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
So I agree with this notion of a double-reductionism, between wholes and parts. — Moliere
I think what gets me are the discontinuities, which I've been attempting to point out with my various examples of theories. — Moliere
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
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
We could re-interpret physics in terms of biology — Moliere
-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.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
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
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
The discontinuities may be a matter of our lack of knowledge. — Fooloso4
For a long time science became increasingly specialized, but there has more recently been an increase in multidisciplinary approaches. — Fooloso4
I agree. — Fooloso4
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
what is the spectrum between reductionism and holism? Are these two methods, or what? — Moliere
... it's the discontinuities which make me feel doubt, at least in my rationalist story. — Moliere
Just as the artists had to follow certain rules, so do the scientists. — Moliere
,I am surprised. How do you make sense of the multiplicity while retaining reductionism as you've laid it out so far? — Moliere
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
Rather than follow the rules cutting edge science establishes them. — Fooloso4
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
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
Isn't that the same for the artists? — Moliere
I'm nowhere near the foundations. I just do my lab job — Moliere
I'm curious what you count as non-reductive science. — Moliere
reduction is the downward motion towards particulars, and holism is the upward motion towards universals. — 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. — Fooloso4
We should approach all topics available for scientific inquiry as if the goal is further reduction to physics. — frank
We know that chemical laws boil down to physical laws,
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
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
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. — NotAristotle
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
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
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.
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