Scientific Reductionism

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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

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? 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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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? 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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 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 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

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

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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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. 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 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

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. 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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.

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, 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 other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com