From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Dialectics in nature
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 12:58:30 -0500


Hi all, & Happy 1999.

Alan wrote:

>What I take this passage to be about is the way in which social phenomena -
>I don't know how it works for natural phenomena - have both a necessity and
>lack it.  What we often take to be fixed characteristics of everyday life -
>the commodity form or the legal form, for example - prove to be
>historically specific.  Thus they are necessary under prevailing social
>relations, but not inevitable in all times and places.

Just as an aside, there is some reason to think this notion of historical
specificity may hold for natural phenomena as well.  As I understand it,
some scientists have noted that certain constants in physics happen to be
"just right" to permit the possibility of life.  Some take this to be a sign
that there is a God, while others suggest that it means there is a potential
infinitude of universes, each possessing slightly different physical
constants and hence having and not having life (as the case permits).  If my
account is at all accurate and we accept the latter interpretation, then it
would seem that life in this universe and the conditions that bound it are
the result of a "local" history.  The "constants" could have been different.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-gis.net
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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