Let’s take the well-studied example of the conversion of sunlight into chemical energy by plants. If physical law really depends importantly on macroscopic context, then there should be some dependence on context when we study something like this—some point where, by breaking something into smaller parts, we make a significantly wrong prediction about its behavior.
So, plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. And if you break a plant into smaller parts, it turns out that it’s the parts with green pigment that do this. But if you cut off the leaf of a tree and look at it without the context of a tree, it still seems to behave the same.
But of course leaves are made of cells, so you can look at just a single cell of the leaf. But a single cell seems to absorb sunlight just the same alone as it did when it was part of the leaf—we can predict the rate of absorption of the leaf more or less just from the cells, and the absorption of the tree from its leaves.
Now let’s jump down to chlorophyll, which is the molecule that absorbs the light. Even if you take chlorophyll out of the cell, it still works fine. The activity of the cell can be predicted from knowledge of chlorophyll.
If you break the chlorophyll into its atoms, it doesn’t absorb light the same. But we can predict how it will work using the arrangement of atoms and quantum mechanics.
I understand your point, but I’d be interested to see this proven (or dis-proven) bottom-up from first principles… observing that something in particular (chlorophyll, photosynthesis, etc) reduces from the top down like this leaves too many holes for it to really disprove the idea (e.g. maybe this isn’t a physical function that changes depending on higher-level organization).
I think the way to check this is that someone would have to come up with a specific theory that explains the currently-poorly-understood low-level behavior of fundamental particles based on the idea that the rules of their behavior depend on their higher-level organization.
Let’s take the well-studied example of the conversion of sunlight into chemical energy by plants. If physical law really depends importantly on macroscopic context, then there should be some dependence on context when we study something like this—some point where, by breaking something into smaller parts, we make a significantly wrong prediction about its behavior.
So, plants convert sunlight into chemical energy. And if you break a plant into smaller parts, it turns out that it’s the parts with green pigment that do this. But if you cut off the leaf of a tree and look at it without the context of a tree, it still seems to behave the same.
But of course leaves are made of cells, so you can look at just a single cell of the leaf. But a single cell seems to absorb sunlight just the same alone as it did when it was part of the leaf—we can predict the rate of absorption of the leaf more or less just from the cells, and the absorption of the tree from its leaves.
Now let’s jump down to chlorophyll, which is the molecule that absorbs the light. Even if you take chlorophyll out of the cell, it still works fine. The activity of the cell can be predicted from knowledge of chlorophyll.
If you break the chlorophyll into its atoms, it doesn’t absorb light the same. But we can predict how it will work using the arrangement of atoms and quantum mechanics.
Etc.
I understand your point, but I’d be interested to see this proven (or dis-proven) bottom-up from first principles… observing that something in particular (chlorophyll, photosynthesis, etc) reduces from the top down like this leaves too many holes for it to really disprove the idea (e.g. maybe this isn’t a physical function that changes depending on higher-level organization).
I think the way to check this is that someone would have to come up with a specific theory that explains the currently-poorly-understood low-level behavior of fundamental particles based on the idea that the rules of their behavior depend on their higher-level organization.