Reducing Reductionism
I am not a reductionist, but I have studied a lot of different fields of science that tend to be reductionist in nature, physics, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, etc. So my criticisms don't apply to any of the actual scientific findings or phenomena that might appear in any reductionist argument (neural network learning say). Only to the interpretation of the body of these results as implying reductionism.
Determinism and reductionism are closely related. Two sides of the same coin. Reductionism and determinism both cloak themselves in the mantle of science. But it is a very selective kind of science, one which assays at the outset to eliminate some of the most interesting phenomena, the phenomena in which we are most interested. Phenomena themselves are not scientific in nature, only our method of investigating them is.
If you are studying mental states, and you deny their reality at the outset in order to prove their non-existence, that is not science, that is a choice (This has to me always seemed tangibly ironic). Mental states may not be explicable in terms of what you consider to be well-founded science, but that makes them no different from any other fundamental but complex phenomena throughout history. Gravity. Fire. There will always be a gap between what we think we know and what is. Science by its very nature is incomplete, since it begins with a problem.
Same thing with freedom. You assume the will is not free in order to be able to account for will phenomena in some other way. Why? There is nothing wrong with the assumption of freedom. It is prima facie reasonable and amenable to scientific analysis. The body of work that is the humanities is both the evidence and the result.
Determinism and reductionism are closely related. Two sides of the same coin. Reductionism and determinism both cloak themselves in the mantle of science. But it is a very selective kind of science, one which assays at the outset to eliminate some of the most interesting phenomena, the phenomena in which we are most interested. Phenomena themselves are not scientific in nature, only our method of investigating them is.
If you are studying mental states, and you deny their reality at the outset in order to prove their non-existence, that is not science, that is a choice (This has to me always seemed tangibly ironic). Mental states may not be explicable in terms of what you consider to be well-founded science, but that makes them no different from any other fundamental but complex phenomena throughout history. Gravity. Fire. There will always be a gap between what we think we know and what is. Science by its very nature is incomplete, since it begins with a problem.
Same thing with freedom. You assume the will is not free in order to be able to account for will phenomena in some other way. Why? There is nothing wrong with the assumption of freedom. It is prima facie reasonable and amenable to scientific analysis. The body of work that is the humanities is both the evidence and the result.
Comments (98)
Back in the day, Reductionism was an innovative method of analysis of Nature. Not only was it required to break-down complex systems into bite-size chunks our baby teeth could masticate, it was also a way to work around the authority of the church, which made outdated religious and philosophical dogma into big beliefs, to be swallowed whole. Unfortunately, we have ridden the horse of Reductionism about as far as it will carry us. That's why the cutting-edge of Science is venturing into holistic Systems Theory, and Complexity Theory, and even Quantum Indeterminism.
Quoting Pantagruel
That's why Science must evolve or die out. Reductionism and Determinism are endangered species. But their fittest genes are still working in those newer forms of scientific investigation.
Yes, that is what Popper would call the positive products of a faulty metaphysical research program.
Reductionism/determinism proves that there is an information channel extending from less complex systems to the more complex systems in which the less complex systems are inter-related. Proves in other words that things like perception and mental-physical interaction take place. Think about it. A determinist argument essentially builds a causal link from the most basic non-mental elements up to the point where it has effects in the mental realm. Does this happen? Sure, it's a feature of mind. But should we therefore eliminate mind, just because it is intimately interconnected with the physical world? Not at all. That is one of its most intriguing features.
In my analysis, reductionism and determinism are grounded in the discoveries and philosophies of the great pioneers of modern scientific method, specifically, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes. A major part of this was the model of the world as material objects obeying strictly physical laws, and an immaterial mind which was destined to being dismissed as being the 'ghost in the machine' (in Gilbert Ryle's phrase.) This is one of the consequences of the division between so-called 'primary' and 'secondary' qualities, with the primary qualities said to be intrinsic to objects (and hence, inherently real), and the latter being designated as 'in the mind of the observer' (which inevitably 'subjectivises' them). This construction has many far-reaching consequences on all of us and culture at large. It's no coincidence that it accompanied the birth of liberal individualism, whereby 'the individual' is felt to be an atomic unit of self-directed moral autonomy living within this 'construction'.
So in this context, mental states and freedom of the will, are not even real objects of analysis, as they're not objectively real. Behaviourism was really the only modern movement that fully acknowledged that, although it's arguable that elminative materialism is really its descendant. But the key point is, 'the modern outlook' *is* a mental construction, it is something that only exists because of consensus. It has no intrinsic reality (although it does have a lot of utility.)
Once you see through that and understand where it comes from, it makes it much easier to understand the controversies around it, although there's a lot of work involved in doing that.
Yes, I have read 3 volumes of the works of Dilthey, who is one of the great historians of ideas. I think that the history of the idea of consciousness, in particular, is in a sense coeval with what we experience as consciousness. I've made that remark on the forum before.
I concur with your assessment of consensus. It's a central theme also.
Yes, I am in this particular case focusing on the eliminative/deterministic aspect because of the connection to will and freedom. But I feel the argument applies, mutatis mutandis, to reductionism at its most abstract or general level.
One thing being made out of another thing is the core of systems theory, which very much synthesizes the material elements of reductionism and the mental elements of rationalism or idealism (depending on whether your context is epistemological or ontological) through the approach of "biperspectivisim." Each is an aspect of a complex adaptive system, depending on whether the viewpoint assumed is external or internal. (I posted a while ago about a physics experiment in which results from these two different viewpoints were gathered and compared, such that time appeared to be flowing backwards.)
And reductionism usually does entail the marginalization of emergent properties, as far as I know. Setting aside "hybrid" types that try to reintegrate what the original approach has tried unsuccessfully to exclude (in the face of critical argument and evidence). I feel when schools of thought branch and evolve like this proponents have in a sense become apologists for the original theory.
Kudos :pray: . That's an achievement in its own right.
Lol! Dilthey is pretty thick. Like a quagmire, but if you get enough underneath you, it is solid enough to stand on. I bought the three volume set about 8 years ago, and got through the first two volumes before I hit saturation point. I only read the third volume last fall.
Absolutely. The science of sociology has evolved more or less self-consciously to fill this niche, which is what I'm focusing on now.
Since the winter I've covered Marx, Weber, Mead, Habermas. I have some more purely cultural works lined up (Dewey, Habermas' political stuff), then I'm going to move on to sociology of linguistics and symbols (Saussure, Cassirer). All in the context of the history of ideas of course. :)
What you easily lose is the ability to answering questions, observing phenomena, that aren't present at all in the constituents parts. There being a causal relation and there being interesting question about phenomena and events don't go hand in hand.
An aircraft is made up of bolts and metal, but a metallurgist cannot say anything about the performance of the aircraft simply looking at the pieces of metal that the aircraft is made up. Question that can be answered about aerodynamics or aircraft engineering cannot be answered by looking at just the parts. But it doesn't apply that those parts wouldn't be what interact together and give the construction the ability to fly. There is just no way you can answer important questions about the whole (how well an aircraft flies) just by looking at the parts.
Hence in my view the problem with reductionism is that it makes false arguments on WHAT QUESTIONS can be answered from parts. Or otherwise quantum physicists could answer questions about cultural history.
In fact, social sciences is a perfect example by itself of how absolutely ridiculous is reductionism taken to it's extreme is. Because societies are made of human beings, why wouldn't all social sciences be answered by a smart biologist / psychologist / neuroscientist? Because group of people that makes up a society doesn't behave as a one human being and even differs from a few people put together.
Unfortunately this isn't understood and there is this idea at least at a unconscious level that reductionism is possible, if we just have better computers, better theories, better data. This thinking simply doesn't understand that there can surely be a causal relationship, but that doesn't mean that every question important to us can be answered going down the causal relationship to smaller parts. Above all, this doesn't mean that something physically is missing from the equation.
I agree that for obvious practical reasons this kind of reductionism is not feasable, but why do you think that it would be impossible in principle? You don't really seem to give an argument for that, which is why I'm asking.
Because you lack the information needed to understand the question that needs more than the part.
That's not really an answer, I don't think, because it just shifts the question. Why do you lack information, if you know everything about the parts and their relation to eachother? Where does additional information come in then?
If the Third Reich used a cyanide-based pesticide to kill for them unwanted people in an efficient way, the "reductionist" correct view is that these specific humans died because breathing this pesticide. You can go all the way to molecular chemistry and biology to show just why this happens. But if someone asks "Why did these people die?", this answer relying on the chemistry and biology really doesn't cut it. Yes, it's correct, but no, it doesn't answer much anything.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
From the questions themselves. Questions define what kind of information we look for. We create these complex things in order to explain complex phenomena. We can see a causal relationship from some specific vantage point going, but the questions aren't anymore answerable.
Just think about economics. There's no such thing as "Gross Domestic Product" or an "Economic Depression" or a "Speculative Bubble" in the material World. But to view our society by using these kind of definitions makes us understand complex phenomena in our economy. And do they effect our behaviour, which by aggregate determines them? Sure. If I read that the GDP is going to fall of a cliff, I change my behaviour with my investment portfolio.
Or to think about in the sphere of natural sciences, when does a cloud that rains turn into a hurricane? Can you explain everything that happens in a hurricane from observing a tiny cloud in an area where hurricanes don't exist?
Okay, thank you for the explanation. I agree with it insofar those higher level questions relate to how we understand things. We wouldn't be able to understand those larger scale phenomenon described at the level of the atoms, not because those explanations are wrong or incomplete, but because we don't have the capacity to comprehend them at that level of detail.
I just don't know why this explanation isn't used.
And if the answer would be that "we have to be more holistic, take into consideration larger amount of interactions", then that wouldn't be reductionistic, would it?
No it wouldn't, it's the opposite it seems to me.
In fact that's actually what knowledge is I think, abstracting away from the world of particulars, to be able to make more general predictions.... or put in another way, we loose information at the level of detail, to gain knowledge on larger scales, i.e. to have a more holistic view.
Reductionism in science is the idea of unity of science: that different special sciences present different aspects of the same fundamental order of nature. If you believe that such an order is at least plausible, then you should not find the idea of reductionism objectionable.
Isn't it a bit more than this? That the special sciences are in principle replaceable by a single fundamental science, usually physics. That means causation is bottom up, and there's no strong emergence of any entirely novel properties.
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, what Marchesk said. :up:
The line between a reductionist approach and a non-reductionist approach is pretty clear, and I don't want to get bogged down in versioning. It struck me, as I said, that in meticulously constructing ever more elaborate bottom-up descriptions of how consciousness can be replaced by empirical-causal mechanisms, what reductionists have done - from the contrary perspective - is actually built a very solid framework for the causal interaction of mind and body.
Of course there will be some amount of bottom-up influence from matter to mind. That's the entire issue. But just because there is this "feedforward" capability doesn't mean it necessarily eliminates consciousness. Feeback from consciousness to the environment can also happen. Must happen, in fact, because for any action to take place there must be an equal and opposite reaction. So the environment can only 'influence' consciousness to the extent it is also influenced by consciousness (assuming there is some universal form of conservation law).
Right, versus the notion that the whole is actually more than the sum of its parts.
There isn't a generally accepted meaning of reductionism, but yes, there is a widely shared view that presents the program of scientific unification as a kind of pyramid with the most fundamental science - usually taken to be physics - at the bottom, underlying all other sciences. However, the exact nature of this underlying is a contested matter. It can be cached out as a loose supervenience, or as Nagelian bridge laws, or something in between.
Quoting Pantagruel
So clear that you still haven't managed to identify it. Reductionism isn't even an ontological thesis, and yet the actual target of your vague vituperations seems to be some cartoonish eliminativism.
A 200lb pile of graphite and a 200lb solid diamond grandfather clock are both just 200lbs of carbon atoms, but the arrangement of those atoms makes all the difference. Saying that does not go against the reducibility of them both.
Sorry Pfhorrest, I don't understand the point? I'm not saying that reductionism qua analysis is invalid. I'm saying that concluding that there is nothing "above" that level of analysis is unwarranted.
Observations? It's intended to be more of a synthesizing exercise, bringing some concepts and points of view together, in the context of my own understanding. Several people appear comfortable with the way reductionism is being characterized, it's neither complicated nor a far reach. The observation is that, ironically, the reductionist enterprise can be seen as constructing a framework for the very things that it denies (emergent properties).
edit. And although I don't like to resort to quicky definitions, your comment about reductionism not being ontological came off as pretty dismissive. From the Stanford EP:
"Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relations between different scientific domains."
Certainly this has always been my own understanding of the concept.
Yes, some people are comfortable with such breathy, substance-free rhetoric that amounts to little more than "Boo reductionism!" ("Boo materialism!" "Boo scientism!) There are any number of critical discussions to be had about reductionism (cf. the SEP article that you just googled), but unfortunately, this is not one of them.
Which have never been found. So in effect it is ‘reduction to a mathematical abstraction’.
I'm very pleased that you have lumped reductionism and materialism in there with scientism. Excellent observation. :up:
Or basically that reductionist view simply doesn't give us any information. Let's think about for example historical events and how we explain them:
As history is focused on what happens with people, you could argue that you would get a better historical explanation if you somehow recorded and wrote down every action that every human being does at some time. Think about it as like a holistic-reductionist mix. Like "The history of 1939 - 1945 of every person, their every action and interaction between other humans during this time". And if that isn't detailed enough, then how about "the position and movement of every atom during the period of 1939 - 1945 in our solar system".
The fact is, that this finite (but very large) set of data simply wouldn't give us much if any useful data if we wouldn't use conventional history. The fact is, we would have to interpret the data. It wouldn't be useful as just raw data. Even on the level of one person that lived during 1939-1945, the thing is the life of a Malian farmer in Colonial French West Africa wouldn't be as informative to historians as let's say the life (every word he utters and every interaction) that the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had 1939-1945. The question we pose define what is important, so I guess for a sociologist studying colonial Mali naturally the farmer would be more important than Stalin, but he or she has a different set of questions from the usual. Some events simply just tell us more than others. And why something is more important than other things is exactly because of our social constructs in our mind like nations etc. that simply aren't reduced to atom level interaction.
I like Popper's three world approach. He describes concepts (social constructs) as constituting their own unique realm (world 3) and quite successfully describes inter-world interactions, I think.
That's not supervenience
Reductionist scientism isn't going to answer questions about it. The only consequence is that journalists trying to ponder about the "deep roots" and "real underlying issues" will ask a quantum physicist or a cosmologist about issues totally outside their realm of study. Not very helpful.
I'm just now really looking outside of philosophy toward sociology for instance because I've grasped the theme of 'spirit' running through philosophy (as in connecting Wittgenstein to Hegel.) 'Spirit' is cultural software (or soft-where?) What kind of being does language have? How does 'the social' exist? It's historical. So what is history? A sequence of events or (more importantly) something alive in us now? In the very language we use (or are) to ask such a question? And how is our own investigation of this history dominated by that same history? We are cat chasing our own tail, and becoming aware of that is part of the chase.
Some philosophers are afraid of 'spirit' as too squishy. They wan't to construct an atemporal method for critical thinking, and they fend off insights that suggest the impossibility of such a project .
Others are keen on addressing spirit but angsty about how historical it seems to be. For them the method is a forgotten treasure, not a work still and perhaps endlessly in progress (both spirit and the talk of spirit, which is part of spirit.)
Also, Saussure is awesome. Culler's little book on him is great.
Yes, I agree, it is almost as if a big part of the battle is internal. If I didn't know better, I'd swear it was the 'little ego' trying to stave off the larger self.....
Thanks very much for the recommendation! I was hoping to find a good introduction before tackling the Course and I was able to find a PDF.
Some people find the notion upsetting, but the fact is, science only attempts to provide a predictive model. As long as the model's predictions are useful in explaining observed events, it doesn't actually matter how accurately the model represents reality. The components of the model may be simplifications, such as in Newtonian physics, which doesn't claim any particular 'center.' It is a mathematical simplification to consider the earth going around the sun. Nothing really 'orbits' anything except in our own perception. That is the model's terminology to explain what we observe in reductionist terms. It doesn't mean there needs to be an evolutionary process, just as there doesnt really need to be an 'orbit,' except in how we observe events predicted by those concepts.
Much of the time, the correlations are observable and straightforward enough in normal human discourse, but too frequently it takes a wild dip into the insane, such as astronomers deciding pluto is not a planet, as if there really has to be such a thing as a 'planet' that astronomers have led themselves to believe they can define better than anyone else in the first place.
The Pluto planethood debate is an excellent example of the biggest fallacy in reductionism, that a simpler model necessarily describes reality.
I'd just about swear the same thing. That 'little ego' is like the kernel of various ideologies that are superficially opposed. I went from Derrida to Saussure, and so much that I like in Derrida was already there in Saussure, albeit more ambivalently. The system of differences without positive elements is pretty mind-blowing, and it helped me see Wittgenstein in a new way. I hope you like Culler's book as much as I did, and it's great you found a pdf.
Yes, that is a pet peeve of mine also. "Planet" is a descriptive category, but it is also an historical one. Scientists can be somewhat...overzealous in their pursuit of categorization, sometimes in changing it and sometimes in defending it.
Yes, this is becoming pretty much universally appreciated I think. The law of conservation seems to be the one universal constant, and it is uncomplicated: for A to affect B, B must equally affect A. You can't push against nothing.
Very interesting. I read Derrida and Wittgenstein 25 years ago, and did not like either. I think I lacked sufficient context to really understand them. I believe I'll revisit both when I get through all my new purchases.
"You can't push against nothing."
Exactly. The same law of action-reaction applies to the mind-body problem. The body has an evident impact on the mind. Thus it follows that the mind must have some impact on the body, like when I ask you to raise your arm and you do it: that's symbolic language having a material impact. So the idea that mind is an epiphenomenon contradicts the laws of physics.
I think Saussure's idea of negative differences between concepts and their absence of clear-cut ontological value is fundamental to understand natural languages. Concepts are relational, the meaning is at the level of the network between concepts more so than inside each concept taken in isolation.
It's what I call naive materialism. The belief in the primacy of "matter" (whatever that means) over anything else. But as we have known since what? Aristotle?, matter always comes in some form. There's no such thing as formless matter. Even pure chaos is a sort of form. And one cannot really conceive of a 'pure' form not encased in some material support (though Plato tried). Therefore matter and information are joined at the conceptual hip: you can't have one without the other.
In a less naive form of materialism, Descartes dualism should be reformed into the fundamental duality or ying-yang relationship between matter and information (understood as the infinite shapes and forms that matter can take and 'support'), two sides of the same coin.
Is this related to the hermenuetic circle?
Sounds like a reasonable direction to me....
More to system thinking and structuralism.
I'm very much a proponent and advocate of systems philosophy. Have you read Laszlo?
Nope. Checked his Wikipedia entry and I'm interested. I like this idea of "a field of information as the substance of the cosmos", the "Akashic field". That's very close to my thinking.
I remain fundamentally a realist as well as a lazy person so I might not buy into all the psychedelics, but I like the idea of a quantum mind as well. This is something I have been playing with, because I found that the quantum wave-particle duality looks strangely similar to my concept of mind-body duality* and to its underlying idea of a matter-information duality as being the stuff this universe is made of (which itself resemble the "Akashic field"?).
* aka mind-brain duality, however the brain is but a part of our nervous system so I prefer "mind-body" - the term "mind-nervous system duality" would be the most precise but it's too long.
Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 1900s, mainly in France and Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when structural linguistics were facing serious challenges from thinkers and philosophers such as Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.
Again, epiphenomenalism is not the same as reductionism. You can maintain that A is in some sense reducible to B without denying the reality and causal efficacy of A.
Epiphenomenalism has always puzzled me by its outsize place in the philosophy of mind. Seen in a larger context, one could use the same causal exclusion premise to construct any number of parallel arguments to the effect that special sciences are causally inert. For example, chemistry must be causally inert if it doesn't play any causal roles over and above underlying physics. So it would seem that epiphenomenalism with respect to the mental is a minor special case of a much larger question of intertheory relations.
Completely wrong. The weakest possible reductive relationship is that of supervenience: "No A changes without B changes." So if A is reducible to B, then anything that happens at the A level must have an effect at the B level.
Unless we have a technological innovation to support handling stupendously large numbers of degrees of freedom, it is insane to treat a large complex system using more exact, elementary theory. The cutoff limit is a technological characteristic only. It is not in any way evidence that any non-elementary field of study is not reducible to a more fundamental theory. There is nothing wrong with a purely theoretical description of the entire Universe in principle. There's something truly wrong with anyone who'd try it in practise.
The other obvious point to make is that just because one set of laws is seen to emerge from a more fundamental set of laws (such as chemical and classical mechanical laws from QM) it doesn't mean that, on day 1, proponents of the latter can explain everything that the former can. There's a lot of ab rectum arguments that start: "But science cannot explain..." which belie a more anti-scientific than anti-reductionist stance. It is not science's job to provide answers to all questions -- it is not a religion. It's often science's job to say "I don't know, let's find out" -- it is a method of enquiry and verification.
The argument that e.g. physical chemistry is incapable of describing mental states on the basis that, still in its infancy, it has failed to describe mental states is a failure to note the trajectory of scientific accomplishment. It is not a "proof" that mental states cannot be yielded from more elementary theory. Perhaps the most interesting part of moving to a more fundamental theory is seeing precisely how complex phenomena emerge, if technology allows. It is certainly not desirable to "eliminate our most interesting phenomena"; we are simply limited in what we can achieve at any given time. Again, it's a method, not a religion.
Last point: science is reductionism-friendly, not reductionism-driven. When someone discovers a more fundamental theory, we examine it. We keep our minds open to the possibility that the electron has internal structure, while proceeding on the assumption that it does not, at least until that assumption can be shown to fail. It is nature that has shown herself partial to reductionism, giving us one phenomena (electromagnetism) that looks to us like two (electricity and magnetism), then three (electricity, magnetism, and the weak nuclear force). We have had to change our theories to suit her. The idea that science is reductionist endeavour because of its human constituents rather than because of the nature it represents paints us as far more motivated than we really are. We get points for testability, not originality.
Ergo, to criticize of reductionism is to have an issue with what explanations are, how the word "explanation" is defined. It's like approving a cake recipe but disapproving the cake itself. To cut to the chase, we need a different definition of "explanation". Just think of it, suppose the mind is not reducible to physics and chemistry and we get our hands on a different explanation but, this explantion too must be ultimately reductionist - the mind being understood in terms of something simpler.
If A has causal efficacy, why can’t something from level A affect something from level B?
Not really. It is to criticize the traditional materialist conceptual toolbox for explaining things as being made of just one single tool. It’s not enough to explain this world.
You tell me.
Quoting Olivier5
Reductionism is not peculiar to materialism, and neither does materialism entail reductionism. Idealism is reductionist with respect to the physical. On the other hand, there are non-reductionists among materialists/physicalists.
If I were to take exception to anything, I would think science is at least partially reductionism-driven, insofar as science should always seek the simplest principles....derived from the fewest conceptions.....to justify its methods.
Otherwise......well done.
Then why give such a misleading name to the problem, - "reductionism"? Call it what it really is - materialism.
Thank you! :) Occam's razor is not really the same as reductionism or is perhaps a very different kind of reductionism. Occam's razor shaves off assumptions in a theory that are unnecessary to the predictions that theory yields, e.g. that gravity is due to the curvature of a spacetime called Barbara. Reductionism replaces study of a system as a whole with study of its structural components working together. What I mean by "not reductionism-driven" is that, when a new thing is discovered (say, the Higgs boson), the next logical question isn't "what is it made of?". It's perfectly reasonable to be open to the idea of a Higgs boson having an internal structure, even though that doesn't fit with Higg's theory. But one proceeds on the assumption of simplicity until experiment suggests otherwise, which is what happened with atoms.
It's not really a philosophical position. We have limited resources for limited time; it is uneconomical to investigate questions there's no experimental reason for asking.
That said, it does happen. After formulating general relativity, Einstein immediately sought a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism. This wasn't completely random: the mathematical similarities between the two theories are intriguing, and Einstein was in a position to do whatever Einstein wanted. A mathematician named Klein later found that both theories are the same in five dimensions, which gave rise to string theory, and what a waste of resources that turned out to be! Quantum gravity theorists are also reductionist, attempting to formulate a quantum theory of gravity to replace general relativity. Again, it's not a total longshot: quantum mechanics absorbed the special theory of relativity easily enough and that gave rise to quantum theories of all other forces, so it was not expected to be as hard as it turned out to be. (Also, string theory, which is a quantum theory, churns out gravity very well, hence it stuck around for so long.)
But these are exceptions to the rule, what we call "fringe science" or sometimes harshly "pseudoscience". Generally, we proceed on the basis that, if there's no evidence for internal structure of a thing, the thing can be assumed to be simple even if it is not. And most of the time we treat complex things as simple. (An anecdote: a fluid mechanics lecturer is asked about the aerodynamics of horse-racing. The lecture thinks, then takes up her chalk: "Assume the horse to be a perfect sphere...")
The drive to determine e.g. how love works on a physical level isn't scientists being spoilsports. We love love as much as the next fella. It's just that we know stuff about the brain now that leads us to examine how complex-seeming phenomena like love in complex systems like bodies can arise from interactions between simpler components for which well-tested theory already exists.
Yeah, William was more into parsimony than reductionism, per se.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What isn’t? Reductionism? True enough, although reasoning logically from the general to the particular might be considered a philosophical reduction.
Another interesting post, at any rate. So thanks for that.
And thank you again! ^ I meant the scientific community's tendency to assume simplicity where possible. It's not a philosophy, rather an economy.
Must be a scientific domain then; there’s no such thing as economic philosophy.
Or using Occam's razor.
Analysis and reductionism are not the same thing. You can analyze anything into its components. It only becomes reductive when you assume that every phenomena at the system level (i.e. the thing being analyzed) must be sufficiently described at the level of the analyzed components.
I should clarify, practically speaking, it's an economy. Scientists will also defend Occam's razor philosophically. (Which is necessary for defending the economy.)
Quoting Pantagruel
For clarity, and your definition does cover this but not explicitly, the phenomena of the structure need to be understandable in terms of more elementary phenomena, not the same phenomena exhibited by more elementary components. What many-body people call "collective behaviour". This rids us of having to explain why the concept of love need not exist in atoms. Or at least it should :joke:
Somehow I missed this reply four days ago, sorry about that.
My point was that it's the arrangement of parts that constitutes the object of study at a higher level.
Physics takes its most fundamental things, say quantum fields today, and builds more complicated things like atoms out of those. At a physics level, even an electron is a rather complicated thing: "it" is actually an ongoing process of two types of proto-electron particles constantly interacting with the Higgs field and alternating between each other. Each type of quark likewise. Nucleons like protons and neutrons in turn are complexes of those quarks (which are already complex processes) interacting with each other and a bunch of gluons, and then atoms are even more complex processes of those nucleons and some electrons interacting with each other and the photons that constitute the electromagnetic field. Even a "simple particle" like a hydrogen atom is not just the sum of its parts, but the sum of its parts and the arrangement between them, including the temporal arrangement, or interaction.
Chemistry then takes the aggregate behaviors of lots of atoms together, only dipping a toe here and there barely down into the physics level, to build substances made of complex molecules, mostly not caring about stuff on the physics level anymore like the gluons holding quarks together into protons. A chemical substance isn't just the sum of the atoms it's made of, but of the atoms and the arrangements between them. A really clear example of this are isomers: octane and iso-octane molecules are made of exactly the same parts, but have very different arrangement of them, and so have very different chemical properties. But still, you could, if it mattered, bother to describe octane and iso-octane and everything they do differently from each other in terms of a bunch of quantum fields. It's just that at this level of study, that'd be a waste of time. There isn't anything new in the description of the world when you introduce the concept of iso-octane; that's just a useful shorthand for a particular pattern of things some atoms can do, which atoms are in turn just useful shorthand for particular patterns of things that more fundamental things can do.
Biology, likewise, takes aggregate behaviors of lots of substances together, various tissues and the structures formed out of them into the bodies of organisms, and only dips a toe here and there barely down into the chemistry level. You could, if it mattered, bother to describe an organism in terms of a bunch of chemical interactions, and for the very simplest of organisms, we sometimes do close to that. Those chemical interactions could in turn be described in terms of quantum fields, if you wanted to waste your time. There still isn't anything new in the description of the world when you introduce the concepts of organisms, species, etc: those are just useful shorthand for particular patterns of things that some chemicals can do.
Psychology likewise. It's about kinds of things some organisms do. It only occasionally dips a toe here and there just barely down into the biological level. But you could, if it mattered, in principle, just describe psychological stuff in terms of biological stuff. It would be a waste of time, because those details aren't important. But when introducing concepts like beliefs and emotions, we're still not adding anything new to the description of the world. We could, in principle, just describe what a bunch of quantum fields are doing, and get a picture (e.g. view a simulation) of human beings with all their thoughts and feelings. It's just extremely useful to have shorthand that hides all of that unnecessary detail when it doesn't matter for the purposes at hand; what one gluon is doing to one quark doesn't matter for the purposes of what Bob is feeling right now. But Bob's feelings still ultimately boil down to a bunch of quarks and gluons and stuff doing things to each other.
I think that's the whole point is that we couldn't just do that. That's the essence of system-emergent properties. As systems co-evolve, new types of inter-relationships come into being which did not exist among the constituent sub-systems.
You could argue, for example, that the laws of chemistry have always existed. But until the long process of plasma-particle-object evolution has actually happened and complex systems capable of housing chemical interactions actually come into being, saying those chemical laws previously existed seems a stretch to me.
That seems highly hypothetical to me. Like angels on the head of a pin hypothetical. I would say the syngeristic-holistic fact of reality transcends simple simulation, yes.
Because I’m pretty sure that’s something someone could code up today, given that we’ve had complex protein folding simulations for decades already.
Pfhorrest, there is no intertheoretic reduction of chemistry to physics.
What really interests me is how a geometric construct called the amplituhedron, functioning along the lines of fractal attractors in systems theory, allows particle-particle interactions which used to require supercomputers significant calculation time to be done by hand on one sheet of paper.
edit: From "Intertheory Relations in Physics" (Stanford EoP)
Even within physical science, reduction between different levels of explanation is problematic—indeed, it is almost always so. Chemistry is supposed to have been reduced to quantum mechanics, yet people still argue over the basic question of how quantum mechanics can describe the shape of a molecule. The statistical mechanics of a fluid reduces to its thermodynamics in the limit of infinitely many particles, yet that limit breaks down near the critical point, where liquid and vapour merge, and where we never see a continuum no matter how distantly we observe the particles … . The geometrical (Newtonian) optics of rays should be the limit of wave optics as the wavelength becomes negligibly small, yet … the reduction (mathematically similar to that of classical to quantum mechanics) is obstructed by singularities
You use the term differently than I do. To me, it's the idea that you can explain anything by looking at its parts, and that this will provide sufficient explanation and prediction. I disagree on ground of system theory, that says that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
May I ask for your definition of reductionism, or a good approximation thereof?
There are different forms and theories of reduction, but the general pattern is to say that A is nothing over and above B, or A is explained by B, or A is corrected by B, or sometimes that A is constituted by B. But these broad generalizations don't tell you much - you really need to look at the specifics of each kind and instance of reduction. Pat slogans like "the whole is larger than its parts" are useless, and gesturing towards "systems theory" (as if there was just one) doesn't help either. This only serves to signal ideological allegiance.
Yes, this is exactly the sense in which I started the thread.
The products of the actual reductive enterprise are valuable, as this can in one sense be viewed as the process of scientific analysis. But the extrapolation to the conclusion that "that's all there is" misses the bigger picture.
The parts are typically replaceable, and the structure (or system) will still work.
For instance, let's take a large mechanical clock, with wheels of say 1 to 3 inches wide, made of some metal eg steel. The clock works. One day for some reason, a wheel breaks. The owner orders the piece but has to wait a long time for it so he decides to 3D print a replica, identical to the broken wheel but made of some hard plastic. He fits it in and the clock works again, at least for a few days (plastic being more wearable than steel).
I posit that what happened there can easily be explained within a non-reductionist system approach: it's the structure, the shape of the pieces and the way they are put together, that makes the clock work. So all you need to replace a part is a replica of the same shape, the actual material you use is secondary (though it matters of course, eg for durability reasons) as long as it is solid at ambiant temperature.
However, in a reductionist approach, one would have to redo the whole quantic level of the explanation, as the fundamental physics involved in explaining metal and plastic solidity are different.
Ergo sometimes system thinking beats reductionism.
Absolutely. I am a staunch systems theorist. It is analysis, but operating within a different governing paradigm, systems-centric.
Yeah, that kind silly example is a good illustration of how useless this slogan is (or any slogan for that matter). That is, if your interest runs deeper than boo-hooray.
I would say it values synthesis and analysis equally, while reductionism uses only analysis.
You must know the paradox called the ship of Theseus. What's your solution for it?
Interestingly, our body is a literal example of the ship of Theseus. Pretty much all the parts in our body, ie the molecules comprising it, are constantly being replaced and recycled. That's how the body keeps itself alive: through constant maintenance and replacement of broken parts.
I think the systems theoretic answer would be that it does not require a solution. It is only a paradox if you attempt to enforce either a bottom-up or a top-down interpretation exclusively. Bi-perspectivism is a feature of systems philosophy.
Exactly. In system thinking, any part of the structure is replaceable by a similar part, because what matters most is the structure. As long as Theseus's ship remains structurally identical to itself, Theseus can replace all the parts and he still has a boat.
What does this have to do with anything? Are you trying to foist another silly strawman on reductionism, or are you just throwing random shit against the wall and hoping that something sticks?
The ship of Theseus is a good example of why the structural level is important. And by definition you cannot explain a structure by breaking it into pieces. You have to pay attention to how the shape of the structure as a whole arranges, channels and combines the interactions between the pieces into a succesful, functioning outcome, eg a floating boat or a living body.
Meaning?
@Pantagruel
My go-to example for this sort of thing is the theory of evolution. It is one of the most powerful and influential scientific theories that we have ("Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansky), and it is not reductionist, it is a systems theory.
Since Darwin developed his theory, we have learned a lot about the chemistry of life in general, and the mechanism of biological inheritance in particular. This has increased our understanding of evolution; for one thing, things that once had to be taken for granted (such as inheritance itself) now have a causal explanation.
This does not mean that the theory of evolution is redundant. On the contrary, a reductionist explanation, of how the current distribution of species on Earth came to be, is conceivable (though very much in principle), in the form of a vast catalog of every mutation along every line of descent of every organism alive today. Even if we had such a catalog, however, we would still, as Dobzhansky says, need a theory of evolution to make sense of it - the purely reductionist view is not wrong, it is just not useful on its own.
These days, there is little support for the notion that there is something about evolution that does not have a physical cause, along the lines described above, and the reason why reductionism is an issue in the philosophy of mind is because we wonder if the same could be said of the mind.
The origin of life is much more speculative than its evolution, but these days, the two camps on that matter simply ignore one another, for the most part. In many ways, the human mind has become the last refuge of vitalism, and science has not yet developed to the point where it can dislodge it.
Excellent example! I totally subscribe to the idea that one can understand an element only by looking at how this element fits in the big picture. E.g. the idea that "selfish genes" drive evolution is simply wrong. Genes are just the ink and paper on which the story is written down. They are not the story. The story is about organisms and species.
Life in general is systemic. It is information bossing matter around, as much or more than vice versa.
I think the essence of systems thinking is that things do not boss each other around so much as they exhibit robust patterns of interconnectedness in a process of ongoing complexification...