He’s asking something like: ‘given that we know living things are built from atoms, what specific questions are you trying to answer?‘. He wants answers (to the question of living things) that specifically mention atoms like ‘I want to know ‘what specific configurations of atoms are commonly used in living things?″ which would have a corresponding answer of ‘well there 20 amino acids are commonly used, here are their structures’.
Then that would be the wrong way to go about it, and part of (I suspect) why anti-reductionist ideologies become popular among human minds. From the fact that atoms (or quarks) govern social interaction and preferences, it does not follow that the best explanation/model directed at a human will speak at the level of atoms, or explicitly reference them.
Rather, it need only use higher level regularities such as emotions, their historical basis, their chemical mechanisms, etc. The mechanisms for moral intuitions almost certainly act in a way that is not dependent on the particulars of atoms, in the same way that the mechanisms behind a heat engine do not depend on any particular atom having any particular velocity—just that, in the aggregate, they produce a certain pressure, temperature, etc.
The constraint of reductionism (which correct reasoning quickly converges to in this universe) is not that every explanation must reference atoms, but rather, that it could ultimately be connected to an atom-level model, even if that adds no further insight on the particular problem under investigation.
So asking for an atom-level explanation is asking for far too fine-grained of a model.
Sorry, I was unclear. I didn’t mean that cousin_it was looking for atom level explanations specifically, I meant that cousin it wanted the questions explained in terms of questions involving already understood phenomena or at least questions that are obviously in-principle reducible (like ‘what is the cognitive algorithm that makes humans think then experience X?’).
He’s asking something like: ‘given that we know living things are built from atoms, what specific questions are you trying to answer?‘. He wants answers (to the question of living things) that specifically mention atoms like ‘I want to know ‘what specific configurations of atoms are commonly used in living things?″ which would have a corresponding answer of ‘well there 20 amino acids are commonly used, here are their structures’.
Then that would be the wrong way to go about it, and part of (I suspect) why anti-reductionist ideologies become popular among human minds. From the fact that atoms (or quarks) govern social interaction and preferences, it does not follow that the best explanation/model directed at a human will speak at the level of atoms, or explicitly reference them.
Rather, it need only use higher level regularities such as emotions, their historical basis, their chemical mechanisms, etc. The mechanisms for moral intuitions almost certainly act in a way that is not dependent on the particulars of atoms, in the same way that the mechanisms behind a heat engine do not depend on any particular atom having any particular velocity—just that, in the aggregate, they produce a certain pressure, temperature, etc.
The constraint of reductionism (which correct reasoning quickly converges to in this universe) is not that every explanation must reference atoms, but rather, that it could ultimately be connected to an atom-level model, even if that adds no further insight on the particular problem under investigation.
So asking for an atom-level explanation is asking for far too fine-grained of a model.
Sorry, I was unclear. I didn’t mean that cousin_it was looking for atom level explanations specifically, I meant that cousin it wanted the questions explained in terms of questions involving already understood phenomena or at least questions that are obviously in-principle reducible (like ‘what is the cognitive algorithm that makes humans think then experience X?’).
Oh, OK.