Reductionism and the Hierarchy of Scale
This is a subject that has come up a number of times in recent discussions, with much disagreement and misunderstanding. Rather than trying to address it in individual threads, I think it is worth one of its own. Most recently, the issue has come up in the context of whether mind is “nothing but” brain function, but I want to take a broader look at the hierarchy of scale in our understanding of the world.
I’ll lay out my understanding of the argument with reference to a well-known paper by P.W. Anderson written in 1972 - “More is Different.” Here’s a link to a PDF version:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308012273_More_is_different_Broken_symmetry_and_the_nature_of_the_hierarchical_structure_of_science/link/5877f21008ae329d622833bd/download
In his paper, Anderson lays out his understanding of the scale hierarchy of science:
The hierarchy has been set up differently by other writers, but I think this one will work for the purposes of this discussion.
Here’s Anderson’s description of “reductionism”:
[i]…The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.
It seems inevitable to go on uncritically to what appears at first sight to be an obvious corollary of reductionism: that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only scientists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws. In practice, that amounts to some astrophysicists, some elementary particle physicists, some logicians and other mathematicians, and few others.[/i]
I got to about this point in my thinking when it struck me there are really two questions involved in this issue, one metaphysical and one…scientific? Or maybe it’s metaphysical too. No, no. Definitely scientific… I’ll start with the metaphysical argument.
In my mind, this argument started with the idea that everything we deal with on a day to day basis is at human scale, the scale of baseballs and baloney sandwiches. Over time, our understanding of the world has come to include phenomena outside of direct human experience - a world billions of years old, a world divisible into pieces so small it’s hard to imagine, a world where even some living things are invisible to us, a universe built up to be so large that the world we know seems impossibly small. At the same time as we feel that these phenomena are outside of human range, we know they have an impact on us, so we need to find a way to talk about them. Our normal way of talking won’t work. To be clear, I don’t know enough history or anthropology to say that this represents any kind of actual historical process.
That’s where the hierarchy of scale comes in. It represents an artificial division of the universe into manageable pieces. The division is made based on the usefulness of the distinctions made at each scale. As I’ve written many times, usefulness, rather than truth, is the measure by which we judge metaphysical factors. Metaphysical questions can not be answered empirically. To me, the hierarchy of scale is a metaphysical entity. By that standard, I choose the level on the hierarchy most useful in describing and understanding a particular phenomenon in a particular situation.
As I indicated at the beginning, there’s more to this subject, but I don’t want the first post to be too long, so I’ll cut it off here and pick up in my second post.
To repeat, it is my intention that this thread will be about the general subject of the nature of the hierarchy of scales, not only about any particular phenomena.
I’ll lay out my understanding of the argument with reference to a well-known paper by P.W. Anderson written in 1972 - “More is Different.” Here’s a link to a PDF version:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308012273_More_is_different_Broken_symmetry_and_the_nature_of_the_hierarchical_structure_of_science/link/5877f21008ae329d622833bd/download
In his paper, Anderson lays out his understanding of the scale hierarchy of science:
- Elementary particle physics
- Solid state or many-body physics
- Chemistry
- Molecular biology
- Cell biology
- Physiology
- Psychology
- Social sciences
The hierarchy has been set up differently by other writers, but I think this one will work for the purposes of this discussion.
Here’s Anderson’s description of “reductionism”:
[i]…The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.
It seems inevitable to go on uncritically to what appears at first sight to be an obvious corollary of reductionism: that if everything obeys the same fundamental laws, then the only scientists who are studying anything really fundamental are those who are working on those laws. In practice, that amounts to some astrophysicists, some elementary particle physicists, some logicians and other mathematicians, and few others.[/i]
I got to about this point in my thinking when it struck me there are really two questions involved in this issue, one metaphysical and one…scientific? Or maybe it’s metaphysical too. No, no. Definitely scientific… I’ll start with the metaphysical argument.
In my mind, this argument started with the idea that everything we deal with on a day to day basis is at human scale, the scale of baseballs and baloney sandwiches. Over time, our understanding of the world has come to include phenomena outside of direct human experience - a world billions of years old, a world divisible into pieces so small it’s hard to imagine, a world where even some living things are invisible to us, a universe built up to be so large that the world we know seems impossibly small. At the same time as we feel that these phenomena are outside of human range, we know they have an impact on us, so we need to find a way to talk about them. Our normal way of talking won’t work. To be clear, I don’t know enough history or anthropology to say that this represents any kind of actual historical process.
That’s where the hierarchy of scale comes in. It represents an artificial division of the universe into manageable pieces. The division is made based on the usefulness of the distinctions made at each scale. As I’ve written many times, usefulness, rather than truth, is the measure by which we judge metaphysical factors. Metaphysical questions can not be answered empirically. To me, the hierarchy of scale is a metaphysical entity. By that standard, I choose the level on the hierarchy most useful in describing and understanding a particular phenomenon in a particular situation.
As I indicated at the beginning, there’s more to this subject, but I don’t want the first post to be too long, so I’ll cut it off here and pick up in my second post.
To repeat, it is my intention that this thread will be about the general subject of the nature of the hierarchy of scales, not only about any particular phenomena.
Comments (89)
The paper by J.W. Anderson I referenced in my previous post, “More is Different” has a different take on reductionism and the hierarchy of scientific scale than the one I discussed in my previous post.
[i]The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much to those of society.
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other. That is, it seems to me that one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy according to the idea: The elementary entities of science [at one level] obey the laws of science [at the previous level].[/i]
[i]
- Elementary particle physics
- Solid state or many-body physics
- Chemistry
- Molecular biology
- Cell biology
- Physiology
- Psychology
- Social sciences
[/i]But this hierarchy does not imply that science X is “just applied Y.” At each stage entirely new laws, concepts, and generalizations are necessary, requiring inspiration and creativity to just as great a degree as in the previous one. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry.
As I indicated, I’m not really sure if Anderson’s view is a metaphysical or a scientific approach. Either way, I think it reinforces my understanding that each level on the hierarchy of scale provides information and understanding not provided at the other levels.
Sorry, I do not understand Anderson's view at all. So I have to questions:
Why does it be hierarchical? I do not see why it is so necessary to put Chemistry above social sciences. Is this means that one is more important than the other?
I am disagree when he states: Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. Why? I guess everything could be connected together, just a little bit.
In the other hand, where can we put philosophy itself in the levels? We can say, probably, that philosophy is above all the list, maybe? Because if we keep in mind the Greek classical thought we can be agree that critical thought, thus philosophy, has developed those hierarchical list
The hierarchy is of scale and complexity, not importance. Anderson is very clear about that. That's really the whole point of his paper and this thread.
Quoting javi2541997
Anderson is clear that there are connections between levels and about what those connections are. He says "...one may array the sciences roughly linearly in a hierarchy according to the idea: The elementary entities of science [at one level] obey the laws of science... [at the previous level]."
Quoting javi2541997
I think you're exactly right. That's what I meant when I said the hierarchy is a metaphysical entity. Philosophy isn't included in the hierarchy, it created it.
Hmmm complexity... That's interesting indeed. I am disagree with him in terms that chemistry is more "complex" than social science. I don't want to sound as an angry social student but for me, his theory sounds off time and old. Saying in nowadays that studying chemistry is harder than learning languages or law (for example) is quite old-fashioned... This thought can lead to some students to feel that they are "less" than others.
Quoting T Clark
Good phrase,! :100: but do you know the real paradox here? That philosophy is used to be included in "social science" area. So according to Anderson Chemistry is more complicated than reasoning or thinking themselves!
As you go down the hierarchy from particle physics to psychology, complexity increases.
I think I completely misunderstood it since the beginning... :fear:
Reductionists and holists mean different things when they talk about hierarchical order.
Reductionists think only in terms of upwards construction. You start with an ultimately simple and stable foundation, then build upwards towards increasing scales of complexity. As high as you like.
But a holist thinks dualistically in terms of upwards construction working in organic interaction with downwards constraint. So you have causality working both ways at once, synergistically, to produce the functioning whole.
The hierarchy thus becomes not a tower of ascending complexity (and arbitrariness or specificity) but it itself reduces to a "basic triadic relation" (as hierarchy theorist, Stan Salthe, dubs it). The holist account reduces all organisation to the interaction between an upward constructionist flow and a downward constraining history or context, plus then the third thing which is the relation that those two causal actions develop in a stable and persistent fashion.
So many key differences to reductionist metaphysics follow from this connected causality.
For example, it makes everything historically or developmentally emergent - the upward construction and the downward constraint. There is no fundamental atomistic grain - a collection of particles - that gets everything started. Instead, that grain is what gets produced by the top-down constraints. The higher order organisation stabilises its own ground of being in bootstrap fashion. It gives shape to the very stuff that composes it.
A simple analogy. If you want an army, you must produce soldiers. You must take average humans with many degrees of freedom (all the random and unstable variety of 18 year olds) and mould them in a boot camp environment which strictly limits those freedoms to the behaviours found to be useful for "an army". You must simplify and standardise a draft of individuals so that they can fit together in a collective and interchangeable fashion that then acts in concert to express the mind and identity of a "military force".
So in the holist view, there is no foundational stability to a functioning system. The stability of the parts comes from the top-down constraints that shape up the kind of parts that are historically best suited to the task of constituting the system as a whole. The parts are emergent and produced by a web of limitation.
When it comes to the metaphysics of science, this is why we see thermodynamics becoming the most general perspective. The broad constraint on all nature is that it must be able to self-organise its way into stable and persistent complexity. And thermodynamics or statistical mechanics offers the basic maths for dealing with systems that develop negentropic organisation by exporting entropy.
From particle physics to neuroscience, thermodynamics explains both simplicity and complexity.
Well, it does if you let it.
I think it's really about the questions we make. Or the answers we want to have.
For example, from metal you can make ships, aeroplanes or space rockets. The physics, chemistry and metallurgy is the same. Yet the problems and questions are different, even if there is no difference in chemistry or physics. Metallurgy cannot itself answer the various complex questions that aerodynamics or hydrodynamics answers to. They on the other hand don't answer to question concerning the performance of the metal in space and how to make a functioning satellite.
Now when you make the leap from biology to sociology, the questions are so much different, that the answers basic biology can give hardly matter anymore.
If you just want technology, you only need to answer the questions concerning efficient and material causality. The questions about formal and final causality appear redundant - because you, as the human, are happy to contribute the design of the system and the purpose which it is intended to serve.
Science is thus shaped by human pragmatic considerations. A search for stable material substance that the creative human mind can fashion into a world of "medium sized dry goods".
But we shouldn't then think reality is mechanical. We should also work on an understanding of reality that is properly holistic.
As having read economics and as an economic historian, which the latter basically some even don't consider a "science", the obvious problem is subjectivity.
It's not a coincidence that the old name for economics was "political economics". It is actually extremely political. The "mathematical turn" that has happened in economics only tries to hide this fact. And if people base their actions on what they have learned in "economics", then their actions in the aggregate are made because of what they have learned. Hence what is the role of "economics", can it be a "purely objective model of reality?"
No.
The basic problem doesn't go away just by assuming some premises that avoid vicious circles or self-fulfilling prophecies. Or in the most stupid way, just to assume a "black box" where something happens, install it to the model and everything is mathematically fine.
History itself actually tells how we avoid this problem. In history we understand the uniqueness of every historical event and time. We understand how meaningless it is to try to hammer such complexity into some mathematical formula, but we use narrative: "Let me tell you a story of the history of the human civilization..."
The funny thing there is that biology used to look just like complicated chemistry. In class in the 1970s, the Krebs cycle at the heart of cellular metabolism was presented as some kind of warm soup of precursors mixed with catalytic enzymes. You had to memorise a chain of chemical reactions.
But nowadays, the foundations of a cell are looking extremely mechanical. Every biomolecule needs to be understood in the language of information switches and engine cycles.
So life itself harnesses the power of reductionist thought! It too learns to regulate the material world by entraining it using an apparatus of molecular machinery.
An enzyme is a mechanical structure that can manipulate chemistry at a quantum level.
So biology is not emergent from chemistry as the "hierarchy of scale" used to have it. Instead, mechanisation - the informational regulation of thermodynamically-driven processes - is a way that formal and final cause can be used to regulate material and efficient cause in an organismic fashion.
Life exists because it could apply mechanical constraint in a top-down fashion to messy chemical dynamics.
And so the irony is that complexity is mechanical - but the causal action reaches down from above rather than works its way up from below.
Societies are organisms. So why would a holist expect "pure objectivity" when the production of "subjectivity" is what defines an organism.
Or in other words, objectivity is the code name for accounts of causality that only take material and efficient cause seriously. Subjectivity then becomes the code name for the formal and final aspects of causality ... which the reductionist wants to remove from nature and reserve solely for the creative human mind.
So the way to understand economics in the most general sense is that it is the way the organism that is a society believes it can organise itself to survive and thrive in a material and efficient cause fashion. It is the machinery for regulating those kinds of entropic flows.
Yet economics is the belief part. That belief part of believing that it can organize itself to survive and thrive is the problem. Belief is the problem.
Because you look at it with the idea: "OK, let's organize the society to survive and thrive" and go with central planning or then say: "OK, let's have the society organize itself to survive and thrive" and go with free market capitalism. Or anything in between. Or something else.
And there's the problem. That general description what you said, and I'm not disagreeing with it, simply doesn't answer anything that has to be answered... in order for that society to survive and thrive.
If you can't properly describe nature then of course you can't then judge economic theories in terms of what might be natural.
But here, you have already made the right start in setting out your dialectical extremes in the usual sociological manner. We have the polar extremes of global cooperation and local competition.
The mistake then is to believe that one or other extreme could be the "correct" setting. Hierarchy theory - as our best theory of self-organising nature - tells us that both poles are correct and ought to be maximised as the upper and lower bounds that make the living system.
So the "best" society is always the one that manages to balance its global cooperation with its local competition. It will be organised to maximise its social cohesion and its individual independence.
The larger problem is then the ecological setting of the sociocultural system in question - the thermodynamic equation that defines what is a functional "burn rate". Are you a society living by hunter/gathering, feudal agriculture or fossil fuel age technology? The rate at which you can afford to eat your world sets the general constraint on what will prove to be a functional, stable and persisting social organisation.
So for example, is neo-liberalism a bad thing? You would think not to the degree that it existed to use up the energy bonanza of fossil fuels. And you would think so to the degree it failed to factor in the long-term cost of the environmental degradation and atmospheric heat sink it treated as an unowned commons.
I'm fine with the idea of putting a price on everything. If you do indeed put a price on everything.
So maximising individual freedom is great - up until the point it erodes the degree of social cohesion needed to survive and thrive. And vice versa. Maximising social cohesion is great - up until it is too restrictive on the individual freedom that is needed.
It's not rocket science.
I thought about you when I was writing these posts. The subject reminded me of discussions we've had in the past. I'm glad you responded.
Quoting apokrisis
When you talk about downward constraints, are you just talking about the normal rules of the more complex level of the hierarchy, e.g. are chemical interactions constrained by the rules of biology, or is it something else? Where did those constraints come from if not constructed from below?
Quoting apokrisis
I went to his web page and I'm reading some of his articles.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a good analogy. It clarified things for me. I still don't get the mechanism that generates the constraints.
Quoting apokrisis
Looking at it this way makes the artificiality of the layered hierarchy clearer.
It's the collective that sets the constraints for the parts. The dynamics of the partial structures are constrained so they shape the whole. Like termites and their castle.
The rules of nature ultimately seem to be mathematically Platonic - based on symmetry principles.
Our cosmos has a dimensional structure, an evolutionary logic, a thermodynamic flow. We can go back to first principles and say that for anything to exist, it must be able to develop and persist. So there is already a selection for the global structure that works, that is rational, that can last long enough for us to be around to talk about it.
So the constraints don't arise out of already concrete material foundations. Constraints (or universals) only "exist" if they have proved to be of the right type to conjure a Cosmos into being out of raw possibility. That is, if they could produce the concrete material foundations needed to instantiate themselves as systems composed of those kinds of atoms/events/processes/etc.
The constraints that fail to stablise their own constituent parts can't even exist. And that selection principle means nature is the product of whatever global rules did the best job at stabilising the means of its own bootstrapping existence.
The ends always justifies the means.
Quoting T Clark
Good luck! :smile:
But he wrote two books on hierarchy theory that are very readable.
Quoting T Clark
An army has to meet its purpose. So there is a Darwinian selection principle that produces the constraints which an army - as a human institution with regulations, history, a social memory - embodies.
The army exists as an idea in the minds of all its participants. So that makes it seem like an idealist fiction.
And yet every private quickly runs into the reality of the army way in a brute and direct fashion if they so much as twitch a nervous smile or leave a speck of dirt on their boots.
The mechanism that generates the constraints is the system as a whole in action over its long-run existence. Or what Salthe would call its cogent moment scale.
Constraint is the great weight of historical accident that builds in Darwinian fashion and acts on every local degree of freedom within a system. It represents the past in terms of what it intends to be its own future.
And then to evolve - being a natural system - it must also be slowly changed by its experiences. So even in armies, the system of constraint gets modified to make it better adapted to its current environmental challenges.
One day you might find women, as well as men, being trained to be unthinking killing machines.
So general evolutionary principles generate the constraints. And at the simplest level, the Darwinian competition is to just exist as a stably persisting process or functional structure.
Natural complexes like termites, bees, flocks of geese, trees, clouds, tornadoes, ice, rocks, volcanoes, platypuses and people are fascinating whether created by physical forces with constraints or by the accidents of evolution in response to environmental catastrophes.
the enclosure of exist in scare quotes is significant - because these constraints must pre-exist, in other words, existence itself depends on them, were they not so, then nothing would exist.
That is why the traditionalist understanding is that universals are more real than particular existents, because they are in greater logical proximity to necessary being. 'In contrast to contemporary philosophers, most 17th century philosophers held that reality comes in degrees—that some things that exist are more or less real than other things that exist. At least part of what dictates a being’s reality, according to these philosophers, is the extent to which its existence is dependent on other things: the less dependent a thing is on other things for its existence, the more real it is.' But there is no conceptual space for 'degrees of reality' in contemporary philosophy - in it, what is real, and what exists, are held to be synonymous. (Peirce said ' I call your attention to the fact that reality and existence are two different things.' )
Quoting apokrisis
But those rules can't be the result of an evolutionary process - they must pre-exist it. Biological evolution at least assumes the existence of species of some kind for any kind of natural selection to operate on, because species uniquely possess the attribute of seeking to continue surviving. Nothing inorganic does that.
How? Maximize what? How do you maximize "social cohesion" and "individual independence"? What do you really measure, if you want to maximize the two? Because to maximize something, you have to have the ability measure it.
Quoting apokrisis
What burn rate?
Quoting apokrisis
What general constraint? What is a functional, stable and persisting social organisation? We can have many ideas of just what is a "functional, stable and persisting social organisation". Yet shouldn't the society be dynamic, capable of adapting to changes where stability and the persistence of social organization might be a bad thing?
As I said, one person could define a "functional, stable and persisting social organisation" one way and another totally differently. So we have a problem.
Quoting apokrisis
It's not science. I have absolutely no clue of what kind of actual policies you would implement with that kind of description. It could be just anything... because you could give nearly any kind of definitions to the issue referred to.
The constraints aren't fixed and eternal. They represent a history of development that acts to remove all lesser possibilities.
So at best, in the "beginning", they are vague. And by the end, they might retrospectively be considered the only correct and possible habits of nature. But it wouldn't help to argue that they thus post-date reality anymore than they pre-exist it.
The circle might sit as the ultimate limit of irregularity. You can't get more symmetric. But dontcha need the irregularity to discover the circle which is its ultimate limit?
If you place Platonic ideals outside of the space/time/energy system we are talking about - the Cosmos - then you are reducing its metaphysics in an unhelpful way.
A process philosophy would see that everything must arise co-dependently. So the symmetries are yoked to their own breaking. The perfection of one is actively reciprocal to the imperfection of its other. Immanence must rule over transcendence if you want to move out of the camp of the reductionist.
Quoting Wayfarer
Peirce developed the fully triadic view where actuality was sandwiched between top-down necessity (or constraint) and bottom-up possibility (or unconstrained potential).
So yes, he made a fuss about universals being real. But equally, he made a fuss about spontaneous chance, or logical vagueness and Tychism, as being real.
The perfections and the imperfections are logically yoked in a reciprocal deal. And inbetween you get what actually expresses both poles as a historical trajectory of development.
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, time itself is emergent at this level of metaphysics. You can call the rules immanent. But that is a retrospective call. It would have been hard to discern any rules at the actual beginning while they were still in a competition to form.
Sure, in a laboratory we can make things, but nature doesn't think things out beforehand. But I doubt that either proposed upwards or downwards direction of natural complex development is logically possible or practicable. A lot of complexity just happens because of known or unknowable circumstances. Remove an enzyme and the organism dies and becomes source material for something else.
Quoting Wayfarer
Evolution can be gradual or punctuated. The sudden bursts in emergence are the consequence of radical changes in the environment, such as fires, floods, volcanic explosions, poisons that create a nutrient rich environment lacking in dominant life forms. The environment is a third, more powerful force than any of the competing species. After environmental catastrophes new factors open possibilities for life. The rules are post hoc.
Sure. Economics is known as the dismal science because it could justify slavery by choosing to measure horsepower.
But don't pretend that better metrics aren't possible. There is a ton of literature on that.
Quoting ssu
Energy expenditure per capita is a good gross metric. Just check out the literature on ecological footprints.
Quoting ssu
You have a problem as you don't seem to accept that societies are part of the natural world and so are constrained by the same general ecological limits, even while being also radically free to invent new worlds if such worlds are possible.
So my view can happily place the idiocies of neoliberal climate destruction alongside the techno-fantasies of limitless clean fusion power.
I don't have to pick a side in some religious fashion. It just becomes a hopefully pragmatic and measurable economic question. Do we bank on the dream of fusion power arriving in time, or do we fully price in the cost of burning fossil fuel?
Quoting ssu
You are not even listening, just raving.
Every human social system that has ever existed has found ways to balance social cohesion with individual autonomy.
And it's never been a utopia. :razz:
so as not to run afoul of them :-)
The problem is that if you now deny the naturalness of molecular machines, then you play straight into the hands of Creationists who want to use ATPase or the bacterial flagella as mechanical marvels that could only have been dreamt up in God's mind.
Pick your poison carefully.
Completely irrelevant, but I just happened to re-read this old quip about the reality of the pragmatic approach to science. Attributed to engine designer, John Kris....
:ok:
What do you make of theoretical physics, by and large an extension of math, math itself a very abstract (mental) subject/field?
I'm sure you're aware of it, but the existence of some "physical" objects like quarks and the God particle (the Higgs-Boson) were deduced from mathematical models of the particle world. That is to say, our minds seem to be in the know about objects and goings on at scales that are clearly not human (we normally can't see quarks or Higgs-Bosons).
On the larger point you made, I agree: each level of organization of matter & energy, as represented broadly in the sequence physics [math]\rightarrow[/math] chemistry [math]\rightarrow[/math] biology [math]\rightarrow[/math] psychology has its own unique, level-specific entities (particles in physics and chemistry, cells in biology, and minds in psychology) which operate under, yet again, tier-specific rules. The reductionist enterprise is a waste of time, something like that.
But one doesn't need math to see that there are quarks when looking at the variety of hadrons. One doesn't need math ti see the weak force is not fundamental. In fact, most interesting ideas in theoretical physics don't stem from math. That's because nature is not mathematical.
Why is math abstract? I think it's very concrete. I removed a Lebesque function once. From a university basement.
The same applies in between any two levels. The leap between inanimate matter (chemistry) and living organism (biology) is also quite huge, and the questions asked are totally different.
Did I say that? As if I wouldn't accept that humans are part of the natural World?
And here you see the issue I'm trying to make clear for you. Economics is really as they defined it in the 19th Century: Political economy. It is political. It cannot avoid not being political. It's all about politics. If you try to assume that it isn't, that there is some Leibnizian way we talk about about it and hide this into mathematical formulas and pseudo-scientific narrative, it's simply wrong. The politics starts from how people see mainstream economics itself. Or Marxian economics. Or any other school of economic thought. The divide is just huge. You can see it well even here in discussions about economics.
Quoting apokrisis
Really? I think that history is full of examples of societies collapsing because of the unsustainability of the system and the incapability of the elite to solve the societies problems. Civil wars, upheavals, political turmoil, show that this balance hasn't been the result.
It is like the error that C.P. Snow made in his distinction when argued about two cultures, of this juxtaposition between "science" and "art". Because in his famous book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution Snow too then presented in the end of his book the idea that "science" could help us on solving the political problems of the present. And for him it was the Cold War and only if we would apply "science" the problem would be solved. Just like the Leibnizian dream of there being a universal language for us to solve our problems and understand each other. But of course it didn't go that way either for Leibniz or for Snow. The Cold War stopped when the Soviet experiment collapsed, when people had had enough of a system nobody believed in anymore. It was a political development.
Quoting apokrisis
It is simply not a "pragmatic and measurable economic question". It is simply a political question. And I assume you know that. What do we really do in our legislation, in our monetary policy, with our taxe rates and how we use those taxes, how we spend on R&D? Those all are political questions, which in a democracy and in a capitalist system are decided one way and in an authoritarian, central planned economy are planned in a different way. And then there's the most often case of mixed economies in between. And all of these will start from different premises, different political situations, to solve these issues and understand even the questions differently.
And since they have different premises, different World views, it's really a bit difficult to argue about universal solutions.
What I've been told is that the universe follows some rules (the laws of nature) that are fundamentally mathematical. Physics and chemistry books, less so biology ones ( :chin: ) are chockablock with math equations. That's a big clue, no, as to the nature of the universe? It, at the very least, looks (very) mathematical.
As for you removing a Lebesque function (whatever that is), from a university basement, it's mere quibbling or word play. If it makes you happy...
Quarks collect in hadron and meson structures, behaving according to new laws that are still weakly connected to quark laws. These new laws can be discovered by isolating them and examining them. Or prmeditating them from the still weakly connected quark laws.
Hadrons , protons and neutrons particularly, collect into atomic nuclei structures, behaving according to laws that can be discovered by isolating them or premeditating them from the lower level quark laws.
In combination with electrons the nuclei form atoms or starry structures. Atoms behave according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws. This is somewhat harder for star structures, but a short-lived piece of neutron star has been made.
Atoms collect in molecule structures, behaving according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures aqund laws. The shape of various proteins was computed by AI neural networks to 90% accuracy.
Atoms collect in solids, liquids, or gasses, behaving according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws.
Molecules combine in structures that show first signs of life. The situations on planets that rotate around their axis are ideal. Planets forming around stars are mostly spinning in the same direction as the stars, so the surface has a day-and-night rythm.
These combined molecular structures behave according to new laws which can be analyzed by isolating them or premeditating them them from the lower level structures and laws.
So if we isolate people we can empirically find out about the high level laws they conform to, or premeditate these laws from the lower level structures and laws.
The social and cultural structures and the laws to which they conform can empirically be found by isolating societies. or premeditated these laws from the lower level structures and laws.
I litterally had such a function (a special function used in physics, in my hands. Made of papier maché, over one century ago, a archeounigeological treasure!
And there are more of them special functions:
Luckily, we could use a fat blue book during examination. The book had an appropriate title: Special Functions, as was the name of the study subject.
Exactly. And everywhere you can see a link from chemistry to biology, but not in the questions. Treating biology just as "complex chemistry" doesn't make sense. You are dealing with such phenomena that simply don't make any sense to treat them as chemistry. And if we got rid of the name "biology" and put it under the name "complex chemistry", the matter wouldn't be any different.
Any knowledge we glean from other scales than the one we find ourselves living in are only useful in the scale we find ourselves living in. We only use states at other scales to explain the behavior of objects on the scale we live in - hence the issue of trying to integrate QM with classical physics. We are trying to use the behavior of objects at the quantum scale to explain and predict the behavior of macro-scale objects.
If use is the scale by which we judge metaphysical factors, then it seems to me that the scales would be epistemological in nature, as in existing in our minds only and not the way the world is actually divided.
When using a microscope to look at a drop of blood and viewing red blood cells, aren't we still looking at the drop of blood - just from a different view (at a smaller scale)? The world is only divided into scales when we take different views of the same thing.
Yes, for instance reproduction, predation and parasitism, flee or fight, symbiosis or symbolism, are concepts which have no meaning whatsoever in chemistry but are central to biology, because they presuppose a living organism, that can flee or fight, eat or be eaten, reproduce or not, etc. So the emergence of these issues in scientific discourse mirrors the emergence of life itself and tries to follow it in all its unpredictable detours and meanders.
I think only symbolism has no meaning in chemistry. There is reproduction, predatism (even in physics where the W and Z bosons eat good Goldstone ghosts to becomecmassive...), parasitism, fleeing and fighting even at the chemical level. Fleeing and fighting in physics: black hole physics, electrical attraction and repulsion.
As I was reading this, I thought of something Hoffman wrote about in "Life's Ratchet." He was discussing how proteins became enzymes at random and then evolved powered by the pounding of fast moving molecules. The enzymes encouraged the formation of specific proteins. Some enzymes also developed, I guess you could say mutated, to include control mechanisms which allowed feedback loops to form. Then loops within loops within loops formed to become cell metabolism.
How does this fit into your military metaphor? You talk about constraints from above. How do the feedback loops constrain the chemistry? Are the products of the enzymes the soldiers? So chemicals evolve into structures that control how they behave.
Quoting apokrisis
So, when you talk about design in this context, you are talking about the effects of this evolutionary process. I remember reading about controversies about Darwinian evolution. How can a mechanistic process "design" something. Saying "design by survival of the fittest" is a circular argument, because fitness is defined by what survives. That always struck me as a trivial thing to get stuck on.
Now this brings to mind other things you've written in past discussions - about semiotics and information. I'll have to go back and reread some of those. Are we talking about the same kind of thing?
Do you have a specific reference?
I'm skeptical of this view, but I don't know enough to give a very credible response.
Quoting Agent Smith
Yes. Frustration from arguments with reductionists brought me to this subject in the first place.
As I indicated in my OP, I think that's a metaphysical division. It's useful, so we use it.
And the history of life is full of examples of species collapsing because of the competition from invasive organisms, asteroid impacts, vulcanism, global warming, over-hunting... The evolutionary process at any level is constantly changing.
I think that's true.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think that's true too.
It's fundamentally different, as no decision has to be made by an electron re. its attraction to protons.
That makes it even easier to flee or fight!
Where would I have said that? You are off at a tangent.
Quoting ssu
But what caused the collapse and led to the unsustainability? Clearly I would look to the balancing act that any sociologist or anthropologist understands - the necessary tension between the individual and the group.
And that tension is hierarchy theory in a nutshell. The need to balance local degrees of freedom and global habits of constraint.
So human organisation - in any form - has the same balancing act. And any natural organisation - of any form - also performs the same balancing act.
That is the thesis here ... if you want to focus on something worth discussing.
Quoting ssu
You haven't understood a word.
What are preons made of?
Correct me if I am wrong, but General Systems Theory covers this concept in detail, does it not? This structural analysis that we're discussing is present in all systems, which the universe is characterized by in arrangement.
"General systems theory at a simple level can be defined as: elements, which are in exchange, and which are bounded. These components constitute a "system", which functions or operates within a field or an environment. Elements can be virtually anything you wish to label as such, the exchanges are any relationships that exist between elements, and the boundary is what you can see, hear, feel, or sense that separates "system" from the background or environment."
https://wsarch.ucr.edu/archive/papers/gregory/gensysTh.html
Enzymes regulate the rate of a reaction. So the soldiers are like all the chemicals ready to get going. Then their sergeant - as a higher level of constraint - gives the stop/go signals. The soldiers are released until they are halted again.
Hierarchy theory is all about feedback and cybernetic control. Feedback loops are a hierarchy theory concept.
Quoting T Clark
Yep. Semiotics is about the use of symbols and models to regulate a system. So it is the extra bit that marks the cut between physics and biology. It is indeed the bit that you can't find within physics.
Geometry and charge. Without mass.
Yep. Hierarchy theory gets reinvented once a generation at least. :up:
GST was founded in 1933.
So ... just symmetry.
Sounds kinda mathy.
Isn't math our tool for mapping this stuff? Wouldn't it make sense if the framework we developed to measure physical phenomena looked like itself when applied to that phenomena?
Why just symmetry?
Sure. And Aleksandr Bogdanov published his Tektology just before, Cybernetics came along just after.
Sarcasm still doesn't work on the interwebs, does it?
Very well, my friend. I didn't know that. I'll do some research. Thank you. 1928, to be exact. Very cool.
I must have missed it, lol.
The charges are conserved. They act as generators for the interaction fields and as coupling strengths to the virtual glue.
I agree also. We're all just a troop of creationists here, aren't we?
At what point do we then give up talking like atomists when we are discussing hierarchical organisation?
Thanks a bunch. Systems science is kind of what my metaphysics is, generally speaking. For me, everything stems from those base concepts.
Well, for example by saying that "the "best" society manages to balance its global cooperation with its local competition by maximizing its social cohesion and its individual independence."
If that isn't what I'm referring to, nothing is. From an economic history point of view, that's just hogwash before you somehow link global cooperation and local competition to social cohesion and individual independence.
That depends where you draw the borderlines. On the deepest level individual preons, then quarks and leptons, then neutrons and protons, atoms, molecules, aggregates and condensates, cells, organs, organisms, and stop...
I think you and I will get along just fine, pardner.
Well, especially in history you do find the tension of the individual and the group certainly. But not perhaps in the way you would want it. It is the problem that all sociologists and those who promote the Longe durée. It's the problem that they will immediately say is a non-issue. It's the Cleopatra's nose. And that's why the focus for example of the Annales school, but others is somewhere that we don't see the ordinary history of rapid transformations where certain small individuals and their actions have huge consequences. Perhaps there are too many Butterfly effects in history that in the end the historian choses to model it by using the old narrative of story telling.
I'm sure you can back that up with a specific example. If not, I can give you a starter.
Why did neoliberalism deem monetarism an essential part of its "naked market" architecture? Why are central banks using the global constraint of money supply to bound the local competitive behaviour of market actors? How does this fail to fit the hierarchy theory metaphysics I've outlined?
And why is the early success of neoliberalism in destroying older forms of social cohesion - like the cosy post-war accomodation between US unions and US corporations - now turning into a big problem to do with a generalised erosion of social cohesion and planetary ecology?
I'm trying to get you to think what you mean by calling individual preons the deepest level of existence. But I'm not succeeding.
QFT describes particle fields. Shortly interacting. It doesn't describe bound states very well (unless very specific conditions are specified). So to find out about quarks and leptons you can do the same as for bound quark states. Bound systems like atoms and molecules are not modeled by QFT. Aggregates of particles that form life can best be described by non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but to say that even the appearing of a bacteria can be described is too much already. A population of bacteria, taking the bacteria as the units, can be described. Etcetera. All high level units with their own laws, fairly independent of the lower levels, but based on them.
The way I want it is analysis based on the maths of hierarchy theory, not Great Men of history fables.
The basic level is more appropriate.
Does neoliberalism deem monetarism as an essential part? Liberalism surely didn't want something as micromanaging as monetarism to be around. But monetary policy is actually the perfect example of things heading for a collapse, not something "balanced".
Quoting apokrisis
Define what the global constraint of money supply is, because I don't know what you mean. I do understand what money supply is and the role of debt, but what is the global constraint of it is something new.
And I predicted you would, exactly.
Oh yes, fables. Lol.
So what does the math of hierarchy theory say about the impact of Donald Trump compared to Joe Biden? Or is it something inconsequential? Or rubbish? Unimportant?!
There are the larger, the more important issues that can be opened up and understood with hierarchy theory and mathematical models, I guess. :snicker:
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats
Why couldn't they evolve as the system evolves, as, for example, Sheldrake conjectures?
Sure. And do you see the general theme that emerges here?
At the bottom, what is basic is fluctuation, excitation, instability. And that (Peircean firstness) is then given is substantial form by downward-acting constraints. Stability is imposed from on high to create the materiality that can then compose ... the realm that embodies those downward-acting constraints.
If preon particle fields are a thing, then they are only a vacuum expectation until some kind of constraining horizon is imposed on their observables. A "concrete" excitation that might be claimed as a particle is only a virtual possibility until some kind of classical frame has been imposed on the situation.
Hierarchy theory says reality is a tower of constraint acting to stabilise instability. So down at the bottom, is whatever can be imagined as the most radical form of instability still framed by some most minimal form of metric constraint.
And that might be a hot quantum fluctuation. Down at the Planck scale, the Planck length defines the Planck frequency and hence the Planck temperature. The least possible space also houses the most possible energy density.
But which one do you want to point to as fundamental - the metric constraint or the energetic violence.
Or do you indeed need to find your fundamental "atom" in the systematic relation between these two opposing things?
Are you claiming it doesn't? :yawn:
Quoting ssu
That how Hegelianism goes. I say balance, you say unbalanced, and we wind up agree that the systems view is all about pendulum swinging and its dynamical balancing act.
So failures of balance are what show balance could even be considered a goal. We found ourselves being tugged in two directions - as will always be the case in a hierarchical system. Social systems are composed of individuals working collectively to generally shared ends ... and also pursuing specific personal goals.
A "well balanced" system is not the one that exactly splits the difference but instead maximises the expression of both tendencies, as well as historical circumstances allow.
It's called a win-win. I thought you were Finnish for some reason. Aren't they good at that?
Quoting ssu
Global = general. Global = macro.
Quoting ssu
In what sense have either of these dudes had an impact on the global economy - in the sense of launching a considered economic policy aimed at some distant useful target?
Fucking things up may be counted as an impact I guess. The asteroid had an impact on the dinosaur. But a hierarchy theory approach makes a clear distinction between information and entropy.
Exactly. The pre-inflationary Planck volume contained virtual preons only, fluctuating in time. The surrounding space is the constraint. If this constrained crosses a critical value, the virtuality is inflated into reality and conditions are set to evolution into increasingly complex structures. This evolution backfires on the Planck volume and delivers the new constraint. And again the critical value will be crossed... So it's all fundamental.
I don't know if this qualifies as successful reductionism but in chemistry class, thousands of years ago, the fact that ice floats on water was explained to me in terms of Hydrogen bonding. I felt quite satisfied with the answer: the H bonds meant that water molecules, quite literally, kept each other at a distance and this results in an increase in overall volume for the same mass of liquid water, making ice less dense than liquid water; hence, said my teach, ice floats on water.
Can this be done for all phenomena?
Consciousness, thus far, has been resistant to such a treatment. Nobody has been able to convincingly explain how electrochemical events in the brain produce thinking/thoughts. We know the two are correlated (brain experiments prove that), but how exactly is still a mystery.
As Anderson acknowledged, higher levels in a hierarchy develop based on the principles of the lower level, i.e. reductionism. That does not mean that you can predict the behavior of phenomena of the higher level based on the rules of the lower level, i.e. constructivism. So, once we know the behavior of ice, we can explain it in terms of chemical bonds. The question is, could we predict it from just the facts of chemistry. I don't know. Anderson doesn't claim that you can never predict higher level behavior based on lower level principles. His position describes the general condition. So, according to Anderson, no, it can't be done for all phenomena.
Quoting Agent Smith
Anderson says that biology is not psychology, which makes sense to me. That doesn't mean that the behavior of mental processes can't be explained by biological principles.
Quoting T Clark
Wait, I thought you agreed that the division of these scales was epistemological, not metaphysical. So physics, chemistry, biology and cosmology are merely epistemological explanations of scales that only exist in our minds, and not real in any sense in the world beyond our minds. So I fail to see how they are useful if they are not representative of what is the case outside of our minds.
You seem content to remain in the bubble of your mind - to live only in the map, and not in the territory while at the same time implying that you are talking about states of affairs outside of your mind. When talking about the world, I'm not interested, not do I find it useful, to talk about your epistemological states. You seem to be confusing epistemology and metaphysics.
Quoting T Clark
Above what? If the scales are epistemological then there is no metaphysical above or below. We are simply talking about the same thing from different views. In other words we are confusing the map with the territory. The constraints from above or below are only figments of our imagination, ie explanations that are useful, but not representative of anything real in any sense outside of our minds. Constraints would only come from the sides - meaning things on the same "scale" (there would only be one scale, so the term becomes meaningless when describing the world outside of your mind) as the thing we are talking about. This is akin to natural selection where forces on the same scale constrain other forces on the same scale, like how predators constrain the evolution of prey and vice versa.