Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1: In Today, we're gonna be looking at the philosophical underpinnings
Speaker 1: of science. Don't run away, stick here, because we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about scientific reductionism. Now, we've done episodes before
Speaker 1: where we've talked about not just you know, the fruits
Speaker 1: of scientific investigation, but the ideas that lie underneath what
Speaker 1: we do when we do science. Uh, we've talked before
Speaker 1: about that Daniel Dennett quote from Darwin's Dangerous Idea where
Speaker 1: he says that you know, scientists a lot of times
Speaker 1: think that philosophies what those other, you know, naval gazers
Speaker 1: do over there, and that that science is really free
Speaker 1: from all the constraints of that naval gazing, that they're
Speaker 1: immune to, quote the confusions that philosophers devote their lives
Speaker 1: to dissolving. But what Dennett says is there's no such
Speaker 1: thing as philosophy free science. There's only science whose philosophical
Speaker 1: baggage is taken on board without examination. And I think
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense. I think that's a
Speaker 1: maximum we should adhere to to to look at what's
Speaker 1: lying underneath science intellectually and and always ask ourselves the question, like,
Speaker 1: is what is what we're doing philosophically grounded? Does it
Speaker 1: make sense? Yeah? I mean it gets it down to
Speaker 1: the idea of to what extent can we truly just
Speaker 1: sort of mathematically, passionlessly, uh, breakdown things into their fundamental
Speaker 1: parts in order to make sense of them. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that is the idea we're gonna be talking about today.
Speaker 1: It's the concept of scientific reductionism. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: start by clarifying the meaning of that term, because if
Speaker 1: you've heard that term used in conversation, there's a very
Speaker 1: good chance that you've heard it used in a way
Speaker 1: that's different than what we mean today. So people did
Speaker 1: bonding on Facebook to say a new story about a
Speaker 1: scientific study or a theory and say, well, that sounds reductionist.
Speaker 1: You're just being a reductionist here. Uh. Yeah. So there's
Speaker 1: one version of the word reductive that means something sort
Speaker 1: of like oversimplified. Like if I say that you know,
Speaker 1: the only reason French cooking tastes good is because they
Speaker 1: use like a full stick of butter and every dish. People.
Speaker 1: You know, some French chef might say, no, wait, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of technique. You're taking a very reductionist attitude.
Speaker 1: It's not that simple um or another one you might hear.
Speaker 1: I think often these days, if you hear people talking
Speaker 1: about scientific reductionism, you're hearing it used, uh, not in
Speaker 1: a philosophical argument about the underpinnings of science, but more
Speaker 1: in an argument about the validity of world views. And
Speaker 1: it works as this kind of snarl word that means
Speaker 1: something like nihilism, or the belief that there is nothing
Speaker 1: of value, beauty, or goodness in the world. That is
Speaker 1: not what we mean. That's not what the term means
Speaker 1: in philosophy of science, and that's not the way we're
Speaker 1: going to be using it today. Yeah. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of this gets back to the concepts that we
Speaker 1: tackled in the Wicked Problems episode and as well as
Speaker 1: the illusion of explanatory depth. And that's the idea that simple,
Speaker 1: broad solutions to complex societal problems, complicts problems in general
Speaker 1: tend to be ineffective and spawn new problems. And you
Speaker 1: could say that's that's because they take a reductionist approach
Speaker 1: to it. Robots are dangerous, so we ban all robots.
Speaker 1: Humans are the cause of war, so exterminate all all humans.
Speaker 1: Right now, I wonder if that way of using reductionism
Speaker 1: fits more into the hater's definition or the definition we're
Speaker 1: going to look at today. Well, the interesting thing, isn't
Speaker 1: it that the hater's definition is itself reductionist, right, and
Speaker 1: then maybe my that definition is also reductionist because to
Speaker 1: a certain extent, Yes, when you there are some things
Speaker 1: that they're complicated enough and if you boil them, you know,
Speaker 1: you can boil them down to sort of concrete solutions
Speaker 1: and concrete um causes. And it depends on what you're studying.
Speaker 1: Like sometimes, especially with societal issues, it's not always that
Speaker 1: cut and dry. There's just too many factors and it's
Speaker 1: difficult to test out the solution, certainly in real time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because by the time you've deployed the answer, you've created
Speaker 1: all these additional problems. So that's that it's only butter explanation.
Speaker 1: Somebody is trying to explain deliciousness in terms of butter
Speaker 1: only when we in reality it's much more complicated. Yes, Okay,
Speaker 1: so what what what I mean by scientific reductionism, and
Speaker 1: what's usually discussed in uh philosophy of science, is that
Speaker 1: as a method, it means that any system or entity
Speaker 1: existing in reality will ultimately be best understood if broken
Speaker 1: down into its simpler constituent parts, and the workings of
Speaker 1: those parts are understood. Uh. And we see this all
Speaker 1: the time in science, right, the science is constantly trying
Speaker 1: to reduce a complex phenomenon into its part and find
Speaker 1: out how it's parts work. Yeah, what's it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's basically what how stuff works is all about, right,
Speaker 1: It's about how is this actually working? What are the properties?
Speaker 1: What are the physical laws involved? Even if it's something
Speaker 1: as simple. Well, for instance, I wrote an article on
Speaker 1: how hula hoops work a while back, and so part
Speaker 1: of that is like the culture of the history, who
Speaker 1: in the in the history of the hula hoop, where
Speaker 1: it came from, how it gained popularity, how it's utilize
Speaker 1: different ways. But you also get down to just the
Speaker 1: basic physics of what's going on when a hula hoop
Speaker 1: is swinging around a body and motion, and you can
Speaker 1: reduce it to physicals. So in that sense, I think
Speaker 1: that is a perfectly valid way of using a reductionist
Speaker 1: approach is saying, like, what are the most basic laws
Speaker 1: and elements and explanatory UH systems that are in play
Speaker 1: when you see somebody hula hooping and there man and
Speaker 1: I can see where there would be people who would say,
Speaker 1: who are like such hula hoop enthusiasts? And it would
Speaker 1: say stop explaining trying to explain the magic of hula hoops.
Speaker 1: When you explain the physics of hula hoops, you take
Speaker 1: all the fun out of it. That would be a
Speaker 1: crazy statement because the fun still there. We're just explaining
Speaker 1: how the fun works, right. And the controversy we're talking
Speaker 1: about today, and this example we can probably use a
Speaker 1: better example in the minic would not be uh whether
Speaker 1: it takes the fun out of it, but whether it
Speaker 1: misses something crucial. If you just describe a hula hoop
Speaker 1: in terms of the basic physics of of how it
Speaker 1: goes around the body, are you missing something factually crucial
Speaker 1: and autonomously true about the phenomenon of hula hooping? Who
Speaker 1: is something vital to its functionality? Yeah, that's probably not
Speaker 1: a good example. But one other way we can look
Speaker 1: at what scientific reductionism is is that it's a it's
Speaker 1: a hypothesis on the final nature of the relationship between
Speaker 1: science and reality, and so it can be interpreted to
Speaker 1: mean that in effect, every correct explanation of the world
Speaker 1: can be reduced to the most fundamental, lowest theory of reality,
Speaker 1: and essentially everything is physics if you go deep enough. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: there're gonna be a lot of reductionists who will say, now,
Speaker 1: I understand that we need sciences like psychology and chemistry
Speaker 1: and political science and sociology to explain things that it
Speaker 1: would be ridiculous to think we can explain by looking
Speaker 1: at all the elementary particles. Um, but that in principle
Speaker 1: we should be able to explain all those things given
Speaker 1: just our understanding of elementary particles and forces. They're just
Speaker 1: too complex for us to understand right now. Okay, So
Speaker 1: let's try to put this into a specific concrete example. Uh.
Speaker 1: If if you accept that everything in the universe is
Speaker 1: subject to the laws of physics, and I think Robert,
Speaker 1: you and I can agree that as far as we
Speaker 1: know it is, uh, then everything in the universe ultimately
Speaker 1: could be best explained by fundamental physics or whatever we
Speaker 1: find lying underneath fundamental physics, whatever is the ultimate theory
Speaker 1: of everything, the ultimate underlying law of the universe. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so let's look at a higher order phenomenon and
Speaker 1: and try to say what it would mean to reduce it.
Speaker 1: So I came up with this horrible example and an
Speaker 1: apparent case of psychogenic blindness. So you are with your
Speaker 1: family on Thanksgiving, and so they get to pick what
Speaker 1: movie you go out and see, and you are overruled,
Speaker 1: and you go to see the new Adam Sandler movie,
Speaker 1: in which I imagine the next one is going to be.
Speaker 1: Adam Sandler plays the fifteenth Dalai Lama and also plays
Speaker 1: the Dalai Lama is really loud, flatulent twin sister. Twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes into the onset of this film, you go
Speaker 1: blind in both eyes. Now you go to the doctor,
Speaker 1: and the doctors can find no evidence of injury or
Speaker 1: neurological dysfunctions, So they classify this as a rare case
Speaker 1: of psychogenic blindness, blindness that's induced by psychological distress rooted
Speaker 1: in a state of mind. And we've discussed this on
Speaker 1: the show before, especially in terms of certain almost for
Speaker 1: natural occurrences right right, where like there's a mystical experience
Speaker 1: and it leads to a bodily manifestation. Yeah, and so
Speaker 1: in psychology there might be some framework for explaining what
Speaker 1: happened to you uh, and that framework would be a
Speaker 1: theory like knowledge. It would be explanatory talking about causes
Speaker 1: in the mind and uh, and perhaps solutions that take
Speaker 1: place in the mind. But of course, assuming that we
Speaker 1: had a complete understanding of the whole state of your
Speaker 1: body at the level of neuroscience, fully explaining all of
Speaker 1: your brain tissues and functions and how they were interacting
Speaker 1: on the reductionist hypothesis, we actually shouldn't need the psychological explanation, right,
Speaker 1: that's just a convenience. If we understood everything there was
Speaker 1: to understand about the physical nature of your brain, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't need psychology. We wouldn't need the psychologist to say,
Speaker 1: what's happening with your blindness. We could just look at
Speaker 1: the cells in your brain. Now. Of course, if we
Speaker 1: had a perfect understanding of your brain from perspective of
Speaker 1: cell biology, explaining what all the cells in your body
Speaker 1: are doing and how, we technically wouldn't need the neuroscience explanation.
Speaker 1: We just say, okay, here's the cell theory that you know.
Speaker 1: This is what explains everything that's going on. And then
Speaker 1: you could reduce it further. You could say, well, of
Speaker 1: course we had a perfect understanding of every molecule in
Speaker 1: your body from the standpoint of fundamental chemistry, understanding what
Speaker 1: all the atoms and molecules are doing and how, we
Speaker 1: wouldn't need the biochemistry you know, the biology or biochemistry explanation.
Speaker 1: And of course, if we had a perfect understanding of
Speaker 1: the whole state of your body from the standpoint of
Speaker 1: fundamental physics, you know, elementary particle physics, the quantum mechanical
Speaker 1: wave functions of all the particles and energy states in
Speaker 1: your body, we wouldn't need the chemistry explanation. So ultimately,
Speaker 1: the hypothesis goes like this, if we're able to explain
Speaker 1: everything in the universe in terms of fundamental physics, we
Speaker 1: would and that would be the best explanation. It's only
Speaker 1: our lack of understanding and our lack of knowledge and
Speaker 1: computational power that forces us to conceive of explanations of
Speaker 1: things that are more complex than fundamental physics, like chemistry,
Speaker 1: like biology, like psychology like you know, sociology, or or
Speaker 1: political science. Um, but that at bottom, the best explanation
Speaker 1: for everything is here are the particles and their energy
Speaker 1: states and vectors. Now it's almost impossible to think about
Speaker 1: something of this without like this, without thinking about comparisons
Speaker 1: to like our modern computing experience, right, you know, like
Speaker 1: thinking of hardware, and then a type of hardware, the code,
Speaker 1: and I'm simplifying here, but then on top of the
Speaker 1: code the sort of uh user interface, and then our
Speaker 1: interaction with that user interface. So it seems like you
Speaker 1: would have I mean, realistically, you would have problems that
Speaker 1: occur with the root of that problem at different levels
Speaker 1: in that in that depth, right, something, you might have
Speaker 1: a problem at the hardware level, you might have a
Speaker 1: problem uh at the the the user interface level. But
Speaker 1: if we had a complete enough understanding, we could address
Speaker 1: any problem from the bottom exactly. So the physical reductionists
Speaker 1: would say, okay, but if you had a perfect understanding, yeah, everything,
Speaker 1: there would be energy states and elementary particles. If you
Speaker 1: understood what all of them were doing, you could fix
Speaker 1: any problem at any level. Yes, So, so so not even
Speaker 1: going down to the hardware level, but going down to
Speaker 1: the the the even more primal levels, going into the
Speaker 1: very basement of reality. Yeah, and so the question today
Speaker 1: is looking at that perspective of the world, is that true?
Speaker 1: Is that a correct understanding of what science is? Um
Speaker 1: or our higher level science is more complex sciences like chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology,
Speaker 1: and so forth. Do these sciences have unique insights that
Speaker 1: are not present at the lower levels of more simplicity
Speaker 1: of you know, simpler realities. Are they just the best
Speaker 1: we can do to understand complex phenomena like society, minds,
Speaker 1: and organisms? Or do they Are they intellectually autonomous? Do
Speaker 1: they have something original to offer? So, like, the counter
Speaker 1: argument here would be that that physics and carpentry engineering
Speaker 1: can explain the way that a stage is built, but
Speaker 1: they're not going to have any impact on say, the
Speaker 1: play that the actors on the stage you're reciting. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that you might uh, well, yeah, I mean that
Speaker 1: that that's sort of an analogy that works, I guess. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the things that I do want to make
Speaker 1: sure we're clarifying is that I don't plan on Robert
Speaker 1: you can, you can violate this if you want, but
Speaker 1: I don't plan on exploring arguments against scientific reductionism that
Speaker 1: are based in a belief in supernatural causation, because, as
Speaker 1: we mentioned in another recent podcast, I'm not even sure
Speaker 1: the concept of supernatural causation is coherent. I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not sure that it's incoherent. But then again, try to
Speaker 1: picture it. What are you picturing? Usually you're just picturing
Speaker 1: natural causation with with some kind of blurry nous or
Speaker 1: some kind of detail obscured. Right, It's like the hand
Speaker 1: of God. Analogy. If if the hand if God is
Speaker 1: something outside of our universe, then for that hand to
Speaker 1: reach into our universe to do something, it has to
Speaker 1: adhere to the laws of physics. It has to wear
Speaker 1: the glove of our reality at least, and then it
Speaker 1: has to therefore be observable as a physical phenomenon. Yet
Speaker 1: to do something, it has to do something right. Um.
Speaker 1: But but we will instead look at a different concept,
Speaker 1: that is the concept of emergentis um, a philosophical distinction
Speaker 1: that says that there are large complex systems that show
Speaker 1: genuinely novel properties due to their complexity, that are not
Speaker 1: inherently predictable from or reducible to the combined effects of
Speaker 1: their simpler, more constituent parts and ultimately not predictable from
Speaker 1: or reducible to fundamental physics. So let's this is where
Speaker 1: I come back to my perhaps imperfect analogy of the
Speaker 1: stage and the actors on the stage. You can't have
Speaker 1: one without the other, but one seems to be operating
Speaker 1: in a way that the lower level cannot fully predict
Speaker 1: or control beyond the very basic levels. Okay, that, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that. I think that's a good analogy.
Speaker 1: Then I'm sorry if I was skeptical it to be. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: A healthy dose of skepticism is uh is important here. Okay.
Speaker 1: So given our given our idea that we're gonna look
Speaker 1: at emergentis um as a form of material understanding of
Speaker 1: the world. You know, it's an extension of science, not
Speaker 1: not an expression of like vitalism or supernaturalism. What are
Speaker 1: some examples of things in nature that we might assume
Speaker 1: are not able to be explained by fundamental physics. Well,
Speaker 1: big one is intelligence. So yeah, even playing like Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons, where you have a definite intelligent score versus
Speaker 1: like wisdom or charisma, I often find myself in conversations
Speaker 1: with the poem i'm playing with, like, was this would
Speaker 1: this be an intelligence check or wisdom check? Like, we
Speaker 1: really have a very ambiguous idea of what constitutes intelligence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But at the same time, intelligence is I think by
Speaker 1: the fact that you consider it this separate property, that
Speaker 1: you have this separate score, and it's natural to think
Speaker 1: of it as something that discreetly emerges at higher levels
Speaker 1: of complexity and isn't reducible to simpler objects. So, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: like you said, it's sometimes kind of difficult to define intelligence.
Speaker 1: What is it? My favorite definition that I've come across
Speaker 1: is that intelligence is the tendency of a system to
Speaker 1: accelerate the solution of problems. It leads to faster solving. So,
Speaker 1: however we define it, we know when we see it right.
Speaker 1: Intelligence is highly useful, ubiquitous, undeniable. It's part of our
Speaker 1: experience of the everyday world. But can intelligence be explained
Speaker 1: in terms of simpler fundamental units. I don't know. After all,
Speaker 1: there is no indication that a single goal neuron possesses
Speaker 1: anything like intelligence. There's no analogy for intelligence below what
Speaker 1: things like brains or computers do, at least as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell. Well, even then, it's far more complicated.
Speaker 1: We've all I felt we've probably even covered on the
Speaker 1: show before the whole topic of what makes a genius?
Speaker 1: What does a genius's brain look like? And yes, you
Speaker 1: can you can draw certain Uh, you can look to
Speaker 1: the gray matter and line up various factors, but a
Speaker 1: lot of it is going to be beyond that. It's
Speaker 1: going to have to do with with with it, with
Speaker 1: the experience and personality of the individual. Yeah, it's the
Speaker 1: whole Boys from Brazil scenario we're trying to colonial. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: I mean assuming that animal intelligence or computer intelligence is
Speaker 1: not magic. We're not believing it's magic, but that it's
Speaker 1: still possible that it can't be explained reductively by recourse
Speaker 1: to more fundamental sciences. That chemistry alone can't explain intelligence.
Speaker 1: It's something that only happens to matter at a certain
Speaker 1: level of complexity and configure curation, and is not predictable
Speaker 1: from lower levels of understanding. Uh so, what what would
Speaker 1: it mean to understand intelligence of the level of single cells.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Maybe it's possible to do that, but
Speaker 1: at least sounds like a very difficult project. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: so the basic idea here is that interactions among smaller
Speaker 1: entities lead to larger entities, and there's a self organizing
Speaker 1: aspect to reality. So what economist Jeffrey Goldstein called quote
Speaker 1: the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns, and properties
Speaker 1: during the process of self organization in complex systems. So
Speaker 1: I think, like a classic sort of science example I
Speaker 1: always go back to, is just the accretion of cosmic
Speaker 1: dust into smaller bodies and clouds, building mass, exerting gravity
Speaker 1: forming stars, planet, everything everything else gravitating around each other,
Speaker 1: held in uh in gravitational um enslavement to each other,
Speaker 1: and becoming the system. A system that emerges initially from
Speaker 1: particles floating around and bumping into each other, and thus
Speaker 1: and thus it does obey the laws of physics at
Speaker 1: every level, But is it reducible too and predictable from
Speaker 1: those laws When the case of just like basic the
Speaker 1: basic assembly of solar system, of of a galaxy, I
Speaker 1: would think, yes, I think this is this is definitely
Speaker 1: a physics based bringing together of properties. But it's such
Speaker 1: a Maybe it's because it's just such a grandiose thing
Speaker 1: to imagine assembling from such minute pieces. It feels an
Speaker 1: appropriate metaphor for the emergence of say consciousness, the vergence
Speaker 1: of intelligence, because if dust can turn into the Milky
Speaker 1: Way galaxy, and and I'm simplifying, uh, but but if
Speaker 1: if something so vast and complex and energetic can can
Speaker 1: can can come together from such small pieces, then it
Speaker 1: makes sense that's something as at least on the individual level,
Speaker 1: as complex and amazing and brew as intelligence and consciousness,
Speaker 1: that that too could emerge from just things bumping into
Speaker 1: each other. Well, yeah, and there you do say something
Speaker 1: that I think should put us on guard against the
Speaker 1: concept of emergentism, which is that it feels good for us,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea that no, no, no, you know,
Speaker 1: things like intelligence and and higher order concepts really are
Speaker 1: somehow unique at their level of organization, and they're not
Speaker 1: just reducible to elementary particles and and energy states. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's something we like to feel, and so thus
Speaker 1: I think we should be a little on guard about
Speaker 1: about that idea. Yeah, but I would to counter I
Speaker 1: would say that basically, the the idea of consciousness, of
Speaker 1: being conscious, of being a live feels majestic. I think
Speaker 1: we can look to just the universe itself and say, well,
Speaker 1: the universe and all its majesty is based on things
Speaker 1: bumping into each other, you know, randomly and in order
Speaker 1: arising out of all of that. Then it's no great
Speaker 1: stretch to say that the mind is the same the
Speaker 1: cosmos is a humiliating analogy. Yeah, well yeah, because you
Speaker 1: can go either way. You can say my mind is
Speaker 1: like the universe, man, but you can also say, hey,
Speaker 1: your mind is just like the universe. It's just stuff
Speaker 1: bumping into each other until a system emerges. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should look at a few more examples of
Speaker 1: supposed emergent behavior that you can see in nature systems,
Speaker 1: where you know, at a complex enough level, things seem
Speaker 1: to happen that are not obviously predictable from the simpler
Speaker 1: components acting alone. Well, evolution is a big one, of course,
Speaker 1: just the I mean, that's the basic underlying principle right
Speaker 1: in the in this uh, this constant race, the survival
Speaker 1: of the fittest, uh, natural selection that you have all
Speaker 1: these different forms, these various mutations that are kind of
Speaker 1: throwing out different different versions of the same product into
Speaker 1: the open market of brutal survivalism, and then whatever sticks sticks, yeah,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, And so that's the thing, like if you
Speaker 1: were just in the universe where there was no life,
Speaker 1: but there was just say, organic chemistry. Would you would
Speaker 1: you be able to really predict the devolution was going
Speaker 1: to occur? Maybe, I don't know. Um what about here.
Speaker 1: Here's a product of evolution that's often been cited as
Speaker 1: a really interesting version of emergent behavior, hive insect behavior.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yeah, this is this is always a cool
Speaker 1: concept the view of you social insects, bees, wasps, ants, uh, termites, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But especially especially bees and ants being like the prime
Speaker 1: examples of this. Uh, they're they're essentially an emergent system
Speaker 1: after all. You know, how else is all of this
Speaker 1: behavior going to get there? Nobody's programming the ants, nobody's
Speaker 1: telling them, Oh, you're the queen and you do this. Uh. No,
Speaker 1: one ant or one b is able to display anything
Speaker 1: like the hive behavior we see, And not even any
Speaker 1: small group of them show these rudimentary signs of it.
Speaker 1: It's only when you get enough of them in our
Speaker 1: acting that hive behavior emerges. Yeah, and out of all
Speaker 1: of these little interactions, these roles, it all adds up
Speaker 1: to a kind of and it's important to say, you know,
Speaker 1: non sci fi and the non science fictional sense, a
Speaker 1: hive mind. You know, they don't like share a conscious experience, right,
Speaker 1: they're not, you know, they don't have their brains all
Speaker 1: hooked up with tubes into a you know, floating mega
Speaker 1: brain or something. But in a very real, non scie
Speaker 1: by sense, there is this hive mind, this high think
Speaker 1: that emerges and they're able to do something many things
Speaker 1: as a group, solve problems as a group that the
Speaker 1: individual is just not. I mean it's almost cheating to
Speaker 1: say they're incapable of it, because they are capable of
Speaker 1: it as this sort of metal organism that they've become,
Speaker 1: just not on the individual level. And this approach has
Speaker 1: proven very useful and artificial intelligence and robotics. I'm sure
Speaker 1: you've covered this in the past and the Forward Thinking
Speaker 1: podcast the the study of of you social insects and
Speaker 1: figuring out how to ads robotics and engineers faces challenges
Speaker 1: and the interactions of simple machines machine learning. So you
Speaker 1: essentially have the creation of like little robots that are
Speaker 1: behaving like ants. Yeah. Uh, here here's another big one. Consciousness.
Speaker 1: This is probably the thing that is most often discussed
Speaker 1: as as a potentially irreducible phenomenon in nature. Uh, so
Speaker 1: you have a mind. You don't just have a brain,
Speaker 1: but you have a mind. Assuming you do have a mind,
Speaker 1: I don't you know, it's impossible for me to know
Speaker 1: anybody else in the world has a mind. I assume
Speaker 1: you do. You seem like you do, you claim to usually,
Speaker 1: But yeah, you've got a mind, a conscious experience. And
Speaker 1: there's no analogy that we can find or that we
Speaker 1: have good evidence of at lower levels. Right, there's no
Speaker 1: evidence that single neurons are conscious. There's no evidence that
Speaker 1: atoms or molecules or anything like that have any kind
Speaker 1: of rudimentary consciousness. Some people assume this. There's like a
Speaker 1: philosophical position known as pan psychism, which is the idea
Speaker 1: that at um it's in some kind of way consciousness
Speaker 1: exists all over the universe and all that matter. This
Speaker 1: is the idea that any sufficiently complex system may manifest
Speaker 1: as consciousness. No. No, this is the idea that that
Speaker 1: all matter is in some sense, that a rock is
Speaker 1: in some sense conscious, but by virtue of being like
Speaker 1: a complex system. Okay, yeah, because even a rock is
Speaker 1: is complex. When you start breaking it down and you
Speaker 1: start really diving the powers of ten style. And now
Speaker 1: I think that's an interesting speculation, but I don't see
Speaker 1: any evidence for that. It would be hard to know
Speaker 1: what evidence for that would be. Yeah, yeah, I like
Speaker 1: I like it too. I think it it lines up
Speaker 1: nicely with some with various supernatural interpretations of reality. But
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how much I'm willing to invest in
Speaker 1: it at this point. So yeah, so we we have
Speaker 1: the rock speaks, When will it speak? And what would
Speaker 1: it say? That's the thing I mean, the rocks. The
Speaker 1: rock it's I mean, it's seen a lot stuff, but
Speaker 1: it hasn't really been up to much. You got mud
Speaker 1: on your face, big disgrace. Oh never mind, Oh yes,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll rock you good, good reference. You can shame
Speaker 1: me later. Okay. One more thing I would think of
Speaker 1: is uh the human equivalent of hive insect behavior? But
Speaker 1: what about social sciences, sociology, political science, anthropology, the study
Speaker 1: of what humans do in large groups. There seem to
Speaker 1: be phenomenon there that are not uh, strictly predictable from
Speaker 1: just understanding of say psychology. Could you look at a
Speaker 1: really really good understanding of psychology and say this is
Speaker 1: how societies will work? I don't know, I mean there
Speaker 1: are those who extrapolate meaning from psychological concepts, who those
Speaker 1: who attempt to. But yeah, it becomes increasingly complicated. Uh.
Speaker 1: One of talking about this difference between, you know, reducible
Speaker 1: phenomena and emergent phenomena. One of my favorite often misattributed
Speaker 1: quotes Joseph Stalin is alleged to have said, falsely alleged
Speaker 1: to have said quantity has a quality all its own.
Speaker 1: I've always liked that quote. I can't find any evidence
Speaker 1: he ever said this, but it does sort of echo
Speaker 1: a sentiment explored by Marx and Engels in their writings
Speaker 1: about economics and their adaptation of Hegelian dialectical philosophy. Uh,
Speaker 1: the quantitative differences over a time, which is what we'd
Speaker 1: sort of be looking at for for reductive philosophy of science.
Speaker 1: Just quantitative changes actually do become qualitative differences. More is
Speaker 1: not just more. In many cases more is different. Yes,
Speaker 1: And I think this is this plasn't nicely with a
Speaker 1: couple of papers, will look at later in the episode. Um,
Speaker 1: as long as we're throwing out quotes, one I always
Speaker 1: uh have have enjoyed on this sort of topic of
Speaker 1: emergence is one from the poet Wawa Stevens his poem
Speaker 1: Connoisseur of Chaos. A violent order is a disorder, and
Speaker 1: be a great disorder as an order. These two of
Speaker 1: things are one pages of illustrations. Oh man, that's a
Speaker 1: good one. Stevens has a lot of great quotes that
Speaker 1: I think somehow apply to science. You know, when I
Speaker 1: often I get I get these feelings about what must
Speaker 1: be true in science, But then I often hear in
Speaker 1: the back of my mind that line from the Emperor
Speaker 1: of ice Cream. Let be b finale of seam. He's
Speaker 1: a good one. If if anyone out there is looking
Speaker 1: to pick up some thought provoking poetry, get yourself a
Speaker 1: book of Wallace Stevens and and to flip around in there. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I think we should take a quick break, and then
Speaker 1: when we come back we will look at one of
Speaker 1: our main resources in this episode, classic paper from the
Speaker 1: history of science from the nineteen seventies called More is Different. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, so tell me Joe is more different. That's
Speaker 1: a good question, Robert. That's sort of the central question
Speaker 1: of this episode. As you reach higher levels of complexity,
Speaker 1: you get more things to other interacting to do different,
Speaker 1: uniquely new properties emerge or is it just more and more? Well.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy two, the Nobel Prize winning American physicist
Speaker 1: Philip W. Anderson published this massively influential, highly cited paper
Speaker 1: in the journal Science, and the title of the the
Speaker 1: essay was more is Different and you, as you can
Speaker 1: probably guess based on the title what position he took
Speaker 1: on the emergentists debate. So Anderson writes that while at
Speaker 1: the time he was writing, which was nint seventy two,
Speaker 1: philosophers might still debate scientific reductionism, but he said scientists don't.
Speaker 1: Scientists just take scientific reductionism for granted. Uh. And his
Speaker 1: formulation of the reductionist hypothesis went like this quote. The
Speaker 1: workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the
Speaker 1: animate or inanimate matter of which they have any detailed knowledge,
Speaker 1: are assumed to be controlled by the same set of
Speaker 1: fundamental laws, which accept under certain extreme conditions, we feel
Speaker 1: we know pretty well. In other words, he's saying, when
Speaker 1: you chase causal explanations deep enough, it all boils down
Speaker 1: to the bottom. It all goes straight down to fundamental physics,
Speaker 1: and that is as it should be right. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's why we established all of these basic fundamental physical
Speaker 1: laws and interactions, because we wanted an idea of how
Speaker 1: the the universe works, and so everything should boil down
Speaker 1: to those laws. If it doesn't, that would indicate there's
Speaker 1: some sort of problem with our laws, then our physics exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what what good does physics if it's not actually fundamental? Uh? So,
Speaker 1: Anderson says, you know, if this is true, many many
Speaker 1: people assume that it entails the idea that very few
Speaker 1: people in the sciences are actually working on anything fundamental,
Speaker 1: anything autonomous, anything original. Uh And to illustrate this example
Speaker 1: or this frame of mind, Anderson quotes this passage from
Speaker 1: the theoretical physicist Victor F. Weisskopf, which which sorts all
Speaker 1: science into these two categories, which Weiskoff calls intensive and extensive.
Speaker 1: So intensive research tries to discover fundamental laws. Extensive research
Speaker 1: tries to explain phenomena with the use of known fundamental laws.
Speaker 1: So at any given time, a minority, vast, a very
Speaker 1: small minority of scientists, generally in fields like particle physics,
Speaker 1: are working on describing fundamental laws that govern reality. Um,
Speaker 1: they're doing the intensive science, and meanwhile, the vast majority
Speaker 1: of scientists are just taking the models of fundamental laws
Speaker 1: and applying them as an explanation for anything. For why
Speaker 1: the rain in Nashville smells like hot dog water, or
Speaker 1: sometimes sometimes I'm just kidding, you know, sometimes rain anywhere
Speaker 1: smells like I haven't spent enough time in Nashville, you know, anything,
Speaker 1: why your eyes won't stop bleeding. Uh So, the the
Speaker 1: extension of this distinction, some presume, is that once we
Speaker 1: have a fundamental theory of physics at the base of
Speaker 1: all science, there's no intensive science left to do. Does
Speaker 1: that make sense? Like you could still apply theories up
Speaker 1: the chain, but there's nothing original left to discover. It's
Speaker 1: just continually the application of what we know to different phenomena.
Speaker 1: But Anderson throws down a flag here. He says, hold on,
Speaker 1: let's say we accept the reductionist hypothesis that we can
Speaker 1: reduce complex phenomenon explanations uh to simpler, more fundamental physical laws.
Speaker 1: That doesn't necessarily imply the converse, which he calls the
Speaker 1: quote constructionist hypothesis. It does not, in his words, it
Speaker 1: does not imply the ability to start from those laws
Speaker 1: and reconstruct the universe. So what is science supposed to do.
Speaker 1: It's supposed to be able to predict. Right, if you
Speaker 1: have a correct scientific theory, you should be able to
Speaker 1: make accurate predictions about the future. But if you can't
Speaker 1: make accurate predictions about the future from the fundamental laws
Speaker 1: of physics, then do the fundamental laws of physics really
Speaker 1: describe everything? So, in in Anderson's view, uh, why does
Speaker 1: it not imply that we can start from the fundamental
Speaker 1: laws and predict everything? Um, you know, shouldn't we be
Speaker 1: able to do that in in in principle? Well, according
Speaker 1: to Anderson, the answer is no. And Anderson says there
Speaker 1: are two main problems with the constructionist hypothesis. One is
Speaker 1: scale and the other is complexity. And I just want
Speaker 1: to read a quote from him. Anderson writes, quote the
Speaker 1: behavior of large and complex aggregations of elementary particles, So
Speaker 1: that would be anything a football, Uh, to return to
Speaker 1: a hot dog, a jar of pickles. Yes, I guess
Speaker 1: I'm all thinking of cylindrical foods. I'm not sure why.
Speaker 1: Um Uh. The behavior of large and complex aggregations of
Speaker 1: elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood
Speaker 1: in terms of a simple explanation of the properties of
Speaker 1: a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity, entirely
Speaker 1: new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors
Speaker 1: requires research, which I think is as fundamental in its
Speaker 1: nature as any other. So he's throwing in with with
Speaker 1: a certain version of the emergentist hypothesis. Studying what happens
Speaker 1: to more complex bodies, like studying what happens to a
Speaker 1: jar of pickles, is doing original research that is actually
Speaker 1: yielding hypotheses and theories that are not predictable from just
Speaker 1: understanding the particles that make up that jar of pickles. Well,
Speaker 1: this just reminds me again of societal examples and then
Speaker 1: the idea of wicked problems. They like rolling out a
Speaker 1: solution into a complex system that is society and not
Speaker 1: realizing that the solution is going to spin off additional problems.
Speaker 1: It's going to create additional complexity. They're going to be
Speaker 1: emergent uh problems out of your solution, right that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are things we can't predict from simpler principles, even
Speaker 1: if those simpler principles are correct. Uh so, uh So,
Speaker 1: Just to clarify, Anderson accepts that the sciences of more
Speaker 1: complex phenomena are explanatorily dependent on the sciences of simpler phenomena. Right,
Speaker 1: psychology is in a sense dependent on biology. We couldn't
Speaker 1: have it without a you know, which is dependent on chemistry,
Speaker 1: which is dependent on physics. But explicitly he rejects the
Speaker 1: idea that this means psychology is just applied biology, or
Speaker 1: that biology is just applied chemistry. At each of these
Speaker 1: new levels of complexity, genuinely novel properties emerge which are
Speaker 1: not necessarily predictable from a complete understanding of the more
Speaker 1: fundamental science. Uh and he grounds this in an example
Speaker 1: from his own field, because he works in many body physics.
Speaker 1: And uh he he grounds it in this concept that
Speaker 1: is known as symmetry breaking. So what does that mean? Well,
Speaker 1: for Anderson, the study of fundamental physics is almost synonymous
Speaker 1: with the study of symmetry. In other words, fundamental physics
Speaker 1: is the search for the laws of reality that are
Speaker 1: homogeneous and isotropic. What does that mean. It means they're
Speaker 1: the same everywhere and they apply to everything no matter
Speaker 1: from what vantage point you look. That sounds like a
Speaker 1: good description to me of what the fundamental laws should be.
Speaker 1: In other words, they're fundamentally symmetrical. They're they're the same everywhere. Right.
Speaker 1: It works in the city, works in the country, works
Speaker 1: on earth, works in alpha centaire. Right, and that that's
Speaker 1: what physics should be. But while all matter obeys basic
Speaker 1: electrodynamics and quantum theory, many objects in the universe, and
Speaker 1: not just minds and societies, but Anderson uses examples of
Speaker 1: tiny basic physical structures. Many of these objects display novel
Speaker 1: or asymmetrical properties, which he says, they're not strictly predictable
Speaker 1: from the symmetrical laws that govern them govern them. So
Speaker 1: these asymmetries include He gives examples like the inversion of
Speaker 1: the ammonia molecule, the shapes of atomic nuclei like sometimes
Speaker 1: an atomic nucleus you can work out mathematically is in
Speaker 1: a sense shaped like a football or shaped like a plate. Uh,
Speaker 1: and he talks about the structures of crystals. These are
Speaker 1: you know, they should be. They're based on symmetrical laws,
Speaker 1: but the symmetrical laws end up generating asymmetries in reality.
Speaker 1: So in Anderson's view, the question is why are large
Speaker 1: systems not just bigger than elementary particles, but fundamentally different
Speaker 1: from them, with unique properties to study. And here I
Speaker 1: want to read a quote from Anderson. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: the essential idea is that in the so called into infinity,
Speaker 1: in approaching infinity limit of large systems between stuff on
Speaker 1: our own macroscopic scale, it is not only convenient but
Speaker 1: essentially to realize that matter will undergo mathematically sharp singular
Speaker 1: phase transitions to state at which the macros microscopic symmetries,
Speaker 1: and even the microscopic equations of motion are in a
Speaker 1: sense violated. The symmetry leaves behind ass as its expression,
Speaker 1: only certain characteristic behaviors, for example, long wavelength vibrations of
Speaker 1: which the familiar example is sound waves, or the unusual
Speaker 1: macroscopic conduction phenomena of the superconductor, or in a very
Speaker 1: deep analogy, the very rigidity of crystal lattices and thus
Speaker 1: of most solid matter. There is, of course no question
Speaker 1: of the systems really violating, as opposed to breaking the
Speaker 1: symmetry of space and time. But because its parts find
Speaker 1: it energetically more favorable to maintain certain fixed relationships with
Speaker 1: each other, the symmetry allows only the body as a
Speaker 1: whole to respond to external forces. Uh so again he
Speaker 1: he's not saying that a big system macroscopic system like
Speaker 1: a jar of pickles, violates the laws of physics, but
Speaker 1: he's saying, at certain levels of complexity, large objects make
Speaker 1: more sense understood as a whole than at the level
Speaker 1: of their constituent parts. Uh. And the whole has a
Speaker 1: novel scheme of behavior that's not easily predictable from the
Speaker 1: nature of its elementary particles. And then of course there
Speaker 1: he's like, well, now we've just talked about you know,
Speaker 1: crystals and stuff like that, but he of course says,
Speaker 1: you know, this applies to d N A and stuff
Speaker 1: like that too. Of Course, once you get much more complex,
Speaker 1: the problem is is magnified all the more things just
Speaker 1: become really seemingly impossible to reduce to or predict from
Speaker 1: the underlying laws of elementary particles. There are these quantum
Speaker 1: leaps where it appears that quantity has a quality all
Speaker 1: its own suddenly, And of course, in the end of
Speaker 1: his paper he paraphrases marks in in that saying quantity
Speaker 1: as a quality all its own, and then I love this.
Speaker 1: He also quotes a supposed conversation between f. Scott Fitzgerald
Speaker 1: and Earnest Hemingway, where of course Fitzgerald says the rich
Speaker 1: are different from us and Hemingway replies, yes, they have
Speaker 1: more money. Now this is interesting because it immediately brings
Speaker 1: to mind some like reductionist criticisms that are thrown out.
Speaker 1: I've seen before about say that human beings to say, oh,
Speaker 1: well you can you can dissect a human being. You can,
Speaker 1: you can hold a human heart in your hand, but
Speaker 1: you're not going to get a sense of who that
Speaker 1: person was based on that experience. Yeah, and I would say,
Speaker 1: actually that um that Anderson is not the final word
Speaker 1: on this, obviously, like people disagree with him, but this
Speaker 1: has been a really interesting and influential paper. And it's
Speaker 1: also not to rule out the idea that redundant sciences
Speaker 1: do exist somewhere. For example, there might be fields of
Speaker 1: science that really do reduce to nothing more the app
Speaker 1: than the application of principles of a more fundamental field
Speaker 1: of science. But it just looks like this is not
Speaker 1: the case for most, if not all, mature scientific fields.
Speaker 1: But somebody out there in a lab right now, it
Speaker 1: could happen to you. You could be reduced to a
Speaker 1: simpler study field is okay, But maybe we should look
Speaker 1: at a counterpoint, because, as as I mentioned, not everybody
Speaker 1: agrees with Anderson. Uh well, and so what if maybe
Speaker 1: it's not as different as you think. More might seem
Speaker 1: different or field different, and more might be useful to
Speaker 1: treat as different given our limitations. But maybe it's not
Speaker 1: really different. There's nothing actually unique going on at higher
Speaker 1: levels of complexity. It's just convenient for us to treat
Speaker 1: it that way. And here I want to come to
Speaker 1: another Nobel Prize winning American physicist, Stephen Weinberg, who offers
Speaker 1: a really interesting complementary counter analysis in his book Dreams
Speaker 1: of a Final Theory. Have you ever read anything by Weinberg?
Speaker 1: I am not sure that I have. He's a really
Speaker 1: good writer. The first chapter of this book is just
Speaker 1: this brilliant, rollicking fun adventure through science, through chemistry and
Speaker 1: particle physics, if you can believe that, where he he
Speaker 1: talks about a piece of chalk, and he's like, let's
Speaker 1: apply the reductionist hypothesis to a piece of chalk, and
Speaker 1: and and in every way possible, look at its properties
Speaker 1: and ask why. And every time you ask why, why
Speaker 1: is the chalk white? Why is the chalk shaped? Like
Speaker 1: it is. Why you know any question like that, you
Speaker 1: can What you're doing, essentially is playing the reductionist game, right,
Speaker 1: You're you're going one level down. I have to do
Speaker 1: that all the time as a as a father. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm constantly asked questions. I mean, he hasn't asked me
Speaker 1: about chalk, but I can easily imagine and ask me
Speaker 1: those very questions. Why is it white? Why does it
Speaker 1: do this? One? Is it? That will get very reductionist
Speaker 1: questions about virtually everything. And when you do that, you're
Speaker 1: putting reductionism into practice. You're saying, Okay, well, I can
Speaker 1: explain these these higher properties in terms of lower properties,
Speaker 1: simpler properties that cause an effect we see at a
Speaker 1: large scale. Yeah, I often don't see see it quite
Speaker 1: that beautifully. Generally, it's like, oh jeez, I'm just trying
Speaker 1: to to drive you to school, and now I've I've
Speaker 1: got to explain gravity. You know, because you were asking
Speaker 1: about a you know, a bird or a football or something,
Speaker 1: what like why did that bird fly into the car window?
Speaker 1: Is it? That's uh no, no, no, no, unfortunately not.
Speaker 1: But you know, it will just be you know, random
Speaker 1: wonderful questions about just how the universe works, and it
Speaker 1: will generally start start with a particular detail, but it
Speaker 1: quickly spirals out into these very complex uh you know,
Speaker 1: notions of of reality. Yeah. Uh so, So Weinberg is
Speaker 1: a fan of reductionism. Weinberg he's looking for a final theory.
Speaker 1: He wants to find a final theory of physics. And
Speaker 1: ultimately he says, yeah, maybe not in practice, can we
Speaker 1: actually reduce everything to physics, like it might just be
Speaker 1: beyond into our capabilities. But in theory, everything should be
Speaker 1: reducible to fundamental physics, that there should be no higher
Speaker 1: order insights. Really, uh, it's all there in the physics.
Speaker 1: So in this opening chapter he's discussing problems with with
Speaker 1: putting the reductionist hypothesis into practice, and he acknowledges there
Speaker 1: are plenty of problems. He's not cavalier about that. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one of the problems with reducing things like biology
Speaker 1: to fundamental physics is that he points out biology is
Speaker 1: not just a product of fundamental laws, but also biology
Speaker 1: incorporates stuff that happened in the past, like it is
Speaker 1: the product of both the fundamental laws of physics and
Speaker 1: some accidents of history. In Weinberg's view, biology wouldn't be
Speaker 1: the way it was if some different things had happened
Speaker 1: in the past. Um. So I think that's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: And in this sense, you see in sciences like biology,
Speaker 1: the past becomes calcified into structures that all life on
Speaker 1: Earth uses, and so physics appears to be timeless and universal.
Speaker 1: But biology is a contingent science. It's a result of
Speaker 1: something that happened at one point. Uh. Now, you could
Speaker 1: maybe go to a higher level and say that even
Speaker 1: physics could be that way. Maybe there, you know, maybe
Speaker 1: there's a multiverse. Maybe the laws of physics in this
Speaker 1: local universe are in fact contingent. They didn't have to
Speaker 1: be that way. Different universes could have different laws of physics,
Speaker 1: that's possible, but they at least appear to be universal
Speaker 1: in this universe. Okay, So yeah, when we look at
Speaker 1: a complex system, we're also looking at a process. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: but then uh. Weinberg also deals with the concept of
Speaker 1: emergence and and he tries to he's respectful toward it,
Speaker 1: but he tries to show that he thinks it doesn't
Speaker 1: undercut the reductionist hypothesis. So he cites Anderson's essay more
Speaker 1: is different, and Weinberg stresses, like Anderson, that while most
Speaker 1: obvious examples of potential emergence are in the biological and
Speaker 1: social sciences, if emergence exists, it appears to be in
Speaker 1: physics as well, and he gives this prime example thermodynamics,
Speaker 1: the study of heat. Now you might be thinking like, well,
Speaker 1: how could heat be all that complex? Heat is mega complex.
Speaker 1: If you ask somebody who's been trying to do, you know,
Speaker 1: calculations and thermodynamics, it's really complicated. And Weinberg points out
Speaker 1: that in the nineteenth century, thermodynamics was a fundamentally different
Speaker 1: and distinct science. It was considered logically autonomous and kept
Speaker 1: separate from general mechanics. So you might have your Newtonians
Speaker 1: over here, you know, doing their mechanics work, and then
Speaker 1: you've got your thermodynamicists. And so while physics relied on
Speaker 1: concepts like particles and forces, he says, thermodynamics relied on
Speaker 1: concepts like temperature and entropy, which just did not have
Speaker 1: counterparts in general mechanics. Uh and uh. He says that
Speaker 1: the only real bridge was the first law of thermodynamics,
Speaker 1: which was the conservation of energy that linked thermodynamics with
Speaker 1: the rest of physics, but he writes that the main
Speaker 1: idea and thermodynamics was the second law, which says that
Speaker 1: in any closed system, there's this magical quantity called entropy,
Speaker 1: which tends to increase over time until the system reaches
Speaker 1: a state of equilibrium, until everything just sort of equals
Speaker 1: out and becomes very mellow um. But then he writes,
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, physicists took the second law of
Speaker 1: thermodynamics as an axiom. They believed it, believed in it
Speaker 1: basically on the basis of induction. Uh. And you could
Speaker 1: and still can see examples of thermodynamics all over nature.
Speaker 1: You can look at the behavior of steam billowing up
Speaker 1: from a pot and see thermody dynamics. You can see
Speaker 1: freezing and boiling liquids, and then you can even see
Speaker 1: versions of what looked like thermodynamics in globular clusters in space.
Speaker 1: But if you see thermodynamics principles play out all over
Speaker 1: all scales of the universe, from like mall lecules of
Speaker 1: H two in your kitchen to clouds and clouds of
Speaker 1: stars and galaxies, then surely thermodynamics is logically independent from
Speaker 1: fundamental physics. Right, But Weinberg says no. He writes that eventually,
Speaker 1: the work of theoretical physicists like Maxwell, Boltzmann and Gibbs
Speaker 1: showed that quote, the principles of thermodynamics could in fact
Speaker 1: be deduced mathematically by an analysis of the pro probabilities
Speaker 1: of different configurations of certain kinds of system those systems
Speaker 1: whose energy is shared among a very large number of subsystems,
Speaker 1: as for instance, a gas whose energy is shared among
Speaker 1: the molecules of which it is composed. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: they came up with the interpretive bridge to show how
Speaker 1: thermodynamics reduces to underlying mechanics, statistical mechanics. And this amazing
Speaker 1: weird property known as heat really just is the combined
Speaker 1: kinetic energy of all the particles in the system. And
Speaker 1: that's what we're taught in school. Now you learn heat
Speaker 1: is the kinetic energy of vibrating particles. Uh An entropy,
Speaker 1: it's just actually a measure of how disordered the system is. Entropy, Uh,
Speaker 1: it just means the amount of order in a closed
Speaker 1: system decreases over time. So thermodynamics, he says, has been
Speaker 1: reduced to underlying theories of particles and forces. And yet
Speaker 1: Weinberg writes, you know, these higher order, complex and seemingly
Speaker 1: emergent properties like temperature and entropy, which have no counterpart
Speaker 1: at the scale of individual particles, they're just not they're
Speaker 1: down low, are still useful for lots of kinds of explanations.
Speaker 1: So he's not saying higher order sciences aren't useful, they're
Speaker 1: just not actually fundamental. They're not describing anything novel necessarily.
Speaker 1: Uh So he he concludes this discussion that, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: by saying, quote, thermodynamics is more like a mode of
Speaker 1: reasoning than a body of universal physical law. Wherever it applies,
Speaker 1: it always allows us to jud stify the use of
Speaker 1: the same principles. But the explanation of why thermodynamics it
Speaker 1: does apply to any particular system takes the form of
Speaker 1: a deduction using the methods of statistical mechanics from the
Speaker 1: details of what the system contains, and this inevitably leads
Speaker 1: us down to the level of elementary particles. So he's
Speaker 1: saying it's useful, but it's it's elementary physics. They're what's
Speaker 1: driving it is really fundamental physics. So my interpretation of
Speaker 1: Weinberg here is that he's using the example of thermodynamics
Speaker 1: to show that while these higher order sciences dealing with
Speaker 1: complex phenomenon might always remain explanatory, useful, they're just never
Speaker 1: logically autonomous, never fundamental, never independent, and they might be
Speaker 1: good to retain for purposes of communication and understanding, but
Speaker 1: they don't describe fundamental truths. For that, you need reduction
Speaker 1: to fundamental physics, paired with an acknowledgement of accidents of history,
Speaker 1: and ultimately a theory of every thing. So basically, any
Speaker 1: of these different fields is ultimately going to be a
Speaker 1: subset of another field. All Right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break, and when we come back, we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss this in terms of some more human elements. Um,
Speaker 1: So if your if your mind is exploding with all
Speaker 1: of the thermodynamics, bear with us, because things are going
Speaker 1: to get a little more human. Okay, So we just
Speaker 1: looked at some difficult examples of where emergent properties may
Speaker 1: appear to exist in things like crystals or thermodynamics. They
Speaker 1: might really exist and be fundamental. They might just be
Speaker 1: an illusion that they're not actually fundamental. But one of
Speaker 1: the places where people have a really hard time not
Speaker 1: seeing something unique and original at higher levels of complexities
Speaker 1: and the human sciences in things like psychology and anthropology.
Speaker 1: So maybe we should look at a couple of examples
Speaker 1: of papers taking the idea of emergentis um and applying
Speaker 1: it to these higher complexity sciences. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 1: a lot of this boils down to like what's the
Speaker 1: saying three's company fours the crowd? Like there, I mean,
Speaker 1: in our own experience, we know that as is more
Speaker 1: people gather together, certain certain realities come online, certain certain
Speaker 1: social responsibilities come online, like, for instance, yoga classes. If
Speaker 1: anyone out there has ever been a yoga class, rom
Speaker 1: exercise class, if there are just two people in it,
Speaker 1: if there's just a teacher and a student, one of
Speaker 1: the realities not to be crude is there there There
Speaker 1: is no plausible deniability of flatulence. If one person um
Speaker 1: passes gas and it's audible or you know, or not audible.
Speaker 1: If it's noticeable, then there's no questioning who did it.
Speaker 1: But if there are three, then there's plausible deniability. Then
Speaker 1: you've got a society, you've got a suspicion and got
Speaker 1: bluffing exactly. And I mean that's just a very simple example.
Speaker 1: But this takes place, the more you expand the social dynamic.
Speaker 1: And uh, and there have been studies that have that
Speaker 1: have looked into this, uh in you know, broad or
Speaker 1: less crude terms of course. UH. One paper in particular,
Speaker 1: and this is one that that that you found for
Speaker 1: us here is from Robert L. Carnario, the Transition from
Speaker 1: Quantity to Quality and neglected causal mechanism in Accounting for
Speaker 1: social evolution. I was interested in this one because it
Speaker 1: plays on the idea of quantity becoming quality. So yeah,
Speaker 1: the basic nugget here is that when the quantitative increase
Speaker 1: in some entity reaches a certain threshold, the situation gives
Speaker 1: rise to a qualitative change. So more is different, right Exactly,
Speaker 1: it's the same process, but the idea is that it
Speaker 1: would break down, uh, you know, beyond mere biological and
Speaker 1: chemical examples. We've touched on some of them already, but
Speaker 1: like a couple more that the the author brings up here,
Speaker 1: like the critical mass of uranium or the quanty aitative
Speaker 1: difference in the wavelength of the light received by our
Speaker 1: retina and the effect that has on color perception. So
Speaker 1: I guess you can think of in terms you know,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a tipping point um where where quantity
Speaker 1: because it becomes quality. Oh yeah, I never thought about that.
Speaker 1: Wavelengths of light, So increasing wavelengths suddenly we just perceive
Speaker 1: a different color, right, that's that's that's the basic idea.
Speaker 1: But the author here focuses on the notion that quantitative
Speaker 1: increases in the form of population give rise to a
Speaker 1: change in the structure of a society. So it's that
Speaker 1: yoga example, it's the threes company fours a crowd, except
Speaker 1: he explores it through some some various other examples here.
Speaker 1: So on a basic level, let's say we have a
Speaker 1: village of humans and it reaches a large enough size
Speaker 1: that you know what, you end up having factions emerge,
Speaker 1: clans emerged, like this is a This is a classic
Speaker 1: trope of various fictional scenarios in which you have outsiders
Speaker 1: and a survivalist. You know, Stephen King's the Mist, Lord
Speaker 1: of the Flies Lost. You're gonna have factions emerged, right,
Speaker 1: and this is reality television. What did you mean the
Speaker 1: Mist or the stand Well, both, right, I guess, because
Speaker 1: the Mist is like simplified version of that. They're all
Speaker 1: trapped in the supermarket and then immediately there's like they're
Speaker 1: like two different factions. There's like the the It's been
Speaker 1: a while since I've read it, but I remember there's
Speaker 1: one one one faction is a little more uh apocalypt
Speaker 1: apocalyptic than the other. Who's to say which one is
Speaker 1: correct given that apocalyptic scenario, but we so so we
Speaker 1: see splintering in groups, We see splintering in countries and organizations,
Speaker 1: both real and fictional. I mean, who can forget the
Speaker 1: People's Front of Judea and the Judea and People's Front
Speaker 1: right from the Life of Brian. Yeah, well you have
Speaker 1: the two different resistance organization that it's splintered from the one,
Speaker 1: and an additional satellite organizations have splintered off as well.
Speaker 1: I think also there, I guess uh satirizing the narcissism
Speaker 1: of small differences. Now, when it breaks down to their
Speaker 1: actual villages, the Kaiapo villages typically hit six hundred or
Speaker 1: eight hundred persons. Okay, that's like the their their upper limit.
Speaker 1: The Yana Mamo, however, they tend to max out at
Speaker 1: two hundred or or even a little below, and then
Speaker 1: they splinter. So the difference here is that the Kappo
Speaker 1: boast a complex social segmentation consisting of clans, while the
Speaker 1: Yana Mamo have only a few different lineages. So the
Speaker 1: takeaway here is that larger popular population aggregates UH can
Speaker 1: bring about an abrupt elaboration in social structure. So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting because the the larger group, the group
Speaker 1: that is able to maintain the larger village, does so
Speaker 1: by through this complex complexity. Like it's the it's almost
Speaker 1: like if you were to apply to an engineering standpoint,
Speaker 1: like to create a large domed building, UH is going
Speaker 1: to be more of an engineering feat and require a
Speaker 1: little more finesse than like a small like an egg
Speaker 1: glue type hut Oh. It's kind of like how we've
Speaker 1: talked about, like the difference between building a house and
Speaker 1: building a skyscraper. Skyscraper is not just bigger, it's a
Speaker 1: different thing. It's a different project. You can't just have
Speaker 1: an approchase with a different mentality, exactly. You can't just
Speaker 1: have a larger elephant. You have to have a different
Speaker 1: organism that may resemble in some way the elephant um
Speaker 1: And so we see we see that reflected here. He
Speaker 1: also points out North American Plains, Indians, they did they
Speaker 1: displayed a tendency to rely on simple social organizations for
Speaker 1: small bands. Okay, so the existing in in small groups,
Speaker 1: and they'll have a leader of those groups, but the
Speaker 1: leader doesn't exert a tremendous amount of power. But then
Speaker 1: when they they will periodically come together for say some
Speaker 1: sort of a large hunt or tribal exercise, and then
Speaker 1: they'll they'll organize under a tribal chief who exerts far
Speaker 1: greater power than a regional So it's not it it's
Speaker 1: it's not like even a necessarily a proportional uh change
Speaker 1: in power. It's a significant change in power, Like the
Speaker 1: complexity really takes off, and then when they have to
Speaker 1: splinter again, it all just kind of goes away. Um,
Speaker 1: But it's it's it's it seems very emergent in its form,
Speaker 1: and that it's not like, oh, they're more of us, now,
Speaker 1: this is the way we do things. It's more like,
Speaker 1: this is the way we do things when we come
Speaker 1: together high necessity. We're making the bigger elephant here interesting
Speaker 1: and uh he he points to uh, some other sources
Speaker 1: on this point. There's a quote here included from anthropologist
Speaker 1: Michael J. Harner, who observed that quote population pressure is
Speaker 1: a major uh determinant of social evolution, and that we
Speaker 1: see this in all of humanity's greatest transformation, so agriculture, industry, science,
Speaker 1: ETCETERA greater land subsistence, resource scarcity with consequently intensified competition
Speaker 1: for its control. This leads to the spread of war,
Speaker 1: the development of states, and all the the human complexity
Speaker 1: that spreads out from that. Yeah, it's interesting to think
Speaker 1: of about how uh in a sense large society is
Speaker 1: I guess they're emphasizing here just not predictable from small
Speaker 1: groups of humans, uh, that that it transforms into this
Speaker 1: fundamentally different thing with with different functions and yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I mean I I can definitely see this even at
Speaker 1: a small scale, like like you were talking about with
Speaker 1: the yoga class. You know, a uh, this is getting
Speaker 1: very colloquial with the idea of emergentism, but you know,
Speaker 1: a gathering of a gathering of five friends is not
Speaker 1: just larger than a gathering of two friends. It's very,
Speaker 1: very different. And to come back to the the apocalyptic
Speaker 1: examples from fiction when we're drawing, I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the appeals of stuff like the Walking Dead or
Speaker 1: the stand or the mist in that these examples reduced
Speaker 1: the human population to a much smaller and at least
Speaker 1: seemingly manageable number. And then we try to and in
Speaker 1: a sense, we're trying to reduce societal problems to fundamental
Speaker 1: proper these like everything goes screwed because of this character,
Speaker 1: how he or she is behaving. You can be familiar
Speaker 1: with all of the agents that matter, right, and this
Speaker 1: is not true of society today. There are tons of
Speaker 1: agents acting upon your life who you don't even know
Speaker 1: who they are, what their names are. Yeah, or it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily oh, the villainous character. It's more like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's the the villainous are that that emerges when this
Speaker 1: group of people get together with these ideals in mind,
Speaker 1: and these ideals are actually really positive, but then there's
Speaker 1: this negative manifestation of it. Yeah, it gets, uh, it gets,
Speaker 1: it gets complexity emerges fairly quickly. And then there's another
Speaker 1: study looked at here, and this is a our Keith
Speaker 1: saw your emergence and psychology lessons from the history of
Speaker 1: non reductionist science, and the basic nugget in this one
Speaker 1: was that while we often look to psychology for a
Speaker 1: reductionist view, there's a lot of potential in an emergent
Speaker 1: view of psychology. The mind is not mere really a
Speaker 1: shadow cast by a functioning brain, which is kind of
Speaker 1: an analogy off and fall back on, but but a
Speaker 1: higher level emergence system forming the shadow puppet on the
Speaker 1: wall and continually revising its form. So like, even if
Speaker 1: you don't take a substance duelist point of view, even
Speaker 1: if you don't think that the mind is supernatural in
Speaker 1: some sense, you could still uh find some merit in
Speaker 1: the idea that the mind is not fully explicable from
Speaker 1: the standpoint of neuroscience. Yes, that's that's my take take
Speaker 1: away from the paper anyway. Yeah, you can't just look
Speaker 1: at all the tissue in the brain and say this
Speaker 1: is the kind of mind it would generate. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: one more thing I wanted to look at before we
Speaker 1: wrap things up is we've heard from the reductionist view
Speaker 1: of Weinberg, and then we've heard from emergentis like Anderson.
Speaker 1: But Anderson accepts one interpretation of reductionism, he just rejects
Speaker 1: another interpretation of it. What about people who are away
Speaker 1: far out there in fully rejecting explanatory reductionism in all
Speaker 1: its forms. Obviously, the debate still going on among some thinkers,
Speaker 1: and I found a good short essay from by the
Speaker 1: biologist and philosopher of science Massimo Pelaucci about this ongoing debate,
Speaker 1: and he discusses the work of a few philosophers like
Speaker 1: John Duprey, Jerry Photo, and Nancy Cartwright who have argued
Speaker 1: against the fundamental unity of sciences and against the reductionist hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And I think he makes a few interesting points. One
Speaker 1: he talks about Jerry phoed or making a distinction about
Speaker 1: what it means for one science to reduce to another. Anyway,
Speaker 1: So you could be talking about ontological reduction, which just
Speaker 1: means that the more complex phenomena the mind is literally
Speaker 1: made out of the simpler phenomena. You know, the mind
Speaker 1: literally is dependent upon the brain. You can agree with that,
Speaker 1: but uh, this part might be pretty obviously true to you.
Speaker 1: Molecules are made out of atoms, organisms are made out
Speaker 1: of cells, populations are made out of individual organisms. But
Speaker 1: when it comes to theoretical reduction, which you might also
Speaker 1: call explanatory or explanatory reduction, the same does not necessarily
Speaker 1: hold true. While complex phenomena are made out of simpler phenomena.
Speaker 1: Are theories explaining complex phenomena are different than the things themselves.
Speaker 1: They exist in our minds, not in physical space. And
Speaker 1: just because the thing reduces does not necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: the proper explanation for it reduces. I know that's kind
Speaker 1: of a strange philosophical point, but I think there's there
Speaker 1: might be a grain of truth there um. Another thing, though,
Speaker 1: is that uh, reductionism is not supported by an inductive
Speaker 1: survey of the progress of science. This is kind of interesting,
Speaker 1: and I think I mostly agree with him on this one.
Speaker 1: Instead of more complex theories collapsing into simpler ones, what
Speaker 1: have we seen in the history of science. We've seen
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite. Instead, we see the proliferation of more
Speaker 1: and more specialized theories. We don't see the specific science
Speaker 1: collapsing into the general. We see the general branching off
Speaker 1: into the specific. Now, maybe this just means our our
Speaker 1: study of science isn't mature enough yet, you know, like
Speaker 1: that we haven't done enough work reducing complex sciences into
Speaker 1: simpler ones. That's possible, but if you're just to look
Speaker 1: at it inductively, science is not reducing. That's not happening.
Speaker 1: At all. Uh. One more thing is that voter says,
Speaker 1: you know, the reductionist assumption is not, as far as
Speaker 1: we know, actually guided by a principle. It might be intuitive,
Speaker 1: especially to scientists who have, you know, some other phenomena,
Speaker 1: who have seen some other phenomena successfully reduced to simpler principles.
Speaker 1: Think of Weinberg talking about thermodynamics. But what reason do
Speaker 1: we actually have to assume that biology can be fully
Speaker 1: explained by physics? Uh? I don't know. My intuition certainly
Speaker 1: tells me it can be. But my intuition, of course,
Speaker 1: is not worth a sack of split piece in science. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then one last idea I wanted to end on
Speaker 1: because I thought this was really yeard, but also very
Speaker 1: interesting is the anti realism of Nancy Cartwright, the philosopher
Speaker 1: of science. Nancy Cartwright not the voice actress who plays
Speaker 1: Bart Simpson. So she offers a positive rationale for believing
Speaker 1: that theories for complex phenomenon might not be expected to
Speaker 1: reduce to theories for simpler ones, and she advocates what's
Speaker 1: known as an anti realist position. And in her case,
Speaker 1: what this means is she rejects the idea that there
Speaker 1: is such a thing as fundamental laws of nature. Now
Speaker 1: you might be thinking, how on earth could you do that? Well,
Speaker 1: this it sounds kind of weird, but think would go
Speaker 1: with her for a second. I think it's actually kind
Speaker 1: of interesting. One thing, we can't denize that science works,
Speaker 1: right we we know it works practically, pragmatically, it just works.
Speaker 1: It generates theories that make predictions which are accurate enough
Speaker 1: for us to make technology and make civilization out of them.
Speaker 1: But what if they're not, in fact truly universal and fundamental,
Speaker 1: but rather, as I said a minute ago, accurate enough.
Speaker 1: And there's really a present precedent for this in the
Speaker 1: history of the pursuit of physics already, because for a
Speaker 1: long time, what did we have in physics? We had
Speaker 1: the mechanics of Isaac Newton, and they were accurate enough
Speaker 1: that we could use them to predict the motions of baseballs,
Speaker 1: or if I throw a jar of pickles at your face,
Speaker 1: even tried to study the motions of planets. This could
Speaker 1: pretty much all be explained accurately by Newtonian mechanics, um
Speaker 1: and we we could we could make a technology out
Speaker 1: of them. We can fire cannonballs, all that stuff. But
Speaker 1: we now know that strictly speaking, Newton was wrong. His
Speaker 1: laws were not able to generate very accurate predictions at
Speaker 1: things beyond the medium scales of matter and energy, and
Speaker 1: for those things they've now been replaced with things like
Speaker 1: general relativity and quantum mechanics, which can give us even
Speaker 1: more accurate predictions to explain those weird few cases where
Speaker 1: Newtonian mechanics break down in our experience. So where does
Speaker 1: Nancy Cartwright go with this? She says, well, what if
Speaker 1: in fact, all possible fundamental theories are like that, accurate
Speaker 1: enough to make predictions, but not actually district descriptive of
Speaker 1: inviolable universal laws. So this could maybe explain why, or
Speaker 1: at least the ultimate reason why it proves so hard
Speaker 1: to reduce all science to physics, because we haven't essentially
Speaker 1: an imperfect system that merely lines up with most things. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, the the idea would be, yeah, that the
Speaker 1: physics will always be imperfect, that there is no universal
Speaker 1: physics at bottom, there's only predictive enough. And in Cartwright's terminology,
Speaker 1: this would mean that all scientific laws are quote phenomenal logical,
Speaker 1: good enough to reckon our experience of the world at
Speaker 1: the level of their appropriate application, but not necessarily truly
Speaker 1: universal and fundamental. Uh. And if that's the case, that
Speaker 1: that could essentially apply all down the line. You know,
Speaker 1: because there is this inherent indeterminacy or you know, this
Speaker 1: inherent imprecision at the basis of all matter and energy,
Speaker 1: you can understand why higher, more complex levels of science
Speaker 1: would not be reducible to lower ones. So it's like
Speaker 1: saying there's no United States. There's actually just all these
Speaker 1: different states. There's no there's no European Union. There's just
Speaker 1: all these different countries. Are they or to go back
Speaker 1: to the state's aeology, there are just these counties that
Speaker 1: are assembled into this this order. On an individual level,
Speaker 1: there can be a truth, but not an overall arching system. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think she would be saying that at
Speaker 1: the bottom there is no universal truth, so that that
Speaker 1: maybe you might have like that there's no there's no
Speaker 1: fundamental basis of political organization from what you're saying, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, you can use political organization to reckon countries, states, counties,
Speaker 1: and stuff, and it all works well enough at those levels,
Speaker 1: but there is no bottom of political organization. There's no
Speaker 1: fundamental unit of it that is perfectly real. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: I can I'm not saying i'd buy her take on it,
Speaker 1: but I can see how it would. I see how
Speaker 1: it lines up. Yeah, and I do think it's interesting.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I'm convinced by her point of view.
Speaker 1: I just think it's an interesting idea. Yeah. And to
Speaker 1: your like point that we laid out at the beginning,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a non magical version of this. Like
Speaker 1: certainly we can look to any two various examples where
Speaker 1: someone uh isn't buying into it for supernatural reasons, but
Speaker 1: she has a a scientific theory here. Yeah, and so uh, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know, but let's say it's at least a
Speaker 1: non supernatural thing and it participates inductively, and so because
Speaker 1: it looks at like, well, this has been the case
Speaker 1: in in some of our study of science, we keep
Speaker 1: finding out that stuff that we think accurately describes the
Speaker 1: world is not really perfectly accurate. Is just accurate enough anyway,
Speaker 1: That's what I got. So, Robert, are you convinced? What
Speaker 1: what do you think? Are you reductionist emergentists somewhere in
Speaker 1: between one of those qualified middle grounds. Oh, I guess
Speaker 1: I've I've got to fall back on the sort of
Speaker 1: you know, lens based view of it. You know, I
Speaker 1: can put the lens of reductionism and the lens of
Speaker 1: of emergence on as needed and certainly see how they
Speaker 1: line up with reality. But but yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: I certainly think, uh, emergence carries a lot of weight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I certainly intuitively feel that sense of emergence. But then again,
Speaker 1: I also when I get thinking in the reductionist of mindset,
Speaker 1: that can make sense to me too. I guess I'm
Speaker 1: just very impressionable. I don't know what to think about this.
Speaker 1: I do think it's a really interesting subject though, and
Speaker 1: I do think it's important always to to come back
Speaker 1: to the kind of stuff we're doing here, where we
Speaker 1: pay attention not just to how science is done, but
Speaker 1: to the assumptions underpinning it. Yeah. Indeed, all right, Well, hey,
Speaker 1: if you want, if you want to find out more
Speaker 1: about this topic other related topics to do with sort
Speaker 1: of the the nature of science and the nature scientific inquiry,
Speaker 1: heading over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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