Month: September 2022

THE TRICKY QUESTION OF TIME. “But, although it might seem more intuitive to regard organisms as things than as processes, the situation quickly begins to reverse when we start giving due consideration to time.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

PROCESS ONTOLOGY. “Our argument in this essay has been that process ontology is far more concordant with the understanding of the living world provided by contemporary biology than its substantialist rival. The more we learn about life, the more necessary a process perspective becomes. This is particularly the case with regard to the increasing realization of the omnipresence of symbiosis, which directly challenges deeply entrenched substantialist assumptions about the living world. Thus the empirical findings of biology are inexorably driving us towards processualism, even if it is less intuitive than substantialism.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

THE LEADERSHIP OF PHYSICS. “It is interesting to observe that physics, which has traditionally been regarded as the more advanced science, was pushed towards process ontology about a century ago (as was argued by Whitehead and others), and now biology—if we and the other contributors to this volume are correct—is following suit. Might this perhaps be an indication that the shift from substantialism to processualism is just something that all sciences go through as they develop?” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SUBSTANCE VERSUS PHENOMENA. “Every science has progressed beyond an initial conception of its phenomena in substance terms to understanding that they are in fact process phenomena. Fire is no longer modeled in terms of the substance phlogiston, but instead in terms of the process of combustion; heat no longer in terms of caloric, but in terms of random kinetic processes; life no longer in terms of vital fluids, but in terms of special kinds of far from thermodynamic equilibrium processes. And so on.“ (Bickhard 2009). https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

WIDELY APPLICABLE. “Metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence—to mention the three phenomena we have discussed here in most detail—all provide compelling empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology.” https://lnkd.in/dE_ZD9q View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this second of two weekends in a remarkable essay on process ontology. Metaphysics rarely strays into biology, or rather, biologists are rarely metaphysical in their thinking. Biologists are generally more comfortable outside of abstract thinking. But this essay, I believe, is deeply important, very timely, and has many practical as well as philosophical consequences. It is worth very careful consideration. View in LinkedIn

The physical cabinet of curiosities; the other is a bird’s nest of clippings and foraging from the marvelous world of ideas. View in LinkedIn

PLANT VAPOR AND CLOUDS. “Plants emit gases from their leaves and sap, which is one reason why they have distinctive smells. When those gases interact with sunlight, their chemistry changes such that they condense from diffuse gas to liquid droplets less than one micrometer — a thousandth of a millimeter — in size. These droplets then serve as the nucleus of a cloud.” https://lnkd.in/dAd-J4G View in LinkedIn

TURBULENCE AND CLOUD SHAPES. "Turbulence is thought to modify the collision efficiency of droplets in one of three ways: 1. By modifying the flow field around the droplets; 2. By generating spatial inhomogeneities in the droplet concentration field; 3. By modifying (generally increasing) the relative velocities between droplets." http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn

"TURBULENT MIXING dilutes the concentration of droplets, thereby reducing the competition for the available vapor, and enhancing the growth rate of favored droplets. Thermodynamically the mixing of sub-saturated air requires net evaporation, either by reducing the number of droplets in the saturated air after the mixing, or by reducing the size of the droplets." (Inhomogeneous mixing). http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/teaching/skript-5.pdf View in LinkedIn