:up:

Maybe after you're through with Marx — frank

One cannot be through with Marx until human emancipation is achieved. :grin:

One cannot be through with Marx until human emancipation is achieved. — Jamal

I guess my identity thread is a long way off then.

We know the amoeba made a decision because it's not just flowing along with the current. That's what volition is: going against wind, so to speak. Id like to do a thread on identity one day. Maybe after you're through with Marx — frank

Hell yeah, sounds good to me.

:D



So we're similarly situated, but I'm still interested in the ideas and differences, and I'm going to keep it to reductionism now.

Your notion of reductionism appeals to the whole, which I am certainly more inclined towards -- the notion that understanding the whole and its parts and their respective relationships is a very appealing form of reductionism. I think what gets me are the discontinuities, which I've been attempting to point out with my various examples of theories. But that isn't to say I'm opposed to reductionism -- I'd just say that scientific theories are frequently independent of one another developed by their own particular group of people studying that problem or companies working on a product. There's a common theoretical core, but that common theoretical core isn't conceptual, it's cultural. It's a craft whereby one figures out how to reduce observations to theories, or vice versa. So I agree with this notion of a double-reductionism, between wholes and parts.

I think I'm just very uncertain about there being only one way of putting it all: where others see unity, I see multiplicities upon multiplicities, and I see no reason to believe science will be finished.

And, a problem with beginnings, as you noted in the reference to the Arche thread: We could re-interpret physics in terms of biology, saying that biology is the queen of the sciences -- how would you respond to this proposal? Would that still be the physical reduction that you're talking about?

So I agree with this notion of a double-reductionism, between wholes and parts. — Moliere

I did not mean a double reductionism. The opposite ends of the spectrum are not opposite ends of reductionism. Reductionism is one end and holism at the other end.

I think what gets me are the discontinuities, which I've been attempting to point out with my various examples of theories. — Moliere

The discontinuities may be a matter of our lack of knowledge.

I'd just say that scientific theories are frequently independent of one another developed by their own particular group of people studying that problem or companies working on a product. — Moliere

For a long time science became increasingly specialized, but there has more recently been an increase in multidisciplinary approaches.

I think I'm just very uncertain about there being only one way of putting it all: where others see unity, I see multiplicities upon multiplicities, and I see no reason to believe science will be finished. — Moliere

I agree.

We could re-interpret physics in terms of biology — Moliere

I don't know what that would look like since much or the focus of physics is not on living organisms. But here is where multidisciplinary approaches come into play.

Complexity Science or complex system science is the study of interactions of large collections of components which give rise to high level features. (self organization, Emergence, Structure , Function etc).
I first heard about it in a great book by Carolyn Merchant "Autonomous Nature - Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution".
Theories like "Chaos Theory", Scientific Emergence, Quantum Biology, Mechanics, Chemistry and many methodologies that use statistical probabilities are part of Complexity Science.
https://complexityexplained.github.io/

One of the things I quickly noticed about this topic is that a person would really need to be a scientist to make any pronouncements, and scientists are usually busy doing other things — frank

-You are correct. After all we can not do meaningful Philosophy without up to date Scientific Epistemology and we can not arrive to a Scientific Conclusion (theory) without Philosophizing about what the results of our research really mean.
Credible Scientific Epistemology is absolutely necessary for out theoretical foundations even for Philosophical questions of Meaning and Value, questions that we can not do science to answer them.

first heard about it in a great book by Carolyn Merchant "Autonomous Nature - Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Times to the Scientific Revolution".
Theories like "Chaos Theory", Scientific Emergence, Quantum Biology, Mechanics, Chemistry and many methodologies that use statistical probabilities are part of Complexity Science. — Nickolasgaspar

That sounds fascinating. Thanks!

I did not mean a double reductionism. The opposite ends of the spectrum are not opposite ends of reductionism. Reductionism is one end and holism at the other end. — Fooloso4

Sorry. I'm filling in gaps where I ought to be asking questions.

I'll just ask an open one: what is the spectrum between reductionism and holism? Are these two methods, or what?

The discontinuities may be a matter of our lack of knowledge. — Fooloso4

I agree they may be. My feeling on what will happen is based on what seems to be -- which perhaps qualifies this as a myth too, now that I think on it.

While I can acknowledge the possibility, my report remains the same -- it's the discontinuities which make me feel doubt, at least in my rationalist story.

For a long time science became increasingly specialized, but there has more recently been an increase in multidisciplinary approaches. — Fooloso4

True. And it's super interesting stuff. I love these approaches.

I think the way my view of science would accommodate that would be similar to artistic movements through history -- there are practitioners who, after upon developing their craft, get to push the boundaries of where things have been.

Just as the artists had to follow certain rules, so do the scientists. The specifics of those rules make each craft what it is. Science as a human craft where we produce knowledge, now that we have a sufficiently rich economy.

With that picture in mind --and it is only a picture -- it's hard for me to believe in a reductionism to the whatevers of physics that we invent in the future. (and this goes back to my picture of science as a social practice which will, by being a social practice, always change rather than arrive at a final picture)

I agree. — Fooloso4

Hrm! I am surprised. How do you make sense of the multiplicity while retaining reductionism as you've laid it out so far?

I don't know what that would look like since much or the focus of physics is not on living organisms. But here is where multidisciplinary approaches come into play. — Fooloso4

I think if we begin with the notion that biology is the queen of the sciences, not in terms of logical relations between the extensions of terms, but in terms of what a science looks like when it's been perfected -- then that's how you'd begin to pick apart the physical sciences.

In a way this almost relates to the OP, because I'm making the argument from success of the sciences -- but saying biology is very successful, and so a candidate for reduction.

what is the spectrum between reductionism and holism? Are these two methods, or what? — Moliere

The spectrum is the subatomic to the cosmological, but much in biology focuses between the molecular or cellular on one end to the living organism and its environment on the other. Many methods.

... it's the discontinuities which make me feel doubt, at least in my rationalist story. — Moliere

Well, we should not mistake an incomplete story for sufficient one.

Just as the artists had to follow certain rules, so do the scientists. — Moliere

Rather than follow the rules cutting edge science establishes them.

,I am surprised. How do you make sense of the multiplicity while retaining reductionism as you've laid it out so far? — Moliere

I'm sitting in the peanut gallery. I take a pragmatic view. Reductionism in science has been and continues to be successful. That seems to be where most of the attention goes, but not all of it. Some scientists are more interested in larger scale views. If's not a question of one or the other but of what works.

In a way this almost relates to the OP, because I'm making the argument from success of the sciences -- but saying biology is very successful, and so a candidate for reduction. — Moliere

I'm not sure what you mean by a candidate for reduction. Much of biology is already reductive - genetics, DNA, genomes, biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics, But systems science is non-reductive, it is dynamic and integrative.

Rather than follow the rules cutting edge science establishes them. — Fooloso4

Isn't that the same for the artists?

I'm sitting in the peanut gallery. I take a pragmatic view. Reductionism in science has been and continues to be successful. That seems to be where most of the attention goes, but not all of it. Some scientists are more interested in larger scale views. If's not a question of one or the other but of what works. — Fooloso4

Fair.

I'm nowhere near the foundations. I just do my lab job, while thinking my little thoughts. Philosophically the one thing that grounds my wonderings is I'm actually thinking about this stuff in terms of what I ought believe. But in a speculative sense, at least. (since, as you can see, I entertain some odd beliefs)

I agree that it's a question of what works -- I think that's what I mean by multiplicity, at least in part. What works is relative to some project, as far as I can tell.

So a plumber knows what makes a pipe work. There's a reason for the pipe, there is knowledge associated with plumbing which is technical enough to require training.

Of course no one thinks plumbing is the fundament.

But in what way is science's "what works" different such that we should pay attention to it for the purposes of thinking about the fundament?

I'm not sure what you mean by a candidate for reduction. Much of biology is already reductive - genetics, DNA, genomes, biochemistry, molecular biology, biophysics, But systems science is non-reductive, it is dynamic and integrative. — Fooloso4

That's interesting. I mean, I agree with the beginning part but I'm curious what you count as non-reductive science.

If you will allow a guess now that you've explained what you mean by between the poles: reduction is the downward motion towards particulars, and holism is the upward motion towards universals. Or, in terms of particular sciences, reductionism is from biological entities' functions to physical forces, and holism is from the whole (whatever that may be) in order to understand the particulars. (I think, in my mind, I think about going back and forth here between wholes and particulars to "check" the relations between ideas, so that's why I filled in as I did before).

Or am I wrong?

Isn't that the same for the artists? — Moliere

Yes, I think so. This is clearly seen in the case of jazz. The innovators made the rules that those who came after them learned and followed. But the innovators did not make the rules in the sense of first making them and then playing according to them. They played and those who studied them codified them.

I'm nowhere near the foundations. I just do my lab job — Moliere

My wife is a PhD biochemist, but has no interest in such discussions. She is interested in how things actually work, in finding answers. My son, on the other hand, is in the lab and enjoys these kinds of discussion.

I'm curious what you count as non-reductive science. — Moliere

Systems science. Morphology. Zoology. Environmental sciences.

reduction is the downward motion towards particulars, and holism is the upward motion towards universals. — Moliere

Not exactly. The study of animals is the study of particulars. A horse or a dog is a particular thing. It is not a matter of universals but of organisms.

Yes, I think so. This is clearly seen in the case of jazz. The innovators made the rules that those who came after them learned and followed. But the innovators did not make the rules in the sense of first making them and then playing according to them. They played and those who studied them codified them. — Fooloso4

So the innovators don't make rules at all. They just play. The ones wo study the innovators are the ones who make the rules.

They just play. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is much more to it than that.

Are they following rules when they play then?

I am unfamiliar with the change from a supernatural to a natural explanation as a "reduction." I am more familiar with taking two scientific fields (chemistry and physics) and reducing one to the other.

I interpret your second question to be asking "can" sciences be reduced? I think the answer to that is yes.

How, precisely, would you define reductionism?

We should approach all topics available for scientific inquiry as if the goal is further reduction to physics. — frank

Isn't that already the case ontologically? We know that chemical laws boil down to physical laws, and that biology ultimately goes down to chemistry. We don't use physics to study biology because biological systems are too complex to track each molecular interaction (methodology), but nonetheless we are aware that, physically, biological phenomenons are derived from physics.

Great image!

There's an old joke. A University Chancellor was going through budget requests with the board of directors.

'The physics department!' he says, throwing his hands up in the air. 'They always want such enormous amounts of money! Big pieces of equipment, special buildings, all kinds of stuff.

"Why can't they be more like the English Department? All they want is books, and stationary, and wastepaper bins.

"Or the math department. They don't even want the bins."

"Or the math department. They don't even want the bins." — Wayfarer

Not true. Housekeeper of a famous mathematician asked what the mathematician does. Answer after deliberation: "He scribbles on paper, then scowls and wads it and throws it in the wastebasket".

I stand corrected.... :yikes:

I guess the guy that told it to me wasn't a mathematician.

We know that chemical laws boil down to physical laws,

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. That is, it is arguably something that has been so popular for so long (since the pre-Socratics) only because it is intuitive, "neat and tidy." But our intuitions often seem to lead us astray, so this might be a knock on the idea as much as support for it.

Bogaard (1978), Scerri (1991, 1994) and Hendry (1998) have all questioned the possibility of fully reducing chemical theories about atoms and molecules to quantum mechanics. Bogaard argues that many key chemical concepts such as valence and bonding do not find a natural home in quantum mechanics. In a similar spirit, Scerri points out that the quantum mechanical calculations of atomic spectra standardly presented in chemistry textbooks make highly idealized assumptions about the structure of many-electron systems. These approximations are well-motivated on pragmatic grounds. However, they do not allow quantum mechanics to “approximately reduce” chemical facts, because the errors introduced by these approximations cannot be estimated (Scerri 1991, 1994). Further, one of the most important chemical trends, the length of periods in the Periodic Table, cannot be derived from quantum mechanics, unless experimentally derived chemical information is specifically introduced (Scerri 1997). Drawing on the work of Woolley (1978) and Primas (1981), Hendry (1998) argues that there are principled difficulties in accommodating molecular shape within quantum mechanics: the Born-Oppenheimer approximation effectively adds structure by hand. Although quantum chemistry can be extremely illuminating, these authors argue that it has not reduced chemistry to physics.

If one thinks that reduction means deriving the phenomenon of the higher level exclusively from the lower level, then these arguments should settle the question of reduction. More than 80 years after the discovery of quantum mechanics, chemistry has not been reduced to it. But there are two possible reductionist responses to this argument...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/#CheRed

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. I am sympathetic to this one. However, it is a problem that this is an argument advanced for almost all cases of apparent emergence, and has been for decades. But since the 1980s computational capabilities have exploded. How far must they advance before this idea loses currency? In theory, you could make this argument no matter how far computational abilities advance. However, we'd then have to ask, "does every last molecule require these vast computational resources to do its thing? How does that work?" This is the intuition that leads pancomputationalist physicists to be surprisingly friendly to the idea of strong emergence. There doesn't seem to be any physical "stuff" that could accommodate this amount of computation.

The second argument goes like this. Most chemists, and most scientists are physicalists. Core ideas in physicalism, particularly superveniance and causal closure, seem to make emergence quite impossible. I am less hot on this one. It seems to be having the cart drive the horse.

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You bring up a good point, but rather than swing between supporting or dismissing, why not simply recognize the need for a more complex and nuanced view?

Oh contraire mon frère, this is more something we thought we knew at the high point of reductionism. The case for this is now more difficult. IMO, it would be foolish to assume reductionism as a given until it is decisively disproved, since reductionism itself was never been decisively proved in the first place. Reductionism trades off millennia old intuitions and philosophical arguments, and this might be grounds for dismissing it as much as supporting it. — Count Timothy von Icarus


You bring up a good point, but rather than swing between supporting or dismissing, why not simply recognize the need for a more complex and nuanced view? — wonderer1

To put that in my own words, I would say "reductionism" is ill-defined. Perhaps a properly defined reductionism may not be at odds with emergentism at all.

To put that in my own words, I would say "reductionism" is ill-defined. Perhaps a properly defined reductionism may not be at odds with emergentism at all. — NotAristotle

I would think we would have to reach more definitive conclusion as to the quantum foundation of nature to have much hope of being free from fuzzy boundary issues between quantum views and classical views. In any case reductionism and weak emergentism work very well at scales where quantum effects can be treated as just noise.

In my opinion, if there were an easy answer to quantum-classical issues it would be elucidating the correct theoretical understanding, although I think we would have figured it out by now if it were a merely theoretical problem; that suggests to me that answers to such issues, if there are answers to be found, will depend on empirical observation and experimentation. But that depends on asking the right questions, which is kind of theoretical I guess. I myself am not sure what "the right questions are" in regards to a quantum-classical bridge. Are there any quantum physicists in the house?

one of the most important chemical trends, the length of periods in the Periodic Table

Really not sure what they mean by this.

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. I am sympathetic to this one. However, it is a problem that this is an argument advanced for almost all cases of apparent emergence, and has been for decades. But since the 1980s computational capabilities have exploded. How far must they advance before this idea loses currency? In theory, you could make this argument no matter how far computational abilities advance. However, we'd then have to ask, "does every last molecule require these vast computational resources to do its thing? How does that work?" This is the intuition that leads pancomputationalist physicists to be surprisingly friendly to the idea of strong emergence. There doesn't seem to be any physical "stuff" that could accommodate this amount of computation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That is interesting for sure. I am also sympathetic to it and it is something I tried to express when I brought up biology. I mean, what else is there? If the visible universe is made of matter and the four forces, it follows that material things would behave based fundamentally on the most fundamental laws of physics, describing that matter and its four fources, otherwise we have laws surfacing ex nihilo.

As a side note, despite the SEP being the highest reference for general philosophy in the West, I don't trust them when it comes to science. Their articles that involve anthropology, for example, are full of perceived consensuses that don't actually exist.

There are generally two big responses to save reduction. One is that we just lack the computational abilities to get to the reduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The Three Body Problem (which BTW, is the title of a great SciFi book) at least suggests that the problem goes much deeper than availability of computational resources:

In physics and classical mechanics, the three-body problem is the problem of taking the initial positions and velocities (or momenta) of three point masses and solving for their subsequent motion according to Newton's laws of motion and Newton's law of universal gravitation.[1] The three-body problem is a special case of the n-body problem. Unlike two-body problems, no general closed-form solution exists, as the resulting dynamical system is chaotic for most initial conditions, and numerical methods are generally required.

I have considered if the whole "getting something from nothing," issue with strong emergence isn't just a more particular form of the old Parmenidean problem of "how can you claim things change at all?"

For things to change, it means they become something they are not. But that means what we really have is a case where things that are cease to be and new things come into being. Which means you have to either deny real change (neo-eleatic positions, eternalism) or recognize that new things coming into being and existing things ceasing to be is downright fundemental.

What offends us about strong emergence then isn't the "something from nothing," but the difficulties of abstracting flux and process into some sort of static equation we can point to and say "this is the real thing! This equation describes all that apparent change, but there isn't really change, there is just this one thing." If there is strong emergence, then by definition you're not going to be able to get that.

As I mentioned in the "What is Computation?" question a while back, this certainly goes into how computation is viewed. Often its necessarily step-wise, processual nature is glossed over, with the idea that it is the eternal relations it elucidates that are fundemental, the process just an accident. But looking at the physical basis of computation would suggest exactly the opposite, that process is fundemental and such "eternal relations" are merely instantiated through them.