Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!rtech!wrs!hwajin
From: hwajin@wrs.wrs.com (Hwa Jin Bae)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Can Machines Think?
Keywords: Emergence, biology, logical positivism, Democritus
Message-ID: <811@wrs.wrs.com>
Date: 29 Dec 89 20:05:26 GMT
References: <31821@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <7880@cbnewsm.ATT.COM> <31945@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> <7853@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: hwajin@wrs.wrs.com ()
Organization: Wind River Systems, Emeryville, CA
Lines: 25

In article <7853@portia.Stanford.EDU> dove@portia.Stanford.EDU (Dav Amann) writes:
[...]
>Perhaps this intuition explains the vigorous defense of Cartesian
>dualism since Descartes without very much empirical evidence.  
>Lately, however, one of the newer sciences has been breaking away from
>Democritus.  Biology discusses and understands more and more about the
>individual cell, yet they find it harder and harder to explain the
>relationship between cells within the pretext of the individual cell.
>Etymologysts understand a lot about termites but they cannot explain
>why five termites together will build arches the Romans  would be
>proud of.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

This theme is further detailed in Fritjof Capra's _The Turning Point_,
which states that Cartesian-Newtonian framework is not sufficient for
a complete understanding of human and physical problems.  [I'm sure
you all have been noticing recent abundance on this particular subject
in popular literature.]  His solution seems to be to incorporate
a holistic and ecological aspect into the Cartesian-Newtonian framework,
producing a new "multidisciplinary" methodology to appropach problems.
Not only that, he seems to be proposing that various different but
mutually consistent concepts may be used to describe different aspects
and levels of reality, without the need to reduce the phenomena of any
level to those of other.  Interesting.

hwajin