If the truth is hard to find, that does not make it not-the-truth. W
If the truth is hard to find, maybe that’s because it isn’t there. Is there anything that could refute reductionism as a universal truth?
But if you knew somebody down to their quarks, and had unlimited computational power, then you would not be able to make any better predictions by adding a psychological model to this physics simulation.
Assuming reductionism.
Also, what would it mean for a phenomenon to be irreducible?
What does it mean for phenomena to be reducible? If you can’t get any predictions out of “reductionism is false”, does it even have any content. (Well, I’d get “some attempts at reductive explanation will fail”.
It can solve it for practical use.
Reductionism is hardly ever practical, as you have noted. In practice, we cannot deal with things at the quark level.
I am not certain whether reductionism is a physical law or a logical statement.
A number of people are trying to take it as both … as something that cannot be wrong, and something that says something about the universe. That’s a problem.
If the truth is hard to find, maybe that’s because it isn’t there. Is there anything that could refute reductionism as a universal truth?
Assuming reductionism.
What does it mean for phenomena to be reducible? If you can’t get any predictions out of “reductionism is false”, does it even have any content. (Well, I’d get “some attempts at reductive explanation will fail”.
Reductionism is hardly ever practical, as you have noted. In practice, we cannot deal with things at the quark level.
A number of people are trying to take it as both … as something that cannot be wrong, and something that says something about the universe. That’s a problem.