Visitors Now:
Total Visits:
Total Stories:

By Menvall
Contributor profile | More stories

Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

On the black hole of conceptualization

Sunday, October 21, 2012 3:00

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

(Before It's News)

Charles Darwin suggested that the origin of biodiversity can be described as an “origin of species”.

Willi Hennig interpreted Darwin’s suggestion literally as that there then must be “a single true tree of life” describing this “origin of species”.

Such “single true tree” of life is, however, a paradox, since a generic entity like “species” is a paradox, because classification is ultimately paradoxical (demonstrated by Bertrand Russell in 1901).

It means that Hennig is wrong in that there is “a single true tree of life”, but not that Darwin is wrong in that the origin of biodiversity can be described as an “origin of species”. The difference between them is that whereas Hennig believes in Darwin’s description of reality, Darwin merely describes reality, and whereas it always is wrong to believe in descriptions of reality, it is never wrong to describe reality.

Descriptions of reality may be more or less subjective or objective, but never wrong, whereas belief in descriptions of reality is always wrong (per definition), for the simple reason that descriptions of reality can’t be wrong and thus neither right. If belief in descriptions of reality, on the contrary, indeed was right, then every description of reality were just as right, and reality was thus paradoxically contradictory. This view, ie, that reality is paradoxically contradictory, contradicts the fundamental assumption for science that there indeed is a single true reality, or as the cladist Magnus Lidén expressed it: “the existence of a true history of life (or that there is one and only one history) is a prerequisite for natural science in the first place”. The fact that the cladist Magnus Lidén thus explicitly contradicts his own implicit axiom merely shows that the belief in descriptions of reality is paradoxically contradictory. Magnus just isn’t aware of that he contradictory both believes in descriptions of reality instead of in reality, and in reality.

The problem for us (humans) is to accept the fact that we can’t describe reality unambiguously with regard to both the included attributes and the excluded attributes, and that including all attributes leads to paradoxical contradiction. Instead, some of us comprehend this fact as a problem that can be solved. When this comprehension leads to the only possible “solution”, that is, that description of reality, instead of reality, is reality, then we have strayed us into typology, ie, the notion that our classification of reality is reality. This is the black hole of conceptualization itself.