QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

machines are given. 387 It is also relevant to ask the fundamental question whether human
understanding, judgement or intentionality really belong in a machine. Researchers into artificial
intelligence have not yet been able to build a machine which has even the smallest amount of
common sense or which can discuss everyday matters using normal language. The deductive
computer is a syntactic piece of equipment which manipulates symbols, but has no creativity and
does not understand meanings. 388
The lack of solutions to basic questions concerning the character and meaning of life does not
necessarily have to be counted as a defect in the mechanistic-deterministic conception of reality.
More problematical is the fact that neither qualitative change in the system or questions
concerning emergence can be handled unambiguously and in a clear manner within this
framework. 389 The Nobel prized physical chemist Ilya Prigogine who has studied the dynamics
of unstable systems has for a long time argued that Newtonian determinism fails; the future is not
determined by the present, and thus the symmetry between past and future is broken. 390 The
biologist Humberto Maturana and his student Franscesco Varela have maintained that it is
misleading to reduce a living system to its different constituent parts, we must also consider both
its environment and its history. 391 The acceptance of this kind of emergent and holistic features
has been problematical. The systematic emergence or self-organisation of different systems, is
difficult to explain within the existing mechanistic-deterministic framework of thought, within
which events are explained by strict external causes. In criticism of holism, scientific character is
usually perhaps unwittingly identified with forms of definition adopted at the dawn of the
modern era: i.e. the metaphysical presuppositions within whose frames it was customary to
conduct research.
In recent decades, the idea of emergent features showing up in certain contexts has become more
common in science. Philosophical considerations related to quantum mechanics, and for example
system thinking and non-linear phenomena point to the inadequacy of Atomist and Reductionist
methods of explanation. Reductionist thinking has nowadays been questioned even in research
accepted as constituents of a revamped logic, side-by-side with axioms and theorems.
387
Kallio-Tamminen 2003.
388
Winograd 1990, 1-2. Devlin 1997, 152-156.
389
The issue whether emergence and reductionism are compatible is controversial and depends, for example, on the
definition assigned to emergence (weak, strong) It is also a matter of discussion whether non-linearity implies nonreductionism.
390
See e.g. Prigogine 1997, 6.
391
Maturana and Varela 1980. Varela, Thomson and Rosch 1991.
147