Quotes About Mechanistic

The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.

The atomists knew that causation must start from something, and that no cause can be assigned to this original something. Motion was simply a given. The atomists asked mechanistic questions and gave mechanistic answers. When they asked "Why?" they meant: what was the cause of an event? When their successors—Plato, Aristotle, and so on—asked "Why?" they were searching for the purpose of an event.

I don't know about you, but I find it exhilarating to see how vague psychological notions evaporate and give rise to a physical, mechanistic understanding of the mind, even if it's the mind of the fly.

It is a most important characteristic of the mechanistic philosophy, however, that it permits one to make a limitless number of adjustments in his detailed point of view, without giving up what is essential to the mechanistic position.

Homo economicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analogue for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic "economic" behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.

As mechanistic biologists, we are hoping that by understanding how the virus works at the molecular level, we will be able to predict with more accuracy how it will evolve.

Input, output, end of story. This is a very mechanistic and ultimately dehumanizing model for how people find and use information. In

panmechanistic world view is committed to a methodological monism; it acknowledges only mechanistic causality because it attributes to it alone any cognitive value or at least a higher cognitive value than to teleology.

second point is how to think about the very concept of personal responsibility in a mechanistic and social world. It is a given that all network systems, social or mechanical, need accountability in order to work.

Like every alternative to Christianity, the mechanistic worldview was essentially a substitute religion, a mental idol.