Talk:Vitalism

NPOV
No scientist believes that biological processes are directly reducible to chemical or physical processes, so the main claim and the way the whole article frames vitalism is unacademic - to say the least. Furthermore, there are no references to the current debate and conspicuously absent are contributions from the fields of biosemiotics or any reference to von Uexküll or Rose. In short, the article is not informative and does not meet Wikipedia standards. 86.6.148.125 (talk) 10:39, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * Thank you for pointing thosse things out. Since you seem quite knowledgeable about vitalism why not try to fix some of these things yourself? Thank you.  The Blue  Rider  Postal horn icon.svg 11:14, 18 March 2024 (UTC)


 * IP, please read the information related to pseudo-scientific articles at the top of this page as well as WP:FRINGE. Do you have a source for your statement "No scientist believes that biological processes are directly reducible to chemical or physical processes"? Because it looks to me that the exact opposite is actually true. In any event, since you have not provided a single source to justify the NPOV tag on the article, I will remove it. In the future, please propose specific changes and always provide sources to back them up. --McSly (talk) 14:24, 18 March 2024 (UTC)
 * So I think the OP has a point here but we have to be cautious of how we characterize things. On the one hand, very few scientists (or virtually none) believe that biological processes are not made up of underlying chemical and physical processes. But as far as I am aware, it is very much an open question whether biological organisms are directly reducible to those processes in our best scientific explanations. This is just to make the banal point that biology is not chemistry or physics; it has its own concepts and explanations, many of which incorporate insights from physics and especially chemistry, but are unique to the biological level. An example would be a notion like "homeostasis," which seems to be something that occurs in a full-fledged way only at very high levels of biological organization, not amid isolated chemical or physical processes alone.
 * The article here conflates the open scientific/philosophical questions of reductionism and emergence, as well as the potential limits to mechanical modes of explanation in the biological sphere, with vitalism as positing non-natural entities. That is a problem. AtavisticPillow (talk) 18:55, 11 June 2024 (UTC)