(The full text is about 2000 words, it takes 2 minutes to read)
Reductionism offers a narrow, unexplained view of reality.
Image Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet
Key takeaways
- Reductionism holds that everything real in the world can be explained by atoms and their interactions.
- But opponents claim that reductionism is wrong, arguing that the world can evolve new things and new laws that reductionism cannot predict.
- Both scientific perspectives have enormous implications for the development of science, not only for ourselves, but also for ourselves from philosophy to economics to politics.
If you've heard the joke below, let me know in the comments section.
"Sociologists obey psychologists; Psychologists obey neuroscientists; Neuroscientists obey biologists; Biologists obey chemists; Chemists obey physicists; Physicists obey mathematicians; Mathematicians obey God. ”
While this is just a joke among scientists, this little joke really describes a hierarchy in which authenticity in some domains boils down to authenticity in others. This "reductionist" view is so prevalent in human culture that it is actually a tacit or implicit philosophy of science that comes to mind, even if they never think about it explicitly.
But today, after embarking on a series of explorations about this idea of reduction and its alternatives, some people have determined that reductionism is wrong, arguing that this is not the way the world works at all. In their view, this worldview is not just a philosophical question, it manifests itself in ways that may be dangerous to our future, for example, if we see the living world as "but a resource", how will we use it? Or if we see ourselves as "but neurons," what do we expect from AI?
Thankfully, there is another way of looking at science, truth, and the world, which may be more correct and "safer," and it is called "emergenceism."
The problem of reductionism
Let's take a bigger look at the problem. Here's what philosopher Paul Humphreys had to offer about reductionism:
"The world is nothing more than a space-time arrangement of basic physical objects and properties. You and me, rocks and galaxies, toads and scrambled eggs are all just processes, and the continuous state of these processes is the spatial arrangement of basic physical objects. These basic physical objects, arranged in different configurations, explain all the mundane and unique changes that we encounter in our daily lives. ”
Those "fundamental objects" described by Humphreys are the elementary particles of physics: electrons, quarks, etc. So his idea is that once you have listed all these elementary particles, and once you know how these particles interact (i.e., what forces they react to), in principle, everything that can happen and what will happen is encoded in the list of particles and their interactions. That is why, in principle, all truths discovered by sociologists must ultimately be explained by the truths discovered by physicists.
Simple reductionist blueprints, while offering a world made entirely of atoms, are no longer seen by the public as the only "sober" scientific view.
This is important because sophisticated proponents of this reductionist view have a sophisticated philosophical understanding of how the chain of causes moves upwards, so that they can explain everything from quarks to mollusks to governments. But even so, proponents of emergence argue that reductionism describes a world without fundamental novelty or fundamental innovation.
This is really a "bottom-up" predictability issue. If you know the basic entities and their laws, in principle you can predict everything that will happen or may happen. All future history and all evolution, because it's just a rearrangement of these electrons and quarks. To reductionists, you, your dog, your love for dogs, and the dog's love for you are nothing more than the arrangement and rearrangement of atoms.
The challenge from emergence
The "emergence" theory is another alternative to this view. As philosophers Brigitte Falkenburg and Margaret Morrison put it:
"If a phenomenon cannot be reduced, explained or predicted from its components, then it is emerging... Emergent phenomena arise from lower-level entities, but they cannot be reduced, explained, or predicted from their microscopic basis. ”
From an emergent point of view, in the course of the history of the universe, new entities have emerged, and even new laws have emerged to govern them.
Evolution is key
According to at least one emergent, the universe absolutely has the ability to innovate and create new things. The process it runs on is evolution, and evolution is not just physics. So, from that perspective, while you're obviously made of atoms, you're not just atoms either. The details of your feelings for you, your dog, and your human dog cannot be predicted, even in principle, even from a perfect knowledge of all your elementary particles.
The crystal demonstrates an urgent fractal process.
As a philosophy, emergence was first proposed by a group of British philosophers in the early 20th century. They argue that phenomena such as life and consciousness are so different from the physics of the systems being studied that they must represent new entities. But with the discovery of the biochemical basis of life, such as DNA, in the 1950s and 60s, interest in emergenceism waned. As Paul Humphreys points out, there is not even an entry on emergence in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, it was since then that significant developments in many fields brought emergence back into the sights of scientists and philosophers.
Science needs emergence
One of the most important reasons for the resurgence of emergence is that science needs it. At the forefront of research, there is a compelling new field called complex systems. Drawing insights from the study of physics, biology, and social systems, complex systems theory provides scientists with a wide range of examples in which new entities and new rules seem to emerge from simpler parts of network interactions. In layman's terms, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
These studies have attracted a new generation of philosophers to refocus on emerging concepts, using advances in science as a driving force to unravel how causal chains close or open and how they operate from the bottom up or top down. In these examinations, distinctions such as the appearance of "weak" and "strong" appear, as well as those who question the necessity of this division.
summary
In reductionism and emergenceism, there are many difficult issues to be worked out. But what is clear to us is that the simple reductionist blueprint, while offering a world made entirely of atoms, is no longer seen as science and its only "sober" view of life, the universe, and everything. And the development of science requires emergence.