Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Preview of my worldview post

I'm working on my next big entry, presenting some basics of my naturalistic worldview. I don't know when it will be ready, but I just wrote an interesting paragraph that I thought might make a nice preview. Think of it as a very rough speculation about the nature of physical law. It will not appear in the final draft as it is here because it is nearly unreadable. I hope you have fun reading it anyway.

Rather than the naive picture of laws governing the behavior of pieces of hard, continuous substance, understand reality as a heterogeneous, ordered structure in which several strands respond to each other (a woven structure?), behaving spontaneously in a way that can only be inferred by us from their changing spacial relationships, space being the field of relationships between them. Causation is just the unfolding of the spontaneous behavior of these several strands as they respond to one another. This is "metaphysical behaviorism". The "laws" do not have their own mysterious existence, but are rather descriptions of the orderly behavior of those strands. The order itself, and how those strands can respond to one another without being One Ultimate Thing and thus being altogether undifferentiated, is a mystery, and we should not presume that humble reason can solve it (and we should never stop trying to).

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