I read that too and I think your take is basically right, but I think Deutsch’s view is a bit more nuanced.

As he said in the Fabric of Reality: “The fabric of reality does not consist only of reductionist ingredients like space, time and subatomic particles, but also of life, thought, computation and the other things to which those explanations refer.”

Also, as I quoted previously in this thread, he said “In the reductionist world-view, the laws governing subatomic particle interactions are of paramount importance, as they are the base of the hierarchy of all knowledge. But in the real structure of scientific knowledge, and in the structure of our knowledge generally, such laws have a much more humble role.”

So, in his view they have “role” (though often a very humble one). The examples you quote point out how humble that can be at times.

The game of life demonstrates how simple rules can result in other rules that weren’t in the original rules. How one thinks of it depends, I think, on how one thinks of the rules; are they descriptors of the behaviors observed or are they, in a very real sense, actual inherent rules that limit behavior.

Maybe, they are both

Baby Jones,

I think that Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity can apply to ways of knowing as well; if you get analytic, you can’t pay attention to the synthetic, and vice-versa. But both are complementary and needed to get the ‘whole picture’.

Ric,

good job

I think part of the ‘issue’ is that, and I think this is a left-over from supernatural theism, that people in Western culture grow up thinking that these laws/habits are more ‘real’/important if they exist independently of us than if they are, at least a bit, created by us (like the various ways we have of harnessing the economy or justice).

I think also a big problem is just translation — when these scientists do their discoveries, they do it (hopefully) in a precise epistemology (eg. we observed this at such and such a time under such and such conditions in this location), but when they then talk about it to the public, they have to then use a language that isn’t quite up to snuff for discussion of the experiment — a lot of the precise nuance is lost and we get things like ‘the G_d particle’ being discussed.

Or so it is perhaps.

But I agree completely with your second paragraph, and that was exactly the point Deutsch was making in my quote above @9. Emergent explanations are often more important than reductionist ones, but reality ultimately consists of both — as long as they’re good explanations. See @16.

On most weekdays, the particles that make up me bounce back and forth between the Ravenswood and Hyde Park neighborhoods of Chicago. Why do my particles do this? My answer would be that I live in Ravenswood and I work in Hyde Park: So this happens because of my job. However, to the reductionist, my “job” seems not exist. It’s not part of the physical stuff of the universe. The building where I do my job is real, but my job is merely a set of immaterial tasks–not ontologically real. So it can’t be the real reason for my particles to bounce between the two neighborhoods. There must be a physical reason for it.

If that’s true, it renders my job, and by extension the industry in which I work, and indeed the entire world economy a mere illusion. Each must be constructed post-hoc, mere reflections of the physical workings of the universe. Any causal powers they may seem to have are illusions. This scenario is troubling to me, and doesn’t pass the parsimony test. Can someone from the reductionist camp show me where I’ve gone wrong?

(Having just re-read this, I will accept “You’re crazy” as an answer.)

What I mean is say there were lots more quantum-like forces in the early universe, much more than just the electoweak and strong forces. These rapidly became unmeasurable via an uncertainty principle based on frequency, except for the forces that we can measure today. That is, these ur-forces went dark after only a short time and the only thing that remains of them is their gravity (gravity being the nonquantum residue of these faded forces; goodbye graviton).

Detection of their faded quanta would be extremely infrequent so as to lie below a Planck Frequency that determines the difference between what can be statistically meaningful and what cannot be statistically meaningful. That is, were they ever to be detected now or in the future it would be in principle impossible to separate the event from detector noise.

This faded forces theory would explain gravity in a new way. Gravity would not be quantum and have some aspects of an effective field theory. Dark matter would be gravitationally observable but not associated with a particle. And although you can make a reductionist statement about the beginning of the universe, since forces fade out, what remains forms essentially a new universe with fewer rules than the previous one, and fewer rules working together would be like new rules emerging.

It’s rather amusing that that someone who probably fancies him or her self as a League-One Scientist has such a hard time spelling League.

Most Leauge-One scientists, i.e. string theorists, have already settled the issue in favour of holism by virtue of Holography. Every time you scratch deeper into an explanation, you end up with a more complicated and rich structure (much to the contrary of the “dream of a final theory” which advocated the explanation of nature by some “elementary particle/string or other simple theory”). String theory, M-theory and further still to be discovered more complicated structures are *necessary* to explain such different phenomena from superconductivity, chaos and confinement. Moreover, the Landscape put the final nail in the coffin of predictability. Hence, we are more and more confident that we cannot explain physical reality even in principle.

So, even if “in principle” we cannot disprove reductionism (but we cannot prove it as well), there is currently a strong intuition to think more in terms of a holistic approach. People who still debate reductionism are not current research frontliners. Those who are in negation, are relegated to League-Two and become astro-cosmologists.

This has gone way off topic from reductionism, though.

Just to clarify, are you saying that something like my appreciation of a certain kind of music should be able to be mapped out using the Schrodinger equation, or are you saying something else?

Like the Bible says with fruits, scientists use the fruits that they have, instead of inventing new fruits. They compare what they experience with the fruits that they already have to figure things out.

So one can look at that recovery and come up with hypotheses and if someone wants to call that ‘G_d’, then more power to them, but that isn’t an explanation, especially since the word itself can be used to mean anything.

So scientists limit themselves. And try to be very specific in that “in this experiment, at this time, at this location, under these conditions, we found such and such to apparently be the case…”

And yes, they are subject to tribalisms, anything human is. Hopefully, they will follow the evidence wherever it leads, no matter how uncomfortable it makes them.

People have to love to learn to live with being limited…or go crazy denying it

I’ll keep my mind open

Not so open your brains fall out, I hope. Really, this “open mind” business is a really boring theme from people who use it simply to mean “I have no evidence or coherent theory to back up what I’m saying, but I would like to deflect any criticism you might make by accusing you of narrow thinking”.

*sigh*