Irreducible Complexity

Mr. Reductionist thinks, mistakenly, that a description is an explanation. But this is a serious definitional issue, which is why I voted for methodological rather than just confused.

You can explain why A punched B by describing the movement of particles (including the particles of the brain) or you can explain why A punched B by describing A's anger with B.

Even if we accept that (meta-)physically A's anger with B can be reduced to brain states, and eventually to the movement of particles, conceptually these are very different things.

So I think by-and-large the reductionist and the antireductionist talk past each other.

I voted substantive mainly because you seem to have ruled it out by setting up the idea that an ecosystem is equivalent to a bunch of billiard balls. So the image you provoke in my mind is of a deterministic system, such as life-game. In such a world, glider guns, gliders, and all the myriad more complex constructions are strictly reducible to the deterministic laws. In such a world, Mr Irreductionist is simply wrong, and the disagreement is substantial.

On the other hand, if the world is not deterministic, Mr reductionist is simply wrong.

It is a substantive difference as the reductionist is claiming that a system is simply constituted of its events while the holist adds that, collectively, those events result in a generalised state of constraint. A global property emerges that restricts those events by becoming their history, their context.

And then the holist will go further in arguing that emergent constraints can actually shape the identity of the events themselves. So collective causality is making the parts which are producing the functional whole. The parts turn out to be emergent too. Holism claims the dependent co-origination of parts and wholes, in the big scheme of things.

Of course the reductionist always chooses examples of systems that do the best job of disguising the holism of nature. Hence billiard balls.

The holism can't be seen easily because we are asked to imagine a set of parts that some person shaped - smooth hard balls and a flat baize table, then the smack with the cue that set the balls in motion, all bounded both by the table having edges and a world with fixed physical laws enforcing energy conservation principles.

A holist is happier with an ecosystem where the collective, emergent, contextual nature of the organisation is now more obvious. The irreducible complexity of a system - the reality of two directions of causality in action - constraints and degrees of freedom - becomes the thing.

Pneumenon:What is the nature of this disagreement?

Lower levels of description always underdetermine higher levels.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hence, the nature of the disagreement is substantive.

Quoting Pneumenon

Wiseass clever-me attempts to deconstruct the question for no good reason will be ignored.

In mitigation, I hope that the below deconstruction is for good reason.

I think the choice of 'billiard balls' as the illustrative metaphor is significant, because of the implication of the fundamental role of Newtonian mechanics. The motion of billiard balls can, after all, be satisfactorily described solely in terms of Newtonian mechanics. So I suggest that the kind of reductionism that this example supposedly illustrates, actually became recognised as untenable a long time ago, because it has long been recognised that Newtonian mechanics has limited scope, and that such a simplified model or abstraction couldn't account for many phenomena in nature. This is so even amongst advocates of reductionism.

So alternative models have emerged, for example 'complexity science', which examines systems with many parts that interact to produce global behaviour that cannot easily be explained in terms of interactions between the individual constituent elements. 'Complexity science' resembles the second of your two examples, although it may still be reductionist - perhaps some degree of reductionism is necessary for any kind of science. But on the other hand, holism thinks in terms of the relationship between systems or environments, and their constituent elements, hence is 'top down', and anti-reductionist in that sense.

(Just happened upon this video preview on the life of Gregory Bateson, who was one of the pioneers of this kind of analysis, for anyone interested.)

Quoting Pneumenon

Mr. Irreductionist claims that it can't, because explaining the actions of any particular particle fully will require an account of its interactions with other particles, so the whole thing telescopes out.

I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of the Irreductionist view. It implies that the irreductionist believes that everything is explained by the interactions of particles, but that one has to take ALL the particles, and all of the myriad interactions, into account. This person believes that the difficulty is the tractability of the problem (as you say, it 'telescopes out'). I don't think that's Irreductionism, it's just Laplacean Reductionism combined with an acknowledgement that the problem of collecting the data of every particle's position and momentum and solving the gigantic system of simulaneous differential equations is not practically possible.

On my understanding, a true Irreductionist (of whom I'd say I am one, except that I resist accepting labels, especially 'ism' ones) denies that, even in theory, our experiences could be explained solely in terms of interactions of particles.

Quoting andrewk

On my understanding, a true Irreductionist (of whom I'd say I am one, except that I resist accepting labels, especially 'ism' ones) denies that, even in theory, our experiences could be explained solely in terms of interactions of particles.

But does the true irreductionist deny that all out experiences (and for that matter all our explanations) could be the result of interactions of particles?

Reply to Janus I think that most people that think of themselves as irreductionists would answer Yes to that question. I would answer yes. I think maybe @Wayfarer thinks of himself as an Irreductionist, so it would be informative to know what his answer is.

Quoting Pneumenon

Do these two have a substantial disagreement at all?

Do any of the billiard balls have a mind of their own, and the capacity to move one's own body in the way it wants? If not, then your "ecosystem" is not a proper representation of the real world in which we live in, which has living things that can do this. If so, then both Mr. Reductionist and Mr. Irreductionist are of track.

Quoting apokrisis

It is a substantive difference as the reductionist is claiming that a system is simply constituted of its events while the holist adds that, collectively, those events result in a generalised state of constraint. A global property emerges that restricts those events by becoming their history, their context.

Yes. This is very close to, or the same as, a view that I've often held implicitly, so thanks for fleshing it out. This is also the reason that Mr. Irreductionist responds the way he does, by appealing to the history of each particle and its interactions with others.

Quoting unenlightened

I voted substantive mainly because you seem to have ruled it out by setting up the idea that an ecosystem is equivalent to a bunch of billiard balls.

Granted, but notice Mr. Irreductionist's counter: "What, exactly, are you explaining?" If you want to, you could pursue that line and say that viewing the whole system as a bunch of particles just doesn't do what you need it to do. Whether that makes it into a methodological disagreement is up to you. Reply to Michael's comment is also along the lines of Mr. Irreductionist's counter.

Quoting andrewk

On my understanding, a true Irreductionist (of whom I'd say I am one, except that I resist accepting labels, especially 'ism' ones) denies that, even in theory, our experiences could be explained solely in terms of interactions of particles.

Right. I think it may be helpful - for you and other people - to view the exchange in the OP dialectically. Mr. Irreductionist's counter that the whole thing telescopes out is a means of trying for a reductio against Mr. Reductionist, while accepting some of his premises, and occurs at the point in the dialectic where you would expect such a thing. Mr. Irreductionist's final counter, that Mr. Reductionist is no longer explaining the same thing, is a case of following this line of reasoning toward something like what you say here.

Quoting Janus

But does the true irreductionist deny that all out experiences (and for that matter all our explanations) could be the result of interactions of particles?

This is an interesting question. I would ask what is meant by result here. It seems odd to say that our experiences are "caused" by the interactions of particles. That looks like it would lead to epiphenomenalism, because if particles are the cause and experiences are the effect, then particles and experiences aren't the same thing, but one is caused and determined wholly by the other. Perhaps you can reply that this misses the point, because you're just saying that the particles must be there for the experiences to be there. But is that reductionism?

Thanks for the responses, everyone. Digging this discussion so far.

I think part of the problem is that neither phenomena nor the explanations that account for them are unitary things: different aspects of any one phenomena may involve different explanatory schemes/levels. That is, any 'explanation' must be coupled with the question - explain what? Thus while an 'explanation' for a system may be furnished in purely reductionist terms, such an explanation may not exhaust the range of things to be explained about that system.

So with respect to the scenario in the OP, I think the reductionist is both right and wrong: yes of course the ecosystem can be 'explained' in purely physical terms - any system can be explained in purely physical terms. But would such an explanation exhaust what there is to be explained about that system? I don't think so. Thus I think even the irreductionist ought to answer 'yes' to Janus's question: yes of course all our experiences are the result of interactions of particles. The question is whether explanations furnished at the level of those interactions exhaust what there is to be explained about experiences. Again, here is where the divergence between the reductionist and the irreductionist really ought to be situated.

Quoting StreetlightX

I think part of the problem is that neither phenomena nor the explanations that account for them are unitary things: different aspects of any one phenomena may involve different explanatory schemes/levels.

Can I get an example of something that is unitary?

Reply to Pneumenon I guess any situation in which all environmental variables are kept stable - ceteris paribus conditions. Such conditions by definition force unitary explanations insofar as they are engineered to isolate context and exclude anything else that would influence the phenomenon under investigation.

Incidentally, 'reduction', as I understand it, means nothing else but context-invariance.

Quoting Pneumenon

Can I get an example of something that is unitary?

That would be something like the problem as you framed it in the OP: "A bunch of billiard balls are bouncing around on a table in a classically cliched example of Newtonian whatever."

This formulation explicitly admits of only one account, and so there isn't anything to be reductionist or irreductionist about. As others have noted (and I think @StreetlightX has been spot-on), the situation that you outlined does not really set up a reductionist/irreductionist conflict. Granted, "reductionist" is a nebulous and loaded term, more often used as a derogatory adjective than actually explained.

So what is reductionism? Reductionism implies different accounts, different explanatory schemes, different theories. Often people talk about levels of explanation. So, not just alternative accounts, but accounts organized in a kind of hierarchy, with the one at the bottom being - on the reductionist view - the most fundamental and the most veridical, the others being merely convenient approximations. This is a view that is common among scientists and some philosophers of science*.

Reductionism is sometimes described as taking a thing apart in order to explain the working of the whole in terms of its parts. This is probably what you were trying to get at with your example, except that from the start both your Mr. Reductionist and Mr. Irreductionist are already looking at an atomized picture, with no intimation of there being a whole (irreducible?) thing that these atoms constitute. (And by the way, the expression "irreducible complexity" was coined by an "intelligent design" (creationism) proponent, and denotes a different idea.)

There is some truth to the part/whole account of reductionism - the truth being that the hierarchy of explanations that I mentioned earlier roughly corresponds to a hierarchy of spacial scales. When, as scientists, we attempt to provide a better, more accurate account of something, oftentimes we get out our microscope and examine it at a finer scale. And since matter tends to clump into more-or-less sharp-edged objects at many different scales (particles, atoms, molecules, cells, chairs, planets, etc.), this is where we get the idea of breaking a thing into parts to understand it better. But I think this part/whole view does not entirely capture the idea of reductionism. Quantum mechanics, with its universal wavefunction and entangled particles, is as "wholistic" as anything, and yet it comfortably fits into many a reductionist worldview as perhaps the most fundamental level of reality.

* Philosopher of physics David Wallace opens this lecture about quantum mechanics by confidently proclaiming the sort of view that I outlined above as the consensus view of physics! I think he is rather overstating the case, even if we only ask physicists.

It would be helpful to start with what is probably the minimal commitment of reductionism, which is supervenience. Supervenience can be summed up with the slogan: "No A differences without B differences." Suppose A and B are alternative accounts of the same phenomena (e.g. cognition). Let P' and P" be distinct phenomenal states, A' and A" - their accounts in theory A (e.g. psychological states), and B' and B" - their accounts in theory B (e.g. neural states). We say that theory A supervenes on theory B if for A' and A" to be distinct, B' and B" must also be distinct, but the reverse is not necessarily true. Thus, the relationship between A and B could also be described as coarse-graining.

The connection with reductionism is that for theory A to reduce to theory B it must, at a minimum, supervene on B. And some would stop at that. But others attempt to go further in elucidating dependent relationships between different levels of explanation. The most ambitious view would probably be one that claims that high-level accounts - "special" sciences and psychology - as well as their specific theoretical entities can be analytically deduced from more fundamental accounts and entities (type-type reduction). A more modest claim is that any particular finding described by a higher-level theory could be traced to some configuration described by a lower-level theory, if only we knew all the relevant facts and possessed the necessary computational resources - but not necessarily according to some fixed bridge law (token-token reduction).

Quoting Pneumenon

Mr. Reductionist says that the actions and behaviors of anything in that ecosystem can be explained by the motions of its constituent particles, since it's all made of matter anyway.

While I do think the situation can be reduced to particle physics, at no point in that view is there a 'thing' which does an 'action'. There is never a definition of a fist or the anger that drives it. I voted for talking past each other.

Quoting unenlightened

I voted substantive mainly because you seem to have ruled it out by setting up the idea that an ecosystem is equivalent to a bunch of billiard balls. So the image you provoke in my mind is of a deterministic system, such as life-game. In such a world, glider guns, gliders, and all the myriad more complex constructions are strictly reducible to the deterministic laws. In such a world, Mr Irreductionist is simply wrong, and the disagreement is substantial.

On the other hand, if the world is not deterministic, Mr reductionist is simply wrong.

The lack of determinism seems to have little impact on reductionist particle descriptions of an ecosystem. OK, in neither the reductionist nor the holistic view can future states be determined, but absent agency from outside the ecosystem (which would be information actually leveraged from the dice rolling), behavioral states seem to follow the classic predictable rules of billiard balls. The only quantum amplifiers I know about are those in physics labs.

Quoting Pneumenon

Now, let's say we have an ecosystem. Mr. Reductionist claims that said ecosystem can be explained in purely physical terms. Mr. Irreductionist claims that it can't. Mr. Reduction anything in that ecosystem can be explained by the motions of its constituent particles, since it's all made of matter anyway. Mr. Irreductionist claims that it can't, because explaining the actions of any particular particle fully will require an account of its interactions with other particles, so the whole thing telescopes out. Mr. Reductionist says that, even after "telescoping out," the whole business will still just be a bunch of particles. Mr. Irreductionist then asks what, exactly, Mr. Reductionist is trying to explain.

If Mr. Irreductionist's objection to Mr. Reductionist's picture amounts to a merely pointing out that the individual motions of the particles requires taking into account the other particles, then it seems like there is no substantive disagreement between them. It would seem like Mr. Irreductionist would still ultimately agree that the ecosystem can in theory be described by a system of interacting particles, so it seems like the dispute is methodological. However, if Mr. Irreductionist's claim requires that there exist something over and above the particles themselves and their interactions, then there would be a substantive disagreement because we are now talking about an ontological dispute.

Reply to Mr Bee That's the way I read it. I think Mr. Irreductionist would need to clearly explain what it is that is missing from Mr Reductionists explanation.

Many emergent properties are the result of our perspective. As we zoom in, we can see an emergent property splitting into it's individual parts and their interactions, and as we zoom out we can observe the emergent property forming out of the individual parts and their interactions. Emergent properties are the result of how the brain handles sensory information at different size scales.

An example once given to me that I find helpful is that of a beach’s being. A beach is composed of sand particles (residing along a large collection of water drops, etc.). Mr/Ms Reductionist would insist that to understand what a beach is we must more closely study the individual sand particles it is composed of, such as by means of a microscope. Mr/Ms Irreductionist will insist that to understand what a beach is we must study the holistic totality of sand particles in its own right. This can touch upon what some may term gestalt being - something that, as an identity, is other than the sum of its parts. (I speculate that there will be some who’ll argue that, because no gestalts exist, no such thing as beaches exist either.)

I’ve opted for substantive disagreement on grounds of disagreement concerning what causal processes in truth exist. For example, all bottom up causation might be upheld by the reductionist as compared with the irreductionist upholding that at least some gestalts, or holons, can hold their own causal abilities (e.g., a beach, as a gestalt thing, can have an effect on the type of waves that manifest).

On a somewhat related note, in line with SophistiCat’s comments, I’d be grateful for further clarification on what reductionism entails. So far it seems to me that we all inevitably reduce the nature of being to something primitive: QM particles, or holons (be these objects, ecosystems, aware beings, etc.), or some set of abstract relations (be these dyadic, triadic, etc.), or processes of becoming, and so forth. Hence, so far, to me there seems to be something in addition to “reducing things to basic givens” that would need to be made explicit so as to demarcate the reductionist from the irreductionist. While I currently uphold this to be linked to the types of causation upheld to be ontic—an underlying belief through which explanations emerge—alternatives to this perspective would be appreciated.

Reply to javra A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Holism stresses the hierarchical fact that parts are made to fit the whole via development, an approach to a common limit. Parts become in fact parts as their initial irregularity or degrees of freedom are regulated so that they become as identical as matters in the construction of the whole.

An army needs to take raw recruits and turn them into soldiers. Young men with irregular natures must be regularised so they can function as parts of a fighting machine. And once a soldier, always a soldier.

It is this fact about holism - the parts themselves get developed by the whole - that make supervenience and determinism bunk in a systems logic context. Or rather, the parts can be deterministic only to the degree the whole has an interest or concern in making them that.

Grains of sand are still irregular rather than exact spheres. They only need to be roughly spherical and reasonably small to meet the Second Law's goal of maximising erosion. To produce perfectly round and perfectly matched grains would require self-defeating care.

Same with soldiers. They only need to approach an acceptable average.

So because the parts must be shaped to fit, perfect determinism is an ideal and in fact there always remains an irreducible uncertainty or indeterminism at the local scale on which any system is being composed.

This has turned out to be true even of fundamental physics of course. The indeterminism of the quantum is irreducible. And that means everything that wants to build itself up from that ground can't be clockwork determinism. It can only be clockwork on average.

Another way to see what is going on with reductionism as ontology is how it regards time. It constructs action in a way that conceals issues of development, indeterminism and local emergence.

So time divides into past, present and future. For the holist, the present is the definite boundary between past and future - the point where a history of events forms a fixed global context of constraints. And in doing so, that weight of the past is what shapes a future of definite possibility. It fixes the set of local freedoms which are shortly to be expressed in some particular direction.

So determinism in this view is evolutionary. The reason a billiard ball is so predictable is because, as a mass, all its possibilities have been shaved down to simplest possible symmetries. It has been machined to roll freely in a straight line in simulation of an ideal Newtonian body. It doesn't have bumps on its surface that might knock it off a path or add haphazard friction to its roll. And while in reality no billiard ball could actually be so perfect, we can certainly manufacture balls that are good enough for a context like playing a game or spinning a convincing analogy.

So note the sly trick that Newtonian reductionism is pulling off when it comes to space as a dimensionality too. There is a holistic constraint at play - the global symmetries of translations and rotations which define inertial motion. The symmetries encode a perfect formal limit towards which all roughness and irregularity of material objects can approach ... as it sheds that very particularity in conforming to the ideal.

Anyway, holism takes the developmental view of time where the present is where the global state of constraint - a history - can be said to determine the future to the degree some set of possibilities, some set of directional freedoms, have been made concrete and definite. One could well be attempting to play billiards with some bunch of small rocks. You can imagine how haphazard the resulting game would be. But still, to the extent that the results remain predictable, the history is determining the future.

So the present is the moment which is the line drawn between this idea of global constraint - the shaping hand of the whole - and then the future which consists of the expression of the resulting degrees of freedom ... which can be highly shaped and so approaching the symmetry ideals encoded in our matching notions of material spatiality, or still quite irregular and unshaped and so rather unpredictable and random. It becomes, conversely, impossibly hard to point to something in the past, something in history, which was a particular cause of that random event.

When it comes to models of spontaneous symmetry breaking - symmetry talk again being the deepest level of metaphysics because it goes directly to the issue of global form - the reductionist is forced to admit that "a fluctuation" made the difference. In other words, the pencil balanced perfectly on its point had to fall in some direction as "anything" would have had the same consequence of tipping its balance. No event could be too small to break the symmetry.

The reductionist then takes a very diferent view of time. It is now all about a present moment that ticks along a spatialised notion of temporal flow in a deterministic clockwork of one step following another. The past becomes unreal. The future is still to be realised. The only truly real thing is the present instant.

So reductionism secures absolute determinism by cancelling away any notions of emergence, development, chance or freedom. Both the laws of nature, its fundamental forms, and its initial conditions, its local material state, are imagined as being fixed and unalterable at the beginning of time. Existence begins in counterfactual definiteness and so progression unfolds like logical clockwork.

Reality is a machine that is essentially timeless. There is only a now that is real in being the sum of all that is causal. An ecosystem never had a choice as its fate was dictated by the laws and the momenta of a collection of particles that obtained in the first instant of the Big Bang.

So reductionism is the flattened view of time. It reduces existence to a synchronic theory of presentism or simultaneity where everything is already always fixed and there is no real development or indeterminism. And that is a really useful, really simplifying, way of imagining reality. You don't have to keep wondering about what is the law at the moment, or what are the spontaneitities that might derail our calculations when striking a billiard ball.

But holism is the larger view. And so it sees time in terms of a past that creates a downward acting, degree of freedom shaping, state of global constraint. Then within that is a future of freedoms to be expressed. There remains some element of fundamental chance or spontaneity that may end up making a difference, rewriting what seemed to be inevitable history's "next step".

To holism, quantum indeterminacy is not a surprise. It is a prediction. Uncertainty has to be irreducible, even if the world is a system with the purpose of reducing that uncertainty to a pragmatic minimum.

Quoting apokrisis

A key part of the holist position is that the top down causality is something real because it shapes the parts.

But wouldn't a holistic physicalist want to say that the top down causality is really nothing more than an emergent manifestation of the interactions of physical particles and forces? What else could they admit as actual existents?

According to that view, it would be granted that top down causation is something we cannot exhaustively model in terms of those interaction, but that it would be the limited nature of our modelling capability (or for that matter any modeling capacity) when it comes to complexity, that explains that inability, wouldn't it? Kind of analogous to the 'Three Body Problem' writ large?

Reply to Janus Again, top down is real because it really does shape the parts. However the parts are real as well as - in the long run, as an averaged outcome - their collective action must manifest as that constraining whole.

So it is a triadic or hierarchical action. Each is the cause of the emergence of the other.

And you can see that in fundamental physics now. Quantum physics is contextual and thermally decoherent. The whole does on the whole shape events down to wavefunction level. But then spontaneity takes over with the actual collapse of a physical event. History gets written with an irreducible dollop of localised indeterminism. The context itself is being rebuilt as some running story of classical events that have now definitely happened and so act as a constraint on all further quantumness.

The reductionist can now insert himself in the conversation with his presentism and clockwork notions of causality. But the deeper quantum picture is of a world that is self constructing because of a mutuality between its local and global scales. It starts in a strongly quantum state of indeterminacy at the Big Bang and then evolves its way - decohering/dissipating uncertainty - until becoming as classical as possible as the Heat Death.

At the Heat Death, the Universe is left as nothing but a structure of holographic bounds populated by the cold fizzle of the black-body photons they must radiate as event horizons.

So actually, the basic cosmological picture now is quantum thermodynamic. Classicality only "exists" as the limit of that metaphysics. The mutuality between parts and wholes - between holographic or informational event horizons and black body quantum radiation - is explicit in the new formalisms of cosmological explanation.

Reply to apokrisis

The notion of a triadic relation of "interindependence" (Pannikar) makes the most sense to me. It can be (and has been) conceptualized in so many ways: 'body, mind and spirit' or 'matter, sign and relation' or 'creation, preservation and transformation', being just three examples.

This idea runs all through the history of human thought; both eastern and western; which makes sense; you would expect the deep structures of human thought to reflect the deep structures of reality since thought is not separate from, but integral to, reality.

For me, the notion of immanence alone is not sufficient; it fails to become fully coherent without its obverse: transcendence. So again there is a trinity: immanence, transcendence and the relation between them.

Reply to Janus Radical trinity might seem the same thing as pansemiosis from a structural view, but there is a big difference.

As you say, your approach wants to make a virtue of that which can't be immanently explained - the transcendent cause that is the divine form and telos. So the mystery of the triadic relation is maximised. It explains the least in terms of a naturalistic metaphysics predicated on the search for causal self-organisation.

Pansemiosis does the opposite by minimising the transcendental element - the first cause or prime mover. Now that mystical bit is understood in terms of a foundational vagueness, or firstness, or Apeiron. It is pure unformed potential and not a big daddy in the sky.

So that foundational "materiality" is not explained immanently by pansemiosis. It is a given coming from "outside". But it is also the very least imaginable kind of "divine cause" in being literally less than nothing.

So in terms of metaphysical reasoning, it can lay claim to being the best model of triadic systems causation - if you apply the epistemic constraint of demanding a scheme with the least possible transcendent mystery or uncertainty.

But hey, I get it. Most folk are really into mystery. :)

Quoting apokrisis

It is pure unformed potential and not a big daddy in the sky.

Yes, but I would say an adequate notion of the Father just is a notion of "pure unformed potential" and certainly not any "sky daddy". The latter is a naïve hypostatization.

Quoting apokrisis

But hey, I get it. Most folk are really into mystery. :)

Some of the best things in life: art. music. poetry, religion, ethics and philosophy itself find their roots in mystery. Science is also one of the best things, but it does not, at least in its methodological dimension, find its roots in mystery, well, at least not when it comes to the harder sciences. As the sciences become 'softer' they begin to approach the arts, and mystery becomes ineliminable. It would be truly horrible if all mystery could be eliminated from human life; luckily it never will be!

Quoting Janus

Yes, but I would say an adequate notion of the father just is a notion of "pure unformed potential" and certainly not any "sky daddy". The latter is a naïve hypostatization.

Great. And so this fundamental potential has no connotations of inherent mindfulness or consciousness or purpose for you? Or at least - this being my position - it has the least possible so far as that is imaginable?

I mean theism always wants the fundamental to be special in that fashion. So it is surprising to find a theistic framework that truly argues for the least possible divinity in the origination of humanity and the cosmos.

Quoting Janus

Some of the best things in life: art. music. poetry, religion, ethics and philosophy itself find their roots in mystery.

This is clearly where our worldviews differ completely. All these things are creative semiotic habits - the new things that language allows us to do in terms of reality modelling.

Sure, fiction can be fun, but there is no essential mystery in how it is created or why - psychologically - it is enjoyable.

And mathematical science is the most purely creative act of imagination. It goes way beyond every other sociocultural effort of telling the truth of things in terms of complete abstractions. In the modern world, all those other activities you mentioned have become a reaction to whatever science happens to be suggesting at some time in its emergent development.

Quoting apokrisis

Great. And so this fundamental potential has no connotations of inherent mindfulness or consciousness or purpose for you? Or at least - this being my position - it has the least possible so far as that is imaginable?

I would say we cannot form any adequate notion of divine purposiveness, because any such attempt will result in an anthropomorphic model of purposiveness; a projection of the way we intuitively understand our own animating impulses onto the cosmos, or what we might imagine lies "behind" the cosmos.

Quoting apokrisis

This is clearly where our worldviews differ completely. All these things are creative semiotic habits - the new things that language allows us to do in terms of reality modelling.

Sure, fiction can be fun, but there is no essential mystery in how it is created or why - psychologically - it is enjoyable.

I agree that in one sense the arts are cultivated semiotic "habits"; that is the obvious practical dimension of the discipline of ever more skilful production. But the source of the imaginative and aesthetic side, which may go all the way from banal to unspeakably profound, remains nonetheless a mystery that cannot be eliminated.

We do not know this profundity discursively but rather affectively, imaginatively, intuitively. Why demand that everything should be discursively explained, when that is clearly impossible? And then why go on to dismiss what cannot be discursively explained as being of no consequence, as positivistic thinking does, when what cannot be explained is clearly a dimension of the greatest importance in human life. "Man does not live by bread alone".

Of course if you simply have no 'feel' for mystery, and the great value of "unknowing" then it is understandable that it will hold no interest for you. :)

Reply to Janus But what is so objectionable in enjoying dispelling mysteries then? Seeking explanations is not the same thing as "demanding" them. Nor is uncertainty minimisation "dismissing" mystery.

You know that your argument must be in trouble when you have to revert to these kinds of rhetorical flourishes, this use of loaded terms, to do the heavy lifting.

I am defending pragmaticism. You are pretending to attack authoritarianism. Yes, that rhetorical strategy is going to win you points with the uncritical. Who isn't against authority these days. :s But still, it is my Peircean pragmatism that you need to be addressing so far as this actual argument goes.

Reply to apokrisis

There's certainly nothing wrong in dispelling mysteries when it comes to empirical enquiry. And I'm not "attacking authoritarianism" or pretending to attack it, but rather questioning the justification of reason that bases itself upon empirical observation that purports to explain (and explain away) that which is beyond its ambit.

The sense of impenetrable mystery is a matter of experience, and I am speaking from experience. I don't expect anyone who doesn't have that experience to understand, much less be convinced, by what I say. I don't believe philosophy properly consists in rigorous argumentation at all, but rather in invitations to think about the world in new and more imaginative ways; it is more art than science.

With this kind of philosophical thinking it is not a matter of being right or wrong, in some intersubjectively determinable sense, but of finding ideas that are transformative for creative understanding; ideas that work, in other words. As I understand it that is actually the essence of pragmatism. The valuing of imaginatively, creatively and spiritually transformative ideas is not a merely epistemic matter as it is with science; which of course is also pragmatic in terms of its set of more purely utilitarian concerns.

apokrisis:So in terms of metaphysical reasoning, it [pansemiosis] can lay claim to being the best model of triadic systems causation - if you apply the epistemic constraint of demanding a scheme with the least possible transcendent mystery or uncertainty...But hey, I get it. Most folk are really into mystery.

Most scientists should be "into" complete explanations which transcend spatiotemporal domains. Since human beings are natural, living, psychophysical unities, and pansemiosis only describes physical phenomena, pansemiosis is an incomplete (i.e., reductionist) explanation of nature as a whole.

Reply to GaluchatWhat are you trying to say?

Reply to apokrisis What are you not understanding?

Reply to Galuchat What transcendent thing is semiosis missing, given it covers both information and dynamics?

apokrisis:What transcendent thing is semiosis missing, given it covers both information and dynamics?

The subject is pansemiosis, not semiosis. Sorry, I'm not interested in playing word games. Enjoy yourself!

Reply to Galuchat I see you realise your error. But even physio-semiosis would combine information and dynamics.

Quoting apokrisis

So where does sand get its shape so that it might compose a beach? How does it get roundish, smoothed and graded by size? What higher constraints lead to the formation of every particle of sand.

Natural selection. Organisms are shaped by natural selection. Planets are shaped by natural selection. Sand gets it's shape from natural selection. Natural selection, in this sense, is the process of environmental feedback acting on an individual and the individual's influence on the rest of the environment.

Quoting Pneumenon

A bunch of billiard balls

On the wiseass front...it's always struck me as surprising that the classic example (who first cited it?) is 'billiard balls'. This places the entire motion of the balls in a framework that is wider than the balls, and in a culture derived from France and England, and ultimately dependent, as my great uncle Ludwig might say with glee, on the rules of a game.

From this wiseass angle the reductionist and irreductionist seem part of the same narrow perspective.

Quoting Harry Hindu

Natural selection, in this sense, is the process of environmental feedback acting on an individual and the individual's influence on the rest of the environment.

Hi Harry,
I am assuming that by Natural Selection you are referring to the Survival of the Fittest model.
The problem I can see with Natural Selection, defined by Survival of the Fittest, is that it is a culling operation. I am sure that there were times in Earth's history when an impossible leap was needed by life so that it either perished from existence completely or it survived. If we simply culled all life because no variant could make the leap, life would have died out many times in Earth's history. To make the impossible leap requires that life is not clinging on to survival with its bare teeth but has an excess capacity to throw out variants. That is, it must be have a creative potential beyond what is demanded by survival of the fittest models. The difference is subtle in its distinction but enormous in its ramifications. And we know that time after time, when the environment gets nasty, life bounces back. What did that guy say on Jurassic Park - Nature finds a way?

Quoting MikeL

Survival of the Fittest model.

The feeling of wanting to survive is a trait of life, not of a soup of chemicals. Survival works against entropy. Materialists have no explanation of how such a trait magically, miraculously springs from some soup of chemicals, in such a way that the chemicals start fighting among each other for survival. They hope that no one notices how outlandish is this story (which is why the indoctrination begins at a very young age, when children cannot question), and if someone should notice, the answer is "It's very complicated and it takes a long time". Is such an answer and more scientific than God did it? There is literally zero evidence for any of this.

A more concrete answer it's that the mind, life, works against entropy in order to create. When one thinks about it, the metaphorical description in the Bible is probably a better description of life and far less miraculous in nature than the story that Evolutionists concocted, i.e. the famous "selfish gene".

Quoting Rich

A more concrete answer it's that the mind, life, works against entropy in order to create.

There's could be a problem of restraint here Rich. Creativity by definition is working against rigidity - against restraint, and yet you've defined it as a restraint on entropy. However without restraint it is entropic in nature.

Even talking with Apokrisis yesterday, I needed to invoke a restraint on the DNA and have only sections of high recombination for it to work. Otherwise we end up with a puddle of goo, which is entropic.

Reply to Mariner Quite the opposite, I'd say: irreductionist is only describing the situation by generalizations and taking a look at the bigger picture. The reductionist is the one explaining. This is all assuming the reductionist is correct of course, in that there's no supernatural force affecting the situation.

Quoting BlueBanana

Quite the opposite, I'd say: irreductionist is only describing the situation by generalizations and taking a look at the bigger picture. The reductionist is the one explaining. This is all assuming the reductionist is correct of course, in that there's no supernatural force affecting the situation.

According to your interpretation, none of them is explaining anything. A full description of all the details involved in an event is not an explanation. "Explain the murder to me, please" cannot be answered by, "well, when he pulled the trigger, it started this specific chemical reaction in the gunpowder and then some gases expanded quickly, pushing the bullet...."

And of course we don't need 'mind' and 'life' to work against entropy because entropy already works against itself (in the form of mind and life, among other things) - the production of local negentropy accelerating and advancing the production of global entropy.

Quoting MikeL

There's could be a problem of restraint here Rich. Creativity by definition is working against rigidity - against restraint, and yet you've defined it as a restraint on entropy. However without restraint it is entropic in nature.

Choice is constrained. Life is self-organizing.

Reply to Rich It's a bit of a prickly paradox. It needs the order to allow the disorder. It can't be All Creative. It is the order part of the creative 'package' that is resisting entropy.

Reply to MikeL Yes, this is an interesting aspect. Bergson writes that the disorder (decay) is the waste of life. In other words spent Elan vital.