Feser’s understanding of reductionism is backwards, which is evident by his choice of the verb “abstract” over “reduce.”
We abstract when we consider some particular aspect of a concrete thing while bracketing off or ignoring the other aspects of the thing. For example, when you consider a dinner bell or the side of a pyramid exclusively as instances of triangularity, you ignore their color, size, function, and metal or stone composition.
Abstraction is precisely what Feser says: we find a simple pattern in complicated systems and approximate the system by that pattern. For example, we ignore the motions of every gas molecule in a tank, that’s too many molecules to store even in a computer. Instead, we average that motion and call it heat, now we can describe other properties of the gas, such as average pressure, to some accuracy. We abstract the motion of avogadros of gas molecules into a simple statement about the system as a whole. We started with too many gas molecules to count, now we have a few numbers representing those molecules.
Abstraction fails because our tank has cracks and gas leaks out. The gas slowly loses energy to the tank walls. Some of the gas undergoes radioactive decay and changes the count of molecules in the tank. Feser argues that these problems refute reductionism.
Reductionism is the opposite. To reduce a tank of gas we need to look at every single molecule and record each and every detail about each molecule. The molecule that escapes is recorded. As molecules pound on the tank walls, each one loses some energy, and this is recorded along with the energy increase of the wall. In order to understand the decay we need to reduce even further.
The author doesn’t see the difference.
There is far more to material systems than what can be captured in the equations of physics...
This is the core of his argument, and it is entirely unfounded. Every single material system ever studied, from brains to galaxies to gas in a tank, obeys the equations of physics. This is because the equations of physics are not abstraction, they are reduction.
This is the core of his argument, and it is entirely unfounded.
It’s not founded, but neither is it explicitly contradicted.
While nothing in chemistry is known to contradict the laws of physics, we have yet to conclusively show that chemistry can indeed be entirely explained by the laws of physics. It is still possible that there are laws of chemistry that cannot be derived from a complete set of laws of physics correctly and fully applied.
Occam’s razor favors the idea that behaviors in chemistry we cannot currently predict directly from physics are results of our not-yet-complete understanding of physics and/or our lack of sufficient computational resources applied to the question. Postulating an additional “level” of rules that can’t be derived from physics is not currently necessary to explain features of chemistry tat are not yet reduced to physics. But that’s not the same as saying another level is ruled out.
Postulating an additional “level” of rules that can’t be derived from physics is not currently necessary to explain features of chemistry tat are not yet reduced to physics. But that’s not the same as saying another level is ruled out.
Physics is better than that. Lets say that there is another level of rules required to reduce chemistry. Then these rules are about physical systems in general, and lower-level than chemistry. We have found new laws of physics!
If they can’t be derived from physics now then that doesn’t mean physics won’t figure them out in the future.
If you define all laws of reality as physics, then sure, there’s nothing physics can’t explain. But that’s, well . . . here, let me tell a fable to explain.
The year 152,036 AD
“Hey, we just got the third-check output from the LMC computer array.”
“Yeah? What did it say?”
“The previous two sets were right. We input the known masses of the fundamental particles to five hundred thousand digits, and the known strengths of all seven fundamental forces to the same, arrange them in the form of a vertebrate animal, and run the sim, we do get an almost-perfect simulation. Minus the Lacuna. In fact, we can now say the evidence for the Lacuna has hit fifty-three sigma.”
“Damn. Any good news on the eighth force candidates?”
“All of them still cause the Sun to fail to fuse, if we allow them to have any measurable effect on covalently-bonded masses smaller than 0.997312121 milligrams.”
“And the collider results completely rule out any of the gauge bosons that fit any of the fifteen proposed models of an eighth force compatible with no effect under a milligram of mass. In fact, they don’t show any evidence of any gauge bosons associated with an eighth force, anywhere short of ten quadrillion yottavolts.”
“They’ve said that for the last hundred thousand years, why would you expect a change now?”
“Look, this is nuts. There is no way that physics has a special force just to explain the Lacuna, and has no affect on anything else, and no other way to detect it than the existence of the Lacuna.”
“Fifty-three sigma. The universe doesn’t care about your incredulity.”
“Yeah, but it’s stupid. How the hell did we wind up in a universe that requires a special law of physics to explain the Lacuna?”
“Because the Creators chose to add it when they were creating the Universe Simulation.”
“Dammit. I still don’t believe it. What kind of genius develops a perfectly good set of fundamental laws, implicit in a single equation you can fit on a T-shirt, that creates all the beauty and wonder of the universe, and then sticks on a pointless extraneous natural law to do absolutely nothing but make a handful of vertebrates, of all things, yawn?”
There is far more to material systems than what can be captured in the equations of physics...
This is the core of his argument, and it is entirely unfounded. Every single material system ever studied, from brains to galaxies to gas in a tank, obeys the equations of physics.
Strawman. Captured != obeys. Humans obey equations of physics, but love is not captured by the Maxwell equations.
You confused the direction. You can reduce love to chemicals to to atoms to quarks, you cannot construct love out of quarks without already knowing what love is.
No, I haven’t.
If I zoom up to the scale of meters I will see that certain loosely-bound groups of atoms behave in a patterned way with each other wot’s ultimate consequence is the manufacture of more loosely-bound groups of atoms. I may not call it love, but that doesn’t really matter.
That’s a statement of faith, not a statement of fact. Love is a subjective experience, and subjective experience is not “captured” by any physics that we know about. We may be able to say something about how hormonal and other physiological variables are correlated with changes in affect, but are you able to give me a naturalistic, non-behavioristic account of what affect is?
Let’s taboo physics: it can mean ‘the set of laws on which the universe runs’ (henceforth physical laws), or ‘the academic discipline studying those laws’ (physical science). Is love captured by physics? It is captured by physical laws (i.e. a logically omniscient being could derive a description of love from them¹), but not by physical science (i.e. not all physicists are much better at getting laid than a typical layman).
Caveats about needing both differential equations and boundary conditions (the equations of the SM and of GR as known today don’t even predict an arrow of time, without the boundary condition of very low entropy in the past), which could be moot given some as-yet-unknown law (Hawking and Penrose sometimes think about such things).
Is love captured by physics? It is captured by physical laws (i.e. a logically omniscient being could derive a description of love from them)
This is still the same “statement of faith” that I criticized at greater length, later in the thread. Love is an experience, and you will not even find a description (to say nothing of an explanation) of an experience, in any sort of physics that we know about, nor in any other discourse that can be reduced to that sort of physics. Our mathematical physics describes what the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave are doing, but it says nothing about what anything is. The nature of experience is a problem of the latter kind, which is one reason why explanations of it in terms of matter, number, and computation are hollow. Then there is the more specific problem that the atomized ontology of physics is an ill-suited place in which to find complex unities like conscious states, which is why I say there will need to be new formal developments in physics, and new physical discoveries in neurobiology, before even a revised physicalism has any chance of explaining us.
Love is an experience, and you will not even find a description (to say nothing of an explanation) of an experience, in any sort of physics that we know about, nor in any other discourse that can be reduced to that sort of physics.
If you simulate the standard model of particle physics with appropriate initial conditions, your simulation will include four-limbed beings who will be happy to describe the experience of love to you at great length. (It’s true that no one will be able to verify this claim any time soon, but there’s every reason to believe it, because the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood). Doesn’t this mean that physics contains a description of the experience of love?
Are you singling out “love” for any specific reason or are you using it as a general example of all human emotions (e.g. fear, trust, jealousy, feeling of knowing, hate, happiness, etc.)?
It means that something is being asserted as true, when it is not known to be true.
ETA Well, it does mean a little more than that. It means that the basis of the assertion is coming from faith in a comprehensive belief system, rather than from any scrutiny of relevant facts; in this case the belief system is “everything reduces to physics”, with no indication that “physics” meant anything other than “physics as it is presently formulated and conceived”.
If I were to use the sequences as my guide, then on this site, the default approach for explaining all forms of experience should be “that’s how it feels to be physical system X”. So the facts about reality are 1) a lot of strictly physical facts, and 2) “what-it’s-like-to-be-an-X” facts. In the first class of facts, I include complex physical facts that can be obtained from the elementary physical facts, like facts about temperature, which are really facts about average energies of large ensembles of particles. Occasionally it’s said that the “feeling” facts are of this type—complex but strictly physical facts—but then that was the point of my question: I was daring the reader to make such a claim and to be specific about how it works. I was careful to stipulate that the explanation should be non-behavioristic; thus iDante’s later comment, about replicative behaviors, doesn’t qualify, and indeed iDante takes care to add that the property described may not actually be the same thing as love, even if it has something to do with the functional consequences and adaptive role of love. Descriptions in terms of function, adaptive value, or physical composition do not say anything about “experience” or “how it feels”, and I think people generally recognize this.
So occasionally it’s said that there are no feeling facts; for example, that seems to be the point of Stephen Diamond’s recent post. That post was strongly downvoted, so I guess people don’t like that option either. But they also aren’t willing to be psychophysical property dualists, and say that there are physical facts, and there are psychological facts, and that the latter are distinct from the former but nonetheless correlated with them.
So we are left with the schizophrenic situation in which people assert their faith in materialism, but also admit the obvious fact that experiences do exist. I’ve made my pitch for a new nondualistic ontology, but that wasn’t very well-received either, and I concede that it’s not easy to understand. Eventually I’ll produce a proper exposition. Meanwhile, I can at least point out the problem, because it’s not going away.
The current setup discourages explanations of downvoting, as it makes the downvoter vulnerable to losing karma. It’s not going to change, so just live with it.
The current setup discourages explanations of downvoting, as it makes the downvoter vulnerable to losing karma.
I don’t think so. It’s the very implication that downvoting requires explanation that’s discouraged, since its presence would increase the cost of downvoting. If there is a social norm of explaining your downvotes, or of explaining them when asked to, then downvoting carries an obligation to also write an explaining comment (perhaps on request), which some downvoters won’t be willing to spend effort on (or get involved in), and wouldn’t downvote as a result. But they want to be able to signal disapproval cheaply, hence the comments that appeal to (and so strengthen if approved) the hypothetical social norm of requiring an explanation would also be downvoted.
Feser’s understanding of reductionism is backwards, which is evident by his choice of the verb “abstract” over “reduce.”
Abstraction is precisely what Feser says: we find a simple pattern in complicated systems and approximate the system by that pattern. For example, we ignore the motions of every gas molecule in a tank, that’s too many molecules to store even in a computer. Instead, we average that motion and call it heat, now we can describe other properties of the gas, such as average pressure, to some accuracy. We abstract the motion of avogadros of gas molecules into a simple statement about the system as a whole. We started with too many gas molecules to count, now we have a few numbers representing those molecules.
Abstraction fails because our tank has cracks and gas leaks out. The gas slowly loses energy to the tank walls. Some of the gas undergoes radioactive decay and changes the count of molecules in the tank. Feser argues that these problems refute reductionism.
Reductionism is the opposite. To reduce a tank of gas we need to look at every single molecule and record each and every detail about each molecule. The molecule that escapes is recorded. As molecules pound on the tank walls, each one loses some energy, and this is recorded along with the energy increase of the wall. In order to understand the decay we need to reduce even further.
The author doesn’t see the difference.
This is the core of his argument, and it is entirely unfounded. Every single material system ever studied, from brains to galaxies to gas in a tank, obeys the equations of physics. This is because the equations of physics are not abstraction, they are reduction.
It’s not founded, but neither is it explicitly contradicted.
While nothing in chemistry is known to contradict the laws of physics, we have yet to conclusively show that chemistry can indeed be entirely explained by the laws of physics. It is still possible that there are laws of chemistry that cannot be derived from a complete set of laws of physics correctly and fully applied.
Occam’s razor favors the idea that behaviors in chemistry we cannot currently predict directly from physics are results of our not-yet-complete understanding of physics and/or our lack of sufficient computational resources applied to the question. Postulating an additional “level” of rules that can’t be derived from physics is not currently necessary to explain features of chemistry tat are not yet reduced to physics. But that’s not the same as saying another level is ruled out.
Physics is better than that. Lets say that there is another level of rules required to reduce chemistry. Then these rules are about physical systems in general, and lower-level than chemistry. We have found new laws of physics!
If they can’t be derived from physics now then that doesn’t mean physics won’t figure them out in the future.
If you define all laws of reality as physics, then sure, there’s nothing physics can’t explain. But that’s, well . . . here, let me tell a fable to explain.
The year 152,036 AD
“Hey, we just got the third-check output from the LMC computer array.”
“Yeah? What did it say?”
“The previous two sets were right. We input the known masses of the fundamental particles to five hundred thousand digits, and the known strengths of all seven fundamental forces to the same, arrange them in the form of a vertebrate animal, and run the sim, we do get an almost-perfect simulation. Minus the Lacuna. In fact, we can now say the evidence for the Lacuna has hit fifty-three sigma.”
“Damn. Any good news on the eighth force candidates?”
“All of them still cause the Sun to fail to fuse, if we allow them to have any measurable effect on covalently-bonded masses smaller than 0.997312121 milligrams.”
“And the collider results completely rule out any of the gauge bosons that fit any of the fifteen proposed models of an eighth force compatible with no effect under a milligram of mass. In fact, they don’t show any evidence of any gauge bosons associated with an eighth force, anywhere short of ten quadrillion yottavolts.”
“They’ve said that for the last hundred thousand years, why would you expect a change now?”
“Look, this is nuts. There is no way that physics has a special force just to explain the Lacuna, and has no affect on anything else, and no other way to detect it than the existence of the Lacuna.”
“Fifty-three sigma. The universe doesn’t care about your incredulity.”
“Yeah, but it’s stupid. How the hell did we wind up in a universe that requires a special law of physics to explain the Lacuna?”
“Because the Creators chose to add it when they were creating the Universe Simulation.”
“Dammit. I still don’t believe it. What kind of genius develops a perfectly good set of fundamental laws, implicit in a single equation you can fit on a T-shirt, that creates all the beauty and wonder of the universe, and then sticks on a pointless extraneous natural law to do absolutely nothing but make a handful of vertebrates, of all things, yawn?”
“You have met software engineers, haven’t you?”
“I’m going to go get drunk.”
I don’t understand your point. If there is a separate law required for yawns then that’s still a physical law that describes physical systems.
Strawman. Captured != obeys. Humans obey equations of physics, but love is not captured by the Maxwell equations.
We can abstract from quarks to atoms to chemicals to cells to brains to love. Maybe it’s not quite that simple, but love is captured by physics.
You confused the direction. You can reduce love to chemicals to to atoms to quarks, you cannot construct love out of quarks without already knowing what love is.
No, I haven’t. If I zoom up to the scale of meters I will see that certain loosely-bound groups of atoms behave in a patterned way with each other wot’s ultimate consequence is the manufacture of more loosely-bound groups of atoms. I may not call it love, but that doesn’t really matter.
That’s a statement of faith, not a statement of fact. Love is a subjective experience, and subjective experience is not “captured” by any physics that we know about. We may be able to say something about how hormonal and other physiological variables are correlated with changes in affect, but are you able to give me a naturalistic, non-behavioristic account of what affect is?
Let’s taboo physics: it can mean ‘the set of laws on which the universe runs’ (henceforth physical laws), or ‘the academic discipline studying those laws’ (physical science). Is love captured by physics? It is captured by physical laws (i.e. a logically omniscient being could derive a description of love from them¹), but not by physical science (i.e. not all physicists are much better at getting laid than a typical layman).
Caveats about needing both differential equations and boundary conditions (the equations of the SM and of GR as known today don’t even predict an arrow of time, without the boundary condition of very low entropy in the past), which could be moot given some as-yet-unknown law (Hawking and Penrose sometimes think about such things).
This is still the same “statement of faith” that I criticized at greater length, later in the thread. Love is an experience, and you will not even find a description (to say nothing of an explanation) of an experience, in any sort of physics that we know about, nor in any other discourse that can be reduced to that sort of physics. Our mathematical physics describes what the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave are doing, but it says nothing about what anything is. The nature of experience is a problem of the latter kind, which is one reason why explanations of it in terms of matter, number, and computation are hollow. Then there is the more specific problem that the atomized ontology of physics is an ill-suited place in which to find complex unities like conscious states, which is why I say there will need to be new formal developments in physics, and new physical discoveries in neurobiology, before even a revised physicalism has any chance of explaining us.
If you simulate the standard model of particle physics with appropriate initial conditions, your simulation will include four-limbed beings who will be happy to describe the experience of love to you at great length. (It’s true that no one will be able to verify this claim any time soon, but there’s every reason to believe it, because the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood). Doesn’t this mean that physics contains a description of the experience of love?
Are you singling out “love” for any specific reason or are you using it as a general example of all human emotions (e.g. fear, trust, jealousy, feeling of knowing, hate, happiness, etc.)?
Using it as a general example.
I said
and I guess the answer is no, since none of the 5+ downvoters has bothered to do so.
ETA: Let me emphasize that I’m talking about this word, I’m not misspelling “effect”.
I would downvote just about any comment that used the below claim as if it meant something:
It means that something is being asserted as true, when it is not known to be true.
ETA Well, it does mean a little more than that. It means that the basis of the assertion is coming from faith in a comprehensive belief system, rather than from any scrutiny of relevant facts; in this case the belief system is “everything reduces to physics”, with no indication that “physics” meant anything other than “physics as it is presently formulated and conceived”.
If I were to use the sequences as my guide, then on this site, the default approach for explaining all forms of experience should be “that’s how it feels to be physical system X”. So the facts about reality are 1) a lot of strictly physical facts, and 2) “what-it’s-like-to-be-an-X” facts. In the first class of facts, I include complex physical facts that can be obtained from the elementary physical facts, like facts about temperature, which are really facts about average energies of large ensembles of particles. Occasionally it’s said that the “feeling” facts are of this type—complex but strictly physical facts—but then that was the point of my question: I was daring the reader to make such a claim and to be specific about how it works. I was careful to stipulate that the explanation should be non-behavioristic; thus iDante’s later comment, about replicative behaviors, doesn’t qualify, and indeed iDante takes care to add that the property described may not actually be the same thing as love, even if it has something to do with the functional consequences and adaptive role of love. Descriptions in terms of function, adaptive value, or physical composition do not say anything about “experience” or “how it feels”, and I think people generally recognize this.
So occasionally it’s said that there are no feeling facts; for example, that seems to be the point of Stephen Diamond’s recent post. That post was strongly downvoted, so I guess people don’t like that option either. But they also aren’t willing to be psychophysical property dualists, and say that there are physical facts, and there are psychological facts, and that the latter are distinct from the former but nonetheless correlated with them.
So we are left with the schizophrenic situation in which people assert their faith in materialism, but also admit the obvious fact that experiences do exist. I’ve made my pitch for a new nondualistic ontology, but that wasn’t very well-received either, and I concede that it’s not easy to understand. Eventually I’ll produce a proper exposition. Meanwhile, I can at least point out the problem, because it’s not going away.
The current setup discourages explanations of downvoting, as it makes the downvoter vulnerable to losing karma. It’s not going to change, so just live with it.
I don’t think so. It’s the very implication that downvoting requires explanation that’s discouraged, since its presence would increase the cost of downvoting. If there is a social norm of explaining your downvotes, or of explaining them when asked to, then downvoting carries an obligation to also write an explaining comment (perhaps on request), which some downvoters won’t be willing to spend effort on (or get involved in), and wouldn’t downvote as a result. But they want to be able to signal disapproval cheaply, hence the comments that appeal to (and so strengthen if approved) the hypothetical social norm of requiring an explanation would also be downvoted.
Or gaining it.