an attempt to describe (say) the rendering of a JPEG image in terms of which transistors are activated at which point is likely a futile exercise
Well, yes—but that arises from the fact that such devices are man-made, and (out of respect to our brains’ limitations) designed to isolate the layers of explanation from one another—to obviate the need for a fully reductionistic account. The argument will not apply to things not man-made.
The argument will not apply to things not man-made.
Not true. There is a reason no one uses quarks to describe chemistry. Its futile to describe whats happening in a superfluid helium in terms of individual particle movement. Far better to use a two fluid model, and vortices.
Let me amend that: the argument will not necessarily apply to things not man-made. There is a categorical difference in this respect between man-made things and the rest, and my intent was to say: “if you’re going to put up an argument against reductionism, don’t use examples of man-made things”.
Whereas we have good reasons to bar “leaky abstractions” from our designs, Nature labors under no such constraint. If it turns out that some particular process that happens in a superfluid helium can be understood only by referring to the quark level, we are not allowed to frown at Nature and say “oh, poor design; go home, you’re drunk”.
For instance, it turns out we can almost describe the universe in the Newtonian model with its relatively simple equations, a nice abstraction if it were non-leaky, but anomalies like the precession of Mercury turn up that require us to use General Relativity instead, and take it into account when building our GPS systems.
The word “futile” in this context strikes me as wishful thinking, projecting onto reality our parochial notion of how complicated a reductionistic account of the universe “should” be. Past experience tells us that small anomalies sometimes require the overthrow of entires swathes of science, in the name of reductionism: there keep turning up cases where science considers it necessary, not futile, to work things out in terms of the lower levels of description.
I think you are making a bad generalization when you turn to Newtonian mechanics vs. general relativity. There are important ways in which mesons and hadron are emergent from quarks that have no correspondence to the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and GR.
As length scales increase, quarks go from being loosely bound fundamental degrees of freedom to not-even-good-degrees-of-freedom. At ‘normal’ length scales, free quarks aren’t even allowed. The modern study of materials is also full of examples of emergence (it underlies much work on renormalization groups), although its farther from my expertise so the only example to spring to mind was liquid helium.
The entire science of psychology is based on the idea that it is useful to apply high-level rules to the neural functioning of the human brain. If I decide to eat a cookie, then I explain it in high-level terms; I was hungry, the cookie smelt delicious. An analysis in terms of the effect of airborne particles originating from the cookie on my nasal passages, and subsequent alterations in the pattern of neural activations in my brain, can give a far more complicated answer to the question of why I ate the cookie; but, again, I don’t see how such a more complicated analysis would be better. If I want to understand my motivations more fully, I can do so in terms of mental biases, subconscious desires, and so forth; rather than a neuron-by-neuron analysis of my own brain.
And while it is technically true that I, as a human, am man-made (specifically, that I was made by my parents), a similar argument could be raised for any animal.
Such situations are rare, but not entirely unknown.
I disagree with your entire premise. I think we should pin down this concept of “levels of perspective” with some good jargon at some point, but regardless...
You can look at a computer from the level of perspective of “there are windows on the screen and I can move the mouse around. I can manipulate files on the hard drive with the mouse and the keyboard, and those changes will be reflected inside information boxes in the windows.” This is the perspective most people see a computer from, but it is not a complete description of a computer (i.e. if someone unfamiliar with the concept of computers heard this description, they could not build a computer from base materials.)
You might also see the perspective, “There are many tiny dots of light on a flat surface, lit up in various patterns. Those patterns are caused by electricity moving in certain ways through silica wires arranged in certain ways.” This is, I think, one level lower, but an unfamiliar person could not build a computer from scratch from this description.
Another level down, the description might be: “There is a CPU, which is composed of hundreds of thousands of transistors, arranged into logic gates such that when electricity is sent through them you can perform meaningful calculations. These calculations are written in files using a specific instruction set (“assembly language”). The files are stored on a disk in binary, with the disk containing many cesium atoms arranged in a certain order, which have either an extra electron or do not, representing 1 and 0 respectively. When the CPU needs to temporarily store a value useful in its calculations, it does so in the RAM, which is like the disk except much faster and smaller. Some of the calculations are used to turn certain square-shaped lights on a large flat surface blink in certain ways, which provides arbitrary information to the user”. We are getting to the point where an unfamiliar human might be able to recreate a computer from scratch, and therefore can be said to actually “understand” the system.
But still yet there are lower levels. Describing the actual logic gate organization in the CPU, the system used by RAM to store variables, how the magnetic needle accesses a specific bit on the hard drive by spinning it… All of these things must be known and understood in order to rebuild a computer from scratch.
Humans designed the computer at the level of “logic gates”, “bits on a hard drive”, “registries”, etc, and so it is not necessary to go deeper than this to understand the entire system (just as you don’t have to go deeper than “gears and cogs” to understand how a clock works, or how you don’t have to go deeper than “classical physics (billiards balls bouncing into each other)” to understand how a brain works.
But I hope that it’s clear that the mechanisms at the lower levels of a system completely contain within them the behavior of the higher levels of the system. There are no new behaviors which you can only learn about by studying the system from a higher level of perspective; those complicated upper-level behaviors are entirely formed by the simple lower-level mechanisms, all the way down to the wave function describing the entire universe.
That is what reductionism means. If you know the state of the entire wavefunction describing the universe, you know everything there is to know about the universe. You could use it to predict that, in some everette branches, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on the third planet from the star Sol in the milky way galaxy would cause a large war on that planet. You could use it to predict the exact moment at which any particular “slice” of the wavefunction (representing a particular possible universe) will enter its maximum entropy state. You could use it to predict any possible behavior of anything and you will never be surprised. That is what it means to say that all of reality reduces down to the base-level physics. That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic level of perspective.
If you can demonstrate to me that there is some organizational structure of matter which causes that matter to behave differently from what would be predicted by just looking at the matter in question without considering its organization (which would require, by the way, all of reality to keep track not only of mass and of velocity but also of its organizational structure relative to nearby reality), then I will accept such a demonstration as being a complete and utter refutation of reductionism. But there is no such behavior.
You are right; my example was a bad one, and it does not support the point that I thought it supported. The mere fact that something takes unreasonably long to calculate does not mean that it is not an informative endeavour. (I may have been working from a bad definition of reductionism).
If you can demonstrate to me that there is some organizational structure of matter which causes that matter to behave differently from what would be predicted by just looking at the matter in question without considering its organization
Um. I suspect that this may have been poorly phrased. If I have a lump of carbon, quite a bit of water, and a number of other elements, and I just throw them together in a pile, they’re unlikely to do much—there may be a bit of fizzing, some parts might dissolve in the water, but that’s about it. Yet if I reorganise the same matter into a human, I have an organisation of matter that is able to enter into a debate about reductionism; which I don’t think can be predicted by looking at the individual chemical elements alone.
But that behaviour might still be predictable from looking at the matter, organised in that way, at its most basic level of perspective (given sufficient computing resources). Hence, I suspect that it is not a counter-example.
That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic level of perspective.
That’s a fusion of reductionism and determinism. Reductionism ins’t necessarily false in an indeterministic universe. What is more pertinent is being able to predict higher level properties and laws from lower level properties and laws. (synchronously, in the latter case).
No it isn’t? I did not mean you would be able to make predictions which came true 100% of the time. I meant that your subjective anticipation of possible outcomes would be equal to the probability of those outcomes, maximizing both precision and accuracy.
“A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the “sum” of the properties of the system’s parts. An emergent property is said to be dependent on some more basic properties (and their relationships and configuration), so that it can have no separate existence. However, a degree of independence is also asserted of emergent properties, so that they are not identical to, or reducible to, or predictable from, or deducible from their bases. The different ways in which the independence requirement can be satisfied lead to various sub-varieties of emergence.”—WP
I meant that your subjective anticipation of possible outcomes would be equal to the probability of those outcomes, maximizing both precision and accuracy.
Still deterinism, not reductionism. In a universe where
*1aTthere are lower-level-properties ..
*1b operating according to a set of deterministic laws.
*2a There are also higher-level properties..
*2b irreducible to and unpredictable from the lower level properties and laws...
*2c which follow their own deterministic laws.
You would be able to predict the future with complete accuracy, given both sets of laws and two
sets of starting conditions. Yet the universe being described is explicitly non-reductionistic.
2a There are also higher-level properties..
2b irreducible to and unpredictable from the lower level properties and laws...
This all this means is that, in addition to the laws which govern low-level interactions, there are different laws which govern high-level interactions. But they are still laws of physics, they just sound like “when these certain particles are arranged in this particular manner, make them behave like this, instead of how the low-level properties say they should behave”. Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe. They are still a part of the code for reality.
But you are right:
unpredictable from lower level properties
Which is what I said:
That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic [lowest] level of perspective.
Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much subjective probability.
Microphysical laws map microphysical states to other microphysical states.Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states.
Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe.
In the sense that they are irreducible, yes. In the sense that they are concerned only with microphyics, no.
Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much subjective probability.
Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states
Can you name any examples of such a phenomenon?
“Deterministic” typically means that an unbounded agent will achieve probabilities of 1.0.
Oh, well in that case quantum physics throws determinism out the window for sure. I still think there’s something to be said for correctly assigning subjective probabilities to your anticipations such that 100% of the time you think something will happen with a 50% chance, it happens half the time, i.e. you are correctly calibrated.
An unbounded agent in our universe would be able to achieve such absolutely correct calibration; that’s all I meant to imply.
Well, yes—but that arises from the fact that such devices are man-made, and (out of respect to our brains’ limitations) designed to isolate the layers of explanation from one another—to obviate the need for a fully reductionistic account. The argument will not apply to things not man-made.
Not true. There is a reason no one uses quarks to describe chemistry. Its futile to describe whats happening in a superfluid helium in terms of individual particle movement. Far better to use a two fluid model, and vortices.
Let me amend that: the argument will not necessarily apply to things not man-made. There is a categorical difference in this respect between man-made things and the rest, and my intent was to say: “if you’re going to put up an argument against reductionism, don’t use examples of man-made things”.
Whereas we have good reasons to bar “leaky abstractions” from our designs, Nature labors under no such constraint. If it turns out that some particular process that happens in a superfluid helium can be understood only by referring to the quark level, we are not allowed to frown at Nature and say “oh, poor design; go home, you’re drunk”.
For instance, it turns out we can almost describe the universe in the Newtonian model with its relatively simple equations, a nice abstraction if it were non-leaky, but anomalies like the precession of Mercury turn up that require us to use General Relativity instead, and take it into account when building our GPS systems.
The word “futile” in this context strikes me as wishful thinking, projecting onto reality our parochial notion of how complicated a reductionistic account of the universe “should” be. Past experience tells us that small anomalies sometimes require the overthrow of entires swathes of science, in the name of reductionism: there keep turning up cases where science considers it necessary, not futile, to work things out in terms of the lower levels of description.
I think you are making a bad generalization when you turn to Newtonian mechanics vs. general relativity. There are important ways in which mesons and hadron are emergent from quarks that have no correspondence to the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and GR.
As length scales increase, quarks go from being loosely bound fundamental degrees of freedom to not-even-good-degrees-of-freedom. At ‘normal’ length scales, free quarks aren’t even allowed. The modern study of materials is also full of examples of emergence (it underlies much work on renormalization groups), although its farther from my expertise so the only example to spring to mind was liquid helium.
The entire science of psychology is based on the idea that it is useful to apply high-level rules to the neural functioning of the human brain. If I decide to eat a cookie, then I explain it in high-level terms; I was hungry, the cookie smelt delicious. An analysis in terms of the effect of airborne particles originating from the cookie on my nasal passages, and subsequent alterations in the pattern of neural activations in my brain, can give a far more complicated answer to the question of why I ate the cookie; but, again, I don’t see how such a more complicated analysis would be better. If I want to understand my motivations more fully, I can do so in terms of mental biases, subconscious desires, and so forth; rather than a neuron-by-neuron analysis of my own brain.
And while it is technically true that I, as a human, am man-made (specifically, that I was made by my parents), a similar argument could be raised for any animal.
Such situations are rare, but not entirely unknown.
I disagree with your entire premise. I think we should pin down this concept of “levels of perspective” with some good jargon at some point, but regardless...
You can look at a computer from the level of perspective of “there are windows on the screen and I can move the mouse around. I can manipulate files on the hard drive with the mouse and the keyboard, and those changes will be reflected inside information boxes in the windows.” This is the perspective most people see a computer from, but it is not a complete description of a computer (i.e. if someone unfamiliar with the concept of computers heard this description, they could not build a computer from base materials.)
You might also see the perspective, “There are many tiny dots of light on a flat surface, lit up in various patterns. Those patterns are caused by electricity moving in certain ways through silica wires arranged in certain ways.” This is, I think, one level lower, but an unfamiliar person could not build a computer from scratch from this description.
Another level down, the description might be: “There is a CPU, which is composed of hundreds of thousands of transistors, arranged into logic gates such that when electricity is sent through them you can perform meaningful calculations. These calculations are written in files using a specific instruction set (“assembly language”). The files are stored on a disk in binary, with the disk containing many cesium atoms arranged in a certain order, which have either an extra electron or do not, representing 1 and 0 respectively. When the CPU needs to temporarily store a value useful in its calculations, it does so in the RAM, which is like the disk except much faster and smaller. Some of the calculations are used to turn certain square-shaped lights on a large flat surface blink in certain ways, which provides arbitrary information to the user”. We are getting to the point where an unfamiliar human might be able to recreate a computer from scratch, and therefore can be said to actually “understand” the system.
But still yet there are lower levels. Describing the actual logic gate organization in the CPU, the system used by RAM to store variables, how the magnetic needle accesses a specific bit on the hard drive by spinning it… All of these things must be known and understood in order to rebuild a computer from scratch.
Humans designed the computer at the level of “logic gates”, “bits on a hard drive”, “registries”, etc, and so it is not necessary to go deeper than this to understand the entire system (just as you don’t have to go deeper than “gears and cogs” to understand how a clock works, or how you don’t have to go deeper than “classical physics (billiards balls bouncing into each other)” to understand how a brain works.
But I hope that it’s clear that the mechanisms at the lower levels of a system completely contain within them the behavior of the higher levels of the system. There are no new behaviors which you can only learn about by studying the system from a higher level of perspective; those complicated upper-level behaviors are entirely formed by the simple lower-level mechanisms, all the way down to the wave function describing the entire universe.
That is what reductionism means. If you know the state of the entire wavefunction describing the universe, you know everything there is to know about the universe. You could use it to predict that, in some everette branches, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on the third planet from the star Sol in the milky way galaxy would cause a large war on that planet. You could use it to predict the exact moment at which any particular “slice” of the wavefunction (representing a particular possible universe) will enter its maximum entropy state. You could use it to predict any possible behavior of anything and you will never be surprised. That is what it means to say that all of reality reduces down to the base-level physics. That is what it means to posit reductionism; that from an information theoretical standpoint, you can make entirely accurate predictions about a system with only knowledge about its most basic level of perspective.
If you can demonstrate to me that there is some organizational structure of matter which causes that matter to behave differently from what would be predicted by just looking at the matter in question without considering its organization (which would require, by the way, all of reality to keep track not only of mass and of velocity but also of its organizational structure relative to nearby reality), then I will accept such a demonstration as being a complete and utter refutation of reductionism. But there is no such behavior.
You are right; my example was a bad one, and it does not support the point that I thought it supported. The mere fact that something takes unreasonably long to calculate does not mean that it is not an informative endeavour. (I may have been working from a bad definition of reductionism).
Um. I suspect that this may have been poorly phrased. If I have a lump of carbon, quite a bit of water, and a number of other elements, and I just throw them together in a pile, they’re unlikely to do much—there may be a bit of fizzing, some parts might dissolve in the water, but that’s about it. Yet if I reorganise the same matter into a human, I have an organisation of matter that is able to enter into a debate about reductionism; which I don’t think can be predicted by looking at the individual chemical elements alone.
But that behaviour might still be predictable from looking at the matter, organised in that way, at its most basic level of perspective (given sufficient computing resources). Hence, I suspect that it is not a counter-example.
That’s a fusion of reductionism and determinism. Reductionism ins’t necessarily false in an indeterministic universe. What is more pertinent is being able to predict higher level properties and laws from lower level properties and laws. (synchronously, in the latter case).
No it isn’t? I did not mean you would be able to make predictions which came true 100% of the time. I meant that your subjective anticipation of possible outcomes would be equal to the probability of those outcomes, maximizing both precision and accuracy.
Yes it is.
“A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the “sum” of the properties of the system’s parts. An emergent property is said to be dependent on some more basic properties (and their relationships and configuration), so that it can have no separate existence. However, a degree of independence is also asserted of emergent properties, so that they are not identical to, or reducible to, or predictable from, or deducible from their bases. The different ways in which the independence requirement can be satisfied lead to various sub-varieties of emergence.”—WP
Still deterinism, not reductionism. In a universe where
*1aTthere are lower-level-properties ..
*1b operating according to a set of deterministic laws.
*2a There are also higher-level properties..
*2b irreducible to and unpredictable from the lower level properties and laws...
*2c which follow their own deterministic laws.
You would be able to predict the future with complete accuracy, given both sets of laws and two sets of starting conditions. Yet the universe being described is explicitly non-reductionistic.
This all this means is that, in addition to the laws which govern low-level interactions, there are different laws which govern high-level interactions. But they are still laws of physics, they just sound like “when these certain particles are arranged in this particular manner, make them behave like this, instead of how the low-level properties say they should behave”. Such laws are still fundamental laws, on the lowest level of the universe. They are still a part of the code for reality.
But you are right:
Which is what I said:
Ergo, a reductionistic universe is also deterministic from a probabilistic standpoint, i.e. the lowest level properties and laws can tell you exactly what to anticipate, and with how much subjective probability.
Microphysical laws map microphysical states to other microphysical states.Top-down causation maps macrophysical states to microphysical states.
In the sense that they are irreducible, yes. In the sense that they are concerned only with microphyics, no.
“Deterministic” typically means that an unbounded agent will achieve probabilities of 1.0.
Can you name any examples of such a phenomenon?
Oh, well in that case quantum physics throws determinism out the window for sure. I still think there’s something to be said for correctly assigning subjective probabilities to your anticipations such that 100% of the time you think something will happen with a 50% chance, it happens half the time, i.e. you are correctly calibrated.
An unbounded agent in our universe would be able to achieve such absolutely correct calibration; that’s all I meant to imply.
I’m a bit confused. What exactly defines a “higher-level” property, if not that it can be reduced to lower-level properties?
eg: being macrscopic, featuring only in the special sciences