If reductionism is false in the way you’ve described, then it seems that we can start at the level of quarks and work our way back up to the highest level, but that at some point there must be a “magical stuff happens here” step where level N+1 cannot be reduced to level N.
Indeed, an irreducible entity (albeit with describable, predictable, behavior) is not much better than a miracle. This is why Occam’s Razor, insisting that our model of the world should not postulate needless entities, insists that everything should be reduced to one type of stuff if possible. But the “if possible” is key: we verify through inference and induction whether or not it’s reasonable to think we’ll be able to reduce everything, not through a priori logic.
Some comic relief, with a serious point:
The famous cartoon of two mathematicians going over a proof, the middle step of which is “then a miracle occurs”.
If reductionism is false in the way you’ve described, then it seems that we can start at the level of quarks and work our way back up to the highest level, but that at some point there must be a “magical stuff happens here” step where level N+1 cannot be reduced to level N.
Indeed, an irreducible entity (albeit with describable, predictable, behavior) is not much better than a miracle. This is why Occam’s Razor, insisting that our model of the world should not postulate needless entities, insists that everything should be reduced to one type of stuff if possible. But the “if possible” is key: we verify through inference and induction whether or not it’s reasonable to think we’ll be able to reduce everything, not through a priori logic.