06.15.10

Stuart Kauffman comments on Pantheism

Posted in Comment at 11:54 am by nemo

Stuart Kauffman comments on Pantheism

This is the to be skewered Stuart Kauffman of Reinventing the Sacred: 1) If you are going to skewer me, do so by argument not by innuendo. 2) If you actually bother to read the book, you will find in Chapter 12 a serious, if scientifically improbable, but no longer impossible, hypothesis that the mind-brain system is quantum coherent, decoheres to classicity (for all practical purposes) the recoheres to quantum and can recycle in this way many times. Very recent physics supports this as does chlorophyll’s behavior. If this is true, mind can “act” on matter acausally by decoherence, possibly answering a question since Descartes. More recently I have struggled with a responsible free will, on line
at http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7 . Don’t criticize until you understand the make your points clearly.

I think we have been relatively fair here: Kauffman was cited en passant, as relevant to a discussion of Spinoza. That Kauffman’s views are more complex seems par for the course. The points on decoherence are fascinating.
In a comment to this comment, Kauffman was invited to post an essay on this here.

Note: Kauffman wants us to be fair. We have commented several times here on the way that he attacks Kantian morality in his book. He has alienated us completely here, after being fans of his self-org ideas.
Given his prestige, he virtually destroyed Kant studies for young scientists in a kind of sophmoric attack on the categorical imperative. I am not a Kantian or a defender of his ethical constructs, but that classic discourse, whatever its problems, gives us one clue The problems with the categorical imperative are well-known, but the overall question of Kantian ethics,and ethics in general is very profound in Kant. A proper critique was needed from Kauffman.
Kantian ethics suggests the need to understand what he calls ‘common ordinary morality’, which he tries to explicate, before concocting bad Darwinian theories of such. Explaining what morality is is beyond biologists, even as they create toxic theory junk on the evolution of ethics.

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