkey, isn't it!?
Now, the consideration of such a situation and its development will be qualitative rather than quantitative, and systemic rather than productive. For, in such a set of simultaneous processes, they will be not only changing each other's contexts, but also using-up or supplying each other's Resources too.
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| Connected Worlds - interactive ecosystem installation, New York |
So, processes related by the product of one, being the resource for another, will form Chains, amd even occasionally Cycles, the preponderances of available resources due to the current location will also determine which Systems are most successful, or Dominant!
Indeed, there will actually be two sets of processes benefiting from the same abundence.
The first will be those going generally in one particular direction >>
The second will be those generally going in the opposite direction <<
And, with universal competition for the very-same resource, most of both sets will lose out - all except the Dominant one in its direction, and its Opposite (sub dominant) in its contrary direction!
(Notice there is a seemingly contradictory hierarchy of opposites)
POSTSCRIPT:
The consequences for current research into the Origin of Life, of ths Holistic Approach, culminated in the Theory of Emergences (2010), which demonstrated once-and-for-all that research to re-create Life from scratch is impossible: and even much worse, that absolutely NONE of the essential interludes in that development will never be reproducable either - as they will all be the results of natural Emergences, the outcomes of which will always be impossible to predict!
A bit of a problem for science, where falsifiable predictions are so vital for proofs!
