Some people were talking about The Ship of Theseus—the question “If a ship’s parts are replaced one-by-one over time, after each part is replaced is it still the same ship?” First thing that came to my mind was that this was a wrong question. I saw it fundamentally as the same mistake as the Blegg/Rube problem—they know every property about the ship that’s relevant to the question, and yet still there feels like a question left unanswered.
Am I right about this?
After talking to some non-reductionists, I’ve come to this idea about what it would mean for reductionism to be false:
I’m sure you’re familiar with Conway’s Game of Life? If not, go check it out for a bit. All the rules for the system are on the pixel level—this is the lowest, fundamental level. Everything that happens in conway’s game of life is reducible to the rules regarding individual pixels and their color (white or black), and we know this because we have access to the source code of Conway’s Game, and it is in fact true that those are the only rules.
For Conways’ Game to be non-reductionistic, what you’d have to find in the source code is a set of rules that override the pixel-level rules in the case of high-level objects in the game. Eg “When you see this sort of pixel configuration, override the normal rules and instead make the relevant pixels follow this high-level law where necessary.”
Something like that.
It’s an overriding of low-level laws when they would otherwise have contradicted high-level laws.