One day, in my early twenties, I was feeling sorry for myself (as early-twenty-somethings often do). I began reflecting how love was just a chemical in my head or somesuch self-indulgent nonsense.
And then it hit me -- there's a chemical in my head that makes me fall in love! And I got all excited because -- wow, that is some crazy shit! And what a bizarre, crazy thing it is to be a human and have all this stuff going on inside you that somehow adds, multiplies, and exponentiates to make up who you are.
Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant.
>Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity.
Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules.
Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm.
It says there are certain elements that interact with each other in certain ways. It does not concern itself with the nature of configurations of such elements, and how those evolve. These may be extremely complex configurations, of huge numbers of the elements, that evolve in very complex ways.
A really important point about this, which is usually misunderstood, is that "does not concern itself with" is not the same as "dismisses" or "views as invalid or unimportant".
Also, this is not a matter of what we "like" or "dislike". It's a matter of how reality is or isn't, and what we like or dislike has no bearing on that.
>Also, this is not a matter of what we "like" or "dislike". It's a matter of how reality is or isn't, and what we like or dislike has no bearing on that.
What we know about how reality is or isn't has a very big impact on what we like or dislike.
Doesn't relate to your reply? I directly quoted the part of your reply I responded to.
My point is, to repeat myself, that what we consider the reality behind the way something is made, what it is composed of, etc, does play a role on whether we like or dislike it. Like or dislike extends beyond the final artifact.
We could even like something (e.g. a painting) and stop liking it, even though it's the same, if we find that it's e.g. an imitation and not the original, or that some romantic story of how the painter created it is not real, etc.
The same can happen when we discover a reductionist explanation of something we admire or are in awe of, that makes it less intriguing and mysterious. E.g. "you think love is some glorious connection to this particular person, but the feeling is just a chemically induced thing, and we can arbitrarily make you feel it for any random person if we inject you with this".
I said it's a matter of how reality is, and that our likes have no bearing on how that reality is. You replied "What we know about how reality is or isn't has a very big impact on what we like or dislike.", and does not relate to what I said. They're completely separate points.
(Also, the point of yours that I was originally replying to was "Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules." which is clearly referring to what is out there in reality not our view of it, and whether we like or dislike that characteristic of reality out there.).
> Because [some of us] don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules. Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm.
And if investigation reveals that all art and music are governed by simple rules, you're suddenly going to dislike all art and music? How precisely does revealing the hidden reality suddenly reduce how pleasing something is to the senses?
>How precisely does revealing the hidden reality suddenly reduce how pleasing something is to the senses?
How "pleasing something is to the senses" is a complex phenomenon, not some crude constant -- and it's subjective basis has a lot of interplay with eras, norms, goals, and lots of other stuff, including how we feel and what we know about it.
When you know how the "sausage is made" you can like it less, even to the point of affective how pleasant the taste is to you.
You're essentially claiming that you only like something because it's not something else, and that it's only worth liking because you think it has some innate magic that separates it from something "mundane". It's basically a religious argument, and when it's revealed that it really is "mundane" after all, suddenly you don't like it. Calling this a type of supernatural elitism is generous I think.
A pop culture "formula" to tailor a piece of art to suit the tastes of a particular audience is not really an example of actual scientific reductionism though. It could potentially be "scientism" if anyone actually believed it was scientific, but I don't think most would.
A better example of a reduction that relates to music, would be about how you can predict which combinations of notes will sound dissonant by looking at intervals between the frequencies of notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance_and_dissonance ). Yes, it means a lot properties of music can be defined in relatively simple mathematical terms (timing and chord theory being other ways) - but that doesn't mean the interaction between those properties isn't still complex and beautiful. It just gives us more ways to explore that beauty.
How could you get perfect model of music until you have perfect model of brain? Expeirience of music happens there.
You can't just say let's not try to explain sth because previous attempts fell short. If that was what smart humans do we would still be in awe why the fire is burning.
I've been reading Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" which goes in very deep on cellular automata and possible applications on it, and I couldn't agree more with you more. There's even one section where he uses cellular automata logic to formally derive the fundamental rules of propositional logic.
Interesting article! You may also be interested in Computability Logic [1]:
> Computability Logic (CoL) understands computational problems in their most general – interactive sense. [...] CoL provides a generalization of the Church-Turing thesis to the interactive level. The classical concept of truth turns out to be a special, zero-interactivity-degree case of computability. This makes classical logic a special fragment of CoL. Being a conservative extension of the former, computability logic is, at the same time, by an order of magnitude more expressive, constructive and computationally meaningful.
I'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering wheels and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to be able to understand the stack all the way down, but there's power in abstraction, and the nature of things changes as they scale while their context remains constant such that by talking about all the component pieces, you might miss the greater whole. Or at least not be able to handle it with any reasonable dexterity.
> I'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering wheels and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to
Your examples hardly involve antidotes. An antidote is for a poison, and we talk of metaphorical antidotes for things we perceive in a negative light.
I think the person you replied to has a point. I've read a fair bit of philosophy for my PhD work, and I've never come across a criticism of reductionism that seemed to actually understand it. Criticisms of reductionism are always criticisms of a strawman of reductionism.
It's not just that people misunderstand what reductionism itself is, but they also misunderstand what reductionism is and isn't meant to explain. It's not meant to explain or document the characteristics of specific patterns made up of the elements, yet again and again people present the fact that it doesn't explain such details as somehow a fatal flaw in the notion of reductionism.
I hate doing this... but what has changed on HN such that a comment like this is downvoted so soon after it's been posted? Sources are present, the tone is not hostile. There may be valid disagreements or gaps somewhere here, but the typical HN response in the past was to explore that via further discussion.
That said, it really does seem like the term "reductionism" is overloaded. Perhaps it would have been more clear if the author had specifically referred to the concept of Scientism, which is related to a specific problem with excessive or mis-applied reductionism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
> The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge
I believe in that context, the original article and content make more sense. Personally, as a fan of David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity", I see absolutely no conflict between acknowledging both that scientism is harmful and that many systems can be reduced to elegant, simple definitions that are incredibly useful to understand.
Unfortunately, back here in the world of today's reality, the "intelligent consciousness" phenomenon still requires this shitty fragile "meatbag" form, to carry it around ...
... but if it makes you more comfortable to think that people who disagree with you, aren't actually people ... then go right ahead.
That doesn't mean that it is something in need of an antidote (which is specifically what the person you were replying to was bringing up).
Of course understanding quantum mechanics does not give you an understanding of psychology, and nothing about reductionism claims it does!
Reductionism says basically that everything is evolving configurations of quantumn-mechanical elements, interacting in quantum mechanical ways.
But it does not directly telll you anything specifically about what the different kinds of (massive) configurations are or the ways those evolve over time. Such details are what we capture in our knowledge of fields such as Psychology.
Think of gases. You can describe them in terms of volume, pressure and temperature. But you know that they are in fact just a bunch of molecules bouncing around. There's nothing new about pressure, volume and temperature that can't be derived from rules of bouncing molecules. But we still value the description in terms of these high level qualities because they provide convenient shorthand for describing how a lot of bouncing molecules behave together.
Same way you can think about chemistry and physics, and biology and chemistry.
Reductionism just says that complex behaviors come from simple rules applied to large number of interacting parts and no additional magic whatsoever. Which makes it only way of looking at things that is grounded in reality, as confirmed by science.
I think it's really a rephrasing of "for every question answered / settled, a bunch of new questions pop up", intimately connected to the cycle of experiment->theory->experiment->... so this is really just "science at work"
Seeing the title I thought this article was going to be about the "problem" of reductionism. But it delightfully doesn't fall into that trap and acknowledges that reductionism to the lowest useful components does not necessarily imply low complexity. Then goes on to express wonderment at the remaining complexity after reductionism. That's fine, I guess. Just as long as we all remember there's no such thing as a chemical that makes you fall in love.
I guess people misinterpreted my last sentence as avocating for or implying that there's some non-observable or sublime facet of love. I really don't mean that. I only mean that release of neurotransmitters at a synapse is not even a tiny part of the story. And the idea that there are 'chemicals' or neurotransmitters that make you fall in love is absurd. It matters where the chemicals are. It matters when. And that's ignoring the activity of astrocytes completely.
I am a reductionist. But there's no such thing as a chemical in love. Such descriptions are necessary but not nearly sufficient.
I can't find the clip at the moment, but I recall a Futurama episode where the professor finally unlocks the last secret of the universe and gets really depressed that there is nothing else to do.
Fortunately, he realizes nobody knows why the universe has a limited number of things to discover...
Wonder and awe are well and good, and certainly the world is awe-inspiring and wonderful. And certainly, the deepening of our understanding of it is can lead us to marvel at it. However, the problem with the article is that it doesn't really get into the meat of the matter of mechanistic materialism. Mechanism is a metaphysical position that we often today take for granted and do so unthinkingly and tacitly, that is to say, without recognizing it for the metaphysical position that it is. As a result, it is confused with empirical science as such. To make matters worse, there are very serious problems with the mechanistic view of nature, and despite our tacit acceptance of it, the destructive consequences of a consistently held mechanism evade us.
It is important to remember that when explaining a fact, it is important not to negate the fact in the process of explaining it. To do so would result not in an explanation, but something else. That something else may be useful, but explanations are not first and foremost about being useful. An explanation is about accounting completely for the causes of a fact as it actually is. The mechanistic philosophy, in construing the world and things within it as machines, destroys whole classes of facts, not least of all because what machines are is observer-relative. Their components are arranged according to human ends that are extrinsic to the machine itself and not according to some intrinsic tendency of the machine. Thus, to construe all of reality in mechanistic terms necessarily forces us to make these broad denials. Furthermore, these human ends (as well as the awe, wonder, experience of mystery and whatever else the author invokes and beyond) are facts which must themselves be accounted for. A mechanistic materialist, when confronted with these facts, is left to either deny their existence (eliminativism), posit a non-mechanistic mind-or-something-else where these facts exist (dualism and its variations) or to reject mechanism. While we need not resort to mental phenomena to criticize mechanism and reductionism, perhaps nowhere else is it made more obvious how defective mechanism is as a metaphysical position.
Since Descartes, mechanists either swept broad classes of facts under the rug of the res cogitans or attributed them to God (think Paley). Mechanistic materialism, having denied both the res cogitans and God, is left to deal with these facts on mechanistic terms. Unfortunately, mechanistic methods are here in principle incapable of explaining them, at least not completely.
Ultimately, mechanistic materialism must be rejected in favor of a richer metaphysics.
40 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 85.4 ms ] threadAnd then it hit me -- there's a chemical in my head that makes me fall in love! And I got all excited because -- wow, that is some crazy shit! And what a bizarre, crazy thing it is to be a human and have all this stuff going on inside you that somehow adds, multiplies, and exponentiates to make up who you are.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/escape-from-sp...
"antidote to scientific reductionism" seems about as useful as "antidote to nonblindness".
Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.
Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules.
Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm.
It says there are certain elements that interact with each other in certain ways. It does not concern itself with the nature of configurations of such elements, and how those evolve. These may be extremely complex configurations, of huge numbers of the elements, that evolve in very complex ways.
A really important point about this, which is usually misunderstood, is that "does not concern itself with" is not the same as "dismisses" or "views as invalid or unimportant".
Also, this is not a matter of what we "like" or "dislike". It's a matter of how reality is or isn't, and what we like or dislike has no bearing on that.
What we know about how reality is or isn't has a very big impact on what we like or dislike.
My point is, to repeat myself, that what we consider the reality behind the way something is made, what it is composed of, etc, does play a role on whether we like or dislike it. Like or dislike extends beyond the final artifact.
We could even like something (e.g. a painting) and stop liking it, even though it's the same, if we find that it's e.g. an imitation and not the original, or that some romantic story of how the painter created it is not real, etc.
The same can happen when we discover a reductionist explanation of something we admire or are in awe of, that makes it less intriguing and mysterious. E.g. "you think love is some glorious connection to this particular person, but the feeling is just a chemically induced thing, and we can arbitrarily make you feel it for any random person if we inject you with this".
(Also, the point of yours that I was originally replying to was "Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules." which is clearly referring to what is out there in reality not our view of it, and whether we like or dislike that characteristic of reality out there.).
And if investigation reveals that all art and music are governed by simple rules, you're suddenly going to dislike all art and music? How precisely does revealing the hidden reality suddenly reduce how pleasing something is to the senses?
How "pleasing something is to the senses" is a complex phenomenon, not some crude constant -- and it's subjective basis has a lot of interplay with eras, norms, goals, and lots of other stuff, including how we feel and what we know about it.
When you know how the "sausage is made" you can like it less, even to the point of affective how pleasant the taste is to you.
Likewise with cooking, but I guess many people like McDonalds.
A better example of a reduction that relates to music, would be about how you can predict which combinations of notes will sound dissonant by looking at intervals between the frequencies of notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance_and_dissonance ). Yes, it means a lot properties of music can be defined in relatively simple mathematical terms (timing and chord theory being other ways) - but that doesn't mean the interaction between those properties isn't still complex and beautiful. It just gives us more ways to explore that beauty.
You can't just say let's not try to explain sth because previous attempts fell short. If that was what smart humans do we would still be in awe why the fire is burning.
He basically re-wrote that section for his blog recently if anyone is curious: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/11/logic-explainability...
> Computability Logic (CoL) understands computational problems in their most general – interactive sense. [...] CoL provides a generalization of the Church-Turing thesis to the interactive level. The classical concept of truth turns out to be a special, zero-interactivity-degree case of computability. This makes classical logic a special fragment of CoL. Being a conservative extension of the former, computability logic is, at the same time, by an order of magnitude more expressive, constructive and computationally meaningful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_logic
> I'd say for the same reason programs need APIs and cars need steering wheels and emotions need words. It's often very helpful to
Your examples hardly involve antidotes. An antidote is for a poison, and we talk of metaphorical antidotes for things we perceive in a negative light.
I think the person you replied to has a point. I've read a fair bit of philosophy for my PhD work, and I've never come across a criticism of reductionism that seemed to actually understand it. Criticisms of reductionism are always criticisms of a strawman of reductionism.
Both Daniel Dennett (for an overview see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greedy_reductionism), and Steven Weinberg https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/10/05/reductionism-red... (behind a paywall) or his book "Facing Up" have pretty decent descriptions of reductionism.
It's not just that people misunderstand what reductionism itself is, but they also misunderstand what reductionism is and isn't meant to explain. It's not meant to explain or document the characteristics of specific patterns made up of the elements, yet again and again people present the fact that it doesn't explain such details as somehow a fatal flaw in the notion of reductionism.
That said, it really does seem like the term "reductionism" is overloaded. Perhaps it would have been more clear if the author had specifically referred to the concept of Scientism, which is related to a specific problem with excessive or mis-applied reductionism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism > The term scientism is also used by historians, philosophers, and cultural critics to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge
I believe in that context, the original article and content make more sense. Personally, as a fan of David Deutsch's "Beginning of Infinity", I see absolutely no conflict between acknowledging both that scientism is harmful and that many systems can be reduced to elegant, simple definitions that are incredibly useful to understand.
If you have to ask, you will never know.
It would be a good question for a Voight-Kampff test.
... but if it makes you more comfortable to think that people who disagree with you, aren't actually people ... then go right ahead.
Of course understanding quantum mechanics does not give you an understanding of psychology, and nothing about reductionism claims it does!
Reductionism says basically that everything is evolving configurations of quantumn-mechanical elements, interacting in quantum mechanical ways.
But it does not directly telll you anything specifically about what the different kinds of (massive) configurations are or the ways those evolve over time. Such details are what we capture in our knowledge of fields such as Psychology.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/red-ism/
Same way you can think about chemistry and physics, and biology and chemistry.
Reductionism just says that complex behaviors come from simple rules applied to large number of interacting parts and no additional magic whatsoever. Which makes it only way of looking at things that is grounded in reality, as confirmed by science.
I read this article a while ago that suggests love is produced by the releasing of various chemicals: https://www.thoughtco.com/the-chemistry-of-love-609354.
I am a reductionist. But there's no such thing as a chemical in love. Such descriptions are necessary but not nearly sufficient.
Indeed, there are many such chemicals, and they don't make you fall in love, the complex soup combined with our neurology is what we call love.
Fortunately, he realizes nobody knows why the universe has a limited number of things to discover...
It is important to remember that when explaining a fact, it is important not to negate the fact in the process of explaining it. To do so would result not in an explanation, but something else. That something else may be useful, but explanations are not first and foremost about being useful. An explanation is about accounting completely for the causes of a fact as it actually is. The mechanistic philosophy, in construing the world and things within it as machines, destroys whole classes of facts, not least of all because what machines are is observer-relative. Their components are arranged according to human ends that are extrinsic to the machine itself and not according to some intrinsic tendency of the machine. Thus, to construe all of reality in mechanistic terms necessarily forces us to make these broad denials. Furthermore, these human ends (as well as the awe, wonder, experience of mystery and whatever else the author invokes and beyond) are facts which must themselves be accounted for. A mechanistic materialist, when confronted with these facts, is left to either deny their existence (eliminativism), posit a non-mechanistic mind-or-something-else where these facts exist (dualism and its variations) or to reject mechanism. While we need not resort to mental phenomena to criticize mechanism and reductionism, perhaps nowhere else is it made more obvious how defective mechanism is as a metaphysical position.
Since Descartes, mechanists either swept broad classes of facts under the rug of the res cogitans or attributed them to God (think Paley). Mechanistic materialism, having denied both the res cogitans and God, is left to deal with these facts on mechanistic terms. Unfortunately, mechanistic methods are here in principle incapable of explaining them, at least not completely.
Ultimately, mechanistic materialism must be rejected in favor of a richer metaphysics.