My philosophy/epistemology holds that the word “emergent” can be replaced with “reducible” with no loss of meaning. People try to sneak in anti-reductionist ideas with the concept of emergence, so what I usually do is replace the word as I’m reading and see if it still makes sense.
Yes. That is also my view. Except that “reducible” carries with it the view from below, often with the goal of explaining or deriving the macroscopic behavior (and often with the implied valuation that the macroscopic effects have no merit of their own) whereas “emergent” carries with it the view from above, where the interplay on the macroscopic level has merit and is of interest of its own.
I fully support using high-level models. After all, doing any sort of macroscopic work by modeling elementary particles is computationally intractable on a fundamental level.
The problem with emergence is that it’s used to sneak in nonreducible magic too often. I need the reminder that however interesting airplanes are, there’s nothing there that isn’t the result of elementary particles and fundamental fields.
My philosophy/epistemology holds that the word “emergent” can be replaced with “reducible” with no loss of meaning. People try to sneak in anti-reductionist ideas with the concept of emergence, so what I usually do is replace the word as I’m reading and see if it still makes sense.
Yes. That is also my view. Except that “reducible” carries with it the view from below, often with the goal of explaining or deriving the macroscopic behavior (and often with the implied valuation that the macroscopic effects have no merit of their own) whereas “emergent” carries with it the view from above, where the interplay on the macroscopic level has merit and is of interest of its own.
I fully support using high-level models. After all, doing any sort of macroscopic work by modeling elementary particles is computationally intractable on a fundamental level.
The problem with emergence is that it’s used to sneak in nonreducible magic too often. I need the reminder that however interesting airplanes are, there’s nothing there that isn’t the result of elementary particles and fundamental fields.