"Parts influence each other and have fuzzy boundaries" doesn't imply anything like "everything is the same thing" or "all is one" etc.Steve3007 wrote: ↑May 13th, 2020, 5:49 amI suspect that there are a variety of different viewpoints that you're covering with this comment, some of which I personally find more interesting than others. You being a nominalist, who has specifically talked about rejecting "real abstracts", I presume one of your objections to most of them is the old "confusing the map with the territory" objection. i.e. mixing up the way we view the world with the way that it ontologically is; reification of abstracts.Terrapin Station wrote:What I never get is the attraction to everything being the same, being "one"/"unified" etc.
Among these viewpoints, there is the desire for a holistic worldview because it is seen as a simple counterweight to what are perceived to be the flaws in Reductionism; i.e. the analysis of a system by considering its parts individually and assuming that the parts either don't influence each other or have simple, well-defined interfaces to each other. I think this is what creation/evolution is vaguely groping towards when he endlessly insists that he doesn't believe anything and that "thee[sic] truth" is simple and easy and that he alone knows it, and everyone else is blinded by their non-child-like knowledge and education. etc. etc.
There is also the simple observation that lots of the phenomena in Nature have very striking similarities and that those similarities can be expressed mathematically. I see nothing wrong with that observation. But I think you tend to balk at things like that because you immediately assume, as soon as something like mathematics is mentioned, that mathematics is being reified. I guess you assume that because you're always looking out for it, due to your strong rejection of "real abstracts".
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail (my current favourite saying). If you're always on the lookout for people mistakenly reifying abstract concepts, you'll see them doing it everywhere. Clearly, having studied philosophy for a long time, you have a lot more than a "hammer". You have a large and varied toolkit, no doubt. But the "hammer" ( by which I mean the objection to the perceived reification of abstract concepts) seems to be your favourite.
"Things have similarities" doesn't imply that everything is the same thing, either, and neither does the fact that we can formulate abstractions like concepts, mathematical representations, etc.