Mazviita Chirimuuta

And I think this is a really nice illustration of what's going on with our interactions with nature as scientists.

Nature is sort of inexhaustibly complex.

There's all kinds of patterns and things going on there.

It can be pinned down and we can get true answers, but when we sort of release our grip, it will carry on shape-shifting and there's lots of other ways that it could be.

So yeah, one final theory.

I'm not so convinced by that.

This is very much a view that I think makes sense if you're

basis for your theory as a philosopher of science is really the biological sciences, which is where I'm coming from.

If you're a physicist it seems much more natural to think that there is one fundamental set of laws of the universe which is going to be nailed down once and for all and could explain everything.

Biology just sort of throws up lots and lots of examples, particularities.

It tends to be

less considered sort of less intellectually satisfying in comparison with physics.

Oh, you can just spend all your time in biology doing stamp collecting because there's this thing and there's this thing and there's this thing.

How do you tie it all together theoretically?

But on the other hand, I think that if you take that particularity and that shifting quality to biological phenomena, then actually it just forces you to think about knowledge differently.

So the connecting thread is really this idea that what cognition is, is something that is machine-like.

Going back to the 17th century, this is a view associated with the philosopher and physicist and physiologist René Descartes, who said we need to go along with this idea that everything that happens in the body is

is explicable in terms of quite simple mechanistic forces.

And this idea that biological systems are machine-like has obviously been hugely influential in the different branches of science.

The reflex theory was one instance of that.