Bringing reductionism home
Suppose you are a relativist/postmodernist philosopher
and also a mother.
Suppose you knew absolutely that you are
the birth mother of your child.
Somebody contests guardianship
claiming herself to be the true birth
mother of your child.
Would you consent to palmistry, astrology
or more importantly alleged eye-witness accounts
as alternatives to DNA testing?
Is it reductionist to be outraged if eye-witness accounts
are given equal weight as DNA testing?
It is not difficult to think of other scenarios.
Accused of a crime you didn't commit, camera footage
of crime vs eyewitness accounts.
and also a mother.
Suppose you knew absolutely that you are
the birth mother of your child.
Somebody contests guardianship
claiming herself to be the true birth
mother of your child.
Would you consent to palmistry, astrology
or more importantly alleged eye-witness accounts
as alternatives to DNA testing?
Is it reductionist to be outraged if eye-witness accounts
are given equal weight as DNA testing?
It is not difficult to think of other scenarios.
Accused of a crime you didn't commit, camera footage
of crime vs eyewitness accounts.
Comments (379)
Social constructionists might want to challenge the test as anachronistic if the birth in question occurred before the 1980s when testable DNA had yet to be "socially constructed".
Allegedly Bruno Latour has claimed that the ancient pharaoh Ramses II couldn't have died of tuberculosis since it was yet to be socially constructed as a single identifiable disease in the 19th century.
Isn't that a bit like saying that no evolution could have occurred before Darwin?
Yeah I guess. :)
Such things happen I suppose, but... quelles horreurs! The poor child... "Deconstruct this dirty diaper, mother!"
Everybody loves stomping on postmodernists, but you need to give us a bit more to go on.
Quoting Frederick KOH
I'm not sure I can work up outrage over this, but eye-witness testimony tends to be very faulty, so it would makes sense to be at least very alarmed if faulty testimony was preferred over something much more reliable, like DNA testing.
Quoting csalisbury
That's exactly what I am asking. When whoever it is criticises scientists for being reductionists, what do they mean? I gave a concrete example derivative of one given by Steven Weinberg, asking whether that is what critics mean.
Then you have misunderstood the point. Would they concede that it trumps all other tests/determiners of biological maternity - I gave examples - that is the real question.
People don't like reductionism (or more to the point, what they think reductionism is) because it seems like it diminishes their humanity in some way. "Oh, you know, the reason you love your baby is because your brain produces oxytocin which binds you to your baby. It's just chemicals." That last statement is bogus, but that's what some people think.
They suppose that because the brain employs neurotransmitters to communicate within itself and within the body, that everything is just chemicals. Not so. The real experience comes first, along with real perception, and real registration.
So, the baby is handed to the mother (who has already gone through the major experience of birth). She experiences the face, heft, warmth, and scent of the newborn, and the sensation of the infant at her breast. This experience is what causes the brain to add a couple of oxytocin drops to the mix -- so that the feeling of love and devotion and attachment to her baby will be fully experienced and fixed in place.
You can show somebody a new clothes dryer and squirt a bit of oxytocin up their nose at the same time, but they won't fall in love with the dryer. (Well, normally they don't.) Men have been known to fall in love with a new car. Maybe there's oxytocin in the new car smell.
It's the snake that scares you, not the adrenalin. The adrenalin is there to make sure you get away from the snake really quickly (or pick it up with your bare hands and bite its head off before it bites you).
I was thinking more of the sort that gets into books and articles (and this forum).
It has to do with DNA testing trumping over all other ways of determining biological maternity - examples given in original post.
I was hoping to provoke "anti-reductionists" to comment here.
In that case, reductionism is simply a mistake and obviously so.
Some examples:
NeoDarwinism - the fundamental objects of study are replicators subject to variation and selection.
Computation - the fundamental object of study being the universal computer.
Information Theory - The study of counterfactuals (I'm being deliberately tendentious)
Thermodynamics - The theory of steam engines (")
Thus the claim that high level explanations cannot be fundamental is false.
If I say "the replicators are the way they are because of chemistry and physics" would I be a reductionist?
If I say "the relationship between the energy, pressure volume and temperature of a gas in a container can be completely explained by atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gasses" , would I be a reductionist?
In these cases, the objects of study are abstract and not coincidentally, they are not considered branches of the natural sciences.
Perhaps you should try the reduction? Take a physical theory and demonstrate that replicators, variation, and selection can be reduced to it. If you manage that then Life could be fully explained by, say the Schrödinger equation.
I don't think you will be able to. Life is a phenomenon that as far as we know, requires an explanation at a certain level of emergence, and could be somewhat independent of the underlying physics.
Whooaaa...hold on a minute here. We do agree that the replicators are DNA (and RNA for some lifeforms) right?
But can you construct a perpetual motion machine of the second kind? Can you improve on the Carnot Cycle?
Each step of the cycle depends on the gas laws that as I have mentioned, are explained by atomic theory and the kinetic theory of gasses.
You think "replicators", "variation", and "selection" are not abstract?
Computers are real things, and the theory of computation has been a branch of physics since 1984. You are similarly wrong about Information Theory.
[quote=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_computation]In theoretical computer science and mathematics, the theory of computation is the branch that [/quote]
Branch of physics?
Like mathematics, it is a study of abstractions, in this case abstractions related to information. It is not one of the natural sciences.
Abstraction is a tool that can be applied to many areas of inquiry. Be that as it may, the "replicators" are still DNA and RNA if you are studying biological evolution. And they are molecules.
I am coming round to the view that anti-reductionists don't like scientific details or even bother with them.
Whooooooaaaaaa!
Strictly speaking the the instances of replicators that occur in the Earth's biosphere are genes - portions of DNA that have specific information encoded in them.
However the replicators happen to be instantiated, to be reductionist, one must demonstrate that the existence of replicators is deducible from quantum mechanics, thus rendering use of "replicator" as an explanatory fundamental, nothing more than shorthand.
Maybe you would be willing to accept that that particular branch of mathematics studies, essentially, the Turing Machine, which is a purely abstract entity.
My original claim was:
Quoting tom
In which I did not mention the Turing Machine, which is abstract, but rather the Universal Computer, which is real.
And then:
Quoting tom
I was wrong in my second claim, the year was 1985. The Universal Computer is a real device, that has certain properties not found in the Turing Machine, due to the laws of physics, which the UC must obey because it is real, and the TM does not because it is abstract.
The theory of computation became a physical theory with this paper:
http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf
;)
Reductionism has been an extremely successful methodology, but even a reductionist must be puzzled that there are so many branches of science.
Some thinkers sympathetic to reductionism, e.g. E.O. Wilson in his Consilience, believe that the divisions between the natural sciences (and perhaps even between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities) are merely artifacts of our current knowledge base, and that such divisions will eventually fall away as the putative deeper connections between these fields' respective theories become better-understood.
However, in his review of Consilience, Jerry Fodor pointed out that, far from reducing the number of scientific fields, building such theoretical bridges can just as often spawn new fields (e.g. neuroeconomics), which proliferate faster than university deans can keep up with them.
What need have we of saying 'reduction'?
Physics isn't reductionist. The physical world isn't "just matter in motion", or some such. Not everything is explained by the 2nd law of thermodynamics -- it's not all "just entropy increasing". Neither is chemistry. There are two broad pillars of chemical theory -- thermodynamics and kinetics -- and several subsets of chemistry which focus on the reactions of chemicals in many various ways.
But, then, these statements turn on a particular way of looking at "reductionism". If one just means that some phenomena can be explained by some simpler and more general statements, then OK. But by that same statement I'd say some phenomena can't be explained by some simpler and more general statements -- perhaps they require another simpler, more general statement, or they are an anomaly of sorts.
Ah, @Arkady did a better job than I, I think, just as I was writing this.
Well, a physicist would certainly seek to explain the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and in doing so may achieve a reduction or a unification.
Quoting Moliere
Quantum mechanics is also extremely important, providing as it does the explanation for the existence of atoms, the various phases of matter, atomic bonding ...
Quoting Moliere
I gave a list above of fundamental objects of certain theories that cannot be reduced: replicators, variation, selection, information, steam-engines, universal computers, perpetual-motion machines of the 2nd kind.
To the above I'm going to add knowledge, which seems to play a fundamental role in an emerging physical theory.
Genes or DNA, would it be reductionist to say that they behave the way they do because of chemistry and physics?
The former is is widely known in the literature. Can you give me references for the latter?
So DNA are molecules. Genes are portions of DNA. Genes are replicators. Is there anything here you disagree with?
There is a chapter in a book of Steven Weinberg entitled "Two Cheers for Reductionism". Would he count as a reductionist?
Quoting tom
Could you provide a synthesis for our benefit?
I'm not concerned so much about resisting reductionism in this case, as being wrong.
Given any particular gene, it can be sequenced. The sequence can be encoded in ASCII or any other format, gzipped, emailed, stored on a USB stick, transmitted, copied, read out loud, etc. From such information, the gene could then be recreated and reinserted into its niche.
A reductionist would have to explain that in terms of the Schrödinger equation.
Perhaps the simplest demonstration of the impossibility of reducing NeoDarwinism to physics, is to recognise that ND does not specify the physics or chemistry required: that Life could exist under different physical conditions or different histories.
So what is being encoded is the sequence of molecules cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), and thymine. We are in agreement here. They are molecules. Would it be reductionist to say that why they and related molecules behave the way they do is because of chemistry and physics?
Here it is again:
http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf
This paper is more accessible:
http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/ItFromQubit.pdf
Actually it has been done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_bond
...that encode the information required for them to remain instantiated in their niche.
Would be more accurate I think.
For your benefit, I'll point out the distinction between a methodology and the misconception that higher level explanations cannot be fundamental.
It would be wrong. The niche of these genes also includes animal behaviour.
As to what is encoded in the genes, as I have already alluded to, it is information, which you refuse to accept is a proper object of study by the natural sciences.
You could take a step further and recognise that it in fact the information content that is being copied, and it is the information that causes itself to remain instantiated in its niche. In Constructor Theory, this type of information is called knowledge.
Here's an interesting paper: http://constructortheory.org/portfolio/the-constructor-theory-of-life/
That's not an explanation of what a gene is and/or of what genes do. Likewise, listing the components of a computer and specifying the way they are soldered together doesn't amount to an explanation of the way such a computer is supposed to function or of what the programs are that such a computer can run. There is much more to a gene being the gene that it is than the nature of the chemical bonds that hold together in DNA molecules the sequence of nucleotides encoding it. The existence of those chemical bonds merely are enabling conditions for those molecules being able to carry stable functional structures from one (or two) living progenitor(s) to its(their) progeny (i.e. whole living organisms). The whole epigenetic context -- which includes many determinate features: (1) of the wider cellular structures and functions; (2) of the whole organism; and (3) of its extended phenotype, and (4) of many aspects of its normal ecological niche (natural affordances) -- plays much more of an explanatory role than do the low level molecular enabling conditions of those high level functions and structures.
They are not nuclear bonds. You don't need to go further than chemical bonds (valency, van der Waals, ionic, etc
Surely you know that DNA replication is something that has been explained at the level of individual molecules. What does "enable" mean in the context of molecules obeying the laws of physics?
Does reductionism fail in your view if protein folding via free energy minimisation counts as an NP complete problem? Or is it OK to be hand-wavingly approximate about even these "simplest" computations that nature appears to carry out in holistic fashion. Does it harm your case to admit the sum of the parts are not literally "a sum" when it comes to chemical and physical systems?
DNA replication is one thing, genetic inheritance is another. The inheritance at issue is inheritance of function. Biological function only can be explained with reference to the high level functional organization typical of specific forms of life. If you abstract away from the context that gives significance to physiological processes, then you are doing physics and chemistry all right, but you have given up providing a biological explanation. You have just narrowed the focus to questions of material constitution, which are just one sort of question one can ask about a biological system.
In the example that you gave, they were fundamental only because they were studies of abstractions, of idealized objects.
One of the things that tends to happen is an object of study inspires an abstraction. Then the abstraction becomes a field of study in its own right. It is in this context that they become fundamental,
Geometry is an abstraction inspired by solid objects in space. It is fundamental. But being an abstraction it does not concern itself with questions like why metallic spheres don't collapse into each other when they are pressed against each other. That answer is provided by quantum mechanics.
Modelling physical phenomena using mathematics? How novel!
Have I said anything to suggest otherwise?
You tell me. I'm unclear whether you are simply defending reductionism on the grounds of epistemic utility or - as it does sound - trying to make a strained ontic claim.
Molecules in motion is one thing. Pressure, temperature and volume is another.
All you had to do was quote a comment of mine.
I will let Steven Weinberg answer this one:
When Edelman says that a person cannot be reduced to molecu-
lar interactions, is he saying anything different (except in degree)
than a botanist or a meteorologist who says that a rose or a thun-
derstorm cannot be reduced to molecular interactions? It may or
may not be silly to pursue reductionist programs of research on
complicated systems that are strongly conditioned by history, like
brains or roses or thunderstorms. What is never silly is the per-
spective, provided by reductionism, that apart from historical ac-
cidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the
fundamental principles of physics.
All I've asked you is whether it matters that protein folding can't be completely modelled as an addition of local bonding forces. Surely you accept that as proof that "something" goes missing once one tries to reduce the rate-dependent dynamics of the real physical world to a rate-independent informational description?
Isn't the very idea of abstraction leaving things out?
Indeed. That's because the ascription of properties such as pressure and temperature to macroscopic systems composed of many molecules can only be performed in a restricted range of conditions near thermodynamic equilibrium (or quasi-static equilibrium -- when there is a sufficiently slow transition from one equilibrium strate to another, as occurs, e.g., within individual stages of the Carnot cycle). Furthermore, pressure and temperature states aren't determinate micro-physical states but rather broad equivalence classes of them (a point emphasized by George Ellis's work on emergence and top-down causation). They specify states that are multiply realizable. That's why specifying the temperature and pressure of a specific sample of gas enclosed in a container abstracts away from the specific states of motion of the individual molecules and only determines broad statistical properties of them.
Thus, some emergent laws, such a the ideal gas law, are idealized abstractions that do indeed govern (some features of) the behavior of real gases in restricted ranges of circumstances. But the validity of those laws jointly depends on some of the laws that govern individual molecular interactions (e.g. conservation of energy and momentum) and also on the obtaining of specific boundary conditions of the whole systems that the theorist choses to focus on for some pragmatic and/or theoretical purpose. This focus entails abstracting away from some of the irrelevant features of material constitution and enables the formulation of high-level laws (and hence of unified formal/causal explanations) that apply to several different gases.
So reductionism = abstraction? Have we changed the subject just to avoid you answering my question about a failure to be able to compute protein folding even from a complete knowledge of the local bonds in play?
And who knows whether you are defending an epistemic-strength or ontic-strength position. You are still refusing to say.
It's OK to admit to being a pragmatist on these issues you know?
One crucial non-reductionist (or pluralist) point that is often overlooked is that both bottom-up material/analytical explanations and top-down formal/functional explanations are achieved though a process of abstraction and hence both leave things out. The former leaves out irrelevant details of functional organization while the latter leaves out irrelevant details of material implementation. What it is that is relevant or irrelevant is conditioned by the pragmatic context and the interests of the theorist/scientist/engineer. None of those two modes of explanation is more fundamental than the other in an absolute sense. Both are incomplete.
Ornithologists don't expect to be able to derive everything from chemical bonds either. What's your point?
Finally...
Is this reductionist:
When Edelman says that a person cannot be reduced to molecu-
lar interactions, is he saying anything different (except in degree)
than a botanist or a meteorologist who says that a rose or a thun-
derstorm cannot be reduced to molecular interactions? It may or
may not be silly to pursue reductionist programs of research on
complicated systems that are strongly conditioned by history, like
brains or roses or thunderstorms. What is never silly is the per-
spective, provided by reductionism, that apart from historical ac-
cidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the
fundamental principles of physics.
So what is stopping them in your view? It would be possible right?
Using calculations by hand you can't model anything more complicated than the hydrogen atom. Computers are used for more complicated atoms. Higher than that, I defer to Weinberg:
When Edelman says that a person cannot be reduced to molecu-
lar interactions, is he saying anything different (except in degree)
than a botanist or a meteorologist who says that a rose or a thun-
derstorm cannot be reduced to molecular interactions? It may or
may not be silly to pursue reductionist programs of research on
complicated systems that are strongly conditioned by history, like
brains or roses or thunderstorms. What is never silly is the per-
spective, provided by reductionism, that apart from historical ac-
cidents these things ultimately are the way they are because of the
fundamental principles of physics.
So these "historical accidents", are they all material events or instead are some of them symbolically meaningful interactions?
When a protein acts as a message to a system, is that covered by Weinberg's reductionist ontology? And why would so many biologists strongly disagree? Are they just bad at reductionism/abstractionism?
Should they all defer to Weinberg. :)
Quoting Frederick KOH
Huh? It doesn't matter how you do your calculations when it comes to NP completeness. This is about whether you can do them.
I've finished reading/re-reading Weinberg's two book chapters on reductionism a couple days ago. I also read one of Ernst Mayr's book chapter (Analysis or reductionism?, in What Makes Biology Unique: Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline) in which he lays out the three forms of reductionism Weinberg refers to in Dreams of a Final Theory. But I have been busy with other things. I'll make more comments on both Weinberg and Mayr another time. I think Mayr's explanations of emergence have some problems too, though I agree with him more than I do with Weinberg.
Weinberg focuses on a specific kind of scientific explanations that purport to answer to "Why?" questions regarding scientific laws and principles from one theory, and seek to explain them with reference to another more "fundamental" theory. Explaining emergent laws with reference to laws that govern interactions between constituents of the entities that populate the ontology at the emergent level just is one case of such reductive explanations. Weinberg endorses a form of reductionism that doesn't purport to be pragmatic or methodological but rather amounts to a metaphysical claim regarding "the way the world is" empirically found to be. (In this respect, Rorty and Weinberg are at polar opposites). The way Weinberg cashes out this claim is through observing that the "arrows of explanation" embodied by his "Why?" questions (and their scientific answers) are seen to be converging towards a unique theory: quantum field theory (or some "final" theory that hopefully will unify the Standard Model of particle physics with a theory of quantum gravity).
Weinberg's denial of the autonomy of emergent domains of scientific explanation seems to rest on the belief that the affirmation of such an autonomy amounts to a denial that the laws and principles formulated at this higher-level can have any explanation. He thus views anti-reductionism, pluralism or strong emergentism as forms of obscurantism, super-naturalism or defeatism. It seems not to occur to him that "arrows of explanation" can have a genuine scientific explanatory role even when they don't tend to converge toward a unique "final" theory of everything. His affirmation of the empirical convergence of known arrows of explanation seem to rest on his favoring as more "fundamental" explanations of a reductive sort and thus his defense of metaphysical reductionism (as a statement regarding "the way the world is") ends up being circular.
And the reason that is never silly, is because God's Laws have now been replaced by The Laws of Physics, and God has become a ghost in his own machine. Amen.
Quote him.
He gave an example using chicken soup and the King's touch. Is the outright dismissal of the King's Touch metaphysics?
In his texts, his actual references to other sciences and the views expressed about them contradict what you say.
What is meant by covered? When a protein "acts as a message to a system" the steps can either be broken down into interactions explained by chemistry or there are people trying to do that.
Try "turning sunlight into food". Photosynthesis is one area where these steps have been explained in chemical terms.
Again, what do you mean by "covered".
For him merely to be making "actual references" to other sciences hardly contradicts my claim that he believes then all to be less "fundamental" than particle physics. Are you denying that he both endorses reductionism and explains his brand of reductionism as the (alleged) convergence of "Why?" explanations (i.e. "arrows of explanation") that link laws and principles from one science to another more fundamental one? If you think "the views he expresses about" other sciences contradict what I say about those views, it would be useful if you would specify what those views are and what claims of mine you take them to be contradicting.
The dismissal of the alleged healing power of the King's Touch is premised on the lack of a plausible naturalistic explanation (including the placebo effect). Most pluralist/emergentist philosophers that I know would have no trouble dismissing the alleged healing power as a likely myth or fraud. It need not be premised on the mere lack of a reductive explanation. It is Weinberg's belief that all genuine scientific explanation is, at base, reductive (i.e. must point downwards in the general direction of the unique "theory of everything" sought after by theoretical physicists) that leads him to assume that search for non-reductive explanations must be reliant on magical thinking. Lack of reduction doesn't amount to magic.
What about the chicken soup? We treat it differently from the King's Touch without having first reduced it.
But I was responding to this
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Are they equivalent?
Except that scientists are the opposite of priests. The greatest honours go to the scientists who overthrow the most established "Laws". That is why that is never silly.
Yes, that is reductionist, in the sense that it appeals to the laws of physics, and hence physicalism, as being the ultimate ground real nature of what there is. It essentially derived from the simplistic idea that 'all that exists is matter in motion', and that life and mind can be understood as having evolved out of these. Complexities such as organic molecules are described as 'frozen accidents', a term coined by Crick to describe the genetic code.
The problem for physicalist reductionism is, however, that the very notion of 'fundamental physics' has now become hopelessly complicated. Had there turned out to be an indivisible point-particle - an unchangeable atom - then this might not have been the case. But that hope was forever torpedoed by the uncertainty principle, which shows that what is fundamental are not particles, as such. So at that point the reductionist enterprise, in terms of physics, came unstuck. The same kind of thinking was then applied to genes, as the 'ultimate determinants' of behaviour, but that has also come unstuck, through later developments in biology itself.
My view is, there is no fundamental object of any kind, nor has science demonstrated the same. That is why science is nowadays spoken of in terms of 'fallibilism' - scientific models which approximate natural laws and phenomena, but are subject to constant revision.
Quoting Frederick KOH
Not any more, they're not. In the secular~scientific view of life, that's exactly how they function. All the blather about 'evidence' still depends on constraining the types of questions that ought to be asked, and the types of evidence that might be sought. But scientific materialism is a faux religion, or it's nothing.
That's why Weinberg didn't get more specific than "the fundamental principles of physics". There are people trying to win prizes by replacing or radically altering those principles.
This is a move he commonly makes, as your later chicken soup reference also illustrates. For instances, in Dreams of a Final Theory (p.62) he argues:
(Weinberg) "Finally, there is the question of emergence: is it really true that there are new kinds of laws that govern complex systems? Yes, of course, in the sense that different levels of experience call for description and analysis in different terms. The same is just as true for chemistry as for chaos. But fundamental new kinds of laws? Gleick's lynch mob provides a counterexample. We may formulate what we learn about mobs in the form of laws (such as the old saw that revolutions always eat their children), but, if we ask for an explanation of why such laws hold, we would not be very happy to be told that the laws are fundamental, without explanation in terms of anything else. Rather, we would seek a reductionist explanation precisely in terms of the psychology of individual humans. The same is true for the emergence of chaos. The exciting progress that has been made in this area in recent years has not taken the form solely of the observation of chaotic systems and the formulation of empirical laws that describe them; even more important has been the mathematical deduction of the laws governing chaos from the microscopic physical laws governing the systems that become chaotic." (My emphasis)
Notice that Weinberg again assumes that either the emergent laws must have reductive explanations in terms of deeper scientific principles that govern (in this case) the individual constituents of the high-level entities (i.e. the composite individuals picked up by the high-level "terms") or they must be believed by the strong emergentist to be governed by principles that are "fundamental" in the sense that they don't have any explanaton at all. Functional intra-level, and partly contingent historical, explanations are just ignored by Weinberg.
But Weinberg is also committing a form of projection here. He's the only one who claims that there must exist "fundamental" principles that can admit of no explanation at all. This is what he believes about his prospective "final theory". Emergentists, or pluralist anti-reductionists, need not believe (and few indeed do so believe) that there are laws at any level that are just given and that can have no explanation at all. (Though some of the boundary conditions that restrict their domains of validity may hold in some specific time and area as a matter of historical contingency, and hence need no other explanation than mention of the initial accident). Rather, it is partial autonomy of the high-level (so-called) principles that is claimed by emergentists to hold with respect to low-level laws. On the question of autonomy, as it relates to emergence, see Karen Crowther's enlightening paper 'Decoupling Emergence and Reduction in Physics', European Journal of Philosophy of Science, (2015) 5.
The sentence after the one you quoted is the one that matters.
Try overthrowing the law that the most basic law is physics. Good luck with that.
I already responded to this. It is the lack of confidence that there might be a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) explanation of the healing power the King's Trough that undermines our faith in the genuineness of the phenomenon. In the case of the chicken soup, it is easier to imagine a naturalistic explanation. Such an explanation no doubt will make reference to some systemic effect of some ingredient in the soup on human physiology (or bacterial physiology). To assume that any such causal explanation ought to reduce to an explanation in terms of basic physico-chemical laws (let alone in terms of a "final theory" of quantum gravity) just is to beg the question against the non-reductionist. Even within the domains of chemistry and physics, there are lots of explanations of emergent phenomena that are primarily top-down (i.e. that display downward causation, multiple realizability and insensitivity to several features of material constitution, including micro-physical initial conditions).
What is behind this privileging of naturalistic explanations?
Weinberg would seem to need to assume that there is just one unique point of convergence to all his "arrows of explanation" lest there be more than one unique "fundamental" theory. And he indeed clearly asserts there to be only one such theory. He needs this to be the case for, else, he would need to investigate more closely the nature of the necessarily non-reductive inter-theoretic relations that hold in between his several "fundamental" theories -- he would have to relax his narrow conception of "explanation" -- and the basis of his faith in reductionism would begin to unravel.
Hah. I'm glad this turned out to be just an extended in-joke and you don't want to make any serious point.
This may be because we like to disclose order in nature, and disclosing pockets of order often affords opportunities for prediction and control within the empirical/technological domains thus disclosed. This satisfies both out thirst for theoretical knowledge and our needs for security (e.g. reliably finding food in the future). What is at issue in this thread is whether naturalistic grounds for order are plural or whether there might be just one unique fundamental ground for all the areas of orderliness that empirical investigation discloses in nature. Investigation into emergent phenomena -- both within and from physical domains -- seems to reveal pluralism to more sensibly portray nature and our cognitive access to it. This finding also harmonises with what is to be found in social sciences where the phenomena are at least partially constituted by our plural human practices.
Having followed this thread from its inception, I think it's clear all he really wanted to do was take a potshot at POMO under the pretense that he was well-versed in the real, hard-stuff the frenchies are too crazed to countenance. As soon as you & Pierre stepped in, he quickly adopted the tactic of ignoring the main thrust of posts in order to feebly debate this or that tangential point (as someone may move a pawn around meaninglessly to defer checkmate)
None of which vindicates pomo (whatever he means by that) but it does reinforce my belief that many of those who are fixated on undermining it, are really just trying to reinforce their sense of being cool-headed rational straight-talkers. They're LARPing being rational, and need a Big Baddie to sustain the Drama. The whole thing falls apart when the people who actually occupy the role they're pretending to play show up.
(Sorry, couldn't resist...)
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I quoted a passage the other day, about Dennett's new book:
A lot of naturalism wants to apply the same principle to the whole of the Universe:
Short History of Time, p 193
That's why Hawkings, Dennett, Stenger, et al, are so implacably hostile to religion: it's professional jealousy!
I meant molecular (or chemical) bonds. I've no idea how "nuclear" slipped though my fingers.
You should get on with Hawking swimmingly-- that statement is failed naturalism, in the similar way to the "God" did it argument.
Instead of dealing with the world as it exists, the approach attempts to reduce everything to a single force which enacts meaning where there was none. Hawking doesn't have professional jeleousy here, he's just upset you demand a different God to his own.
But these things are achieved by even cultures that don't privilege naturalistic explanations.
Why can't someone say the same thing for grounds in general, natural or not?
That's certainly true. Naturalistic explanation just is one mode of explanation among many others. It does disclose specific empirical domains that aren't cognitively (or technologically) accessible through other means. But some cultures go by without much of it. They still are capable of making objective judgments and to provide varieties of rational explanations of human behaviors, animal behaviors, and natural phenomena -- some of which often elude us for want of familiarity with, and understanding of, untamed natural environments.
So back to the chicken soup and the King's Touch. Why?
Of course you can say it, truly. Grounds for functional behaviors of human artifacts, or grounds of human cognitive/social phenomena aren't any less plural than are grounds for natural phenomena.
Then back to the chicken soup and the King's Touch. Why?
You can leave the King's touch out of it. Superstition is rampant in both primitive and technologically advanced societies. What is at issue is the reductibility, or lack thereof, of successful explanations -- not illusory ones.
This was not your original response (the one involving naturalistic explanations).
Could you provide a synthesis of this response and the original one?
My claims was and remains that the King's Trouch is a distraction. The issue of the King's Touch was raised by Weinberg because he believes faith in pure magic (and the attendant refusal to provide any explanation) to constitute the only possible alternative to his specific brand of reductive explanation. And he believes this because he can't countenance genuine scientific (or naturalistic) explanation not to consist into explanations of high-level scientific principles in terms of "deeper" scientific principles that belong to a more inclusive scientific theory that is closer to *the* unique "final theory". He isn't arguing against the possibility of a partial autonomy of the "special sciences" (Fodor's term), or of the possibility of intra-level causal explanation within emergent domains, or of downward causation from emergent properties to low-level ones. He is discounting those possibilities from the get go and without argument.
No, you used the criteria of whether an explanation was naturalistic:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
But then you say
Quoting Pierre-Normand
That being the case, why this mode of explanation and not others?
I want to give them a hard target, in this case Steven Weinberg, and see what they really mean in plain language.
I'm not used to language like this. Too long in an egalitarian context I suppose.
Quoting csalisbury
Anyone is free to point specific instances and revive them. I have in Pierre's case.
OK, I see what you mean. My suggestion (or acknowledgement) that primitive (i.e. pre-scientific) societies rely on non-naturalistic explanations was a bit rash. When they explain a sickness by reference to the ingestion of some harmful plant, or the failure of a crop by reference to lack of rain, or why someone fell down because she tripped on a hidden tree root, they manifest a genuine understanding of nature. Those explanations are naturalistic. They may not know why exactly plants need water to survive or why this or that plant is poisonous, and they may be tempted to supply non-naturalistic explanations for those. E.g. they may attribute intentions and powers to gods or to salient features of nature itself.
It is a mistake, though, to conclude that what separates successful naturalistic explanations of a sickness, or of a crop failure, from an ineffective supernatural explanation is the primitiveness of the latter and the "reductibility in principle" of the former. Reductive scientific explanation just disclose one source of natural regularity among others (See Mayer's discussion of "analysis" in the previously referenced book chapter). The tribes-people may be wrong about the intentions of the gods (or, indeed, about there being gods) but they need not believe that the intentions of the gods are "fundamental" in Weinberg's sense, and hence unexplainable and to be accepted on faith. They rather believe gods (or animistically conceived forces of nature) to be parts of nature just as much as human beings are. Intentions of gods don't supply a successful explanation of real patterns of order in nature if the gods don't actually exist. The ostensive pattern in nature may in this case be illusory or, if real, misattributed. But there are other sorts of agents in nature whose intentions and reasons non-reductively explain what they do, namely human beings. And there are numerous examples of naturalistic albeit non-reductive explanations of phenomena within biology, physics and chemistry too. So, Weinberg's criteria of irreducibility and fundamentalism aren't good demarcation criteria of magical thinking versus objectively valid naturalistic explanation.
But naturalistic/non-naturalistic is a distinction our culture makes. You are applying it to practices in theirs. Is our culture privileged?
I was discussing Weinberg's arguments regarding reductionism and "arrows of explanation". I didn't make any claim regarding the comparative merits of distinct human cultures. That seems a bit pointless, as well as off topic (for this thread, anyway). Each human culture embodies wisdom about some things and misconceptions or blindness about others. That doesn't mean that all cultures are equal or that they are incommensurable. In spite of the fact that I am disagreeing with Rorty's somewhat post-modern radical rejection of objectivity, I am somewhat in agreement with his view of the pragmatic basis for the necessity of a widening of the sphere of inclusive solidarity as a ground for the refusal of radical cultural relativism.
Presuppose rather than claim.
What is it that I presupposed?
No, there is a chain from this that leads all the way to chicken soup and the king's touch. That is one of the ways Weinberg explained his reductionism.
How do you apply a distinction to practices within culture that does not recognize it (the distinction) without privileging you own?
Instead of a reply why not reformulate your response to Weinberg's chicken soup and the king's touch based on what has been exchanged so far.
The belief in the power of the King's touch would be one the the things this culture is wrong about. It may even be the case that the widespread wrong belief is false by that's cultures own lights. (A majority of people flouting a norm doesn't make it not a norm). There hardly is a valid inference from the humdrum claim that not all cultures share the same body of knowledge and/or make the same mistakes to the conclusion that magical thinking is vindicated.
And I explained why Weinberg's rejection of magical thinking falls far short from vindicating his very specific form of reductionism, which, remember, isn't a pragmatically grounded proposal for a mode of scientific practice but rather purports to be a claim about "the way the world is".
Quoting Pierre-Normand
To this:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Would you agree that they are different enough for a synthesis to be helpful?
It really hasn't.
DNA replication in the biosphere involves animal behaviour: finding a mate, being sexually selected, fighting off rivals, creating a nest, ...
These, and many more behaviours, are required for replication to occur. This plus the molecular machinery.
This same problem arises whenever two people who belong to a common culture disagree. How do you apply a conceptual distinction to the "conceptual scheme" of an intellectual opponent who doesn't recognize this distinction without privileging your own "conceptual scheme"? First, there is no way of discussing anything that doesn't start from beliefs and understandings that are your own. (This is a point Putnam made, paraphrasing: "of course, I am presupposing the correctness of my own point of view in the world, whose else point of view could it be?") Secondly, this point also is reinforced by Davidson's considerations on the principle of charity and his views on radical interpretation. Davidson's considerations apply to the case of allegedly incommensurate cultures too. If a culture is to be intelligible as such (to an anthropologist or curious tourist, say) as embodying a body of knowledge and understanding of "its" world at all, then this only can be construed to be so on the background of an interpretation that discloses the beliefs of the members of this culture as being mostly true. This shared body of beliefs (and the understanding implied by them) then can serve as a stepping stone for engaging in a rational/political dialogue about the elements that are being disputed.
So it could turn out that the culture that does not recognize the naturalistic/non-naturalistic distinction might end up convincing you of its point of view. What happens to your original response to the soup and touch then?
I did it twice already. Why not produce your own paraphrase of what you take to be a valid argument that runs from chicken soup to Weinberg's style arrows-of-explanation-reductionism?
How did it resolve the difference between
this:
It is the lack of confidence that there might be a naturalistic (i.e. non-supernatural) explanation of the healing power the King's Trough that undermines our faith in the genuineness of the phenomenon. In the case of the chicken soup, it is easier to imagine a naturalistic explanation. Such an explanation no doubt will make reference to some systemic effect of some ingredient in the soup on human physiology (or bacterial physiology).
and this:
The belief in the power of the King's touch would be one the the things this culture is wrong about. It may even be the case that the widespread wrong belief it is false by that's cultures own lights. (A majority of people flouting a norm doesn't make it not a norm).
They are different claims because they are making different points. Producing explanations and syntheses of Weinberg's arguments, and of my replies to them, it is all I do. Taking random pot shots and asking non-committal rhetorical questions seems to be all you do. I am sorry to say but your posts would resemble Trump's tweets rather more if they were just a bit longer and better articulated.
:-O
Laying bare your presuppositions is all I did O:)
Basically, all you are suggesting here is that if my epistemic powers are fallible then that entails that anything that I now believe to be true could be shown to me to be false. The response to this argument is either to acknowledge it as such and endorse a form of radical skepticism or, maybe, counter it with something like McDowell's epistemological disjunctivism. I would favor the latter, but it could be the topic of another thread on epistemology. I don't see the relevance of this to our discussion of Weinberg's reductionism.
What if I was using naturalism as a way to probe what counts as a valid defence in your eyes and do the same for Weinberg's reductionism?
You are seemingly trying to saddle with beliefs in radical relativism, magical thinking, or some such. However, just like your post-modern hero Rorty, I don't endorse relativism and I explicitly argue against it. Furthermore, unlike him, I don't recuse scientific discourse's claim to objectivity (though I don't restrict this right to scientific discourse alone, let alone to reductive modes of scientific explanation).
Showing that something is a presupposition doesn't make the opposite true. It only makes the burden of consistency heavier.
Do it, then. Discussion would be much easier if you would lay your card down on the table, as I do.
I don't know what your defences are. They changed enough that I felt a need to ask for a synthesis.
This suggests one. It doesn't need a defence for the same reason that naturalism doesn't.
No. I've carefully read three book chapters and attempted enough explanations of what Weinberg's main argument is, and why I think it is unsound. My views didn't change (well, obviously they changed since I was a huge Weinberg fan 20 years ago) in spite of the fact that I tried to meet you mid-way though following your numerous side tracks. Now it's your turn to explain what you take Weinberg's main argument to be and why you take this argument not to be invalidated by my challenges.
Is naturalism any better defended?
BTW, I think this is what Weinberg was trying to do with the soup and touch story.
Yes, because he believes naturalism (construed as the rejection of magical thinking cum super-naturalism) to entail 'reductionism' (as conceived by him) and hence, by contraposition, the rejection of 'reductionism' to entail super-naturalism. So, we agree on the form his specific argument. Now you can address my objections to it.
Wrong. Not entailment. Structural similarity. Naturalism suffers from the same structural defects as reductionism.
It didn't seem to me that Weinberg believes his own brand of 'convergence-of-explanatory-arrows' reductionism to suffer from structural defects. Did you see him express self-doubts that I may have missed somewhere in those two book chapters?
If the defects are the same as those of naturalism, he would not consider them defects. There is no conclusive argument against solipsism but we feel free to ignore it.
If Weinberg doesn't recognize them to be defects, then what relevance does this have to your assessment of his argument? Are *you* now acknowledging that Weinberg's reductionism is defective?
Naturalism is also defective. But you are still going to choose the soup. He is pleading at a court that doesn't have philosophers in the jury. The same jury that would laugh at solipsism.
The similarity of his arguments to ones that would be used to defend naturalism.
OK, so your view is that he's just pretending to advance rational arguments in favor of reductionism but he's merely bulshiting. He actually believes that his being a distinguished theoretical physicist entitles him to dismiss without argument the challenges put forward by both philosophers of science and fellow scientists such as Ernst Mayr, Michel Bitbol and George Ellis. And yet, in spite of this philistine attitude of his, he merely pretends to be rationally arguing against people who hold contrary views and whom he consider to be good friends and colleagues.
You can offer rational arguments, but in many areas of life they are never airtight. People at the caliber of Weinberg know this. The gaps that can be attacked I just call them defects. You call them bullshit.
That's rather unclear. You seem to be claiming that your construal of his argument may be defective (or intended for a jury of people who don't care about arguments at all -- owing to their having an unshakable faith in reductionism) but that it must be deemed to be relevant to Weinberg's argument because it is (in some unspecified respect) similar to arguments that "would be used" by others, though not by Weinberg himself, to reach the same conclusion?
I call them bulshiting because you are characterizing them as being devised to gather approval from a jury who doesn't care one bit about their soundness and validity, because they purport to support preconceived notions uncritically accepted by this jury.
Nice try. Laughing at solipsism does no imply one is doesn't care one bit about their soundness and validity.
Twice. You need new tricks. Laughing at solipsism does no imply one is doesn't care one bit about arguments.
Also, you seem to see the gaps that I have highlighted in Weinberg's pro-reductionism arguments to be minor defects akin to unfulfilled promissory notes. This could be said of the sort of "in principle" 'ontological reductionism' that often is claimed to be consistent with the falsity of merely 'epistemic reductionism'. Weinberg's true "final theory", for instance, could be claimed to lay, possibly, forever beyond the reach of human knowledge due merely to contingent limitations of human cognitive and/or computational powers. This all very well be true of the "final theory" of particle physics. But those contingent explanatory "gaps" have nothing to do with the flaws I have highlighted in Weinberg's conception of reductionism. Those flaws rather have to do with his overly narrow conception of causal explanation, which leads him to ignore many real and well understood non-reductive causal determinations of emergent phenomena. Weinberg's explanatory gaps are actually wider than the argumentatively filled up space between then. They consist in Weinberg passing over, or downgrading (e.g. as mere reflection on historical accidents) large areas of fruitful and uncontentious scientific practice and understanding.
If you say a similar argument can be made against naturalism, I am happy to concede.
Laugh and ironise all you want; it is your own refusal to engage in arguments that may lead one to conclude that you don't care about them. Although Weinberg's pro-redutionism arguments seem to me to be defective, I can not fault him with merely substituting laughter for them. He clearly acknowledges the need to be arguing soundly for the truth of his conclusions, in spite of his numerous potshots at philosophers.
I did. It's just that you find them in an inconvenient form. How does one reject reductionism without making naturalism as vulnerable.
I have been explicitly arguing that naturalism and reductionism are not aligned positions. I've criticized Weinberg's tacit assimilation of them. I endorse a form of the former and reject most forms of the latter. (I endorse only Ernst Mayr's scientific "analysis", a rather weak form of methodological/heuristic "reductionism"). Naturalism and irreducible-pluralism live happily together. Almost all of the emergentist/anti-reductionist scientists and philosophers who I learn from are naturalists. (They may be called 'relaxed' naturalists: a position that harmonises with Putnam's 'realism with a human face'). For a depiction of this sort of naturalism, see the various essays in Mario De Caro, David Macarthur eds, Naturalism in Question, HUP 2008. (I recommend especially the essays by Davidson, Dupré, Hornsby, McDowell and Putnam.)
They don't have to be aligned and I am not saying they are. I am saying analogous arguments can be made against naturalism.
It is not a sound criticism of a sound argument that merely "similar" arguments can be made to support a false position. If this is the case, then you had better attend to the difference, rather than the similarity, in order to properly diagnose the subtle flaw in the second argument.
All non-trivial philosophical positions have respectable arguments against them. What does "false" mean?
Quoting Pierre-Normand
As I keep saying, they have the same flaws, subtle or not.
Supernatural phenomena are really only natural phenomena we don't expect. In any case, the reason for rejecting a (super) natural phenomena is because of a lack of evidence/falsification.
When we ask: "how does the chicken soup do that?", a testable hypothesis needs to be defined before we can approach the question. To just speculate "magic" fails to do this. We can't even progress to whether or not a (super) natural cause is in effect because no (super) natural cause has been proposed. Someone has just seen chicken soup and said "magic".
They are, in fact, saying there is nothing further to investigate about how the chicken soup worked. Magic has not been defined as a testable actor. As presented, it is not suggesting any sort of answer to how the chicken soup works, so it's rightly dismissed for failing to even define a hypothesis.
You haven't stated what the flaws in my arguments were. You haven't offered any specific counter-argument. You merely complained that if they weren't assumed to be flawed in some way or other then some dogmatic "naturalists" might sh*t their pants.
"They" referred to naturalism and reductionism. How did my "they" turn into your "my"?
In a way, you argued with yourself. You were challenged on your naturalism and your position shifted noticeably. I even juxtaposed/quoted the change in some of my comments.
Sorry, I misunderstood. But your argumentative strategy is so bizarre and out of this world that you are easily misunderstood. You are now arguing, again, that it matters not at all if Weinberg's arguments in favor of reductionism are afflicted by little or large flaws. (And this after straddling me with the burden of criticizing his allegedly very strong arguments). You are now arguing that the flaws in his pro-reductionism arguments must be ignored since, if they were acknowleged, then similar (albeit unspecified) flaws in pro-naturalism arguments could make some naturalists worried. Meanwhile, you are declining to indicate how the sort of pluralism that I (together with several distinguished scientists and philosophers of science) recommend might constitute any threat at all to a defensible naturalism that wouldn't share the flaws that afflict reductionism.
The arguments against naturalism are respectable philosophical arguments. If we accept naturalism anyway, does it mean that it matters not at all that arguments against it are afflicted by little or large flaws?
Since you assumed naturalism to be roughly equivalent to reductionism, you misconstrued what my acknowledgement of naturalism (which I defined as the mere denial of super-naturalism, or of mysterious emergent laws that defy all explanation) entailed. You position shifted rather more dramatically from an acknowledgement of the burden to defend Weinberg's pro-reductionism arguments against my criticism to a claim of indifference towards the flaws, small or large, that they may present.
No. Please give me exact quote.
There isn't one.
When you deny the "super" of something, how do you avoid talking about the something first?
No. Quite the contrary. If we endorse naturalism then we thereby straddle ourselves with the burden of showing that anti-naturalism arguments are flawed. Either that, or we must show that the specific form of naturalism that we endorse doesn't share in the flaws of the different sort of naturalism that the anti-naturalism arguments target. The essays in the Naturalism in Question book that I references earlier make clear that there are various doctrines that fall under the name "naturalism", some of which are viewed as reasonable (e.g. McDowell's "relaxed" naturalism) and some of which are viewed as questionable (e.g. various forms of reductionism or scientism), by the very same philosophers.
Accepting a position does not mean you are indifferent to its flaws. Similar flaws exist in other positions.
The tactic Weinberg used is particularly suitable for this situation where all alternatives are problematic. Soup or touch. We know what choice we would make first and think of the reasons later.
This does not erase the flaws of naturalism.
If this were a thread about naturalism, then I might take that burden. But I need no produce a detailed account of the naturalism that I would feel comfortable arguing for in order to point out that Weinberg's assimilation of anti-reductionism to a belief in magic, or in supernatural phenomena, is unwarranted. It suffices for me to sketch an account of the forms of non-reductive scientific explanations -- explanations that are commonly generated in ordinary scientific practice, including in physics -- the structure of which Weinberg completely overlooks, in order to show that his fear is unwarranted.
Then how can any denial of super-naturalism be "mere"?
Well, how else do you "erase" the alleged flaws of a position that you endorse other than through showing that the arguments mustered by your critics against it are themselves flawed or point missing?
You asked rhetorically: "How does one reject reductionism without making naturalism as vulnerable." and you seem to value highly the defense of naturalism. Since you mostly argue through asking non-committal rhetorical questions, it's very hard to reconstruct what it is that you might believe of be arguing for, positively. If you feel that your views are being misconstrued, it would be better for you to be more explicit rather than challenge *me* to justify my paraphrases of them, and invite even more misunderstanding without committing to anything.
This is a mere dogmatic denial. There are many such forms of naturalism on offer (both in the philosophical literature and within ordinary scientific practice). It is your burden to show that they entail some sort of unacknowledged belief in magic, or to show that all forms of genuine scientific explanation that don't involve magic (and that aren't either reliant on mysterious emergent laws that defy all explanation) must be reductionistic in Weinberg's sense. I have showed you why Weinberg's demonstration that all "Why?" explanations must either be reductive or magical is flawed, since he overlooks many forms of successful explanation of scientific laws or principles (or natural regularities, biological norms, etc.) that are commonly made use of in ordinary scientific practice and that are neither reductionistic nor magical. They just don't happen to all point neatly in the direction of the unique point of convergence where Weinberg locates his dreamed of "final theory".
I am not faulting you for failing to abandon the position that you had taken the burden to defend (and that you had straddled me with the burden of criticizing the specific arguments Weinberg muster in favor of it). I am rather faulting you with failing to even acknowledge (let alone seriously address) my criticisms of Weinberg's positive arguments on the ridiculous ground that any flaws a philosophical position might present aren't necessary fatal to it and hence dont really undermine it.
In the case of Weinberg, he faces what I consider an insurmountable disadvantage. Even when he engages philosophers, he engages as a scientist. He makes claims that have no hope of being philosophically defended because they are empirical claims but of a different order. They are not properly scientific either because these are claims at a higher level of generality than a scientific theory.
"How does one reject reductionism without making naturalism as vulnerable."
to
Quoting Pierre-Normand
No I don't. Either there is such a naturalism and people opposed to naturalism in general are all incapable of reasoning or there is none. I am inclined to conclude the latter.
Because he isn't doing philosophy. I repeat here what I said in another comment:
In the case of Weinberg, he faces what I consider an insurmountable disadvantage. Even when he engages philosophers, he engages as a scientist. He makes claims that have no hope of being philosophically defended because they are empirical claims but of a different order. They are not properly scientific either because these are claims at a higher level of generality than a scientific theory.
I guess I can agree with you that Weinberg's arguments aren't any better when construed as scientific arguments than they are when construed as philosophical arguments. His lack of so much as a cursory acquaintance with the relevant literature on reduction and emergence, either in physics, specifically, or in science, generally (e.g. in chemistry, biology, social sciences and cognitive sciences) also puts him at a severe disadvantage compared with his numerous colleagues who both are well acquainted with this literature, and who also (some of them) actively contribute to it.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Suppose we have an empirically adequate theory at a certain level. Does an "emergentist" have any theory to determine whether that theory is autonomous or admits further reduction?
But at that level you either do borderline science or inconclusive philosophy.
Just because the option of a non-reductive naturalism isn't a live option in the minds of several intellectuals (scientists and philosophers alike) doesn't mean that they are incapable of reasoning. It may merely means that the general ignorance of such a position is rooted in widespread prejudice. Correct philosophical accounts aren't all popular philosophical accounts.
Just because a philosopher has a good scientific understanding doesn't necessarily makes her produce "inconclusive philosophy". Also, just because a scientist is well acquainted with philosophy doesn't make her produce "borderline science". Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hillary Putnam, Susan Hurley, Werner Heisenberg, James Jerome Gibson, Ernst Mayr and George Ellis are cases in point.
It's borderline and inconclusive irrespective of the people involved.
But you are using the wrong measure in your estimation of him.
Suppose we have an empirically adequate theory at a certain level. Does an "emergentist" have any theory to determine whether that theory is autonomous or admits further reduction?
That some of the features of the theory that are explanatory fruitful do not admit of further reduction isn't a claim of ignorance. It is a positive claim that can be demonstrated conclusively and without appeal to any sort of magic. What is shown is that this explanatory relevant feature of the system is common to several other systems with heterogeneous material constitutions owing simply to them belonging to an equivalence class: sharing formal/functional features that directly ground those laws. (This is what is being referred to as multiple realizability). That is, it is only from those high level formal/functional features (and also, in many cases, some contingent features of the history of the system and of its normal boundary conditions) that the high/level laws, norms, principles or regularities can be derived and explained.
George Ellis, in his recent books and many articles, provides countless examples of emergent laws in physics, biology, computer science and cognitive science. There also exist an abundant literature pertaining to emergence and top-down causation in chemistry. One paper that I read recently (authored by a professor of chemistry) provides an example of a class of chemical networks where the concentration of a reactant is fixed insensitively to the concentrations of the other reactants in the network provided only that the individual reactions satisfy a specific structural/topological relationship. And that it must be so derives from a mathematical theorem (recently proven) regarding the structure of such networks. I'll dig up the reference if you want.
It's quite simple:
A theory that explains sets of phenomena in their own terms, without analysing them into their constituent entities such as gluons, quarks or superstrings, is a theory at the appropriate level of emergence whose fundamental objects are autonomous.
They produced insightful philosophical works and made genuine scientific discoveries irrespective of your stubborn denials.
So the answer is no. In case you forgot the simple direct question I was asking here it is again:
Quoting Frederick KOH
Philosophy is inconclusive, but some of it is insightful despite that.
They made genuine scientific discoveries. But they also speculate on the borderline of science.
I am not being stubborn. You are being careless.
Indeed, explanatory autonomy is the key. As I mentioned earlier, the relevant concept of (at least partial) autonomy is neatly explained in Karen Crowther's Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics while discussing "towers of theories" in the framework of effective field theories -- exactly the scientific context where Weinberg would most strongly expect to find "arrows of explanation" that all point towards the levels of higher energy scales in the direction of his uniquely fundamental "final theory"!
A good example of this is the theory of Computation, specifically the theory of computational universality. Computational Universality cannot be deduced from the laws of physics, it can however be proved that quantum mechanics is compatible with it.
So here we have a fundamental feature of reality which has been discovered in the usual way - by conjecture - that is compatible with, but not deducible from, known physics.
It could be that some future physical theory explains Computational Universality, but I seriously doubt that such a theory could also explain what computationally universal entities do.
Before reduction is attempted, is there a way to tell if the theory was autonomous?
Yes, there is. I just explained it in a long message moments ago. (Well, just two short paragraphs, actually). The autonomy of the theory is demonstrated through deriving it directly from high level structural features (and normal boundary conditions, etc.) of the systems belonging to an equivalence class that abstracts away from most determinate (thought irrelevant to the derivation of the high level laws) features of material constitution. In that case, to attempt a reduction of the high level laws just is pointless. It's akin to seeking your keys under the lamp post, just because there is more light there, and in spite of the fact that you know for a fact that you've lost your keys further down the street in the shadows!
Using your way to describe autonomy, is it then still possible to also reduce the same explained phenomena into lower level structures?
Apo gave up quickly, realizing you weren't for real. Pierre, with saint-like patience, has continued, which I'm thankful for, because his posts have been enlightening.
As for me, I lack the consitution to deal with the kind of thing you're doing. I'm not sure you're even aware what you're doing. There's a type of person wants to exemplify a certain virtue (in this case no-nonsense rationality) but, since they don't actually have this virtue, merely want it (or want others to see them as having it), they latch on blindly to another figure (in this case weinberg) - this type of person will never be a good defender of the person they latch onto, because they haven't really engaged with their ideas in a meaningful sense. They've merely identified their hero as someone who exemplifies the virtues they want to possess and, on a purely psychological level, aligned themselves with them.
This type of person is quickly revealed - they seem to have a distinct incapacity to argue coupled with a distinct compulsive need to keep the conversation going, by making trivial and confused points about marginal issues.
Pierre's a good dude, I think, but I'm not, really, and I have no patience for the thing you're doing. It hurts to watch. Find a hobby, meet some people, do something else.
Pointless is not impossible.
No, it is not possible. That's because it is proven that the high level features shared by systems that belong to the relevant equivalence class fully explain the existence of the high level laws (since the latter can be causally/deductively derived from the former), on the one hand, and since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class. Hence, the availability of any bottom-up (and hence reductive) explanation is positively ruled out.
Do the following have these non-reductive features
1) Protein production
2) Plant conversion of sunlight into starches
3) Macroscopic properties of gasses.
Isn't is simpler to ignore my posts and as you say "Find a hobby, meet some people, do something else."
It is pointless because it is impossible. It is also pointless because, even if, per impossibile, such a reductive explanation were to be achieved, it would be redundant with the formal explanation at the emergent level. You would have a case of causal overdetermination or epiphenomenalism. More plausibly, you would have a case where the reductive "explanation" is an overly complicated pseudo-"explanation" that is entirely parasitic on the high-level explanation, since it would merely amount to claiming that the material constituents were determined by low level laws (and initial conditions) to come to realize an arrangement that happens to constitute the system's falling under the high-level concept that is a causal antecedent for the high-level law such as to thereby necessitate a micro-physical arrangement that (as it happens) realizes the consequent of the law. But that is just another way of stating what the high-level law already was understood to necessitate and fully explain in the much simpler high-level terms while abstracting away from the micro-physical features of the system that contribute nothing to the causal explanation.
Is this a correct paraphrase?
But there is another error of reductionism, which maybe even deeper: the misconception that our theories form a hierarchy.
That would be a relevant example. We may say that the software laws govern how the computers behave, at the relevant functional level that gives meaning to significant input/output structures. The lower levels of hardware implementation enable rather than govern what the software does (as characterized at the relevant symbolic level). In the case where a bug can be traced to a hardware malfunction (e.g. a real winged bug being fried up on a vacuum tube) rather than to a programming error, and only in that case, are reductive explanations of the episode of software failure to meaningfully be sought after. We can also seek to explain how the software is being enabled to run effectively on a specific machine, and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. But they are answers to a different question, and not even indirectly relevant to the high-level question concerning the obtaining of the input/output structure that is fully explained by the software specification. (Indeed the hardware design might plausibly have been implemented by the computer builders in order to enable the execution of the software in accordance with its own autonomous laws. So the ensuing operation of the hardware, under the governance of the software instructions, constitutes a clear case of downward causation.)
I can't answer that for myself, at least for the part of me that's drawn to provocation for the sake of provocation (which, say what you want, is all this thread really amounts to.) So maybe I want to provoke you into giving an answer that'll help me.
Yes, I thing that is true also. Causal networks in complex dynamical systems can be very messy and fail to display clear cases of upward and downward causation operating between neatly distinguished levels. (That doesn't prevent such messy systems from displaying stable attractors such as the deterministic surface warming response to the enhanced greenhouse effect.) The same is true of biological systems. Alan C. Love has written a fascinating paper in which he criticizes the narrow focus of theoreticians on neat hierarchies: Hierarchy, causation and explanation: ubiquity, locality and pluralism. The abstract may be worth quoting in full:
"The ubiquity of top-down causal explanations within and across the sciences is prima facie evidence for the existence of top-down causation. Much debate has been focused on whether top-down causation is coherent or in conflict with reductionism. Less attention has been given to the question of whether these representations of hierarchical relations pick out a single, common hierarchy. A negative answer to this question undermines a commonplace view that the world is divided into stratified ‘levels’ of organization and suggests that attributions of causal responsibility in different hierarchical representations may not have a meaningful basis for comparison. Representations used in top-down and bottom-up explanations are primarily ‘local’ and tied to distinct domains of science, illustrated here by protein structure and folding. This locality suggests that no single metaphysical account of hierarchy for causal relations to obtain within emerges from the epistemology of scientific explanation. Instead, a pluralist perspective is recommended—many different kinds of top-down causation (explanation) can exist alongside many different kinds of bottom-up causation (explanation). Pluralism makes plausible why different senses of top-down causation can be coherent and not in conflict with reductionism, thereby illustrating a productive interface between philosophical analysis and scientific inquiry."
Which one of those requires superstrings as part of the explanation? Quarks?
Good old Socrates wannabe trolling.
But this confuses epistemology and ontology.
Of course our causal accounts of nature might well be varied and poorly connected due to accidents of history and differences in interests. But the naturalist perspective would expect - for rational reasons, accounted for in hierarchy theory itself - a deep unity of nature, and so the potential for some actual nested hierarchy of theories.
So sure, pluralism could be the epistemic case if we had no particular desire to get the whole story of nature right. But on the other hand, it is very reasonable to expect that nature does have its one unified story to tell - even if it is also agreed that a lot of the actual story involves historical accidents along the way that add random elements of a degree of "living" spontaneity.
A theory of birds is contingent on there being birds. Yet still that evolutionary accident fits into a greater hierarchical story of an intersection between ecological constraints and organismic possibilties. Something like a bird would have had to fill that niche.
So a totalising discourse would be ontically pluralist in that strict sense - the history of the Cosmos has its accidents too. But that still leaves as our main target the formal backbone of all that counts as its integrative necessity - the hierarchy that is simplicity building into complexity via the semiosis of level-creating symmetry breakings.
As an aside, biology is going through what could be its "standard model" style causal revolution. There is an argument that life can only exist because of the chemo-structural possibility of a respiratory chain. And that involves a symmetry breaking depending on which way protons are pushed across a membrane (in to out, or out to in). Nature of course had no choice but to do both - giving us bacteria and archaea. Then have dichotomised respiration, again it was inevitable that the two modes would become mixed in the one organism to produce the large complex cells of the eukaryota.
If this is true - and we are talking about work only a decade old - then almost all the old evolutionary contingency when it comes to the evolution of life is removed at source. There is in the whole universe only this single way that the potential of chemistry could take the next step to be organised as living dissipative structure.
And this is just like particle physics with its tale of gauge symmetry breaking. The destiny of Universe - once its bath of radiation had cooled and expanded sufficiently - was completely locked in by Platonic-strength constraints on particle production.
Even human social, economic and political structures are likely to have very little that are truly contingent about them - http://pontotriplo.org/quickpicks/constructal_theory_of_social_dynamics.html
So I would say we are learning that nature is far more unified by some general organisational principles - mainly to do with closure for causality (symmetries) and least action principles (symmetry breakings) - than we ever really expected. Simplicity and complexity are being united under the one set of metaphysical rules.
In that case, that's quite an anti-climax. Engineers create structures like this all the time. Engineers who make parts and components at one level are also at the same time creating abstractions for engineers at the next level.
The part of your difference with Weinberg where he does not consider
this autonomy to be fundamental - well I am on his side on this,
It is not a difference in the understanding of the facts. It is one of perspective.
I am sure you can debate perspective, but I would rather debate something else.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
Nothing matters.
Sounds pretty religious to me.
Both the hardware and software levels are abstracts levels. (They're akin to the levels of cell physiology and of whole organism physiology). They also both are real functional levels. The software-level description characterizes real material processes (executions of high-level source code programs) that are both symbolically significant and that abstract away from some features of hardware (or virtual machine) implementation. The hardware-level processes (executions of individual steps of machine code, or, at an even lower level, of elementary binary logical functions) have the same features but what this level abstracts away from are the high-level symbolic modes of operation that are conferred to it (as viewed from above) by the higher level algorithmic structure defined by the software "loaded" into the computer.
Engineers may create structures like this all the time, as you notice, but so does nature. In some cases, the levels may be clear cut, as are the different energy scales in effective field theories, or, in other cases, fail to form neat hierarchies, as is the case for the Earth climate system or for biological organisms. What is common to all of those natural and artifactual (and also cognitive and social) phenomena is the ubiquity of downward causation and their illustrating the inadequacy of Weinberg-style reductionism as a purported description of "the way the world is".
So, contrary to what Weinberg believes, the level of his hypothesized "final theory" isn't fundamental as a matter of "the world being the way it is", where this is conceived as stemming form all the "arrows of explanation" being found empirically to converge towards one single theory of particle physics. It rather consists in this lowest "material" level being dignified by him with the word "fundamental" merely through downgrading as not being really "fundamental" (or as being dependent on mere "historical accidents") all the real arrows of scientific explanation (a majority of them, actually) that don't happen to point towards his favored theory. The real phenomenon of the (partial) autonomy of higher level processes and phenomena from their lower level bases of material constitution just destroys his mythical structure of arrow convergence. This grand structure, rather than being a reflection of anything empirically verifiable in nature, turn out to be a product of his prejudice.
So, you really are after an understanding of the facts that doesn't rest on any conceptually informed perspective at all? Or is there a way to do science without making use of any theoretical or empirical concepts?
Nothing matters.
Thus spake Nietzsche.
But I'm sure this presents no problem at all for a Weinbergian metaphysics. It is all just meaningless atomic motions in the end, no messages or semiotics in play.
Or if we must admit to something more than just brute material physics here, then we can still pretend that is covered by an analysis of electrochemical action at synapses and within muscles controlling a wing. We can stick to talking about the physics of symbols rather than their meanings.
Indeed, rather like the plover frantic about the prospect of its nest being trodden on, we will be found racing about in a distracting fashion - throwing out a succession of enticingly lame evasions - in the hope of leading any pursuer far from our threatened belief system.
Ugh, that only sticks to the loop of reductionism.
This goes back to the question of "What is an electron?" Like the materialist reductionists, the substance dualist and advocates of "mystery" consider thing to be defined by something else, to be reduced that idea.
For someone it say: "well, it's an electron" is considered somehow inadequate. Supposedly, to be talked about, the election must be reduced to something else, whether that be "properties" or "mystery."
The truth is, all along, "it's an electron" was a perfectly fine account. Sure it doesn't tell us what the electron does or how it interacts with other things, but that was never the point-- here we are interested in self-definition, in how an electron is an electron.
Reductionism is the scourge which doesn't allow us to recognise that we talk about other things, which proclaims anything must really be something else or defined by something else. As such it is an act common to both elimative materialism and substance dualists. Neither understand every state has its own being, and so cannot be reduced to properties, ideas or "mystery."
Does Weinberg give similar caveats for his version what a fundamental theory is?
Sartre actually.
"The consensus of the sages — I recognized this ever more clearly — proves least of all that they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they themselves, these wisest men, shared some physiological attribute, and because of this adopted the same negative attitude to life — had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value about life, for it or against it, can in the end never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are meaningless. One must stretch out one's hands and attempt to grasp this amazing subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not impartial judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to object to putting a value on life is an objection others make against him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men — they were not only decadents but not wise at all." -- Nietzche
Yeah, that one.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
So attempting to synthesize your position: while "those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class", we can seek to explain how low level features enable the high level ones and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive.
Does Weinberg give similar caveats for his version what a fundamental theory is?
Not so far as I can see. Also, my objections can't be met with mere caveats. What comes closest to caveats in Weinberg's two texts are his acknowledgement that high-level theories are useful irrespective of them actually having been effectively reduced. But his reductionist claims are explicitly metaphysical rather then methodological/pragmatist. So this weak caveat isn't really relevant to my objection to his stronger metaphysical claim.
Another qualification that he offers is rather more akin to an anti-caveat. He distinguishes explicitly his own brand of "grand reductionism" from the more ordinary "petty reductionism" that he identifies with Mayr's "analysis" of a system onto material constituents in order to highlight bottom-up principles and constraints. Pluralists and emergentists are happy to recognize the explanatory fecundity of such a process of analysis. Weinberg is insistent that his own brand of theoretical ("grand") reductionism is much stronger than that. But it is owing to the strength of his claim that the counterexamples to it exemplified by the clear cases of strong emergence, ubiquitous in normal scientific practice, are fatal to it.
Yes, for sure. But this merely amounts to material constitutive analysis; something that Ernst Mayr, for instance, readily acknowledges as an important area (albeit just a part) of fruitful scientific inquiry, and that Weinberg tends to downplay as mere "petty reductionism" as contrasting with his own metaphysical claim of "grand reductionism" to a unique "final theory". But Weinberg is also blind to the positive features of the emergent relations (involving 'autonomy' and 'universality', as explained by Karen Crowther) displayed alongside reductive analysis. Those explanatory relevant positive features of emergent phenomena just destroy Weinberg's grand metaphysical claim since they give rise to "explanatory arrows" that point away from his dreamed of final theory.
A further point of clarification. You to refer to "relevant equivalence class" because a single high level theory may have instantiations with different low level features/substrates. Or to use a previous example, the same software can run on different kinds of computers.
Or did you mean something else.
No, that's broadly correct. I get the "equivalence class" concept from George Ellis, mainly. (And I also homed in on it independently in a manuscript titled Autonomy, Consequences and Teleology that I wrote in 2009). It is closely connected to Karen Crowther's idea of "universality", which alongside "autonomy" characterizes emergent phenomena and the emergent norms and/or laws that govern them. It is also closely connected to the idea of "multiple realizability" made use of by functionalists in the philosophy of mind. When a functional system is multiply realizable, then all the possible realizations fall under an equivalence class defined by the functional specification.
But multiple realizability, thus conceived, just is one sort of case where Crowther's more general idea of "universality" is exemplified by emergent phenomena in nature; and hence just one sort of way to characterize equivalance classes of systems that admit of the same high-level explanation. The other two cases consist in (2) equivalence classes of micro-physical realizations of a macro-variable (you can refer back to my discussion of the ideal gas law earlier in this thread, for instance) and cases where the underlying physical theory is underdetermined by the emergent theory. This is what is exemplified by the cases of critical phase transitions or broken symmetries that characterize, among other things, the relations between adjacent "effective field theories" that have their domains of validity tied to distinct energy scales. The phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity exemplify this.
Then are these autonomous high level theories empirical theories?
Yes. The ideal gal law is an empirical law, and so are quantum electrodynamics or quantum chromodynamics (both of the latter are effective field theories), for instance. Ethological accounts of animal behavior also are empirical. The number of examples from natural or social sciences is almost infinite. Theories that are fully reducible are the exception rather than the rule.
So you consider all these autonomous high level theories. In the case of quantum electrodynamics, electroweak theory is not a reduction, "since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class."
Or did you mean something else?
No, that's exactly what I meant. The theory of the electoweak interaction (i.e. the effective quantum field theory that is found to be empirically valid, as well as theoretically adequate, above the 246 GeV unificaton energy) is underspecified by the theory of quantum electrodynamics. All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale (i.e., any energy below 246 GeV) belong to an equivalence class of theories, such that QED can be derived from any one of them. But the empirical discovery that one specific theory happens to be empirically adequate above 246 GeV (and up to the grand unification energy of the true GUT theory, presumably), adds nothing to the explanation of the validity of the laws of QED over and above this "reducing" theory belonging to the aforementioned equivalence class. This is where the (partial) explanatory autonomy of QED comes from and why the "arrows of explanation" stemming from Weinberg's question as to "Why?" its laws obtain don't point to specific features of the empirically valid theory of the electroweak force one step up (in order of increasing energy scales) in the hierarchy of effective field theories.
I think this misses the point.
Explanations at any level of emergence can be fundamental. We think of quantum mechanics and general relativity as "fundamental", which they are, but NeoDarwinism and the Theory of Computation are also fundamental.
There is no downwards or upwards causation between fundamental theories.
If for a theory to be fundamental means that it is universal and applies everywhere, at any time, and on every energy/spatial scale, then very few theories are fundamental (not even general relativity). If it means that they provide autonomous explanations that abstract away from features of the contingent material constitution of the entities that they regulate, then stating that they are fundamental doesn't entail anything more than stating that they are autonomous. Hence, I prefer the term "autonomous". Quantum mechanics is more of a framework than it is a theory. It consists in a set of formal features shared by more determinate empirical theories such as quantum electrodynamics. Such theories are likewise autonomous.
The ideas of downward or upward causation don't relate to causal links between the theories themselves which regulate phenomena. They rather pertain to causal relationships between phenomena that belong to distinct levels of description, or scales of intervention. When an intervention on a macro-scale variable reliably produces a specific, targeted, effect on the micro-physical state of a system, for instance, that constitutes an instance of downward causation. The existence of meaningful downward causation is being disputed by some philosophers (such as Jaegwon Kim) and some scientists (such as Sean Carroll) on the same grounds on which they also dispute the existence of strong emergence. They believe both the ideas of strong emergence (and hence of the autonomy of "high-level" theories with respect to "low-level" ones) and the existence of (irreducible) downward causation to be inconsistent with the causal closure of the micro-physical domain. Those objections at least make some sort of intuitive sense in the framework of deterministic classical mechanics, but they are invalid, in my view, in a way that is simply made even more salient by their failures to go through in the context of quantum physics.
All the more egregiously in the case of Sean Carroll, who is, after all, a physicist.
It's also a bit disappointing on account of the fact that Carroll, unlike colleagues of his like Hawking, Krauss or Weinberg, isn't utterly dismissive of philosophy. In the comment section of the first one in a series of four blog posts about emergence written by Massimo Pigliucci, George Ellis takes Carroll to task on this very issue (i.e. he points out the inadequacy of Newtonian billiard ball models as a basis for an anti-emergentist argument). Ellis proceed to discuss superconductivity as an example of a emergent theory where the very nature of the "low level entities" (in this case, Cooper pairs) is conditioned by high-level features of a physical system.
As I had suggested, however, even if deterministic Newtonian physics had turned out to be true, strong emergence would still make sense. Werner Heisenberg indeed understood early on, prior even to the development of his matrix mechanics, that if point particles obeying the laws of Newtonian mechanics were somehow conceived to be the material basis of the physical world, it would still not be possible to know determinately all their intrinsic mechanical properties, and thus those properties would become 'noumenal', as it were, and not allowed to be represented as genuine physical magnitudes in an empirically grounded physical theory. (I think that was in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, which I had read in the French edition some 30 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy. But the gist of his argument stuck with me.)
I think the only real reason is that he's a bit more tactful. Here is a review of Carroll's latest book which might be of interest.
While underdetermination is well known enough in the philosophy of science, could you give a central text which uses the term underspecified.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say all theories (QED included) would have been consistent with experimental results at the lower energy scale
I meant underdetermined, thank you.
In plainer words, the theory of the electoweak interaction gives the correct results for experimental data at 246 GeV unificaton energy whereas quantum electrodynamics does not.
Is there anything you would disagree with here?
No. That wouldn't make sense. QED is not part of its own set of higher-energy (and shorter-range structure) possible realization bases.
Since it is an empirical theory, what experimental data is it consistent with?
No but it's not a paraphrase of what I wrote. It ignores the point about underdetermination.
You can read Feyman's popular "QED" book, if you're curious; or Google the Wikipedia page, maybe.
So there is empirical data that QED consistent with.
Electroweak theory is also consistent with the same empirical data.
Is there anything you disagree with here?
None of the theories I mentioned seeks to protect itself from falsification by the adoption of any ad-hoc restrictions on where and when they might apply. So, IF that is your definition of fundamental, they all still qualify.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
It means that the abstractions with which the theories deal, are real. If you are not ready to take that plunge, then "autonomous" may be sufficient to annoy reductionists.
Reductionism requires the behaviour of high level physical systems to always consist of nothing more than the behaviour of its low-level constituents, with most of the details ignored, or as you say "abstracted away", for convenience.
The trouble is, even in physics, reductionism doesn't always work, and we require autonomous higher-level explanations that are irreducible - e.g. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Whatever you prefer to call Quantum Mechanics does not change the constraints imposed on it and any future theory by Computational Universality.
It could very well be, that high-level theories, taken together, imply the low-level theories, that would otherwise appear fine-tuned.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I made this remark in a later comment that I hope you don't disagree with:
Quoting Frederick KOH
But you disagree with this remark of mine:
Quoting Frederick KOH
Saying:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Why? Some of that data was in existence before QED was even close to being a mature theory.
The set of theories that I mentioned are singled out as being part of the relevant equivalence class. It was meant as a definition of this equivalence class. You quoted only the first part of the sentence where I explain this and then suggested: "Wouldn't it be more accurate to say all theories (QED included) would have been consistent with experimental results at the lower energy scale". But that's not more accurate. That's saying something else entirely, quite irrelevant to what I meant. I had assumed you meant that I had forgotten to include QED in the relevant equivalence class. It need not be included at all, although, trivially, of course QED also is consistent with the experimental results that it itself has been devised to explain. It looks like, through reading only one half of a sentence of mine, and rushing to respond to it, you misconstrued what it meant.
So this is the criteria for being in the same equivalence class as QED:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
This is not more accurate, but characterizes what valid empirical theories should do:
Quoting Frederick KOH
Is there anything you disagree with here?
No, QED is not part of the relevant equivalence class. You are still badly misconstruing what I said. Are you really incapable of reading a whole sentence? Can't you at least try to make sense of it with reference to the surrounding context of the discussion? Here is the whole sentence, together with the sentence immediately before it:
(PN:) "The theory of the electoweak interaction (i.e. the effective quantum field theory that is found to be empirically valid, as well as theoretically adequate, above the 246 GeV unificaton energy) is underspecified by the theory of quantum electrodynamics. All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale (i.e., any energy below 246 GeV) belong to an equivalence class of theories, such that QED can be derived from any one of them."
The alternatives that are being considered are alternatives to the theory of the electroweak interaction; not alternatives to QED itself! It is a class of possible realization bases (analogous to material realization in classical physics or other "high-level" natural sciences) of QED that Karen Crowther meant to specify. If this may help, as an analogy: if you were to define as belonging to the same equivalence class all the hats that fit on your head, then you yourself wouldn't be a member of this equivalence class. You should probably go back and read again the whole post rather than pulling out sentence fragments out of it, because the inferences you are drawing from those fragments are nonsensical, and lead you to miss the point by a mile.
Yes. Because what you say is a bit unexpected.
You define an equivalence class in terms of an existing theory.
You do not define it in terms of a set of empirical data to explain
Have I interpreted you correctly?
I'm not sure what the difficulty is. There are parameters of the electroweak theory (EWT, for short) that can only be determined empirically through performing experiments in large particle accelerators (through producing and analyzing interactions that involve energies above 246 GeV). If this were not the case, then EWT would not be underdetermined by the experimental evidence that supports QED, and that is available through observing common lower energy interactions outside of particle accelerators. So, if EWT is considered to be one possible "reduction base" of QED (i.e. one that is actual, and not merely possible), then other similar theories that would have alternate values to the empirically determined (at high energy) parameters of EWT would constitute other possible reduction bases of QED. In other words -- and this is the main point -- the actual values of those determinate parameters of EWT are irrelevant to the explanation of the structure of QED, or to the determination of its specific laws.
Do you disagree?
In every theory there are open problems describable in terms of the theory itself. Does this apply to what you call autonomous theories?
It's rather misleading to call it an alternative to QED when QED can be logically derived from it. It would be better to say that it's a more determinate theory. It is inferentially stronger and hence more falsifiable. (It defines a wider "exluded zone", John Haugeland would say; some potential experimental results that it rules out aren't ruled out by QED).
I can't say. Your first sentence is too vague. Maybe you could phrase it more precisely and explain the relevance of your question to what we've been discussing.
Example "why is the photon massless" is question expressible in terms of QED
Yes, sure. The photon's being massless is a requirement for QED being renormalisable. (I didn't remember that, by the way. I Googled it). What's your point?
So there is a directionality between the two, leaving aside what to conclude from this directionality.
Yes, there is.
Do you consider chemistry autonomous from the theories in quantum mechanics?
This binary question is much too crude. There are specific laws of chemistry that are autonomous with respect to the laws that govern simple molecular interactions. The situation here is much more complex and disorderly than it is in the case of the relation between to neighboring effective field theories that merely differ with regard to the energy scales of their respective domains of application. I made mention of a specific example concerning networks of chemical reactions a couple of days ago, though I didn't dig up the reference. Refer to Earley's discussion of "concentration robustness" in chemical reaction networks that satisfy the conditions of the theorem proven by Shinar and Feinberg (Structural sources of robustness in biochemical reaction networks, Science (2010) Mar 12). That's in Earley, Joseph E. Three Concepts of Chemical Closure and their Epistemological Significance.
The main point is that autonomy of a scientific discipline with respect to another always is autonomy in some specific respects. Some laws of chemistry are emergent, some aren't.
Then I am not sure how to use your terminology here. What are what you call "high level structures" then? Are they logically different for each specific law even it they refer to the same sort of objects?
I don't recall using the phrase "high level structures" (though that might aptly characterize the objects and properties directly being governed by the laws of a high-level theory). I once mentioned high-level structural features, which include such things as the boundary conditions of a system, and which can serve as a theoretical basis for the direct derivation of the emergent (irreducible) laws of a high-level theory. Those high level structural features thus constitute the specific conditions under which the phenomena being explained and governed by the high-level theory can arise. They are being pointed at by the multitudinous "arrows of explanation" that mess up Weinberg's "grand reductionism" of explanatory-arrow-convergence.
For example (from Wikipedia)
"An acid is a molecule or ion capable of donating a hydron (proton or hydrogen ion H+), or, alternatively, capable of forming a covalent bond with an electron pair (a Lewis acid)"
In terms of what law is the statement above made?
Yes, and so? QED may have a wide range of applications and a large domain of validity. This has nothing to do with the question whether or not it might be reducible to some other, more "fundamental", theory.
How did I "stay within" a single law (whatever that means)? I'm providing counterexamples to Weinberg's imprudent generalization one at a time.
Actually, you can't reduce chemistry to quantum mechanics. Chemistry is highly dependent on the history of the universe and the particular values of certain physical constants. Chemistry may also require additional laws like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
So, chemistry may be reduced to Quantum mechanics (specifically the Standard Model) plus initial conditions of the universe, plus several arbitrary constants, plus General Relativity (in order to provide the conditions for atom formation), plus thermodynamics, at least. Not much of a reduction!
A sentence like this is perfectly valid in chemistry:
"An acid is a molecule or ion capable of donating a hydron (proton or hydrogen ion H+), or, alternatively, capable of forming a covalent bond with an electron pair (a Lewis acid)"
What do you call the framework which provides the vocabulary to express it and also the conventions used to determine its validity? And is this framework autonomous?
That's true, for sure. But, in addition to this, many of the laws of chemistry are valid only for some specific classes of bounded chemical systems (and presuppose specific boundary conditions, such as the total energy of the system). In that regard, such laws are akin to the unified sets of laws (or norms) of animal physiology and behavior that only apply to specific animals.
I never said anything about the autonomy of "frameworks". I argued that some theories are non-reducible when they explain some emergent phenomena and when some of their explanatory successful laws are autonomous in the sense that they are derived from the joint realization of specific sets of high-level structural features of the systems -- whole equivalence classes of them, as previously explained -- in which those laws apply. (There is an intentional circularity, here). Those high level structural features thereby circumscribe the scope of applicability of the emergent laws.
So do you agree with this
Valid claims and questions can be made within chemistry that straddles multiple autonomous laws.
For sure. It's Weinberg who would object to this, not me. He can't admit of his "arrows of explanation" pointing "sideways" to autonomous laws rather than them all pointing "below" in the general direction of his "final theory"
But if it can straddle multiple autonomous laws, why not also admit the objects of the theories of physics?
Converge.
Why not indeed! But the pluralist/emergentist admits readily of them. Remember Ernst Mayr on "analysis"? For one merely to be admitting of the existence of such "reductive" (i.e. analytical) explanations amounts to what Weinberg downplays as mere "petty reductionism". What Weinberg's "grand reductionism" requires is that only the objects of the theories of physics be admitted, or, at least, that only the objects of theories somehow "closer" to the "final theory" of physics be admitted.
They must converge towards a single point, according to Weinberg. They must converge towards the "final theory", somewhere underneath both the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity.
So what is the term you would use when the question "why do elements have the valencies they do" is answered by a theory of quantum mechanics?
My point was that you can occasionally go sideways and still converge.
If the explanation were complete (which I may assume it to be, for the sake of the argument), then the term that I would use is "reductive explanation". Ernst Mayr, in his book What Makes Biology Unique, offers many historical examples of successful reductive explanations in biology. I don't know how many time I must point out that for pluralists/emergentists to deny that *all* genuine explanations of scientific laws are reductive (as Weinberg would require them all to be) doesn't entail that they don't believe any explanation to be reductive. Some high level laws represent cases of strong emergence, and some are reducible. Weinberg wants them all to be reducible, because the only alternative that he can imagine is magic.
In any case, to get back to your specific example of atomic valence, it may be doubted that the explanation of such properties is reductive in kind. See the enlightening discussion of orbital hybridization in the case of the tetrahedral geometry of methane, in section 8 of Michel Bitbol's Downward causation without foundations (There is a direct link to the pdf file down the page.)
Fair enough. But you can also fail to converge. Weinberg believes it to be an empirical fact (regarding the history of science) that actual arrows of explanation produced by the various special sciences tend to converge in the general direction of particle physics. But he focuses almost exclusively on reductive explanations and assumes without argument that non-reductive explanations that aren't pointing "down" to some underlying theory must be discounted as resting on uninteresting historical accidents (e.g. the contingent fact that an animal species has evolved in this or that way). So, his argument for "grand reductionism" is circular and the product of a lack of imagination (and, presumably also, a lack of familiarity with the analysis of the structure of non-reductive explanations.)
What does it mean for an explanation to be complete? We are talking about science are we not?
Maybe you and I are, but Weinberg isn't. He takes his observation about the apparent convergence of the arrows of explanation produced by science to furnish irresistible evidence for what he takes to be a fundamental fact about "the way the world is". This is why his "final theory" could remain just a "dream", in his view; and "grand reductionism" would still be a true characterization of the ways the world is. The complete explanation at issue amounts to "reduction in principle", not the actual production of complete reductive explanations. You and Rorty may be Deweyan pragmatists. Weinberg isn't.
What Weinberg argues for is effectively the complete determination (which is a matter of metaphysics rather than epistemology) of the principles governing higher-level phenomena (e.g. animal behavior) by the principles governing low-level phenomena (e.g. particle behavior). If this were the case, then, there would exist complete reductive explanations that are knowable in principle, even if they were only really known to God.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that SOME of the laws of chemistry are approximations?
I did not suggest that they were approximations, though some undoubtedly are. For a law not to apply universally need not entail that there must exist a more precise, as of yet unknown, "universal" law that it approximates. (This incorrect expectation lays at the root of Davidson's nomological principle of causality, I think)
My point was different. There are strong arguments to be made (on Kantian/Aristotelian grounds) that any law that purportedly governs empirical phenomena either must have exceptions (i.e. can be interfered with by something (or may fails to apply at some energy scale, etc.) or isn't really an empirically significant law but rather merely is an idealized abstract principle (a mathematical constraint, for instance). But, in the latter case, such a principle must always be interpreted in a determinate empirical context in order to be rendered relevant to the regulation of empirical phenomena that show up within specific domains of inquiry. We are then back to the first situation.
Truly exceptionless "laws" always are unreal abstractions, on that view. This possibility may be obscured by the tendency to conceive of "universal laws of nature" against the background assumption of a metaphysics of temporally instantaneous (and ontologically self-contained) "events" and Humean causation. But empirical results gathered from real experimental setups (and from ordinary human perceptual experience) always must be made sense of on the quite different background of a metaphysics of objects (i.e. traditional "substances") and their specific fallible powers.
Bohr's complementarity principle, in its wider philosophical generalization beyond the narrow scope of quantum mechanics, constitutes an explanation of this, I think. The principles of quantum mechanics determine not only the unitary evolution of pure quantum "states" (this is the abstract "universal" part of the theory) but must also specify the projections of those states onto definite "observables". And the latter always must make at least tacit reference to definite macroscopic experimental setups, as well at to definite human conceptual understandings, and/or pragmatic uses, of those setups.
He is more equivocal:
" Sometimes things can be explained by studying their constituents—sometimes not."
pg 111 Facing Up
Later:
Reductionism may or may not be a good guide for a program of weather
forecasting, but it provides the necessary insight that there are no
autonomous laws of weather that are logically independent of the
principles of physics. Whether or not it helps the meteorologist to
keep it in mind, cold fronts are the way they are because of the
properties of air and water vapor and so on, which in turn are[b]the
way they[/b] are because of the principles of chemistry and physics.
We don’t know the final laws of nature, but we know that they are
not expressed in terms of cold fronts or thunderstorms.
You read "complete determination" into "the way they are". I don't.
Nothing wrong with that. That's how hypotheses are formulated sometimes. You don't need the word irresistible to qualify the evidence you use to form hypotheses.
Do you find the abandonment of vitalism in the life sciences equally unwarranted?
OK, but the list of laws that underlie chemistry are universal, plus there are the universal constants and the non-universal initial conditions of the universe. Chemists might be remiss in not specifying that certain reactions on earth can't happen in a plasma or prior to the formation of super-novae, but that's not the point of chemistry.
It is quite simply a fact of history that there are levels of approximation to true explanations, and it is a fact of epistemology that the true laws of nature must be able to be approached in this way. That the laws of nature permit this is a something that requires an explanation in itself.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
But the laws of nature don't "govern empirical phenomena". They are explanations of what exists in reality, how it behaves, and why. From these explanations, certain empirical phenomena may be deduced, which is how we test the laws.
And, it is a deep sin in science to protect one's theories by ad-hoc means.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Not sure where this is going, mostly because Causation and Physical Law are indeed abstractions, they are not physical objects.
It might be worth noting that Causation and our best Physical Laws (both abstractions) are under some tension, if not completely incompatible ideas.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Then decoherence happened.
I think this is a bit cheap. Any decent theory of cosmology will, in the long run, have to take account of what sentient knowledge-bearing entities, found in the viscinity of stars, decide to do do. That cannot be achieved by String Theory alone.
Not even the weather can be in-principle predicted by the principles of physics and chemistry alone. On Venus it can, but not on Earth. What humans will do to affect the weather cannot be predicted.
This means that areas of inquiry with autonomous theories are not themselves autonomous. Given a question, explanations do not have to stay within a theory, autonomous or not. So this gives a sense to the word "fundamental" as used by Weinberg whether you agree with his choice of word. The more "fundamental" a theory is, the more widespread the possibility and actuality of its use becomes (especially if you include the theories underwriting the instruments of observation).
No, it doesn't entail that. The autonomy of whole theories almost always is merely partial, since broad theories encompass both emergent laws and reducible laws. As applied to individual laws, then the autonomy can be total.
They may not need to but they very often do.
Weinberg's "final theory" only is fundamental, then, in the sense that its scope of application is allegedly wider. But it is only wider than the scope of high-level theories owing to the fact that it explains laws that govern either the parts of the entities explained by those theories, or the parts or their parts, or the parts of the parts of their parts, etc. So, it is merely concerned with the ultimate "parts" (or quantum fields or whatever) while abstracting away from emergent structures that don't depend on intrinsic properties of their parts (or of whatever laws govern the phenomena of the "underlying" theories), and that generalize across multiply-realizable domains (and hence actually have wider explanatory scopes than theories merely applying to a bunch of small particles!).
So, Weinberg's preferred arrows of explanations all point towards the smallest parts. He ignores the arrows that point to structural relationships between parts at the same level of mereological composition. His explanation of what is "fundamental" then fails to justify his view of reductionism, since this view is premised in the idea of the convergence of the arrows explanation but he has simply ignored all the arrows that don't ultimately lead to his preferred "fundamental" level.
I was making a claim about areas of inquiry. We saw a stark example with a simple statement about acids.
What I said about broad theories, as opposed to individual laws, is also true of wide areas of inquiry. The explanation of the properties of acids and bases may make reference to both emergent laws and reductive laws. Maybe it is a stark example of the scientific fruitfulness of reductive explanations (Ernst Mayr's "analysis"). So? There are also stark examples of the scientific fruitfulness of non-reductive explanations.
It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry.
I don't follow. What are those two means?
Could be more than two - depending on how you use your terminology.
I have two sets of questions in this regard. I have put them in different comments to make clear their separation.
When the discussion touched chemistry, you used the term "autonomous law" instead of "autonomous theory".
Suppose this question was asked in 1835:
Are the following what you consider to be autonomous laws:
Coulomb's Law
The Biot-Savart Law
Oersted's Law
Faraday's Law of Induction
In what sense is QCD autonomous?
The data that theorists sought to explain and whose work resulted in QCD were created by instruments designed on principles that are not based on QCD.
In the context of effective field theories, the autonomy at issue is the autonomy of a large-scale, low-energy, theory (such as QED) relative to a smaller-scale, higher-energy, theory (such as QCD). I've already explained the sense in which it is autonomous. In addition to Crowther's paper, referenced earlier (Decoupling emergence and reduction in physics), you can also look up Jonathan Bain, Emergence in Effective Field Theories (2012).
You often present alleged examples of reduction, which I then proceed to analyse. You then ignore my analysis, ask more rhetorical questions, and then challenge me with more examples. What's the point in me analyzing and discussing your own examples in details if you are just going to ignore the analysis again? This new Gish gallop of yours is you answer to my request that you would give me some inkling of the meaning of your claim that: 'It means that "fundamental" theories have two means of being "transported" from their original birthplace to other areas of inquiry.'
This was beginning to look like an argument. Can you make it a little more explicit?
The gish gallop was from you. From your own switch from "autonomous theories" to "autonomous laws", deftly, and with wiliness, hoping no one would notice that the term used has changed without you characterizing the difference.
I suspect the reason you are not answering is because these four laws developed in a way that is very different from the ones in chemistry.
Do you agree that these four laws developed in a way that is very different from the ones in chemistry? Are they autonomous laws?
But also a sense which does not include instruments and experimental set up in a theory meant to be empirical.
That's not true. I took some pain to explain the sense in which individual laws can be said to be autonomous relative to the laws that govern the interactions between the material constituents in the lower-level theory. I had explained this here and here among other places.
This complaint is rather fuzzy. In what way should the sense of the word autonomy "include instruments and experimental set up"? Each theory has its own set of observational concepts and relies on specific types of experimental setups. Reductibiliy (or autonomy) concerns derivability (or lack thereof) of the laws in one set from the laws in the other set. It is a matter of theoretical analysis whether or not such a derivability is possible. But it is a matter of empirical inquiry whether the laws governing the entities belonging to either levels are satisfied.
You were postulating that your question regarding the autonomy of those laws was being asked in 1835. One would have to look up what the status of each of those laws, and of the broad theories they were a part of, were at that time. When a law is first being derived empirically from the identification of some regularity, or of manifest causal networks, in a set of observations and experiments, then the question of the autonomy or derivability of those laws relative to another as of yet unknown theory is an open question. In the case of the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics, the question of their potential reduction began to make sense when quantum field theory was developed. It turned out that relative to their "realization base" (higher-energy effective field theories) the laws of quantum electrodynamics were partially autonomous since they involved different degrees of freedom and were, in a sense, multiply-realizable.
There is something wrong when a specific question is asked and generalities are proffered in response. Especially when we know exactly what happened to those laws.
It is interesting that you managed to get from "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" to "quantum field theory" without mentioning Maxwell's equations. I am going to be charitable and assume that somewhere in "the laws of electromagnetism and electrodynamics" you include Maxwells equations. In either case it is either disingenuousness or ignorance that no mention how those four laws relate to Maxwell's equations.
What use is a theory, autonomous or not, it it does not come with means to connect it to experiments.
Quoting Pierre-Normand
Those concepts and setups exist prior to and motivate the theories in question.
And in the four laws I gave an example where what the material constituents were is not clear. Especially when we know the classical theory that came after.
Well, yes. The classical theory of electromagnetism indeed incorporates its mathematical expression in the form of Maxwell's equations. Thank you for your generosity.
So, was your point that the four laws that you mentioned somehow "reduce" to Maxwell's equations? With the minor caveat that Coulomb's law just is an approximation (i.e. it doesn't account for "retarded potentials") those laws can be regarded as being unified into a coherent field theory that has been formalized by Maxwell. (Full blown classical electrodynamics also incorporates the Lorentz force law).
I don't see this as a clear case of one theory being reduced to another. (And even if it were, that would lend no support whatsoever to Weinberg's "grand reductionism"; that would just be another instance of "petty reductionism", which pluralists and emergentists are happy to grant). Maybe your point is different. Again, when you have a point to make, if would make our discussion less cumbersome if you would just make it explicitly, rather than rely entirely on the mere asking of rhetorical or gotcha questions.
Sure. In that case you can't achieve reduction through appealing to a more fundamental theory that regulates interactions between smaller material constituents. Weinberg's "why?" questions would still be the question why those laws are valid, assuming that they aren't themselves fundamental. If Weinberg's "grand reductionism" were correct, then there would exist a more fundamental theory -- a reduction base for it (i.e. a theory that is closer to Weinberg's unique "final theory") -- such that those laws are causally and/or deductively determined by it. Maxwell's equations don't constitute such a reduction base, since they merely express those very same laws in a consistent and rigorous manner. Maxwell's equations don't answer the question why they themselves are valid.
The most obvious candidate for a theory that would serve as an appropriate reduction base for classical electrodynamics, according to Weinberg himself, would be a high-energy theory such as QCD. QCD is thus a theory that he deems to figure on the path towards his dreamed of final theory, with a GUT theory, and a theory of quantum gravitation also figuring further down this path. Unfortunately, as I've argued, effective field theories that are valid at different energy scales don't appear to reduce one another.
It's not generally the case that the empirical concepts that figure in a theory already were in use prior to the development of the theory. This would be to forget the theory-ladenness of observation. The theoretical understanding of the laws of a theory, on the one side, and the understanding of the empirical objets, relations and properties that populate the ontology of this theory, on the other side, more often than not grow together. The concept of a gene didn't predate the discovery of Mendelean inheritance. The understanding of the concept of mass and of force weren't quite the same before and after the development of Newtonian mechanics (or before and after Einstein's special theory or relativity), etc.
Thank you for bringing this up. This is because you seem to want to define your way out of any counter-argument. How else do I pin down what you mean when you use terms that I have never seen any philosopher of science use?
As an exercise to anyone else still reading this thread, google "autonomous law" and see what you get.
I am beginning to think that I will have to use the same reasoning as the proverbial judge who had to rule on what pornography is.
Steven Weinberg uses the phrase "autonomous law" in "Two Cheers for Reductionism", one of the two book chapters that you enjoined me to argue against and endeavored to defend. I also was quite careful in explaining how I was using the term, quite consistently with Weinberg's own use, to signify the irreducibility of such a law within a theory to laws and principles from some other more fundamental theory. The explanation why such autonomous laws obtain (answering Weinberg's "Why?" question) rather is to be found at the same level of theory. I first made use of the phrase in this thread in order to explain the idea of a merely partial autonomy from one theory to another; when you had seemed to think that the question of the reducibility (or autonomy) of a whole theory in relation to some other theorie(s) is an all or nothing matter.
The Maxwell equations don't constitute a reduction of the four laws that you mentioned in anything like Weinberg's sense of reduction. That's because, for Weinberg, reducing a law (or scientific principle) consists in explaining why this law (or principle) obtains in terms of a more fundamental theory. The Maxwell equations formalize the laws of electromagnetism in a precise and consistent manner. They don't explain why those laws are valid. As I reminded you -- and you ignored again -- that is precisely why Weinberg seeks to reduce QED (the quantum mechanical version of electrodynamics) to another higher-energy effective field theory such as QCD.
There is no scientific theory that does that!
Which is precisely why you must seek some deeper reduction base -- a more "fundamental" theory -- in order to disclose at least one of the multiple "arrows of explanation" the alleged convergence of which ground Weinberg's grand reductionism. Weinberg's "arrows" always point from one law or principle of a theory to laws or principles from another theory. Else, in his view, the first theory (and its laws) would be freestanding and grand reductionism would fail.
Quoting Frederick KOH
an example of a non-sequitur is this:
Quoting Pierre-Normand
I agree that it is a non sequitur! It is Weinberg's non-sequitur. It is a non sequitur because there actually are lots of reasonable explanations why some specific laws within some theories obtain that aren't reductive explanations in Weinberg's sense.
That is indeed the prejudice. It is entirely possible (as I mentioned earlier) that an exact law of nature at a higher level will perform the explanatory role. The conservation lawsand the 2nd law of thermodynamics perform similar roles.
As I also mentioned, a higher-level exact law may be the solution to the fine-tuning problem, and we have candidates for this.
And, given what we already know about reality, it is impossible that the "final theory" of physics can explain everything. We still need fundamental theories of life, information, computation, epistemology and consciousness to name a few.
Fast forward to the modern world. Many are now still convinced that quantum theories and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle are 'discoveries of the way the world really is.' But they are not. They are the consequences of our own ability to comprehend the material world, and the experiments simply demonstrate that which Vedic philosophers deduced by reason several thousand years ago.
Science is only a model corroborated by experiment, and the model can only be as good as our minds can create. Within our brief time-bound existence, the ultimate nature of reality is beyond our absolute comprehension. When approaching the limits of science, we approach the limits of that which we can comprehend, which is the limits of our ability to reason, and not the actual limits of the material world--if indeed it exists independent of the domain of mind.
Those who dismiss domains of mind, independent of matter, have already dismissed much that can be explained. Attempting to explain to such minimalists any deeper understanding could be limited by their own lack of insight--while the minimalists will continue to deride attempts to explain alternative perspectives as flaky imagination. And with the exploding pseudosciences resulting from the decay of hermeneutic knowledge into the pseudodata of post-modernism, the minimalists can point to good examples. There are now many bizarre theories claiming to define consciousness perfectly in terms of quantum mechanics, or string theory, or whatever, because the actual metaphysical distinction between mind and matter still remains opaque to many people.
Similarly, many modern political theories are not really understood because people do not know the history of thought that went into their making. Most of their answers are no better than those provided by hypnotists seeking out your identity in a previous life, which even itself has been labeled a 'science' of 'regressive therapy.' To answer questions of politics properly, one must understand the theories which produced the questions, or it is no more than the blind stabs into an unknown dark, producing the ephemera of intangible and irresolvable debate that has already degenerated the 'age of enlightenment' into 'the information age.' First, simple data correlation slowly replaced analytical thought, over many generations of ignorant skepticism. From that, it was only a tiny step to the more rapid degeneration into the current 'post-truth era,' within which 'defining the narrative' replaces 'the search for rational truth' with an increasingly perilous rate of acceleration.
Which, apart from being poor reasoning, bears no resemblance to quantum theory.
Yes, this issue may not be exactly on the point of this thread. But I agree with you that the reasoning is both interesting and relevant to features of quantum mechanics that bridge metaphysics and epistemology. I had mentioned earlier (I think in this thread) some similar reasoning that had put Heisenberg on the right path for the developments of his early formulation of QM (matrix mechanics). He explained his thought process in The Physicist's Conception of Nature.
Regarding the quality of the reasoning, there might be some obscurity in the argument, but those old Vedic philosophers don't strike me as being as being any less insightful than the early Greek atomists were.
Many of the puzzles, as well as many of the insights, were real, it seems to me. There are both deep differences and deep similarities. If you read the intellectual biographical recollections of Heisenberg (or Schrödinger, or Einstein) you'll find that there are lots of philosophical and other a priori considerations that grounded their theoretical innovations. Of course there is a sort of interplay between theory and experiment that rests on the practice of the mathematical formalization of the laws of physics (and of the laws of some other special sciences) and the derivation of precisely quantifiable predictions (and explanations) that wasn't developed until recent centuries. This profound difference doesn't negate the profound similarities.
Of course, I didn't mean to imply that the development of new scientific theories is mere curve-fitting. Philosophical and even esthetic considerations played a role. But if that's the extent of the "profound similarities," that's not much.
They were (ahem) Europeans, who were quite steeped in the European philosophical tradition; unlike, for instance, Sean Carroll and other contemporary physicists who comment on philosophy. Schrodinger frequently referred to Schopenhauer, Heisenberg to the Greek philosophers.
Quoting ernestm
Heisenberg himself would not have said that. He is famous for saying 'What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning'.
Quoting ernestm
That is very much a consequence of the history of Western thought, in particular, subsequent to Descartes, who posited a world comprising mind and matter.
I have read something of the debates between the early Indian atomists and Buddhists; the Buddhists are the ones who argued that the idea of a 'dimensionless point' is incoherent, on account of it not having any sides. However none of the ancients had any ideas corresponding to electromagnetic fields or 'action at a distance' or anything of that nature.
I think the main philosophical significance of quantum mechanics is that it undermines materialism, as Adam Frank explains.
Except that he explains that there is an interpretation that doesn't do that.
That price being, a proliferation of universes. It's a case of a desperate problem calling for a desparate solution, as far as I am concerned.
That is false. There are no more "worlds" in Many Worlds than already exist in cosmology. And the "worlds" don't proliferate. There is no "price" to pay - MW adds no complexity. Some even think the cosmological multiverse and the quantum multiverse are the same thing.
The essay which explicitly says that, in order to pretend that QM has anything to say about proving or disproving materialism, you need to pretend QM is an abnormal theory.
You mean likr non-computable numbers?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is proved that reality is perfectly comprehensible.
Does it? What do you know?
It would help if you could construct a sentence.
Anyway, it is proved that reality is comprehensible. it is an exact physical law.
Please explain the relevance of Gödel's 2nd theorem?
If you can't explain your claimed relevance of Gödel's 2nd theorem to the comprehensibility of reality, then you have been caught bull-shitting.
You are lying.
Quoting ernestm
What do axiomatic systems have to do with the fundamental comprehensibility of reality?
Quoting ernestm
So you are happy to bullshit, but want a reference from me. Well here it is:
http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf
Well, you're the one who did say: Quoting tom
So, if reality is perfectly comprehensible, then surely you must understand everything, mustn't you? Doesn't the first entail the second?
Let me hold you by the hand and give you a childish example: An equation may have a solution, which you may prove must exist, but that does not mean you possess the solution. Is that a bit complicated?
"then surely you must understand everything"? Fucking idiot!
'Knowing that there might be a solution to an equation' is a far cry from claiming that 'reality is perfectly comprehensible'.
Pardon me for literally understanding everything.
You asked for the proof, you got it.
Is that the kind of thing you have in mind?
Six beers, three beers, maybe you are on a different intellectual plane? Hard to tell.
But you were saying something about reality itself being comprehensible. We might certainly be inclined towards such an ontological belief given a supporting epistemic framework of theory and measurement. However you seem fixated on a naive Platonism when it comes to this issue. For you, the deductive truths of mathematics appear to bypass any need to demonstrate that the world is as the models say, rather than those models merely placing strong notional constraints on our speculations.
Even mathematics has had to accept that it starts its modelling with the "good guess" of an axiom. The point of Godel was to show that axioms are modelling hypotheses, not self-formalising truths. They become secured over time due to the fact they deliver - in terms of our also rather human purposes.
But all this is Epistemology 101. Curious.
Well, remind me not to buy you any beers.
It is also transparently obvious to me how the Vedic thought I mentioned before is the same as quantum theory. This is because it is obvious to me that it is impossible to know the position and velocity of a subatomic particle simultaneously. Further it is obvious to me that a temperature of absolute zero is only hypothetical, hence that all objects are continually in randomized motion, even if quantized. And thus it is obvious to me that it is impossible to know where a subatomic particle is at any one point in time. It is only possible to know where it was, or how fast it is moving. Thus the Vedic philosophers were correct in thinking that matter is actually made of tiny compartments of space, inside any of which there may or may not be solidity, but it is impossible to know. What they did was anticipate, by pure thought, the results of experiments producing paradoxes which are now quaintly referred to as Schrodinger's cat and Maxwell's demon. And so I cited this as an example of how our own limited understanding shapes the limit of what we can know.
Similarly one can consider the rather jaded question of whether light is an energy wave or a particle. In some cases light behaves with quantum behavior, so it must be a particle, they say. But if you shine a light source with total emission energy of less than one photon through two close yet parallel slits, it still draws an extremely faint diffraction pattern, again with a total energy of less than one photon. How can that be, they ponder?
But it is because in our perception of gross matter, it has to be either a wave or particle. We can't natively conceive of something which is partly both, but the experiments say that the nature of photons is partly like a wave, and partly like a particle. So we have to try and imagine something that we cannot physically perceive. We have to make a cognitive leap and say there exists something which is 'in between' a wave and particle, or 'changes state between' the two.
But in reality, it is neither. It is light, that is how light is, and our attempts to define it as either a wave or a particle are introducing the paradox, generated by own limited comprehension of reality.
I wrote quite a lot today, excuse me I am going to have to rest quite a long time now.
Only since Gödel's theorem.
Quoting ernestm
Neils Bohr dealt with that in his 'principle of complementarity'. It was so important to him that he included the Tao symbol in his family Coat of Arms:
Neils Bohr Coat of Arms
Trying to parse this. You were taught 'Godel's theories' at 15 in formal education setting? (what else would it mean to be 'granted' an 'good education' that included those theories?) But, though you learned those easily enough, it never struck you that others might not have been learning them in a similar manner? Like, you assumed 'Godel's Theories' were part of a universal high school sophomore curriculum? and only in adulthood were you disabused of that notion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
But what I have since realized is that H. is a very good author, but it does take some time to read, far more than most people read books at all these days, so maybe its not so surprising the topic remains so obscure to so many.If you do like to read, well it is very easy to read, and well illustrated too, and although some of the ideas are a bit off the wall, everyone who does read it finds there are parts of it that do make a rather lasting impression. It's true not everyone can read it. At first there was quite a bit of controversy about it, and it wasn't published in the USA for quite a while. This was to the amusement of my family who thought it insane, but when it was published, it was an instant bestseller.
Also, on the topic of quantum theory, I read the following in the same year:
https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Tompkins-Paperback-Canto-Classics/dp/1107604680
Its very entertaining and I would recommend it to anyone genuinely interested in the topic.
I just find it very idiosyncratic to find a book at 15, learn it, and then assume everyone else knows whats in it, until realizing much later thats not the case.
Cantor I didn't discover until a few years ago, and I do have to admit it all seemed trite to me. It's difficult for me to understand how other people find it confusing.
Did it ever occur to you that perhaps the reason you find these things "transparently obvious" is because your understanding of them is very superficial, to the point of being nonexistent?