Vitalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vitalism is the belief that "living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things". Where vitalism explicitly invokes a vital principle, that element is often referred to as the "vital spark", "energy" or "élan vital", which some equate with the soul. In the 18th and 19th centuries vitalism was discussed among biologists, between those who felt that the known mechanics of physics would eventually explain the difference between life and non-life and vitalists who argued that the processes of life could not be reduced to a mechanistic process. Some vitalist biologists proposed testable hypotheses meant to show inadequacies with mechanistic explanations, but these experiments failed to provide support for vitalism. Biologists now consider vitalism in this sense to have been refuted by empirical evidence, and hence regard it either as a superseded scientific theory, or, since the mid-20th century, as a pseudoscience.

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: many traditional healing practices posited that disease results from some imbalance in vital forces.

History

Ancient times

The notion that bodily functions are due to a vitalistic principle existing in all living creatures has roots going back at least to ancient Egypt. In Greek philosophy, the Milesian school proposed natural explanations deduced from materialism and mechanism. However, by the time of Lucretius, this account was supplemented, (for example, by the unpredictable clinamen of Epicurus), and in Stoic physics, the pneuma assumed the role of logos. Galen believed the lungs draw pneuma from the air, which the blood communicates throughout the body.

Medieval

In Europe, medieval physics was influenced by the idea of pneuma, helping to shape later aether theories.

Early modern

Vitalists included English anatomist Francis Glisson (1597–1677) and the Italian doctor Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694). Caspar Friedrich Wolff (1733–1794) is considered to be the father of epigenesis in embryology, that is, he marks the point when embryonic development began to be described in terms of the proliferation of cells rather than the incarnation of a preformed soul. However, this degree of empirical observation was not matched by a mechanistic philosophy: in his Theoria Generationis (1759), he tried to explain the emergence of the organism by the actions of a vis essentialis (an organizing, formative force), stating "All believers in epigenesis are vitalists." Carl Reichenbach (1788–1869) later developed the theory of Odic force, a form of life-energy that permeates living things.

In the 17th century, modern science responded to Newton's action at a distance and the mechanism of Cartesian dualism with vitalist theories: that whereas the chemical transformations undergone by non-living substances are reversible, so-called "organic" matter is permanently altered by chemical transformations (such as cooking).

As worded by Charles Birch and John B. Cobb, "the claims of the vitalists came to the fore again" in the 18th century: "Georg Ernst Stahl's followers were active as were others, such as the physician genius Francis Xavier Bichat of the Hotel Dieu." However, "Bichat moved from the tendency typical of the French vitalistic tradition to progressively free himself from metaphysics in order to combine with hypotheses and theories which accorded to the scientific criteria of physics and chemistry." John Hunter recognised "a 'living principle' in addition to mechanics."

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach also was influential in establishing epigenesis in the life sciences in 1781 with his publication of Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte. Blumenbach cut up freshwater Hydra and established that the removed parts would regenerate. He inferred the presence of a "formative drive" (Bildungstrieb) in living matter. But he pointed out that this name,

like names applied to every other kind of vital power, of itself, explains nothing: it serves merely to designate a peculiar power formed by the combination of the mechanical principle with that which is susceptible of modification.

19th century

The synthesis of urea in the early 19th century from inorganic compounds was counterevidence for the vitalist hypothesis that only organisms could make the components of living things.

Jöns Jakob Berzelius, one of the early 19th century fathers of modern chemistry, argued that a regulative force must exist within living matter to maintain its functions. Vitalist chemists predicted that organic materials could not be synthesized from inorganic components, but Friedrich Wöhler synthesised urea from inorganic components in 1828. However, contemporary accounts do not support the common belief that vitalism died when Wöhler made urea. This Wöhler Myth, as historian Peter Ramberg called it, originated from a popular history of chemistry published in 1931, which, "ignoring all pretense of historical accuracy, turned Wöhler into a crusader who made attempt after attempt to synthesize a natural product that would refute vitalism and lift the veil of ignorance, until 'one afternoon the miracle happened'".

Between 1833 and 1844, Johannes Peter Müller wrote a book on physiology called Handbuch der Physiologie, which became the leading textbook in the field for much of the nineteenth century. The book showed Müller's commitments to vitalism; he questioned why organic matter differs from inorganic, then proceeded to chemical analyses of the blood and lymph. He describes in detail the circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory, digestive, endocrine, nervous, and sensory systems in a wide variety of animals but explains that the presence of a soul makes each organism an indivisible whole. He also claimed the behavior of light and sound waves showed that living organisms possessed a life-energy for which physical laws could never fully account.

Louis Pasteur argued that only life could catalyse fermentation. Painting by Albert Edelfelt, 1885

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) after his famous rebuttal of spontaneous generation, performed several experiments that he felt supported vitalism. According to Bechtel, Pasteur "fitted fermentation into a more general programme describing special reactions that only occur in living organisms. These are irreducibly vital phenomena." Rejecting the claims of Berzelius, Liebig, Traube and others that fermentation resulted from chemical agents or catalysts within cells, Pasteur concluded that fermentation was a "vital action".

20th century

Hans Driesch (1867–1941) interpreted his experiments as showing that life is not run by physicochemical laws. His main argument was that when one cuts up an embryo after its first division or two, each part grows into a complete adult. Driesch's reputation as an experimental biologist deteriorated as a result of his vitalistic theories, which scientists have seen since his time as pseudoscience. Vitalism is a superseded scientific hypothesis, and the term is sometimes used as a pejorative epithet. Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) wrote:

It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine... The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable.

Vitalism has become so disreputable a belief in the last fifty years that no biologist alive today would want to be classified as a vitalist. Still, the remnants of vitalist thinking can be found in the work of Alistair Hardy, Sewall Wright, and Charles Birch, who seem to believe in some sort of nonmaterial principle in organisms.

Other vitalists included Johannes Reinke and Oscar Hertwig. Reinke used the word neovitalism to describe his work, claiming that it would eventually be verified through experimentation, and that it was an improvement over the other vitalistic theories. The work of Reinke influenced Carl Jung.

John Scott Haldane adopted an anti-mechanist approach to biology and an idealist philosophy early on in his career. Haldane saw his work as a vindication of his belief that teleology was an essential concept in biology. His views became widely known with his first book Mechanism, life and personality in 1913. Haldane borrowed arguments from the vitalists to use against mechanism; however, he was not a vitalist. Haldane treated the organism as fundamental to biology: "we perceive the organism as a self-regulating entity", "every effort to analyze it into components that can be reduced to a mechanical explanation violates this central experience". The work of Haldane was an influence on organicism.

Haldane also stated that a purely mechanist interpretation can not account for the characteristics of life. Haldane wrote a number of books in which he attempted to show the invalidity of both vitalism and mechanist approaches to science. Haldane explained:

We must find a different theoretical basis of biology, based on the observation that all the phenomena concerned tend towards being so coordinated that they express what is normal for an adult organism.

— By 1931, biologists had "almost unanimously abandoned vitalism as an acknowledged belief."

Emergentism

Contemporary science and engineering sometimes describe emergent processes, in which the properties of a system cannot be fully described in terms of the properties of the constituents. This may be because the properties of the constituents are not fully understood, or because the interactions between the individual constituents are also important for the behavior of the system.

Whether emergence should be grouped with traditional vitalist concepts is a matter of semantic controversy. According to Emmeche et al. (1997):

On the one hand, many scientists and philosophers regard emergence as having only a pseudo-scientific status. On the other hand, new developments in physics, biology, psychology, and cross-disciplinary fields such as cognitive science, artificial life, and the study of non-linear dynamical systems have focused strongly on the high level 'collective behaviour' of complex systems, which is often said to be truly emergent, and the term is increasingly used to characterize such systems.

Mesmerism

Franz Mesmer proposed the vitalist force of magnétisme animal in animals with breath.

A popular vitalist theory of the 18th century was "animal magnetism", in the theories of Franz Mesmer (1734–1815). However, the use of the (conventional) English term animal magnetism to translate Mesmer's magnétisme animal can be misleading for three reasons:

• Mesmer chose his term to clearly distinguish his variant of magnetic force from those referred to, at that time, as mineral magnetism, cosmic magnetism and planetary magnetism.
• Mesmer felt that this particular force/power only resided in the bodies of humans and animals.
• Mesmer chose the word "animal," for its root meaning (from Latin animus="breath") specifically to identify his force as a quality that belonged to all creatures with breath; viz., the animate beings: humans and animals.

Mesmer's ideas became so influential that King Louis XVI of France appointed two commissions to investigate mesmerism; one was led by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the other, led by Benjamin Franklin, included Bailly and Lavoisier. The commissioners learned about Mesmeric theory, and saw its patients fall into fits and trances. In Franklin's garden, a patient was led to each of five trees, one of which had been "mesmerized"; he hugged each in turn to receive the "vital fluid," but fainted at the foot of a 'wrong' one. At Lavoisier's house, four normal cups of water were held before a "sensitive" woman; the fourth produced convulsions, but she calmly swallowed the mesmerized contents of a fifth, believing it to be plain water. The commissioners concluded that "the fluid without imagination is powerless, whereas imagination without the fluid can produce the effects of the fluid."

Medical philosophies

Vitalism has a long history in medical philosophies: many traditional healing practices posited that disease results from some imbalance in vital forces. In the Western tradition founded by Hippocrates, these vital forces were associated with the four temperaments and humours; Eastern traditions posited an imbalance or blocking of qi or prana. One example of a similar notion in Africa is the Yoruba concept of ase. Today forms of vitalism continue to exist as philosophical positions or as tenets in some religious traditions.

Complementary and alternative medicine therapies include energy therapies, associated with vitalism, especially biofield therapies such as therapeutic touch, Reiki, external qi, chakra healing and SHEN therapy. In these therapies, the "subtle energy" field of a patient is manipulated by a practitioner. The subtle energy is held to exist beyond the electromagnetic energy produced by the heart and brain. Beverly Rubik describes the biofield as a "complex, dynamic, extremely weak EM field within and around the human body...."

The founder of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, promoted an immaterial, vitalistic view of disease: "...they are solely spirit-like (dynamic) derangements of the spirit-like power (the vital principle) that animates the human body." The view of disease as a dynamic disturbance of the immaterial and dynamic vital force is taught in many homeopathic colleges and constitutes a fundamental principle for many contemporary practising homeopaths.

Criticism

The 17th century French playwright Molière mocked vitalism in his 1673 play Le Malade imaginaire.

Vitalism has sometimes been criticized as begging the question by inventing a name. Molière had famously parodied this fallacy in Le Malade imaginaire, where a quack "answers" the question of "Why does opium cause sleep?" with "Because of its dormitive virtue (i.e., soporific power)." Thomas Henry Huxley compared vitalism to stating that water is the way it is because of its "aquosity". His grandson Julian Huxley in 1926 compared "vital force" or élan vital to explaining a railroad locomotive's operation by its élan locomotif ("locomotive force").

Another criticism is that vitalists have failed to rule out mechanistic explanations. This is rather obvious in retrospect for organic chemistry and developmental biology, but the criticism goes back at least a century. In 1912, Jacques Loeb published The Mechanistic Conception of Life, in which he described experiments on how a sea urchin could have a pin for its father, as Bertrand Russell put it (Religion and Science). He offered this challenge:

"... we must either succeed in producing living matter artificially, or we must find the reasons why this is impossible." (pp. 5–6)

Loeb addressed vitalism more explicitly:

"It is, therefore, unwarranted to continue the statement that in addition to the acceleration of oxidations the beginning of individual life is determined by the entrance of a metaphysical "life principle" into the egg; and that death is determined, aside from the cessation of oxidations, by the departure of this "principle" from the body. In the case of the evaporation of water we are satisfied with the explanation given by the kinetic theory of gases and do not demand that to repeat a well-known jest of Huxley the disappearance of the "aquosity" be also taken into consideration." (pp. 14–15)

Bechtel states that vitalism "is often viewed as unfalsifiable, and therefore a pernicious metaphysical doctrine." For many scientists, "vitalist" theories were unsatisfactory "holding positions" on the pathway to mechanistic understanding. In 1967, Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, stated "And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow."

While many vitalistic theories have in fact been falsified, notably Mesmerism, the pseudoscientific retention of untested and untestable theories continues to this day. Alan Sokal published an analysis of the wide acceptance among professional nurses of "scientific theories" of spiritual healing. (Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?). Use of a technique called therapeutic touch was especially reviewed by Sokal, who concluded, "nearly all the pseudoscientific systems to be examined in this essay are based philosophically on vitalism" and added that "Mainstream science has rejected vitalism since at least the 1930s, for a plethora of good reasons that have only become stronger with time."

Joseph C. Keating, Jr. discusses vitalism's past and present roles in chiropractic and calls vitalism "a form of bio-theology." He further explains that:

"Vitalism is that rejected tradition in biology which proposes that life is sustained and explained by an unmeasurable, intelligent force or energy. The supposed effects of vitalism are the manifestations of life itself, which in turn are the basis for inferring the concept in the first place. This circular reasoning offers pseudo-explanation, and may deceive us into believing we have explained some aspect of biology when in fact we have only labeled our ignorance. 'Explaining an unknown (life) with an unknowable (Innate),' suggests chiropractor Joseph Donahue, 'is absurd'."

Keating views vitalism as incompatible with scientific thinking:

"Chiropractors are not unique in recognizing a tendency and capacity for self-repair and auto-regulation of human physiology. But we surely stick out like a sore thumb among professions which claim to be scientifically based by our unrelenting commitment to vitalism. So long as we propound the 'One cause, one cure' rhetoric of Innate, we should expect to be met by ridicule from the wider health science community. Chiropractors can't have it both ways. Our theories cannot be both dogmatically held vitalistic constructs and be scientific at the same time. The purposiveness, consciousness and rigidity of the Palmers' Innate should be rejected."

Keating also mentions Skinner's viewpoint:

"Vitalism has many faces and has sprung up in many areas of scientific inquiry. Psychologist B.F. Skinner, for example, pointed out the irrationality of attributing behavior to mental states and traits. Such 'mental way stations,' he argued, amount to excess theoretical baggage which fails to advance cause-and-effect explanations by substituting an unfathomable psychology of 'mind'."

According to Williams, "[t]oday, vitalism is one of the ideas that form the basis for many pseudoscientific health systems that claim that illnesses are caused by a disturbance or imbalance of the body's vital force." "Vitalists claim to be scientific, but in fact they reject the scientific method with its basic postulates of cause and effect and of provability. They often regard subjective experience to be more valid than objective material reality."

Victor Stenger states that the term "bioenergetics" "is applied in biochemistry to refer to the readily measurable exchanges of energy within organisms, and between organisms and the environment, which occur by normal physical and chemical processes. This is not, however, what the new vitalists have in mind. They imagine the bioenergetic field as a holistic living force that goes beyond reductionist physics and chemistry."

Such a field is sometimes explained as electromagnetic, though some advocates also make confused appeals to quantum physics. Joanne Stefanatos states that "The principles of energy medicine originate in quantum physics." Stenger offers several explanations as to why this line of reasoning may be misplaced. He explains that energy exists in discrete packets called quanta. Energy fields are composed of their component parts and so only exist when quanta are present. Therefore, energy fields are not holistic, but are rather a system of discrete parts that must obey the laws of physics. This also means that energy fields are not instantaneous. These facts of quantum physics place limitations on the infinite, continuous field that is used by some theorists to describe so-called "human energy fields". Stenger continues, explaining that the effects of EM forces have been measured by physicists as accurately as one part in a billion and there is yet to be any evidence that living organisms emit a unique field.

Vitalistic thinking has also been identified in the naive biological theories of children: "Recent experimental results show that a majority of preschoolers tend to choose vitalistic explanations as most plausible. Vitalism, together with other forms of intermediate causality, constitute unique causal devices for naive biology as a core domain of thought."

Fussing Over One Degree of Simulation

August 12, 2021 By jennifer

I was at the Australian National University in October 2018, when the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere began running the simulations that have now been published as the IPCC’s Assessment Report No. 6 (AR6). It’s being touted as the most comprehensive climate change report ever. It is certainly based on a very complex simulation model (CMIP6).

Many are frightened by the official analysis of the model’s results, which claims global warming is unprecedented in more than 2000 years. Yet the same modelling is only claiming the Earth is warming by some fractions of a degree Celsius! Specifically, the claim is that we humans have caused 1.06 °C of the claimed 1.07 °C rise in temperatures since 1850, which is not very much. The real-world temperature trends that I have observed at Australian locations with long temperature records would suggest a much greater rate of temperature rise since 1960, and cooling before that.

Allowing some historical perspective shows that the IPCC is wrong to label the recent temperature changes ‘unprecedented’. They are not unusual in magnitude, direction or rate of change, which should diminish fears that recent climate change is somehow catastrophic.

To understand how climate has varied over much longer periods, over hundreds and thousands of years, various types of proxy records can be assembled derived from the annual rings of long-lived tree species, corals and stalagmites. These types of records provide evidence for periods of time over the past several thousand years (the late Holocene) that were either colder, or experienced similar temperatures, to the present, for example the Little Ice Age (1309 to 1814) and the Medieval Warm Period (985 to 1200), respectively. These records show global temperatures have cycled within a range of up to 1.8 °C over the last thousand years.

Indeed, the empirical evidence, as published in the best peer-reviewed journals, would suggest that there is no reason to be concerned by a 1.5 °C rise in global temperatures over a period of one hundred years – that this is neither unusual in terms of rate nor magnitude. That the latest IPCC report, Assessment Report 6, suggests catastrophe if we cannot contain warming to 1.5 °C is not in accordance with the empirical evidence, but rather a conclusion based entirely on simulation modelling falsely assuming these models can accurately simulate ocean and atmospheric weather systems. There are better tools for generating weather and climate forecasts, specifically artificial neural networks (ANNs) that are a form of artificial intelligence.

Of course, there is nowhere on Earth where the average global temperature can be measured; it is very cold at the poles and rather warmer in the tropics. So, the average global temperature for each year since 1850 could never be a direct ‘observation’, but rather, at best, a statistic calculated from measurements taken at thousands of weather stations across the world. And can it really be accurately calculated to some fractions of a degree Celsius?

AR6, which runs to over 4,000-pages, claims to have accurately quantified everything including confidence ranges for the ‘observation’ of 1.07 °C. Yet I know from scrutinising the datasets used by the IPCC, that the single temperature series inputted for individual locations incorporate ‘adjustments’ by national meteorological services that are rather large. To be clear, even before the maximum and minimum temperature values from individual weather stations are incorporated into HadCRUT5 they are adjusted. A key supporting technical paper (eg. Brohan et al. 2006, Journal of Geophysical Research) clearly states that: ‘HadCRUT only archives single temperature series for particular location and any adjustments made by national meteorological services are unknown.’ So, the idea, that the simulations are based on ‘observation’ with real meaningful ‘uncertainty limits’ is just not true.

According to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), which is one of the national meteorological services providing data for HadCRUT, the official remodelled temperatures are an improvement on the actual measurements. This may be so that they better accord with IPCC policy, with the result being a revisionist approach to our climate history. In general they strip the natural cycles within the datasets of actual observations, replacing them with linear trends that accord with IPCC policy.

The BOM’s Blair Trewin, who is one of the 85 ‘drafting authors’ of the Summary for Policy Makers, in 2018 remodelled and published new values for each of the 112 weather stations used to calculate an Australian average over the period 1910 to 2016, so that the overall rate of warming increased by 23 %. Specifically, the linear trend (°C per century) for Australian temperatures had been 1 °C per century as published in 2012 in the Australian Climate Observations Reference Network − Surface Air Temperature (ACORN-SAT) database version 1. Then, just in time for inclusion in this new IPCC report released on Tuesday, all the daily values from each of the 112 weather stations were remodelled and the rate of warming increased to 1.23 °C per century in ACORN-SAT version 2 that was published in 2018. This broadly accords with the increase of 22% in the rate of warming between the 2014 IPCC report (Assessment Report No. 5) which was 0.85 °C (since 1850), and this new report has the rate of warming of 1.07 °C.

Remodelling of the data sets by the national meteorological services generally involves cooling the past, by way of dropping down the values in the first part of the twentieth century. This is easy enough to check for the Australian data because it is possible to download the maximum and minimum values as recorded at the 112 Australian weather stations for each day from the BOM website, and then compare these values with the values as listed in ACORN-SAT version 1 (that I archived some years ago) and ACORN-SAT version 2 that is available at the BOM website. For example, the maximum temperature as recorded at the Darwin weather station was 34.2 °C on 1 January 1910 (this is the very first value listed). This value was changed by Blair Trewin in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 1 to 33.8 °C. He ‘cooled’ this historical observation by a further 1.4 °C in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 2, just in time for inclusion in the values used to calculate a global average temperature for AR6. When an historic value is cooled relative to present temperatures, then an artificial warming trend is created.

I am from northern Australia, I was born in Darwin, so I take a particular interest in its temperature series. I was born there on 26th August 1963. A maximum temperature of 29.6 °C was recorded at the Darwin airport on that day from a mercury thermometer in a Stevenson screen, which was an official recording station using standard equipment. This is also the temperature value shown in ACORN-SAT version 1. This value was dropped down/cooled by 0.8 °C in the creation of ACORN-SAT version 2, by Blair Trewin in 2018. So, the temperature series incorporated into HadCRUT5, which is one of the global temperature datasets used in all the IPCC reports shows the contrived value of 28.8 °C for 26th August 1963, yet the day I born a value of 29.6 °C was entered into the meteorological observations book for Darwin. In my view, changing the numbers in this way is plain wrong, and certainly not scientific.

The BOM justifies remodelling because of changes to the equipment used to record temperatures and because of the relocation of the weather stations, except that they change the values even when there have been no changes to the equipment or locations. In the case of Darwin, the weather station has been at the airport since February 1941, and an automatic weather station replaced the mercury thermometer on 1 October 1990. For the IPCC report (AR5) published in 2014, the BOM submitted the actual value of 29.6 °C as the maximum temperature for Darwin on 26th August 1963. Yet in November 2018, when the temperatures were submitted for inclusion in the modelling for this latest report (AR6), the contrived value of 28.8 °C was submitted.

The temperature series that are actual observations from weather stations at locations across Australia tend to show cooling to about 1960 and warming since then. This is particularly the case for inland locations from southeast Australia. For example, the actual observations from the weather stations with the longest records in New South Wales were plotted for the period to 1960 and then from 1960 to 2013, for a presentation that I gave to the Sydney Institute in 2014. I calculated an average cooling from the late 1800s to 1960 of minus 1.95 °C, and an average warming of plus 2.48 °C from the 1960s to the present, as shown in Table 1. Yet this new United Nation’s IPCC report claims inevitable catastrophe should the rate of warming exceeds 1.5 °C, yet this can be shown to have already occurred at many Australian locations.

This is consistent with the findings in my technical report as published in the international climate science journal Atmospheric Research (volume 166, pages 141-149) in 2015, which shows significant cooling in the maximum temperatures at the Cape Otway and Wilsons Promontory lighthouses, in southeast Australia, from 1921 to 1950. The cooling is more pronounced in temperature records from the farmlands of the Riverina, including at Rutherglen and Deniliquin. To repeat, while temperatures at the lighthouses show cooling from about 1880 to about 1950, they then show quite dramatic warming from at least 1960 to the present. In the Riverina, however, minimum temperatures continued to fall through the 1970s and 1980s because of the expansion of the irrigation schemes. Indeed, the largest dip in the minimum temperature record for Deniliquin occurs just after the Snowy Hydroelectricity scheme came online. This is masked by the remodelled by dropping down/cooling all the minimum temperatures observations at Deniliquin before 1971 by 1.5 °C.

In my correspondence with the Bureau about these adjustments it was explained that irrigation is not natural and therefore there is a need to correct the record through remodelling of the series from these irrigation areas until they show warming consistent with theory. But global warming itself is not natural, if it is essentially driven by human influence, which is a key assumption of current policy. Indeed, there should be something right-up-front in the latest assessment of climate change by the IPCC (AR6) explaining that the individual temperature series have been remodelled before inclusion in the global datasets to ensure a significant human influence on climate in accordance with IPCC policy. These remodelled temperature series are then incorporated into CMIP6 which is so complex it can only be run only a supercomputer that generates so many scenarios for a diversity of climate parameters from sea level to rainfall.

In October 2018, I visited the Australian National University (ANU) to watch CMIP6 at work on the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. It was consuming obscene amounts of electricity to run the simulations for this latest IPCC report, and it is also used to generate medium to long range rainfall forecasts for the BOM. The rainfall forecasts from these simulation models even just three months in advance are, however, notoriously unreliable. Yet we are expected to believe rainfall forecasts based on simulations that make projections 100 years in advance, as detailed in AR6.

There are alternative tools for generating temperature and rainfall forecasts. In a series of research papers and book chapters with John Abbot, I have documented how artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used to mine historical datasets for patterns and from these generate more accurate medium and long-range rainfall and temperature forecast. Our forecasts don’t suggest an impending climate catastrophe, but rather that climate change is cyclical, not linear. Indeed, temperatures change on a daily cycle as the Earth spins on its axis, temperatures change with the seasons because of the tilt of the Earth relative to its orbit around the Sun, and then there are ice ages because of changes in the orbital path of the Earth around the Sun, and so on.

Taking this longer perspective, considering the sun rather than carbon dioxide as a driver of climate change, and inputting real observations rather than remodelled/adjusted temperature values, we find recurrent cycles greater than 1.07 degrees Celsius during the last 2000 years. Our research paper entitled ‘The application of machine learning for evaluating anthropogenic versus natural climate change’, published in GeoResJ in 2017 (volume 14, pages 36-46) shows a series of temperature reconstructions from six geographically distinct regions and gives some graphic illustration of the rate and magnitude of the temperature fluctuations.

ANNs are at the cutting edge of AI technology, with new network configurations and learning algorithms continually being developed. In 2012, when John Abbot and I began using ANNs for rainfall forecasting we choose a time delay neural network (TDNN), which was considered state-of-the-art at that time. The TDNN used a network of perceptrons where connection weights were trained with backpropagation. More recently we have been using General Regression Neural Networks (GRNN), that have no backpropagation component.

A reasonable test of the value of any scientific theory is its utility – its ability to solve some particular problem. There has been an extraordinary investment into climate change over the last three decades, yet it is unclear whether there has been any significant improvement in the skill of weather and climate forecasting. Mainstream climate scientists, and meteorological agencies continue to rely on simulation modelling for their forecasts such as the CMIP6 models used in this latest IPCC report – there could be a better way and we may not have a climate catastrophe.

Further Reading/Other Information

The practical application of ANNs for forecasting temperatures and rainfall is detailed in a series of papers by John Abbot and me that are listed here: https://climatelab.com.au/publications/

Chapter 16 of the book ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’ provides more detail on how the Australian Bureau of Meteorology takes a revisionist approach to Darwin’s history.
https://climatechangethefacts.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/MAROHASY-2020-Rewriting-Australias-Temperature-History-CCTF2020_16.pdf

There is an interactive table based on the maximum and minimum values as originally recorded for each of the 112 Australian weather stations used to calculate the official temperature values as listed in ACORN-SAT version 1 and version 2 at my website, click here:
https://jennifermarohasy.com/acorn-sat-v1-vs-v2/

The feature image, at the top of this blog post, shows Jennifer Marohasy in front of the supercomputer at the Australian National University in October 2018, which was running simulations for the latest IPCC report.

 

Emergentism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism 

 

In philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with and also does not contrast with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them.

Emergent properties, laws and principles, appear when a system is studied at a higher level of organization (holistic instead of atomic level). They often show a high level of complexity, despite the fundamental principles that regulate the components of the system being simple. For example, in emergentism, the laws of chemistry are believed to emerge only from a few fundamental laws of physics (some still not discovered), biology from chemistry, and psychology from biology, although we still have not been able to fully deduce these holistic relations from the atomic level because of their complexity. Consciousness is believed to appear in certain large neural networks, but is not an attribute of a single neuron. In emergentism, no mystic principles are believed to be added at higher level, but emergentism is naturalistic.

Emergent properties are not identical with, reducible to, or deducible from the other properties. The different ways in which this independence requirement can be satisfied lead to variant types of emergence.

Forms

All varieties of emergentism strive to be compatible with physicalism, the theory that the universe is composed exclusively of physical entities, and in particular with the evidence relating changes in the brain with changes in mental functioning. Many forms of emergentism, including proponents of complex adaptive systems, do not hold a material but rather a relational or processual view of the universe. Furthermore, they view mind–body dualism as a conceptual error insofar as mind and body are merely different types of relationships. As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. It is generally not obvious whether an emergent theory of mind embraces mental causation or must be considered epiphenomenal.

Some varieties of emergentism are not specifically concerned with the mind–body problem but constitute a theory of the nature of the universe comparable to pantheism. They suggest a hierarchical or layered view of the whole of nature, with the layers arranged in terms of increasing complexity with each requiring its own special science. Typically physics (mathematical physics, particle physics, and classical physics) is basic, with chemistry built on top of it, then biology, psychology, and social sciences. Reductionists respond that the arrangement of the sciences is a matter of convenience, and that chemistry is derivable from physics (and so forth) in principle, an argument which gained force after the establishment of a quantum-mechanical basis for chemistry.

Other varieties see mind or consciousness as specifically and anomalously requiring emergentist explanation, and therefore constitute a family of positions in the philosophy of mind. Douglas Hofstadter summarises this view as "the soul is more than the sum of its parts". A number of philosophers have offered the argument that qualia constitute the hard problem of consciousness, and resist reductive explanation in a way that all other phenomena do not. In contrast, reductionists generally see the task of accounting for the possibly atypical properties of mind and of living things as a matter of showing that, contrary to appearances, such properties are indeed fully accountable in terms of the properties of the basic constituents of nature and therefore in no way genuinely atypical.

Intermediate positions are possible: for instance, some emergentists hold that emergence is neither universal nor restricted to consciousness, but applies to (for instance) living creatures, or self-organising systems, or complex systems.

Some philosophers hold that emergent properties causally interact with more fundamental levels, an idea known as downward causation. Others maintain that higher-order properties simply supervene over lower levels without direct causal interaction.

All the cases so far discussed have been synchronic, i.e. the emergent property exists simultaneously with its basis. Yet another variation operates diachronically. Emergentists of this type believe that genuinely novel properties can come into being, without being accountable in terms of the preceding history of the universe. (Contrast with indeterminism where it is only the arrangement or configuration of matter that is unaccountable). These evolution-inspired theories often have a theological aspect, as in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne.

Relationship to vitalism

Main article: Vitalism

A refinement of vitalism may be recognized in contemporary molecular histology in the proposal that some key organising and structuring features of organisms, perhaps including even life itself, are examples of emergent processes; those in which a complexity arises, out of interacting chemical processes forming interconnected feedback cycles, that cannot fully be described in terms of those processes since the system as a whole has properties that the constituent reactions lack.

Whether emergent system properties should be grouped with traditional vitalist concepts is a matter of semantic controversy. In a light-hearted millennial vein, Kirshner and Michison call research into integrated cell and organismal physiology “molecular vitalism.”

According to Emmeche et al. (1997):

"On the one hand, many scientists and philosophers regard emergence as having only a pseudo-scientific status. On the other hand, new developments in physics, biology, psychology, and crossdisciplinary fields such as cognitive science, artificial life, and the study of non-linear dynamical systems have focused strongly on the high level 'collective behaviour' of complex systems, which is often said to be truly emergent, and the term is increasingly used to characterize such systems."

Emmeche et al. (1998) state that "there is a very important difference between the vitalists and the emergentists: the vitalist's creative forces were relevant only in organic substances, not in inorganic matter. Emergence hence is creation of new properties regardless of the substance involved." "The assumption of an extra-physical vitalis (vital force, entelechy, élan vital, etc.), as formulated in most forms (old or new) of vitalism, is usually without any genuine explanatory power. It has served altogether too often as an intellectual tranquilizer or verbal sedative—stifling scientific inquiry rather than encouraging it to proceed in new directions."

In The Conscious Mind (1996) David Chalmers argues that comparisons between vitalism and the "hard problem of consciousness" commit a category error, because, unlike life, consciousness is irreducible to lower-order physical facts. It is logically impossible that one could perfectly replicate all the lower order facts of, say, wombat cellular biology without the higher order facts about the wombat coming along for the ride. In contrast, it is logically possible that one all the physical facts of the world could be the same without consciousness ever coming into the question (i.e. philosophical zombies). By Chalmers account, facts about consciousness are "further facts about the world in addition to the physical facts." Chalmers concludes that consciousness is a fundamental fact of nature, and thus has no need to emerge out of anything.

History

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill outlined his version of emergentism in System of Logic (1843). Mill argued that the properties of some physical systems, such as those in which dynamic forces combine to produce simple motions, are subject to a law of nature he called the "Composition of Causes". According to Mill, emergent properties are not subject to this law, but instead amount to more than the sums of the properties of their parts.

Mill believed that various chemical reactions (poorly understood in his time) could provide examples of emergent properties, although some critics believe that modern physical chemistry has shown that these reactions can be given satisfactory reductionist explanations. For instance, it has been claimed by Dirac that the whole of chemistry is, in principle, contained in the Schrödinger equation.

C. D. Broad

British philosopher C. D. Broad defended a realistic epistemology in The Mind and its Place in Nature (1925) arguing that emergent materialism is the most likely solution to the mind–body problem.

Broad defined emergence as follows:

Put in abstract terms the emergent theory asserts that there are certain wholes, composed (say) of constituents A, B, and C in a relation R to each other; that all wholes composed of constituents of the same kind as A, B, and C in relations of the same kind as R have certain characteristic properties; that A, B, and C are capable of occurring in other kinds of complex where the relation is not of the same kind as R; and that the characteristic properties of the whole R(A, B, C) cannot, even in theory, be deduced from the most complete knowledge of the properties of A, B, and C in isolation or in other wholes which are not of the form R(A, B, C).

This definition amounted to the claim that mental properties would count as emergent if and only if philosophical zombies were metaphysically possible. Many philosophers take this position to be inconsistent with some formulations of psychophysical supervenience.

C. Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander

Samuel Alexander's views on emergentism, argued in Space, Time, and Deity (1920), were inspired in part by the ideas in psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan's Emergent Evolution. Alexander believed that emergence was fundamentally inexplicable, and that emergentism was simply a "brute empirical fact":

"The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour. The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I should prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the “natural piety” of the investigator. It admits no explanation." (Space, Time, and Deity)

Despite the causal and explanatory gap between the phenomena on different levels, Alexander held that emergent qualities were not epiphenomenal. His view can perhaps best be described as a form of non-reductive physicalism (NRP) or supervenience theory.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Ludwig von Bertalanffy founded general systems theory (GST), which is a more contemporary approach to emergentism. A popularization of many of the elements of GST may be found in The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra.

Jaegwon Kim

Figure demonstration how M1 and M2 are not reduced to P1 and P2.

Addressing emergentism (under the guise of non-reductive physicalism) as a solution to the mind–body problem Jaegwon Kim has raised an objection based on causal closure and overdetermination.

Emergentism strives to be compatible with physicalism, and physicalism, according to Kim, has a principle of causal closure according to which every physical event is fully accountable in terms of physical causes. This seems to leave no "room" for mental causation to operate. If our bodily movements were caused by the preceding state of our bodies and our decisions and intentions, they would be overdetermined. Mental causation in this sense is not the same as free will, but is only the claim that mental states are causally relevant. If emergentists respond by abandoning the idea of mental causation, their position becomes a form of epiphenomenalism.

In detail: he proposes (using the chart on the right) that M1 causes M2 (these are mental events) and P1 causes P2 (these are physical events). P1 realises M1 and P2 realises M2. However M1 does not causally effect P1 (i.e., M1 is a consequent event of P1). If P1 causes P2, and M1 is a result of P1, then M2 is a result of P2. He says that the only alternatives to this problem is to accept dualism (where the mental events are independent of the physical events) or eliminativism (where the mental events do not exist).

Emergent evolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Emergent evolution is the hypothesis that, in the course of evolution, some entirely new properties, such as mind and consciousness, appear at certain critical points, usually because of an unpredictable rearrangement of the already existing entities. The term was originated by the psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan in 1922 in his Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, which would later be published as the 1923 book Emergent Evolution.

The hypothesis has been widely criticized for providing no mechanism to how entirely new properties emerge, and for its historical roots in teleology.

However, emergent properties in living systems are recognized by contemporary science, in particular by the science of complex systems.

Historical context

The term emergent was first used to describe the concept by George Lewes in volume two of his 1875 book Problems of Life and Mind (p. 412). Henri Bergson covered similar themes in his popular 1907 book Creative Evolution on the Élan vital. Emergence was further developed by Samuel Alexander in his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow during 1916–18 and published as Space, Time, and Deity (1920). The related term emergent evolution was coined by C. Lloyd Morgan in his own Gifford lectures of 1921–22 at St. Andrews and published as Emergent Evolution (1923). In an appendix to a lecture in his book, Morgan acknowledged the contributions of Roy Wood Sellars's Evolutionary Naturalism (1922).

Origins

Response to Darwin's Origin of Species

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's presentation of natural selection, coupled to the idea of evolution in Western thought, had gained acceptance due to the wealth of observational data provided and the seeming replacement of divine law with natural law in the affairs of men. However, the mechanism of natural selection described at the time only explained how organisms adapted to variation. The cause of genetic variation was unknown at the time.

Darwin knew that nature had to produce variations before natural selection could act …The problem had been caught by other evolutionists almost as soon as The Origin of Species was first published. Sir Charles Lyell saw it clearly in 1860 before he even became an evolutionist…(Reid, p.3)

St. George Jackson Mivart's On the Genesis of Species (1872) and Edward Cope's Origin of the Fittest (1887) raised the need to address the origin of variation between members of a species. William Bateson in 1884 distinguished between the origin of novel variations and the action of natural selection (Materials for the Study of Variation Treated with Especial Regard to Discontinuity in the Origin of Species).

Wallace's further thoughts

Wallace throughout his life continued to support and extend the scope of Darwin's theory of evolution via the mechanism of natural selection. One of his works, Darwinism, was often cited in support of Darwin's theory. He also worked to elaborate and extend Darwin and his ideas on natural selection. However, Wallace also realized that the scope and claim of the theory was limited. Darwin himself had limited it.

the most prominent feature is that I enter into popular yet critical examination of those underlying fundamental problems which Darwin purposely excluded from his works as being beyond the scope of his enquiry. Such are the nature and cause of Life itself, and more especially of its most fundamental and mysterious powers - growth and reproduction ...

Darwin always ... adduced the "laws of Growth with Reproduction," and of "Inheritance with Variability," as being fundamental facts of nature, without which Natural Selection would be powerless or even non-existent ...

... even if it were proved to be an exact representation of the facts, it would not be an explanation... because it would not account for the forces, the directive agency, and the organising power which are essential features of growth …

In examining this aspect, excluded ab initio by Darwin, Wallace came to the conclusion that Life itself cannot be understood except by means of a theory that includes "an organising and directive Life-Principle." These necessarily involve a "Creative Power", a "directive Mind" and finally "an ultimate Purpose" (the development of Man). It supports the view of John Hunter that "life is the cause, not the consequence" of the organisation of matter. Thus, life precedes matter and when it infuses matter, forms living matter (protoplasm).

a very well-founded doctrine, and one which was often advocated by John Hunter, that life is the cause and not the consequence of organisation ... if so, life must be antecedent to organisation, and can only be conceived as indissolubly connected with spirit and with thought, and with the cause of the directive energy everywhere manifested in the growth of living things ... endowed with the mysterious organising power we term life ...

Wallace then refers to the operation of another power called "mind" that utilizes the power of life and is connected with a higher realm than life or matter:

evidence of a foreseeing mind which...so directed and organised that life, in all its myriad forms, as, in the far-off future, to provide all that was most essential for the growth and development of man's spiritual nature ...

Proceeding from Hunter's view that Life is the directive power above and behind living matter, Wallace argues that logically, Mind is the cause of consciousness, which exists in different degrees and kinds in living matter.

If, as John Hunter, T.H. Huxley, and other eminent thinkers have declared, "life is the cause, not the consequence, of organisation," so we may believe that mind is the cause, not the consequence, of brain development. ... So there are undoubtedly different degrees and probably also different kinds of mind in various grades of animal life ... And ... so the mind-giver ... enables each class or order of animals to obtain the amount of mind requisite for its place in nature ...

Emergent evolution

Early roots

The issue of how change in nature 'emerged' can be found in classical Greek thought - order coming out of chaos and whether by chance or necessity. Aristotle spoke of wholes that were greater than the sum of their parts because of emergent properties. The second-century anatomist and physiologist Galen also distinguished between the resultant and emergent qualities of wholes. (Reid, p. 72)

Hegel spoke of the revolutionary progression of life from non-living to conscious and then to the spiritual and Kant perceived that simple parts of an organism interact to produce a progressively complex series of emergences of functional forms, a distinction that carried over to John Stuart Mill (1843), who stated that even chemical compounds have novel features that cannot be predicted from their elements. [Reid, p. 72]

The idea of an emergent quality that was something new in nature was further taken up by George Henry Lewes (1874–1875), who again noted, as with Galen earlier, that these evolutionary "emergent" qualities are distinguishable from adaptive, additive "resultants." Henry Drummond in The Descent of Man (1894) stated that emergence can be seen in the fact that the laws of nature are different for the organic or vital compared to the inertial inorganic realm.

When we pass from the inorganic to the organic we come upon a new set of laws - but the reason why the lower set do not seem to operate in the higher sphere is not that they are annhilated, but that they are overruled. (Drummond 1883, p. 405, quoted in Reid)

As Reid points out, Drummond also realized that greater complexity brought greater adaptability. (Reid. p. 73)

Samuel Alexander took up the idea that emergences had properties that overruled the demands of the lower levels of organization. And more recently, this theme is taken up by John Holland (1998):

If we turn reductionism on its head we add levels. More carefully, we add new laws that satisfy the constraints imposed by laws already in place. Moreover these new laws apply to complex phenomena that are consequences of the original laws; they are at a new level.

C. Lloyd Morgan and emergent evolution

Another major scientist to question natural selection as the motive force of evolution was C. Lloyd Morgan, a zoologist and student of T.H. Huxley, who had a strong influence on Samuel Alexander. His Emergent Evolution (1923) established the central idea that an emergence might have the appearance of saltation but was best regarded as "a qualitative change of direction or critical turning point."(quoted in Reid, p. 73-74) Morgan, due to his work in animal psychology, had earlier (1894) questioned the continuity view of mental evolution, and held that there were various discontinuities in cross-species mental abilities. To offset any attempt to read anthropomorphism into his view, he created the famous, but often misunderstood methodological canon:

In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.

— Morgan, 1894, p. 53

However, Morgan realizing that this was being misused to advocate reductionism (rather than as a general methodological caution), introduced a qualification into the second edition of his An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1903):

To this, however, it should be added, lest the range of the principle be misunderstood, that the canon by no means excludes the interpretation of a particular activity in terms of the higher processes, if we already have independent evidence of the occurrence of these higher processes in the animal under observation.

— Morgan, 1903, p. 59

As Reid observes,

While the so-called historiographical "rehabilitation of the canon" has been underway for some time now, Morgan's emergent evolutionist position (which was the highest expression of his attempt to place the study of mind back into such a "wider" natural history) is seldom mentioned in more than passing terms even within contemporary history of psychology textbooks.

Morgan also fought against the behaviorist school and clarified even more his emergent views on evolution:

An influential school of 'behaviorists' roundly deny that mental relations, if such there be, are in any sense or in any manner effective... My message is that one may speak of mental relations as effective no less 'scientifically' than... physical relations...

— Morgan, 1930, p. 72

His Animal Conduct (1930) explicitly distinguishes between three "grades" or "levels of mentality" which he labeled: 'percipient, perceptive, and reflective.' (p. 42)

Alexander and the emergence of mind

Morgan's idea of a polaric relationship between lower and higher, was taken up by Samuel Alexander, who argued that the mental process is not reducible to the neural processes on which it depends at the physical-material level. Instead, they are two poles of a unity of function. Further, the neural process that expressed mental process itself possesses a quality (mind) that the other neural processes don’t. At the same time, the mental process, because it is functionally identical to this particular neural process, is also a vital one.

And mental process is also "something new, "a fresh creation", which precludes a psycho-physiological parallelism. Reductionism is also contrary to empirical fact.

All the available evidence of fact leads to the conclusion that the mental element is essential to the neural process which it is said to accompany...and is not accidental to it, nor is it in turn indifferent to the mental feature. Epiphenomenalism is a mere fallacy of observation.

At the same time Alexander stated that his view was not one of animism or vitalism, where the mind is an independent entity action on the brain, or conversely, acted upon by the brain. Mental activity is an emergent, a new "thing" not reducible to its initial neural parts.

All the available evidence of fact leads to the conclusion that the mental element is essential to the neural process which it is said to accompany...and is not accidental to it, nor is it in turn indifferent to the mental feature. Epiphenomenalism is a mere fallacy of observation.

For Alexander, the world unfolds in space-time, which has the inherent quality of motion. This motion through space-time results in new “complexities of motion” in the form of a new quality or emergent. The emergent retains the qualities of the prior “complexities of motion” but also has something new that was not there before. This something new comes with its own laws of behavior. Time is the quality that creates motion through Space, and matter is simply motion expressed in forms in Space, or as Alexander says a little later, “complexes of motion.” Matter arises out of the basic ground of Space-Time continuity and has an element of “body” (lower order) and an element of “mind” (higher order), or “the conception that a secondary quality is the mind of its primary substrate.”

Mind is an emergent from life and life itself is an emergent from matter. Each level contains and is interconnected with the level and qualities below it, and to the extent that it contains lower levels, these aspects are subject to the laws of that level. All mental functions are living, but not all living functions are mental; all living functions are physico-chemical, but not all physico-chemical processes are living - just as we could say that all people living in Ohio are Americans, but not all Americans live in Ohio. Thus, there are levels of existence, or natural jurisdictions, within a given higher level such that the higher level contains elements of each of the previous levels of existence. The physical level contains the pure dimensionality of Space-Time in addition to the emergent of physico-chemical processes; the next emergent level, life, also contains Space-Time as well as the physico-chemical in addition to the quality of life; the level of mind contains all of the previous three levels, plus consciousness. As a result of this nesting and inter-action of emergents, like fluid Russian dolls, higher emergents cannot be reduced to lower ones, and different laws and methods of inquiry are required for each level.

Life is not an epiphenomenon of matter but an emergent from it ... The new character or quality which the vital physico-chemical complex possesses stands to it as soul or mind to the neural basis.

For Alexander, the "directing agency" or entelechy is found "in the principle or plan".

a given stage of material complexity is characterised by such and such special features…By accepting this we at any rate confine ourselves to noting the facts…and do not invent entities for which there seems to be no other justification than that something is done in life which is not done in matter.

While an emergent is a higher complexity, it also results in a new simplicity as it brings a higher order into what was previously less ordered (a new simplex out of a complex). This new simplicity does not carry any of the qualities or aspects of that emergent level prior to it, but as noted, does still carry within it such lower levels so can be understood to that extent through the science of such levels, yet not itself be understood except by a science that is able to reveal the new laws and principles applicable to it.

Ascent takes place, it would seem, through complexity.[increasing order] But at each change of quality the complexity as it were gathers itself together and is expressed in a new simplicity.

Within a given level of emergence, there are degrees of development.

... There are on one level degrees of perfection or development; and at the same time there is affinity by descent between the existents belonging to the level. This difference of perfection is not the same thing as difference of order or rank such as subsists between matter and life or life and mind ...

The concept or idea of mind, the highest emergent known to us, being at our level, extends all the way down to pure dimensionality or Space-Time. In other words, time is the “mind” of motion, materialising is the “mind” of matter, living the “mind” of life. Motion through pure time (or life astronomical, mind ideational) emerges as matter “materialising” (geological time, life geological, mind existential), and this emerges as life “living” (biological time, life biological, mind experiential), which in turn give us mind “minding” (historical time, life historical, mind cognitional). But there is also an extension possible upwards of mind to what we call Deity.

let us describe the empirical quality of any kind of finite which performs to it the office of consciousness or mind as its 'mind.' Yet at the same time let us remember that the 'mind' of a living thing is not conscious mind but is life, and has not the empirical character of consciousness at all, and that life is not merely a lower degree of mind or consciousness, but something different. We are using 'mind' metaphorically by transference from real minds and applying it to the finites on each level in virtue of their distinctive quality; down to Space-Time itself whose existent complexes of bare space-time have for their mind bare time in its empirical variations.

Alexander goes back to the Greek idea of knowledge being “out there” in the object being contemplated. In that sense, there is not mental object (concept) “distinct” (that is, different in state of being) from the physical object, but only an apparent split between the two, which can then be brought together by proper compresence or participation of the consciousness in the object itself.

There is no consciousness lodged, as I have supposed, in the organism as a quality of the neural response; consciousness belongs to the totality of objects, of what are commonly called the objects of consciousness or the field of consciousness ... Consciousness is therefore "out there" where the objects are, by a new version of Berkleyanism ... Obviously for this doctrine as for mine there is no mental object as distinct from a physical object: the image of a tree is a tree in an appropriate form...

Because of the interconnectedness of the universe by virtue of Space-Time, and because the mind apprehends space, time and motion through a unity of sense and mind experience, there is a form of knowing that is intuitive (participative) - sense and reason are outgrowths from it.

In being conscious of its own space and time, the mind is conscious of the space and time of external things and vice versa. This is a direct consequence of the continuity of Space-Time in virtue of which any point-instant is connected sooner or later, directly or indirectly, with every other... The mind therefore does not apprehend the space of its objects, that is their shape, size and locality, by sensation, for it depends for its character on mere spatio-temporal conditions, though it is not to be had as consciousness in the absence of sensation (or else of course ideation). It is clear without repeating these considerations that the same proposition is true of Time; and of motion ... I shall call this mode of apprehension in its distinction from sensation, intuition. ... Intuition is different from reason, but reason and sense alike are outgrowths from it, empirical determinations of it...

In a sense, the universe is a participative one and open to participation by mind as well so that mind can intuitively know an object, contrary to what Kant asserted. Participation (togetherness) is something that is “enjoyed” (experienced) not contemplated, though in the higher level of consciousness, it would be contemplated.

The universe for Alexander is essentially in process, with Time as its ongoing aspect, and the ongoing process consists in the formation of changing complexes of motions. These complexes become ordered in repeatable ways displaying what he calls "qualities." There is a hierarchy of kinds of organized patterns of motions, in which each level depends on the subvening level, but also displays qualities not shown at the subvening level nor predictable from it… On this there sometimes supervenes a further level with the quality called "life"; and certain subtle syntheses which carry life are the foundation for a further level with a new quality. "mind." This is the highest level known to us, but not necessarily the highest possible level. The universe has a forward thrust, called its "nisus" (broadly to be identified with the Time aspect) in virtue of which further levels are to be expected...

Robert G. B. Reid

Emergent evolution was revived by Robert G. B. Reid (March 20, 1939 - May 28, 2016), a biology professor at the University of Victoria (in British Columbia, Canada). In his book Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis (1985), he stated that the modern evolutionary synthesis with its emphasis on natural selection is an incomplete picture of evolution, and emergent evolution can explain the origin of genetic variation. Biologist Ernst Mayr heavily criticized the book claiming it was a misinformed attack on natural selection. Mayr commented that Reid was working from an "obsolete conceptual framework", provided no solid evidence and that he was arguing for a teleological process of evolution.

Reid later published the book Biological Emergences (2007) with a theory on how emergent novelties are generated in evolution. According to Massimo Pigliucci "Biological Emergences by Robert Reid is an interesting contribution to the ongoing debate on the status of evolutionary theory, but it is hard to separate the good stuff from the more dubious claims." Pigliucci noted a dubious claim in the book is that natural selection has no role in evolution. It was positively reviewed by biologist Alexander Badyaev who commented that "the book succeeds in drawing attention to an under appreciated aspect of the evolutionary process". Others have criticized Reid's unorthodox views on emergence and evolution. Biologist Samuel Scheiner stated that Reid's "presentation is both a caricature of evolutionary theory and severely out of date."

 

Religion and health

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_health 

Scholarly studies have investigated the effects of religion on health. The World Health Organization (WHO) discerns four dimensions of health, namely physical, social, mental, and spiritual health. Having a religious belief may have both positive and negative impacts on health and morbidity.

Religion and spirituality

Spirituality has been ascribed many different definitions in different contexts, but a general definition is: an individual's search for meaning and purpose in life. Spirituality is distinct from organized religion in that spirituality does not necessarily need a religious framework. That is, one does not necessarily need to follow certain rules, guidelines or practices to be spiritual, but an organized religion often has some combination of these in place. Some people who suffer from severe mental disorders may find comfort in religion. People who report themselves to be spiritual people may not observe any specific religious practices or traditions.

Scientific research

More than 3000 empirical studies have examined relationships between religion and health, including more than 1200 in the 20th century, and more than 2000 additional studies between 2000 and 2009. Various other reviews of the religion/spirituality and health literature have been published. These include two reviews from an NIH-organized expert panel that appeared in a 4-article special section of American Psychologist. Several chapters in edited academic books have also reviewed the empirical literature. The literature has also been reviewed extensively from the perspective of public health and its various subfields ranging from health policy and management to infectious diseases and vaccinology. More than 30 meta-analyses and 100 systematic reviews have been published on relations between religious or spiritual factors and health outcomes.

Dimensions of health

The World Health Organization (WHO) discerns four dimensions of health, namely physical, social, mental, and spiritual health.

Physical health

Positive effects

According to Ellison & Levin (1998), some studies indicate that religiosity appears to positively correlate with physical health. For instance, mortality rates are lower among people who frequently attend religious events and consider themselves both religious and spiritual. According to Seybold & Hill (2001), almost all studies involved in the effect of religion on a person's physical health have revealed it has a positive attribution to their lifestyle. These studies have been carried out among all ages, genders and religions. These are based on the experience of religion is positive in itself.

One possibility is that religion provides physical health benefits indirectly. Church attendees present with lower rates of alcohol consumption and improvement in mood, which is associated with better physical health. Kenneth Pargament is a major contributor to the theory of how individuals may use religion as a resource in coping with stress, His work seems to show the influence of attribution theory. Additional evidence suggests that this relationship between religion and physical health may be causal. Religion may reduce likelihood of certain diseases. Studies suggest that it guards against cardiovascular disease by reducing blood pressure, and also improves immune system functioning. Similar studies have been done investigating religious emotions and health. Although religious emotions, such as humility, forgiveness, and gratitude confer health benefits, it is unclear if religious people cultivate and experience those emotions more frequently than non-religious peoples.

Church attendance

In many studies, attendance at religious services has been found to be associated with lower levels of multiple risk factors for ill health and mortality and with lower prevalence and incidence of illness and mortality. For example, a recent report of a follow-up study of over five thousand Americans found those attending more than weekly had half the mortality of those never attending after adjusting for multiple variables. This can be expressed as an increase life expectancy (Hummer et al. 1999) with a life expectancy at age 20 of 83 years for frequent attendees and 75 years for non-attendees. A causal association between a risk factor and an outcome can only be proven by a randomized controlled experiment, obviously infeasible in this case. Hence, observational findings of an association of religious attendance with lower mortality are compatible with a causal relationship but cannot prove one. Church goers may differ from others in ways not measured that could explain their better health.

Death rates

Kark et. (1996) included almost 4,000 Israelis, over 16 years (beginning in 1970), death rates were compared between the experimental group (people belonging to 11 religious kibbutzim) versus the control group (people belonging to secular kibbutzim). Some determining factors for the groups included the date the kibbutz was created, geography of the different groups, and the similarity in age. It was determined that “belonging to a religious collective was associated with a strong protective effect". Not only do religious people tend to exhibit healthier lifestyles, they also have a strong support system that secular people would not normally have. A religious community can provide support especially through a stressful life event such as the death of a loved one or illness. There is the belief that a higher power will provide healing and strength through the rough times which also can explain the lower mortality rate of religious people vs. secular people.

The existence of ‘religious struggle’ in elderly patients was predictive of greater risk of mortality in a study by Pargament et al. (2001). Results indicate that patients, with a previously sound religious life, experienced a 19% to 28% greater mortality due to the belief that God was supposedly punishing them or abandoning them.

Infections

A number of religious practices have been reported to cause infections. These happened during an ultra-orthodox Jewish circumcisions practice known as metzitzah b'peh, the ritual 'side roll' in Hinduism, the Christian communion chalice, during the Islamic Hajj and after the Muslim ritual ablution.

Prayer

Some religions claim that praying for somebody who is sick can have positive effects on the health of the person being prayed for. Meta-studies of the literature in the field have been performed showing evidence only for no effect or a potentially small effect. For instance, a 2006 meta analysis on 14 studies concluded that there is "no discernible effect" while a 2007 systemic review of intercessory prayer reported inconclusive results, noting that 7 of 17 studies had "small, but significant, effect sizes" but the review noted that the most methodologically rigorous studies failed to produce significant findings.

Randomized controlled trials of intercessory prayer have not yielded significant effects on health. These trials have compared personal, focused, committed and organized intercessory prayer with those interceding holding some belief that they are praying to God or a god versus any other intervention. A Cochrane collaboration review of these trials concluded that 1) results were equivocal, 2) evidence does not support a recommendation either in favor or against the use of intercessory prayer and 3) any resources available for future trials should be used to investigate other questions in health research. In a case-control study done following 5,286 Californians over a 28-year period in which variables were controlled for (i.e. age, race/ethnicity, gender, education level), participants who went to church on a frequent basis (defined as attending a religious service once a week or more) were 36% less likely to die during that period. However, this can be partly be attributed to a better lifestyle since religious people tend to drink and smoke less and eat a healthier diet.

Mental health

Evidence suggests that religiosity can be a pathway to both mental health and mental disorder. For example, religiosity is positively associated with mental disorders that involve an excessive amount of self-control and negatively associated with mental disorders that involve a lack of self-control. Other studies have found indications of mental health among both the religious and the secular. For instance, Vilchinsky & Kravetz found negative correlations with psychological distress among religious and secular subgroups of Jewish students. In addition, intrinsic religiosity has been inversely related to depression in the elderly, while extrinsic religiosity has no relation or even a slight positive relation to depression. Religiosity has been found to mitigate the negative impact of injustice and income inequality on life satisfaction.

The link between religion and mental health may be due to the guiding framework or social support that it offers to individuals. By these routes, religion has the potential to offer security and significance in life, as well as valuable human relationships, to foster mental health. Some theorists have suggested that the benefits of religion and religiosity are accounted for by the social support afforded by membership in a religious group.

Religion may also provide coping skills to deal with stressors, or demands perceived as straining. Pargament's three primary styles of religious coping are 1) self-directing, characterized by self-reliance and acknowledgement of God, 2) deferring, in which a person passively attributes responsibility to God, and 3) collaborative, which involves an active partnership between the individual and God and is most commonly associated with positive adjustment. This model of religious coping has been criticized for its over-simplicity and failure to take into account other factors, such as level of religiosity, specific religion, and type of stressor. Additional work by Pargament involves a detailed delineation of positive and negative forms of religious coping, captured in the BRIEF-RCOPE questionnaire which have been linked to a range of positive and negative psychological outcomes.

Depression

Studies have shown a negative relationship between spiritual well-being and depressive symptoms. In one study, those who were assessed to have a higher spiritual quality of life on a spiritual well-being scale had less depressive symptoms. Cancer and AIDS patients who were more spiritual had lower depressive symptoms than religious patients. Spirituality shows beneficial effects possibly because it speaks to one's ability to intrinsically find meaning in life, strength, and inner peace, which is especially important for very ill patients.

Exline et al. 1999 showed that the difficulty in forgiving God and alienation from God were associated with higher levels of depression and anxiety. Among those who currently believed in God, forgiving God for a specific, unfortunate incident predicted lower levels of anxious and depressed mood.

Schizophrenia and psychosis

Studies have reported beneficial effects of spirituality on the lives of patients with schizophrenia, major depression, and other psychotic disorders. Schizophrenic patients were less likely to be re-hospitalized if families encouraged religious practice, and in depressed patients who underwent religiously based interventions, their symptoms improved faster than those who underwent secular interventions. Furthermore, a few cross-sectional studies have shown that more religiously involved people had less instance of psychosis.

Life satisfaction

Research shows that religiosity moderates the relationship between “thinking about meaning of life” and life satisfaction. For individuals scoring low and moderately on religiosity, thinking about the meaning of life is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. For people scoring highly on religiosity, however, this relationship is positive. Religiosity has also been found to moderate the relationship between negative affect and life satisfaction, such that life satisfaction is less strongly influenced by the frequency of negative emotions in more religious (vs less religious) individuals.

Coping with trauma

One of the most common ways that people cope with trauma is through the comfort found in religious or spiritual practices. Psychologists of religion have performed multiple studies to measure the positive and negative effects of this coping style. Leading researchers have split religious coping into two categories: positive religious coping and negative religious coping. Individuals who use positive religious coping are likely to seek spiritual support and look for meaning in a traumatic situation. Negative religious coping (or spiritual struggles) expresses conflict, question, and doubt regarding issues of God and faith.

The effects of religious coping are measured in many different circumstances, each with different outcomes. Some common experiences where people use religious coping are fear-inflicting events such as 9/11 or the holocaust, death and sickness, and near death experiences. Research also shows that people also use religious coping to deal with everyday stressors in addition to life-changing traumas. The underlying assumption of the ability of religion to influence the coping process lies in the hypothesis that religion is more than a defence mechanism as it was viewed by Sigmund Freud. Rather than inspiring denial, religion stimulates reinterpretations of negative events through the sacred lens.

Moral mandate

Spiritual health

Spiritual Health is one of four dimensions to well-being as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO), which include physical, social, and mental.

The preamble to Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted by the International Health Conference held in New York from 19 June to 22 July 1946 and signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States defined health as a state of "physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity" and it has not been amended.

However, but many spiritual folks experience moments of joy. But However, in 1983 twenty-two WHO member countries from the Eastern Mediterranean Region proposed a draft resolution to this preamble to include reference to spiritual health, such that it would redefine health as a state of "physical, mental, spiritual and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity".

Whilst WHO did not amend the preamble to its constitution, resolution WHA31.13 passed by the Thirty-seventh World Health Assembly, in 1984 called upon Member States to consider including in their Health For All strategies a spiritual dimension as defined in that resolution in accordance with their own social and cultural patterns recognizing that "the spiritual dimension plays a great role in motivating people's achievements in all aspects of life".

The complete description of the spiritual dimension as articulated by the Health Assembly is as follows:

The spiritual dimension is understood to imply a phenomenon that is not material in nature, but belongs to the realm of ideas, beliefs, values and ethics that have arisen in the minds and conscience of human beings, particularly ennobling ideas. Ennobling ideas have given rise to health ideals, which have led to a practical strategy for Health for All that aims at attaining a goal that has both a material and non-material component. If the material component of the strategy can be provided to people, the non-material or spiritual one is something that has to arise within people and communities in keeping with their social and cultural patterns. The spiritual dimension plays a great role in motivating people’s achievement in all aspects of life.

Since the inclusion of spiritual health within WHO's purview, a number of other significant organizations have also attended to spirituality and incorporated reference to it in key documents, including the United Nations action plan Agenda 21 which recognizes the right of individuals to "healthy physical, mental, and spiritual development".