Re: [Fis] consilience of limited observers

Folks,

   Recent exchanges between Aleks, Loet, Malcolm, Pedro and Stan are
intriguing. Then, let me add my piece to the already flourishing venue.

   Consilience must be a wonderful middleman if we restrict ourselves to
third person descriptions in the present tense. For third person
descriptions as a means of practicing sciences share one thing in common.
That is unbounded spacetime continuum since every statement precipitated
there is claimed to be valid whenever and wherever. Even general relativity
committed to local description of the spacetime continuum internally
presumes the legitimacy of the externalist stance as admitting the global
stipulation such that the spacetime continuum would be flat without limits
if matter is absent. That's fine.

   On the other hand, the spatio-temporal horizon to any biological
organisms even including human beings remains finite and bounded. A
bacterium tumbling its body for foods is agential in that it has to
compensate for the incurred energy expenditure in any case even if its
effort for searching for foods turns out futile from time to time because of
the limitedness of the spatio-temporal horizon available to the organism.
Otherwise, the bacterium would starve to death. Any influences coming from
over the current finite horizon are no other than surprises to the
bacterium, either good or bad.

   Similarly, the biochemist observes that the successful bacterium does not
fail in meeting the both ends of acquiring and spending the necessary food
resources in the intended theoretical framework of flat space and time. The
bacterium would thus be seen as a molecular machine regulated so as to feed
on the necessary food resources continuously without failure. The difference
of whether the bacterium is agential or merely mechanical resides within the
nature of the spatio-temporal horizon to be employed. The biochemist can
conceive of the horizon whose extent would far exceed the one that has been
naturalized to the organism, while how exquisite the limited spatio-temporal
horizon to the very bacterium would be is simply beyond our imagination.

   Descriptive appraisal of the finite spatio-temporal horizon may be done
in the tenses other than the present tense, such as the present progressive
tense. At issue may be how could the idea of consilience be applied to
descriptions in different tenses. At the least, if we think information is a
serious matter, it would also require for us to pay attention to the
presence of finite spatio-temporal horizons in the sense that there may be
no information if there are no surprises. That is the internalist stance.

   Cheers,
   Koichiro

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Received on Thu Oct 21 08:58:23 2004