nitro
Registered: Sep 2001
Posts: 17946 |
04-15-10 06:46 PM
Quote from bronks:
I like this passage (out of context): "...Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."
Right, although some elementary chemistry is applied physics.
I'm surfacely familiar with emergent science. I stumbled across it years back when I was studying esoteric patterns and trying to fit in to my trading (fractals)... but I digress. I look at it as just another branch of the physics tree.
Not really. It is its own discipline, and applies equally to all of them (biology is emergent from chemistry, etc.)
The interesting thing is, on a subatomic level, there is no difference or preference per say, how atoms arrange themselves. Animate/inanimate - sentient/non-sentient, the fact is, there is always either attraction or repulsion(?). What I'm getting at, and you are probably more familiar with it than I, is an experiment done years ago, and please correct me if I'm wrong, where, simply put, robots with a very primitive random motorization system (non-sentient) were distributed throughout a large room and over time, all ended up huddled in one corner.
Hmmmm, I am not aware of this experiment. It is an interesting result though. I would expect that if the robot actions were indeed random, then one would expect entropy and diffusion to occurr. That they all end up in one corner could be a result of either hidden correlations in the code that governs the robots movements, or perhaps the random number generators have some sort of undetected attractor unbeknown to the programmers.
Now this can be explained in a myriad of ways but it all leads (IMO) to attraction/repulsion, no matter how you slice it.
It is amazing to me, [and I am not even sure I believe it], that all the diversity we see is a result ultimately of subatomic scattering.
Getting back to the passage - eventually as we become more enlightened, every single one of these boundaries separating these disciplines from physics to metaphysics, from biology to psychology, onto chemistry and wizardry, will melt away and TOE will no longer be a theory... but also, won't be needed.
...I'll get to the other stuff in a bit.
That is not the opinion of current science. In fact, some scientist think that unification is a dead end, a dreamed up luxury of Einstein's. Thing is, many [most, every ?] advance in the elementary sciences have come as the result of some unification of what was once thought to be different phenomena. I don't know what to believe, but if I were allowed wishful thinking, I would wish for unification.
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