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ryan g's picture

As a psychology major in

As a psychology major in undergrad, I often felt that there was a gap between the "harder" natural sciences (chem, bio, physics) and "softer" sciences such as psychology, anthropolgy etc..  Maybe it was only at my school, but I really felt like psychologists had an inferiority complex about it.  Or maybe it was just me...  

Anyway, I wonder why there needs to be a rift.  

Dr. Grobstein got me thinking about this in his first post where he alluded to entropy.  Here are some quotes from Dr. G's post:

"We have randomness (meaninglessness) as a driving force that causes new things to be created." 

"Perhaps those things, rather than being failings, are actually what drives the ongoing process of 'getting it less wrong'" 

and here are some quotes from the Wikipedia article on entropy:

"[Entropy] is a measure of the randomness of molecules in a system...  Spontaneous changes, in isolated systems, occur with an increase in entropy. Spontaneous changes tend to smooth out differences in temperaturepressuredensity, and chemical potential that may exist in a system" 

I see a lot of parallels.   

I guess my point is... It's not hard to imagine that mental and psychological phenomena may obey some of the laws of nature that "hard science" has discovered gotten less wrong.  Perhaps we would be well-served to use these principles as guides and/or foundations for new exploration into mental and psychological phenomena.

Another example...  I like the argument that Marty makes for a metaphysical aspect of reality.  He says that nothing comes from nothing... something is, something always was.  

That sounds like the first law of thermodynamics to me.  

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