Just a few days ago it occurred to me that reductionism is the inevitable result of strictly local causality—or putting it differently, any universe with a speed-limit in causality (in our universe this seems to be c) must by necessity be a reductionist universe.
The conclusion seems obvious but the connection between the two had never before occurred to me.
Ah, I guess I was thinking of a different type of non-reductionism, where e.g. an organism gained an extra non-reductionist property “life” which caused all its parts to behave differently than if they lacked that property...
Just a few days ago it occurred to me that reductionism is the inevitable result of strictly local causality—or putting it differently, any universe with a speed-limit in causality (in our universe this seems to be c) must by necessity be a reductionist universe.
The conclusion seems obvious but the connection between the two had never before occurred to me.
How so? In a local nonreductionist universe, wouldn’t a fundamentally complicated thing just have to have zero width?
Ah, I guess I was thinking of a different type of non-reductionism, where e.g. an organism gained an extra non-reductionist property “life” which caused all its parts to behave differently than if they lacked that property...