Scientific Reductionism

You might have read that 'love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs,' but would it really be better explained as the behavior of a large aggregation of elementary particles and their quantum mechanical and electrodynamic properties? Would a perfect a scientific worldview ultimately reduce all explanations to fundamental physics, or is there genuine novelty at the higher levels of complexity we find in everything from superconductors to politics? Join Robert and Joe for a journey into the innerverse of complexity, reductionism and emergence.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
In Today, we're gonna be looking at the philosophical underpinnings
of science. Don't run away, stick here, because we're gonna

(00:25):
be talking about scientific reductionism. Now, we've done episodes before
where we've talked about not just you know, the fruits
of scientific investigation, but the ideas that lie underneath what
we do when we do science. Uh, we've talked before
about that Daniel Dennett quote from Darwin's Dangerous Idea where
he says that you know, scientists a lot of times

(00:47):
think that philosophies what those other, you know, naval gazers
do over there, and that that science is really free
from all the constraints of that naval gazing, that they're
immune to, quote the confusions that philosophers devote their lives
to dissolving. But what Dennett says is there's no such
thing as philosophy free science. There's only science whose philosophical

(01:10):
baggage is taken on board without examination. And I think
that makes a lot of sense. I think that's a
maximum we should adhere to to to look at what's
lying underneath science intellectually and and always ask ourselves the question, like,
is what is what we're doing philosophically grounded? Does it
make sense? Yeah? I mean it gets it down to

(01:30):
the idea of to what extent can we truly just
sort of mathematically, passionlessly, uh, breakdown things into their fundamental
parts in order to make sense of them. Yeah, And
that is the idea we're gonna be talking about today.
It's the concept of scientific reductionism. Now, I want to
start by clarifying the meaning of that term, because if

(01:52):
you've heard that term used in conversation, there's a very
good chance that you've heard it used in a way
that's different than what we mean today. So people did
bonding on Facebook to say a new story about a
scientific study or a theory and say, well, that sounds reductionist.
You're just being a reductionist here. Uh. Yeah. So there's
one version of the word reductive that means something sort

(02:12):
of like oversimplified. Like if I say that you know,
the only reason French cooking tastes good is because they
use like a full stick of butter and every dish. People.
You know, some French chef might say, no, wait, there's
a lot of technique. You're taking a very reductionist attitude.
It's not that simple um or another one you might hear.

(02:33):
I think often these days, if you hear people talking
about scientific reductionism, you're hearing it used, uh, not in
a philosophical argument about the underpinnings of science, but more
in an argument about the validity of world views. And
it works as this kind of snarl word that means
something like nihilism, or the belief that there is nothing

(02:55):
of value, beauty, or goodness in the world. That is
not what we mean. That's not what the term means
in philosophy of science, and that's not the way we're
going to be using it today. Yeah. I think a
lot of this gets back to the concepts that we
tackled in the Wicked Problems episode and as well as
the illusion of explanatory depth. And that's the idea that simple,
broad solutions to complex societal problems, complicts problems in general

(03:18):
tend to be ineffective and spawn new problems. And you
could say that's that's because they take a reductionist approach
to it. Robots are dangerous, so we ban all robots.
Humans are the cause of war, so exterminate all all humans.
Right now, I wonder if that way of using reductionism
fits more into the hater's definition or the definition we're
going to look at today. Well, the interesting thing, isn't
it that the hater's definition is itself reductionist, right, and

(03:43):
then maybe my that definition is also reductionist because to
a certain extent, Yes, when you there are some things
that they're complicated enough and if you boil them, you know,
you can boil them down to sort of concrete solutions
and concrete um causes. And it depends on what you're studying.
Like sometimes, especially with societal issues, it's not always that

(04:05):
cut and dry. There's just too many factors and it's
difficult to test out the solution, certainly in real time. Yeah,
because by the time you've deployed the answer, you've created
all these additional problems. So that's that it's only butter explanation.
Somebody is trying to explain deliciousness in terms of butter
only when we in reality it's much more complicated. Yes, Okay,

(04:27):
so what what what I mean by scientific reductionism, and
what's usually discussed in uh philosophy of science, is that
as a method, it means that any system or entity
existing in reality will ultimately be best understood if broken
down into its simpler constituent parts, and the workings of

(04:50):
those parts are understood. Uh. And we see this all
the time in science, right, the science is constantly trying
to reduce a complex phenomenon into its part and find
out how it's parts work. Yeah, what's it's kind of like,
I mean, it's basically what how stuff works is all about, right,
It's about how is this actually working? What are the properties?

(05:10):
What are the physical laws involved? Even if it's something
as simple. Well, for instance, I wrote an article on
how hula hoops work a while back, and so part
of that is like the culture of the history, who
in the in the history of the hula hoop, where
it came from, how it gained popularity, how it's utilize
different ways. But you also get down to just the
basic physics of what's going on when a hula hoop
is swinging around a body and motion, and you can

(05:32):
reduce it to physicals. So in that sense, I think
that is a perfectly valid way of using a reductionist
approach is saying, like, what are the most basic laws
and elements and explanatory UH systems that are in play
when you see somebody hula hooping and there man and
I can see where there would be people who would say,
who are like such hula hoop enthusiasts? And it would
say stop explaining trying to explain the magic of hula hoops.

(05:56):
When you explain the physics of hula hoops, you take
all the fun out of it. That would be a
crazy statement because the fun still there. We're just explaining
how the fun works, right. And the controversy we're talking
about today, and this example we can probably use a
better example in the minic would not be uh whether
it takes the fun out of it, but whether it

(06:16):
misses something crucial. If you just describe a hula hoop
in terms of the basic physics of of how it
goes around the body, are you missing something factually crucial
and autonomously true about the phenomenon of hula hooping? Who
is something vital to its functionality? Yeah, that's probably not
a good example. But one other way we can look

(06:37):
at what scientific reductionism is is that it's a it's
a hypothesis on the final nature of the relationship between
science and reality, and so it can be interpreted to
mean that in effect, every correct explanation of the world
can be reduced to the most fundamental, lowest theory of reality,
and essentially everything is physics if you go deep enough. Uh. Now,

(07:02):
there're gonna be a lot of reductionists who will say, now,
I understand that we need sciences like psychology and chemistry
and political science and sociology to explain things that it
would be ridiculous to think we can explain by looking
at all the elementary particles. Um, but that in principle
we should be able to explain all those things given

(07:24):
just our understanding of elementary particles and forces. They're just
too complex for us to understand right now. Okay, So
let's try to put this into a specific concrete example. Uh.
If if you accept that everything in the universe is
subject to the laws of physics, and I think Robert,
you and I can agree that as far as we
know it is, uh, then everything in the universe ultimately

(07:47):
could be best explained by fundamental physics or whatever we
find lying underneath fundamental physics, whatever is the ultimate theory
of everything, the ultimate underlying law of the universe. Uh.
And so let's look at a higher order phenomenon and
and try to say what it would mean to reduce it.
So I came up with this horrible example and an

(08:09):
apparent case of psychogenic blindness. So you are with your
family on Thanksgiving, and so they get to pick what
movie you go out and see, and you are overruled,
and you go to see the new Adam Sandler movie,
in which I imagine the next one is going to be.
Adam Sandler plays the fifteenth Dalai Lama and also plays

(08:30):
the Dalai Lama is really loud, flatulent twin sister. Twenty
five minutes into the onset of this film, you go
blind in both eyes. Now you go to the doctor,
and the doctors can find no evidence of injury or
neurological dysfunctions, So they classify this as a rare case
of psychogenic blindness, blindness that's induced by psychological distress rooted

(08:53):
in a state of mind. And we've discussed this on
the show before, especially in terms of certain almost for
natural occurrences right right, where like there's a mystical experience
and it leads to a bodily manifestation. Yeah, and so
in psychology there might be some framework for explaining what
happened to you uh, and that framework would be a
theory like knowledge. It would be explanatory talking about causes

(09:17):
in the mind and uh, and perhaps solutions that take
place in the mind. But of course, assuming that we
had a complete understanding of the whole state of your
body at the level of neuroscience, fully explaining all of
your brain tissues and functions and how they were interacting
on the reductionist hypothesis, we actually shouldn't need the psychological explanation, right,

(09:40):
that's just a convenience. If we understood everything there was
to understand about the physical nature of your brain, we
wouldn't need psychology. We wouldn't need the psychologist to say,
what's happening with your blindness. We could just look at
the cells in your brain. Now. Of course, if we
had a perfect understanding of your brain from perspective of

(10:00):
cell biology, explaining what all the cells in your body
are doing and how, we technically wouldn't need the neuroscience explanation.
We just say, okay, here's the cell theory that you know.
This is what explains everything that's going on. And then
you could reduce it further. You could say, well, of
course we had a perfect understanding of every molecule in
your body from the standpoint of fundamental chemistry, understanding what

(10:22):
all the atoms and molecules are doing and how, we
wouldn't need the biochemistry you know, the biology or biochemistry explanation.
And of course, if we had a perfect understanding of
the whole state of your body from the standpoint of
fundamental physics, you know, elementary particle physics, the quantum mechanical
wave functions of all the particles and energy states in
your body, we wouldn't need the chemistry explanation. So ultimately,

(10:45):
the hypothesis goes like this, if we're able to explain
everything in the universe in terms of fundamental physics, we
would and that would be the best explanation. It's only
our lack of understanding and our lack of knowledge and
computational power that forces us to conceive of explanations of
things that are more complex than fundamental physics, like chemistry,

(11:08):
like biology, like psychology like you know, sociology, or or
political science. Um, but that at bottom, the best explanation
for everything is here are the particles and their energy
states and vectors. Now it's almost impossible to think about
something of this without like this, without thinking about comparisons
to like our modern computing experience, right, you know, like

(11:31):
thinking of hardware, and then a type of hardware, the code,
and I'm simplifying here, but then on top of the
code the sort of uh user interface, and then our
interaction with that user interface. So it seems like you
would have I mean, realistically, you would have problems that
occur with the root of that problem at different levels
in that in that depth, right, something, you might have

(11:53):
a problem at the hardware level, you might have a
problem uh at the the the user interface level. But
if we had a complete enough understanding, we could address
any problem from the bottom exactly. So the physical reductionists
would say, okay, but if you had a perfect understanding, yeah, everything,
there would be energy states and elementary particles. If you
understood what all of them were doing, you could fix

(12:16):
any problem at any level. Yes, So, so so not even
going down to the hardware level, but going down to
the the the even more primal levels, going into the
very basement of reality. Yeah, and so the question today
is looking at that perspective of the world, is that true?
Is that a correct understanding of what science is? Um
or our higher level science is more complex sciences like chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology,

(12:44):
and so forth. Do these sciences have unique insights that
are not present at the lower levels of more simplicity
of you know, simpler realities. Are they just the best
we can do to understand complex phenomena like society, minds,
and organisms? Or do they Are they intellectually autonomous? Do

(13:05):
they have something original to offer? So, like, the counter
argument here would be that that physics and carpentry engineering
can explain the way that a stage is built, but
they're not going to have any impact on say, the
play that the actors on the stage you're reciting. Sure, yeah,
that that you might uh, well, yeah, I mean that

(13:25):
that that's sort of an analogy that works, I guess. Um.
One of the things that I do want to make
sure we're clarifying is that I don't plan on Robert
you can, you can violate this if you want, but
I don't plan on exploring arguments against scientific reductionism that
are based in a belief in supernatural causation, because, as

(13:46):
we mentioned in another recent podcast, I'm not even sure
the concept of supernatural causation is coherent. I'm not I'm
not sure that it's incoherent. But then again, try to
picture it. What are you picturing? Usually you're just picturing
natural causation with with some kind of blurry nous or
some kind of detail obscured. Right, It's like the hand

(14:07):
of God. Analogy. If if the hand if God is
something outside of our universe, then for that hand to
reach into our universe to do something, it has to
adhere to the laws of physics. It has to wear
the glove of our reality at least, and then it
has to therefore be observable as a physical phenomenon. Yet
to do something, it has to do something right. Um.

(14:29):
But but we will instead look at a different concept,
that is the concept of emergentis um, a philosophical distinction
that says that there are large complex systems that show
genuinely novel properties due to their complexity, that are not
inherently predictable from or reducible to the combined effects of

(14:50):
their simpler, more constituent parts and ultimately not predictable from
or reducible to fundamental physics. So let's this is where
I come back to my perhaps imperfect analogy of the
stage and the actors on the stage. You can't have
one without the other, but one seems to be operating
in a way that the lower level cannot fully predict

(15:12):
or control beyond the very basic levels. Okay, that, yeah,
I can see that. I think that's a good analogy.
Then I'm sorry if I was skeptical it to be. No, no, no,
A healthy dose of skepticism is uh is important here. Okay.
So given our given our idea that we're gonna look
at emergentis um as a form of material understanding of
the world. You know, it's an extension of science, not

(15:34):
not an expression of like vitalism or supernaturalism. What are
some examples of things in nature that we might assume
are not able to be explained by fundamental physics. Well,
big one is intelligence. So yeah, even playing like Dungeons
and Dragons, where you have a definite intelligent score versus

(15:55):
like wisdom or charisma, I often find myself in conversations
with the poem i'm playing with, like, was this would
this be an intelligence check or wisdom check? Like, we
really have a very ambiguous idea of what constitutes intelligence. Yeah,
But at the same time, intelligence is I think by
the fact that you consider it this separate property, that

(16:15):
you have this separate score, and it's natural to think
of it as something that discreetly emerges at higher levels
of complexity and isn't reducible to simpler objects. So, uh yeah,
like you said, it's sometimes kind of difficult to define intelligence.
What is it? My favorite definition that I've come across
is that intelligence is the tendency of a system to

(16:36):
accelerate the solution of problems. It leads to faster solving. So,
however we define it, we know when we see it right.
Intelligence is highly useful, ubiquitous, undeniable. It's part of our
experience of the everyday world. But can intelligence be explained
in terms of simpler fundamental units. I don't know. After all,

(16:58):
there is no indication that a single goal neuron possesses
anything like intelligence. There's no analogy for intelligence below what
things like brains or computers do, at least as far
as I can tell. Well, even then, it's far more complicated.
We've all I felt we've probably even covered on the
show before the whole topic of what makes a genius?

(17:18):
What does a genius's brain look like? And yes, you
can you can draw certain Uh, you can look to
the gray matter and line up various factors, but a
lot of it is going to be beyond that. It's
going to have to do with with with it, with
the experience and personality of the individual. Yeah, it's the
whole Boys from Brazil scenario we're trying to colonial. Yeah. So,

(17:39):
I mean assuming that animal intelligence or computer intelligence is
not magic. We're not believing it's magic, but that it's
still possible that it can't be explained reductively by recourse
to more fundamental sciences. That chemistry alone can't explain intelligence.
It's something that only happens to matter at a certain
level of complexity and configure curation, and is not predictable

(18:02):
from lower levels of understanding. Uh so, what what would
it mean to understand intelligence of the level of single cells.
I don't know. Maybe it's possible to do that, but
at least sounds like a very difficult project. Yeah, I mean,
so the basic idea here is that interactions among smaller
entities lead to larger entities, and there's a self organizing
aspect to reality. So what economist Jeffrey Goldstein called quote

(18:26):
the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties
during the process of self organization in complex systems. So
I think, like a classic sort of science example I
always go back to, is just the accretion of cosmic
dust into smaller bodies and clouds, building mass, exerting gravity
forming stars, planet, everything everything else gravitating around each other,

(18:49):
held in uh in gravitational um enslavement to each other,
and becoming the system. A system that emerges initially from
particles floating around and bumping into each other, and thus
and thus it does obey the laws of physics at
every level, But is it reducible too and predictable from

(19:09):
those laws When the case of just like basic the
basic assembly of solar system, of of a galaxy, I
would think, yes, I think this is this is definitely
a physics based bringing together of properties. But it's such
a Maybe it's because it's just such a grandiose thing
to imagine assembling from such minute pieces. It feels an

(19:33):
appropriate metaphor for the emergence of say consciousness, the vergence
of intelligence, because if dust can turn into the Milky
Way galaxy, and and I'm simplifying, uh, but but if
if something so vast and complex and energetic can can
can can come together from such small pieces, then it

(19:54):
makes sense that's something as at least on the individual level,
as complex and amazing and brew as intelligence and consciousness,
that that too could emerge from just things bumping into
each other. Well, yeah, and there you do say something
that I think should put us on guard against the
concept of emergentism, which is that it feels good for us,
you know, the idea that no, no, no, you know,

(20:16):
things like intelligence and and higher order concepts really are
somehow unique at their level of organization, and they're not
just reducible to elementary particles and and energy states. Well,
that's that's something we like to feel, and so thus
I think we should be a little on guard about
about that idea. Yeah, but I would to counter I

(20:37):
would say that basically, the the idea of consciousness, of
being conscious, of being a live feels majestic. I think
we can look to just the universe itself and say, well,
the universe and all its majesty is based on things
bumping into each other, you know, randomly and in order
arising out of all of that. Then it's no great

(20:58):
stretch to say that the mind is the same the
cosmos is a humiliating analogy. Yeah, well yeah, because you
can go either way. You can say my mind is
like the universe, man, but you can also say, hey,
your mind is just like the universe. It's just stuff
bumping into each other until a system emerges. Okay, well,
maybe we should look at a few more examples of
supposed emergent behavior that you can see in nature systems,

(21:20):
where you know, at a complex enough level, things seem
to happen that are not obviously predictable from the simpler
components acting alone. Well, evolution is a big one, of course,
just the I mean, that's the basic underlying principle right
in the in this uh, this constant race, the survival
of the fittest, uh, natural selection that you have all

(21:42):
these different forms, these various mutations that are kind of
throwing out different different versions of the same product into
the open market of brutal survivalism, and then whatever sticks sticks, yeah,
uh yeah, And so that's the thing, like if you
were just in the universe where there was no life,
but there was just say, organic chemistry. Would you would

(22:04):
you be able to really predict the devolution was going
to occur? Maybe, I don't know. Um what about here.
Here's a product of evolution that's often been cited as
a really interesting version of emergent behavior, hive insect behavior.
Oh yes, yeah, this is this is always a cool
concept the view of you social insects, bees, wasps, ants, uh, termites, etcetera.

(22:27):
But especially especially bees and ants being like the prime
examples of this. Uh, they're they're essentially an emergent system
after all. You know, how else is all of this
behavior going to get there? Nobody's programming the ants, nobody's
telling them, Oh, you're the queen and you do this. Uh. No,
one ant or one b is able to display anything

(22:51):
like the hive behavior we see, And not even any
small group of them show these rudimentary signs of it.
It's only when you get enough of them in our
acting that hive behavior emerges. Yeah, and out of all
of these little interactions, these roles, it all adds up
to a kind of and it's important to say, you know,
non sci fi and the non science fictional sense, a

(23:14):
hive mind. You know, they don't like share a conscious experience, right,
they're not, you know, they don't have their brains all
hooked up with tubes into a you know, floating mega
brain or something. But in a very real, non scie
by sense, there is this hive mind, this high think
that emerges and they're able to do something many things
as a group, solve problems as a group that the

(23:34):
individual is just not. I mean it's almost cheating to
say they're incapable of it, because they are capable of
it as this sort of metal organism that they've become,
just not on the individual level. And this approach has
proven very useful and artificial intelligence and robotics. I'm sure
you've covered this in the past and the Forward Thinking

(23:54):
podcast the the study of of you social insects and
figuring out how to ads robotics and engineers faces challenges
and the interactions of simple machines machine learning. So you
essentially have the creation of like little robots that are
behaving like ants. Yeah. Uh, here here's another big one. Consciousness.
This is probably the thing that is most often discussed

(24:17):
as as a potentially irreducible phenomenon in nature. Uh, so
you have a mind. You don't just have a brain,
but you have a mind. Assuming you do have a mind,
I don't you know, it's impossible for me to know
anybody else in the world has a mind. I assume
you do. You seem like you do, you claim to usually,
But yeah, you've got a mind, a conscious experience. And

(24:38):
there's no analogy that we can find or that we
have good evidence of at lower levels. Right, there's no
evidence that single neurons are conscious. There's no evidence that
atoms or molecules or anything like that have any kind
of rudimentary consciousness. Some people assume this. There's like a
philosophical position known as pan psychism, which is the idea

(24:59):
that at um it's in some kind of way consciousness
exists all over the universe and all that matter. This
is the idea that any sufficiently complex system may manifest
as consciousness. No. No, this is the idea that that
all matter is in some sense, that a rock is
in some sense conscious, but by virtue of being like
a complex system. Okay, yeah, because even a rock is

(25:22):
is complex. When you start breaking it down and you
start really diving the powers of ten style. And now
I think that's an interesting speculation, but I don't see
any evidence for that. It would be hard to know
what evidence for that would be. Yeah, yeah, I like
I like it too. I think it it lines up
nicely with some with various supernatural interpretations of reality. But

(25:46):
I'm not sure how much I'm willing to invest in
it at this point. So yeah, so we we have
the rock speaks, When will it speak? And what would
it say? That's the thing I mean, the rocks. The
rock it's I mean, it's seen a lot stuff, but
it hasn't really been up to much. You got mud
on your face, big disgrace. Oh never mind, Oh yes,

(26:09):
we'll we'll rock you good, good reference. You can shame
me later. Okay. One more thing I would think of
is uh the human equivalent of hive insect behavior? But
what about social sciences, sociology, political science, anthropology, the study
of what humans do in large groups. There seem to
be phenomenon there that are not uh, strictly predictable from

(26:33):
just understanding of say psychology. Could you look at a
really really good understanding of psychology and say this is
how societies will work? I don't know, I mean there
are those who extrapolate meaning from psychological concepts, who those
who attempt to. But yeah, it becomes increasingly complicated. Uh.
One of talking about this difference between, you know, reducible

(26:57):
phenomena and emergent phenomena. One of my favorite often misattributed
quotes Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said, falsely alleged
to have said quantity has a quality all its own.
I've always liked that quote. I can't find any evidence
he ever said this, but it does sort of echo
a sentiment explored by Marx and Engels in their writings

(27:18):
about economics and their adaptation of Hegelian dialectical philosophy. Uh,
the quantitative differences over a time, which is what we'd
sort of be looking at for for reductive philosophy of science.
Just quantitative changes actually do become qualitative differences. More is
not just more. In many cases more is different. Yes,

(27:40):
And I think this is this plasn't nicely with a
couple of papers, will look at later in the episode. Um,
as long as we're throwing out quotes, one I always
uh have have enjoyed on this sort of topic of
emergence is one from the poet Wawa Stevens his poem
Connoisseur of Chaos. A violent order is a disorder, and
be a great disorder as an order. These two of
things are one pages of illustrations. Oh man, that's a

(28:03):
good one. Stevens has a lot of great quotes that
I think somehow apply to science. You know, when I
often I get I get these feelings about what must
be true in science, But then I often hear in
the back of my mind that line from the Emperor
of ice Cream. Let be b finale of seam. He's
a good one. If if anyone out there is looking

(28:23):
to pick up some thought provoking poetry, get yourself a
book of Wallace Stevens and and to flip around in there. Okay, well,
I think we should take a quick break, and then
when we come back we will look at one of
our main resources in this episode, classic paper from the
history of science from the nineteen seventies called More is Different. Alright,

(28:48):
we're back, so tell me Joe is more different. That's
a good question, Robert. That's sort of the central question
of this episode. As you reach higher levels of complexity,
you get more things to other interacting to do different,
uniquely new properties emerge or is it just more and more? Well.
In nineteen seventy two, the Nobel Prize winning American physicist

(29:11):
Philip W. Anderson published this massively influential, highly cited paper
in the journal Science, and the title of the the
essay was more is Different and you, as you can
probably guess based on the title what position he took
on the emergentists debate. So Anderson writes that while at
the time he was writing, which was nint seventy two,

(29:32):
philosophers might still debate scientific reductionism, but he said scientists don't.
Scientists just take scientific reductionism for granted. Uh. And his
formulation of the reductionist hypothesis went like this quote. The
workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the
animate or inanimate matter of which they have any detailed knowledge,

(29:55):
are assumed to be controlled by the same set of
fundamental laws, which accept under certain extreme conditions, we feel
we know pretty well. In other words, he's saying, when
you chase causal explanations deep enough, it all boils down
to the bottom. It all goes straight down to fundamental physics,
and that is as it should be right. I mean,

(30:15):
that's why we established all of these basic fundamental physical
laws and interactions, because we wanted an idea of how
the the universe works, and so everything should boil down
to those laws. If it doesn't, that would indicate there's
some sort of problem with our laws, then our physics exactly. Yeah,
what what good does physics if it's not actually fundamental? Uh? So,

(30:39):
Anderson says, you know, if this is true, many many
people assume that it entails the idea that very few
people in the sciences are actually working on anything fundamental,
anything autonomous, anything original. Uh And to illustrate this example
or this frame of mind, Anderson quotes this passage from
the theoretical physicist Victor F. Weisskopf, which which sorts all

(31:02):
science into these two categories, which Weiskoff calls intensive and extensive.
So intensive research tries to discover fundamental laws. Extensive research
tries to explain phenomena with the use of known fundamental laws.
So at any given time, a minority, vast, a very

(31:23):
small minority of scientists, generally in fields like particle physics,
are working on describing fundamental laws that govern reality. Um,
they're doing the intensive science, and meanwhile, the vast majority
of scientists are just taking the models of fundamental laws
and applying them as an explanation for anything. For why

(31:44):
the rain in Nashville smells like hot dog water, or
sometimes sometimes I'm just kidding, you know, sometimes rain anywhere
smells like I haven't spent enough time in Nashville, you know, anything,
why your eyes won't stop bleeding. Uh So, the the
extension of this distinction, some presume, is that once we

(32:04):
have a fundamental theory of physics at the base of
all science, there's no intensive science left to do. Does
that make sense? Like you could still apply theories up
the chain, but there's nothing original left to discover. It's
just continually the application of what we know to different phenomena.
But Anderson throws down a flag here. He says, hold on,

(32:28):
let's say we accept the reductionist hypothesis that we can
reduce complex phenomenon explanations uh to simpler, more fundamental physical laws.
That doesn't necessarily imply the converse, which he calls the
quote constructionist hypothesis. It does not, in his words, it
does not imply the ability to start from those laws

(32:50):
and reconstruct the universe. So what is science supposed to do.
It's supposed to be able to predict. Right, if you
have a correct scientific theory, you should be able to
make accurate predictions about the future. But if you can't
make accurate predictions about the future from the fundamental laws
of physics, then do the fundamental laws of physics really

(33:13):
describe everything? So, in in Anderson's view, uh, why does
it not imply that we can start from the fundamental
laws and predict everything? Um, you know, shouldn't we be
able to do that in in in principle? Well, according
to Anderson, the answer is no. And Anderson says there
are two main problems with the constructionist hypothesis. One is

(33:34):
scale and the other is complexity. And I just want
to read a quote from him. Anderson writes, quote the
behavior of large and complex aggregations of elementary particles, So
that would be anything a football, Uh, to return to
a hot dog, a jar of pickles. Yes, I guess
I'm all thinking of cylindrical foods. I'm not sure why.

(33:58):
Um Uh. The behavior of large and complex aggregations of
elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood
in terms of a simple explanation of the properties of
a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity, entirely
new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors
requires research, which I think is as fundamental in its

(34:21):
nature as any other. So he's throwing in with with
a certain version of the emergentist hypothesis. Studying what happens
to more complex bodies, like studying what happens to a
jar of pickles, is doing original research that is actually
yielding hypotheses and theories that are not predictable from just

(34:42):
understanding the particles that make up that jar of pickles. Well,
this just reminds me again of societal examples and then
the idea of wicked problems. They like rolling out a
solution into a complex system that is society and not
realizing that the solution is going to spin off additional problems.
It's going to create additional complexity. They're going to be

(35:04):
emergent uh problems out of your solution, right that, Yeah,
there are things we can't predict from simpler principles, even
if those simpler principles are correct. Uh so, uh So,
Just to clarify, Anderson accepts that the sciences of more
complex phenomena are explanatorily dependent on the sciences of simpler phenomena. Right,

(35:26):
psychology is in a sense dependent on biology. We couldn't
have it without a you know, which is dependent on chemistry,
which is dependent on physics. But explicitly he rejects the
idea that this means psychology is just applied biology, or
that biology is just applied chemistry. At each of these
new levels of complexity, genuinely novel properties emerge which are

(35:49):
not necessarily predictable from a complete understanding of the more
fundamental science. Uh and he grounds this in an example
from his own field, because he works in many body physics.
And uh he he grounds it in this concept that
is known as symmetry breaking. So what does that mean? Well,
for Anderson, the study of fundamental physics is almost synonymous

(36:12):
with the study of symmetry. In other words, fundamental physics
is the search for the laws of reality that are
homogeneous and isotropic. What does that mean. It means they're
the same everywhere and they apply to everything no matter
from what vantage point you look. That sounds like a
good description to me of what the fundamental laws should be.
In other words, they're fundamentally symmetrical. They're they're the same everywhere. Right.

(36:36):
It works in the city, works in the country, works
on earth, works in alpha centaire. Right, and that that's
what physics should be. But while all matter obeys basic
electrodynamics and quantum theory, many objects in the universe, and
not just minds and societies, but Anderson uses examples of
tiny basic physical structures. Many of these objects display novel

(36:58):
or asymmetrical properties, which he says, they're not strictly predictable
from the symmetrical laws that govern them govern them. So
these asymmetries include He gives examples like the inversion of
the ammonia molecule, the shapes of atomic nuclei like sometimes
an atomic nucleus you can work out mathematically is in
a sense shaped like a football or shaped like a plate. Uh,

(37:21):
and he talks about the structures of crystals. These are
you know, they should be. They're based on symmetrical laws,
but the symmetrical laws end up generating asymmetries in reality.
So in Anderson's view, the question is why are large
systems not just bigger than elementary particles, but fundamentally different

(37:42):
from them, with unique properties to study. And here I
want to read a quote from Anderson. He says, quote,
the essential idea is that in the so called into infinity,
in approaching infinity limit of large systems between stuff on
our own macroscopic scale, it is not only convenient but
essentially to realize that matter will undergo mathematically sharp singular

(38:04):
phase transitions to state at which the macros microscopic symmetries,
and even the microscopic equations of motion are in a
sense violated. The symmetry leaves behind ass as its expression,
only certain characteristic behaviors, for example, long wavelength vibrations of
which the familiar example is sound waves, or the unusual

(38:27):
macroscopic conduction phenomena of the superconductor, or in a very
deep analogy, the very rigidity of crystal lattices and thus
of most solid matter. There is, of course no question
of the systems really violating, as opposed to breaking the
symmetry of space and time. But because its parts find

(38:47):
it energetically more favorable to maintain certain fixed relationships with
each other, the symmetry allows only the body as a
whole to respond to external forces. Uh so again he
he's not saying that a big system macroscopic system like
a jar of pickles, violates the laws of physics, but
he's saying, at certain levels of complexity, large objects make

(39:09):
more sense understood as a whole than at the level
of their constituent parts. Uh. And the whole has a
novel scheme of behavior that's not easily predictable from the
nature of its elementary particles. And then of course there
he's like, well, now we've just talked about you know,
crystals and stuff like that, but he of course says,
you know, this applies to d N A and stuff

(39:30):
like that too. Of Course, once you get much more complex,
the problem is is magnified all the more things just
become really seemingly impossible to reduce to or predict from
the underlying laws of elementary particles. There are these quantum
leaps where it appears that quantity has a quality all
its own suddenly, And of course, in the end of

(39:53):
his paper he paraphrases marks in in that saying quantity
as a quality all its own, and then I love this.
He also quotes a supposed conversation between f. Scott Fitzgerald
and Earnest Hemingway, where of course Fitzgerald says the rich
are different from us and Hemingway replies, yes, they have
more money. Now this is interesting because it immediately brings

(40:14):
to mind some like reductionist criticisms that are thrown out.
I've seen before about say that human beings to say, oh,
well you can you can dissect a human being. You can,
you can hold a human heart in your hand, but
you're not going to get a sense of who that
person was based on that experience. Yeah, and I would say,
actually that um that Anderson is not the final word

(40:39):
on this, obviously, like people disagree with him, but this
has been a really interesting and influential paper. And it's
also not to rule out the idea that redundant sciences
do exist somewhere. For example, there might be fields of
science that really do reduce to nothing more the app
than the application of principles of a more fundamental field
of science. But it just looks like this is not

(41:01):
the case for most, if not all, mature scientific fields.
But somebody out there in a lab right now, it
could happen to you. You could be reduced to a
simpler study field is okay, But maybe we should look
at a counterpoint, because, as as I mentioned, not everybody
agrees with Anderson. Uh well, and so what if maybe

(41:23):
it's not as different as you think. More might seem
different or field different, and more might be useful to
treat as different given our limitations. But maybe it's not
really different. There's nothing actually unique going on at higher
levels of complexity. It's just convenient for us to treat
it that way. And here I want to come to

(41:45):
another Nobel Prize winning American physicist, Stephen Weinberg, who offers
a really interesting complementary counter analysis in his book Dreams
of a Final Theory. Have you ever read anything by Weinberg?
I am not sure that I have. He's a really
good writer. The first chapter of this book is just

(42:06):
this brilliant, rollicking fun adventure through science, through chemistry and
particle physics, if you can believe that, where he he
talks about a piece of chalk, and he's like, let's
apply the reductionist hypothesis to a piece of chalk, and
and and in every way possible, look at its properties
and ask why. And every time you ask why, why

(42:27):
is the chalk white? Why is the chalk shaped? Like
it is. Why you know any question like that, you
can What you're doing, essentially is playing the reductionist game, right,
You're you're going one level down. I have to do
that all the time as a as a father. Yeah,
I'm constantly asked questions. I mean, he hasn't asked me
about chalk, but I can easily imagine and ask me

(42:47):
those very questions. Why is it white? Why does it
do this? One? Is it? That will get very reductionist
questions about virtually everything. And when you do that, you're
putting reductionism into practice. You're saying, Okay, well, I can
explain these these higher properties in terms of lower properties,
simpler properties that cause an effect we see at a

(43:08):
large scale. Yeah, I often don't see see it quite
that beautifully. Generally, it's like, oh jeez, I'm just trying
to to drive you to school, and now I've I've
got to explain gravity. You know, because you were asking
about a you know, a bird or a football or something,
what like why did that bird fly into the car window?
Is it? That's uh no, no, no, no, unfortunately not.

(43:29):
But you know, it will just be you know, random
wonderful questions about just how the universe works, and it
will generally start start with a particular detail, but it
quickly spirals out into these very complex uh you know,
notions of of reality. Yeah. Uh so, So Weinberg is
a fan of reductionism. Weinberg he's looking for a final theory.

(43:51):
He wants to find a final theory of physics. And
ultimately he says, yeah, maybe not in practice, can we
actually reduce everything to physics, like it might just be
beyond into our capabilities. But in theory, everything should be
reducible to fundamental physics, that there should be no higher
order insights. Really, uh, it's all there in the physics.
So in this opening chapter he's discussing problems with with

(44:14):
putting the reductionist hypothesis into practice, and he acknowledges there
are plenty of problems. He's not cavalier about that. Uh.
And one of the problems with reducing things like biology
to fundamental physics is that he points out biology is
not just a product of fundamental laws, but also biology
incorporates stuff that happened in the past, like it is

(44:35):
the product of both the fundamental laws of physics and
some accidents of history. In Weinberg's view, biology wouldn't be
the way it was if some different things had happened
in the past. Um. So I think that's kind of interesting.
And in this sense, you see in sciences like biology,
the past becomes calcified into structures that all life on

(44:58):
Earth uses, and so physics appears to be timeless and universal.
But biology is a contingent science. It's a result of
something that happened at one point. Uh. Now, you could
maybe go to a higher level and say that even
physics could be that way. Maybe there, you know, maybe
there's a multiverse. Maybe the laws of physics in this

(45:20):
local universe are in fact contingent. They didn't have to
be that way. Different universes could have different laws of physics,
that's possible, but they at least appear to be universal
in this universe. Okay, So yeah, when we look at
a complex system, we're also looking at a process. Yeah. Um,
but then uh. Weinberg also deals with the concept of
emergence and and he tries to he's respectful toward it,

(45:42):
but he tries to show that he thinks it doesn't
undercut the reductionist hypothesis. So he cites Anderson's essay more
is different, and Weinberg stresses, like Anderson, that while most
obvious examples of potential emergence are in the biological and
social sciences, if emergence exists, it appears to be in
physics as well, and he gives this prime example thermodynamics,

(46:06):
the study of heat. Now you might be thinking like, well,
how could heat be all that complex? Heat is mega complex.
If you ask somebody who's been trying to do, you know,
calculations and thermodynamics, it's really complicated. And Weinberg points out
that in the nineteenth century, thermodynamics was a fundamentally different
and distinct science. It was considered logically autonomous and kept

(46:31):
separate from general mechanics. So you might have your Newtonians
over here, you know, doing their mechanics work, and then
you've got your thermodynamicists. And so while physics relied on
concepts like particles and forces, he says, thermodynamics relied on
concepts like temperature and entropy, which just did not have

(46:51):
counterparts in general mechanics. Uh and uh. He says that
the only real bridge was the first law of thermodynamics,
which was the conservation of energy that linked thermodynamics with
the rest of physics, but he writes that the main
idea and thermodynamics was the second law, which says that
in any closed system, there's this magical quantity called entropy,

(47:13):
which tends to increase over time until the system reaches
a state of equilibrium, until everything just sort of equals
out and becomes very mellow um. But then he writes,
in the nineteenth century, physicists took the second law of
thermodynamics as an axiom. They believed it, believed in it
basically on the basis of induction. Uh. And you could

(47:35):
and still can see examples of thermodynamics all over nature.
You can look at the behavior of steam billowing up
from a pot and see thermody dynamics. You can see
freezing and boiling liquids, and then you can even see
versions of what looked like thermodynamics in globular clusters in space.
But if you see thermodynamics principles play out all over

(47:57):
all scales of the universe, from like mall lecules of
H two in your kitchen to clouds and clouds of
stars and galaxies, then surely thermodynamics is logically independent from
fundamental physics. Right, But Weinberg says no. He writes that eventually,
the work of theoretical physicists like Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs

(48:19):
showed that quote, the principles of thermodynamics could in fact
be deduced mathematically by an analysis of the pro probabilities
of different configurations of certain kinds of system those systems
whose energy is shared among a very large number of subsystems,
as for instance, a gas whose energy is shared among

(48:39):
the molecules of which it is composed. So, in other words,
they came up with the interpretive bridge to show how
thermodynamics reduces to underlying mechanics, statistical mechanics. And this amazing
weird property known as heat really just is the combined
kinetic energy of all the particles in the system. And

(49:00):
that's what we're taught in school. Now you learn heat
is the kinetic energy of vibrating particles. Uh An entropy,
it's just actually a measure of how disordered the system is. Entropy, Uh,
it just means the amount of order in a closed
system decreases over time. So thermodynamics, he says, has been
reduced to underlying theories of particles and forces. And yet

(49:22):
Weinberg writes, you know, these higher order, complex and seemingly
emergent properties like temperature and entropy, which have no counterpart
at the scale of individual particles, they're just not they're
down low, are still useful for lots of kinds of explanations.
So he's not saying higher order sciences aren't useful, they're
just not actually fundamental. They're not describing anything novel necessarily.

(49:45):
Uh So he he concludes this discussion that, um, yeah,
by saying, quote, thermodynamics is more like a mode of
reasoning than a body of universal physical law. Wherever it applies,
it always allows us to jud stify the use of
the same principles. But the explanation of why thermodynamics it

(50:05):
does apply to any particular system takes the form of
a deduction using the methods of statistical mechanics from the
details of what the system contains, and this inevitably leads
us down to the level of elementary particles. So he's
saying it's useful, but it's it's elementary physics. They're what's
driving it is really fundamental physics. So my interpretation of

(50:28):
Weinberg here is that he's using the example of thermodynamics
to show that while these higher order sciences dealing with
complex phenomenon might always remain explanatory, useful, they're just never
logically autonomous, never fundamental, never independent, and they might be
good to retain for purposes of communication and understanding, but

(50:49):
they don't describe fundamental truths. For that, you need reduction
to fundamental physics, paired with an acknowledgement of accidents of history,
and ultimately a theory of every thing. So basically, any
of these different fields is ultimately going to be a
subset of another field. All Right, we're gonna take a
quick break, and when we come back, we're going to

(51:09):
discuss this in terms of some more human elements. Um,
So if your if your mind is exploding with all
of the thermodynamics, bear with us, because things are going
to get a little more human. Okay, So we just
looked at some difficult examples of where emergent properties may

(51:34):
appear to exist in things like crystals or thermodynamics. They
might really exist and be fundamental. They might just be
an illusion that they're not actually fundamental. But one of
the places where people have a really hard time not
seeing something unique and original at higher levels of complexities
and the human sciences in things like psychology and anthropology.

(51:56):
So maybe we should look at a couple of examples
of papers taking the idea of emergentis um and applying
it to these higher complexity sciences. Yeah, and you know
a lot of this boils down to like what's the
saying three's company fours the crowd? Like there, I mean,
in our own experience, we know that as is more

(52:17):
people gather together, certain certain realities come online, certain certain
social responsibilities come online, like, for instance, yoga classes. If
anyone out there has ever been a yoga class, rom
exercise class, if there are just two people in it,
if there's just a teacher and a student, one of
the realities not to be crude is there there There

(52:40):
is no plausible deniability of flatulence. If one person um
passes gas and it's audible or you know, or not audible.
If it's noticeable, then there's no questioning who did it.
But if there are three, then there's plausible deniability. Then
you've got a society, you've got a suspicion and got

(53:00):
bluffing exactly. And I mean that's just a very simple example.
But this takes place, the more you expand the social dynamic.
And uh, and there have been studies that have that
have looked into this, uh in you know, broad or
less crude terms of course. UH. One paper in particular,
and this is one that that that you found for

(53:20):
us here is from Robert L. Carnario, the Transition from
Quantity to Quality and neglected causal mechanism in Accounting for
social evolution. I was interested in this one because it
plays on the idea of quantity becoming quality. So yeah,
the basic nugget here is that when the quantitative increase
in some entity reaches a certain threshold, the situation gives

(53:41):
rise to a qualitative change. So more is different, right Exactly,
it's the same process, but the idea is that it
would break down, uh, you know, beyond mere biological and
chemical examples. We've touched on some of them already, but
like a couple more that the the author brings up here,
like the critical mass of uranium or the quanty aitative
difference in the wavelength of the light received by our

(54:03):
retina and the effect that has on color perception. So
I guess you can think of in terms you know,
there's a there's a tipping point um where where quantity
because it becomes quality. Oh yeah, I never thought about that.
Wavelengths of light, So increasing wavelengths suddenly we just perceive
a different color, right, that's that's that's the basic idea.

(54:24):
But the author here focuses on the notion that quantitative
increases in the form of population give rise to a
change in the structure of a society. So it's that
yoga example, it's the threes company fours a crowd, except
he explores it through some some various other examples here.
So on a basic level, let's say we have a

(54:46):
village of humans and it reaches a large enough size
that you know what, you end up having factions emerge,
clans emerged, like this is a This is a classic
trope of various fictional scenarios in which you have outsiders
and a survivalist. You know, Stephen King's the Mist, Lord
of the Flies Lost. You're gonna have factions emerged, right,

(55:07):
and this is reality television. What did you mean the
Mist or the stand Well, both, right, I guess, because
the Mist is like simplified version of that. They're all
trapped in the supermarket and then immediately there's like they're
like two different factions. There's like the the It's been
a while since I've read it, but I remember there's
one one one faction is a little more uh apocalypt
apocalyptic than the other. Who's to say which one is

(55:31):
correct given that apocalyptic scenario, but we so so we
see splintering in groups, We see splintering in countries and organizations,
both real and fictional. I mean, who can forget the
People's Front of Judea and the Judea and People's Front
right from the Life of Brian. Yeah, well you have
the two different resistance organization that it's splintered from the one,
and an additional satellite organizations have splintered off as well.

(55:54):
I think also there, I guess uh satirizing the narcissism
of small differences. Now, when it breaks down to their
actual villages, the Kaiapo villages typically hit six hundred or
eight hundred persons. Okay, that's like the their their upper limit.
The Yana Mamo, however, they tend to max out at
two hundred or or even a little below, and then

(56:15):
they splinter. So the difference here is that the Kappo
boast a complex social segmentation consisting of clans, while the
Yana Mamo have only a few different lineages. So the
takeaway here is that larger popular population aggregates UH can
bring about an abrupt elaboration in social structure. So it's

(56:36):
it's it's interesting because the the larger group, the group
that is able to maintain the larger village, does so
by through this complex complexity. Like it's the it's almost
like if you were to apply to an engineering standpoint,
like to create a large domed building, UH is going
to be more of an engineering feat and require a

(56:57):
little more finesse than like a small like an egg
glue type hut Oh. It's kind of like how we've
talked about, like the difference between building a house and
building a skyscraper. Skyscraper is not just bigger, it's a
different thing. It's a different project. You can't just have
an approchase with a different mentality, exactly. You can't just
have a larger elephant. You have to have a different

(57:20):
organism that may resemble in some way the elephant um
And so we see we see that reflected here. He
also points out North American Plains, Indians, they did they
displayed a tendency to rely on simple social organizations for
small bands. Okay, so the existing in in small groups,
and they'll have a leader of those groups, but the

(57:41):
leader doesn't exert a tremendous amount of power. But then
when they they will periodically come together for say some
sort of a large hunt or tribal exercise, and then
they'll they'll organize under a tribal chief who exerts far
greater power than a regional So it's not it it's
it's not like even a necessarily a proportional uh change
in power. It's a significant change in power, Like the

(58:03):
complexity really takes off, and then when they have to
splinter again, it all just kind of goes away. Um,
But it's it's it's it seems very emergent in its form,
and that it's not like, oh, they're more of us, now,
this is the way we do things. It's more like,
this is the way we do things when we come
together high necessity. We're making the bigger elephant here interesting

(58:26):
and uh he he points to uh, some other sources
on this point. There's a quote here included from anthropologist
Michael J. Harner, who observed that quote population pressure is
a major uh determinant of social evolution, and that we
see this in all of humanity's greatest transformation, so agriculture, industry, science,
ETCETERA greater land subsistence, resource scarcity with consequently intensified competition

(58:50):
for its control. This leads to the spread of war,
the development of states, and all the the human complexity
that spreads out from that. Yeah, it's interesting to think
of about how uh in a sense large society is
I guess they're emphasizing here just not predictable from small
groups of humans, uh, that that it transforms into this

(59:11):
fundamentally different thing with with different functions and yeah, um,
I mean I I can definitely see this even at
a small scale, like like you were talking about with
the yoga class. You know, a uh, this is getting
very colloquial with the idea of emergentism, but you know,
a gathering of a gathering of five friends is not

(59:34):
just larger than a gathering of two friends. It's very,
very different. And to come back to the the apocalyptic
examples from fiction when we're drawing, I think that's one
of the appeals of stuff like the Walking Dead or
the stand or the mist in that these examples reduced
the human population to a much smaller and at least
seemingly manageable number. And then we try to and in

(59:56):
a sense, we're trying to reduce societal problems to fundamental
proper these like everything goes screwed because of this character,
how he or she is behaving. You can be familiar
with all of the agents that matter, right, and this
is not true of society today. There are tons of
agents acting upon your life who you don't even know

(01:00:16):
who they are, what their names are. Yeah, or it's
not necessarily oh, the villainous character. It's more like, oh,
it's the the villainous are that that emerges when this
group of people get together with these ideals in mind,
and these ideals are actually really positive, but then there's
this negative manifestation of it. Yeah, it gets, uh, it gets,

(01:00:38):
it gets complexity emerges fairly quickly. And then there's another
study looked at here, and this is a our Keith
saw your emergence and psychology lessons from the history of
non reductionist science, and the basic nugget in this one
was that while we often look to psychology for a
reductionist view, there's a lot of potential in an emergent
view of psychology. The mind is not mere really a

(01:01:00):
shadow cast by a functioning brain, which is kind of
an analogy off and fall back on, but but a
higher level emergence system forming the shadow puppet on the
wall and continually revising its form. So like, even if
you don't take a substance duelist point of view, even
if you don't think that the mind is supernatural in
some sense, you could still uh find some merit in

(01:01:22):
the idea that the mind is not fully explicable from
the standpoint of neuroscience. Yes, that's that's my take take
away from the paper anyway. Yeah, you can't just look
at all the tissue in the brain and say this
is the kind of mind it would generate. Okay, Well,
one more thing I wanted to look at before we
wrap things up is we've heard from the reductionist view
of Weinberg, and then we've heard from emergentis like Anderson.

(01:01:45):
But Anderson accepts one interpretation of reductionism, he just rejects
another interpretation of it. What about people who are away
far out there in fully rejecting explanatory reductionism in all
its forms. Obviously, the debate still going on among some thinkers,
and I found a good short essay from by the

(01:02:05):
biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pelaucci about this ongoing debate,
and he discusses the work of a few philosophers like
John Duprey, Jerry Photo, and Nancy Cartwright who have argued
against the fundamental unity of sciences and against the reductionist hypothesis.
And I think he makes a few interesting points. One
he talks about Jerry phoed or making a distinction about

(01:02:30):
what it means for one science to reduce to another. Anyway,
So you could be talking about ontological reduction, which just
means that the more complex phenomena the mind is literally
made out of the simpler phenomena. You know, the mind
literally is dependent upon the brain. You can agree with that,
but uh, this part might be pretty obviously true to you.

(01:02:51):
Molecules are made out of atoms, organisms are made out
of cells, populations are made out of individual organisms. But
when it comes to theoretical reduction, which you might also
call explanatory or explanatory reduction, the same does not necessarily
hold true. While complex phenomena are made out of simpler phenomena.
Are theories explaining complex phenomena are different than the things themselves.

(01:03:15):
They exist in our minds, not in physical space. And
just because the thing reduces does not necessarily mean that
the proper explanation for it reduces. I know that's kind
of a strange philosophical point, but I think there's there
might be a grain of truth there um. Another thing, though,
is that uh, reductionism is not supported by an inductive

(01:03:36):
survey of the progress of science. This is kind of interesting,
and I think I mostly agree with him on this one.
Instead of more complex theories collapsing into simpler ones, what
have we seen in the history of science. We've seen
exactly the opposite. Instead, we see the proliferation of more
and more specialized theories. We don't see the specific science

(01:03:58):
collapsing into the general. We see the general branching off
into the specific. Now, maybe this just means our our
study of science isn't mature enough yet, you know, like
that we haven't done enough work reducing complex sciences into
simpler ones. That's possible, but if you're just to look
at it inductively, science is not reducing. That's not happening.

(01:04:19):
At all. Uh. One more thing is that voter says,
you know, the reductionist assumption is not, as far as
we know, actually guided by a principle. It might be intuitive,
especially to scientists who have, you know, some other phenomena,
who have seen some other phenomena successfully reduced to simpler principles.
Think of Weinberg talking about thermodynamics. But what reason do

(01:04:42):
we actually have to assume that biology can be fully
explained by physics? Uh? I don't know. My intuition certainly
tells me it can be. But my intuition, of course,
is not worth a sack of split piece in science. Uh.
And then one last idea I wanted to end on
because I thought this was really yeard, but also very
interesting is the anti realism of Nancy Cartwright, the philosopher

(01:05:07):
of science. Nancy Cartwright not the voice actress who plays
Bart Simpson. So she offers a positive rationale for believing
that theories for complex phenomenon might not be expected to
reduce to theories for simpler ones, and she advocates what's
known as an anti realist position. And in her case,
what this means is she rejects the idea that there

(01:05:30):
is such a thing as fundamental laws of nature. Now
you might be thinking, how on earth could you do that? Well,
this it sounds kind of weird, but think would go
with her for a second. I think it's actually kind
of interesting. One thing, we can't denize that science works,
right we we know it works practically, pragmatically, it just works.
It generates theories that make predictions which are accurate enough

(01:05:52):
for us to make technology and make civilization out of them.
But what if they're not, in fact truly universal and fundamental,
but rather, as I said a minute ago, accurate enough.
And there's really a present precedent for this in the
history of the pursuit of physics already, because for a
long time, what did we have in physics? We had

(01:06:12):
the mechanics of Isaac Newton, and they were accurate enough
that we could use them to predict the motions of baseballs,
or if I throw a jar of pickles at your face,
even tried to study the motions of planets. This could
pretty much all be explained accurately by Newtonian mechanics, um
and we we could we could make a technology out
of them. We can fire cannonballs, all that stuff. But

(01:06:34):
we now know that strictly speaking, Newton was wrong. His
laws were not able to generate very accurate predictions at
things beyond the medium scales of matter and energy, and
for those things they've now been replaced with things like
general relativity and quantum mechanics, which can give us even
more accurate predictions to explain those weird few cases where

(01:06:56):
Newtonian mechanics break down in our experience. So where does
Nancy Cartwright go with this? She says, well, what if
in fact, all possible fundamental theories are like that, accurate
enough to make predictions, but not actually district descriptive of
inviolable universal laws. So this could maybe explain why, or

(01:07:18):
at least the ultimate reason why it proves so hard
to reduce all science to physics, because we haven't essentially
an imperfect system that merely lines up with most things. Yeah,
I mean, the the idea would be, yeah, that the
physics will always be imperfect, that there is no universal
physics at bottom, there's only predictive enough. And in Cartwright's terminology,

(01:07:42):
this would mean that all scientific laws are quote phenomenal logical,
good enough to reckon our experience of the world at
the level of their appropriate application, but not necessarily truly
universal and fundamental. Uh. And if that's the case, that
that could essentially apply all down the line. You know,
because there is this inherent indeterminacy or you know, this

(01:08:06):
inherent imprecision at the basis of all matter and energy,
you can understand why higher, more complex levels of science
would not be reducible to lower ones. So it's like
saying there's no United States. There's actually just all these
different states. There's no there's no European Union. There's just
all these different countries. Are they or to go back

(01:08:26):
to the state's aeology, there are just these counties that
are assembled into this this order. On an individual level,
there can be a truth, but not an overall arching system. Well,
I mean, I think she would be saying that at
the bottom there is no universal truth, so that that
maybe you might have like that there's no there's no
fundamental basis of political organization from what you're saying, Like,

(01:08:50):
you know, you can use political organization to reckon countries, states, counties,
and stuff, and it all works well enough at those levels,
but there is no bottom of political organization. There's no
fundamental unit of it that is perfectly real. Yeah, all right,
I can I'm not saying i'd buy her take on it,

(01:09:11):
but I can see how it would. I see how
it lines up. Yeah, and I do think it's interesting.
I'm not saying I'm convinced by her point of view.
I just think it's an interesting idea. Yeah. And to
your like point that we laid out at the beginning,
it's a it's a non magical version of this. Like
certainly we can look to any two various examples where
someone uh isn't buying into it for supernatural reasons, but

(01:09:33):
she has a a scientific theory here. Yeah, and so uh, well,
I don't know, but let's say it's at least a
non supernatural thing and it participates inductively, and so because
it looks at like, well, this has been the case
in in some of our study of science, we keep
finding out that stuff that we think accurately describes the
world is not really perfectly accurate. Is just accurate enough anyway,

(01:09:59):
That's what I got. So, Robert, are you convinced? What
what do you think? Are you reductionist emergentists somewhere in
between one of those qualified middle grounds. Oh, I guess
I've I've got to fall back on the sort of
you know, lens based view of it. You know, I
can put the lens of reductionism and the lens of
of emergence on as needed and certainly see how they

(01:10:20):
line up with reality. But but yeah, I mean, I
I certainly think, uh, emergence carries a lot of weight. Yeah,
I certainly intuitively feel that sense of emergence. But then again,
I also when I get thinking in the reductionist of mindset,
that can make sense to me too. I guess I'm
just very impressionable. I don't know what to think about this.

(01:10:41):
I do think it's a really interesting subject though, and
I do think it's important always to to come back
to the kind of stuff we're doing here, where we
pay attention not just to how science is done, but
to the assumptions underpinning it. Yeah. Indeed, all right, Well, hey,
if you want, if you want to find out more
about this topic other related topics to do with sort
of the the nature of science and the nature scientific inquiry,

(01:11:05):
heading over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's what we'll find all the podcast episodes, videos, blog
post links out to various social media accounts of his Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, etcetera.
And hey, there's even an old fashioned way to get
in Dutch with us as well. Right, you can email
us as always that blow the mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this than thousands of

(01:11:32):
other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com