The argument will not apply to things not man-made.
Not true. There is a reason no one uses quarks to describe chemistry. Its futile to describe whats happening in a superfluid helium in terms of individual particle movement. Far better to use a two fluid model, and vortices.
Let me amend that: the argument will not necessarily apply to things not man-made. There is a categorical difference in this respect between man-made things and the rest, and my intent was to say: “if you’re going to put up an argument against reductionism, don’t use examples of man-made things”.
Whereas we have good reasons to bar “leaky abstractions” from our designs, Nature labors under no such constraint. If it turns out that some particular process that happens in a superfluid helium can be understood only by referring to the quark level, we are not allowed to frown at Nature and say “oh, poor design; go home, you’re drunk”.
For instance, it turns out we can almost describe the universe in the Newtonian model with its relatively simple equations, a nice abstraction if it were non-leaky, but anomalies like the precession of Mercury turn up that require us to use General Relativity instead, and take it into account when building our GPS systems.
The word “futile” in this context strikes me as wishful thinking, projecting onto reality our parochial notion of how complicated a reductionistic account of the universe “should” be. Past experience tells us that small anomalies sometimes require the overthrow of entires swathes of science, in the name of reductionism: there keep turning up cases where science considers it necessary, not futile, to work things out in terms of the lower levels of description.
I think you are making a bad generalization when you turn to Newtonian mechanics vs. general relativity. There are important ways in which mesons and hadron are emergent from quarks that have no correspondence to the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and GR.
As length scales increase, quarks go from being loosely bound fundamental degrees of freedom to not-even-good-degrees-of-freedom. At ‘normal’ length scales, free quarks aren’t even allowed. The modern study of materials is also full of examples of emergence (it underlies much work on renormalization groups), although its farther from my expertise so the only example to spring to mind was liquid helium.
Not true. There is a reason no one uses quarks to describe chemistry. Its futile to describe whats happening in a superfluid helium in terms of individual particle movement. Far better to use a two fluid model, and vortices.
Let me amend that: the argument will not necessarily apply to things not man-made. There is a categorical difference in this respect between man-made things and the rest, and my intent was to say: “if you’re going to put up an argument against reductionism, don’t use examples of man-made things”.
Whereas we have good reasons to bar “leaky abstractions” from our designs, Nature labors under no such constraint. If it turns out that some particular process that happens in a superfluid helium can be understood only by referring to the quark level, we are not allowed to frown at Nature and say “oh, poor design; go home, you’re drunk”.
For instance, it turns out we can almost describe the universe in the Newtonian model with its relatively simple equations, a nice abstraction if it were non-leaky, but anomalies like the precession of Mercury turn up that require us to use General Relativity instead, and take it into account when building our GPS systems.
The word “futile” in this context strikes me as wishful thinking, projecting onto reality our parochial notion of how complicated a reductionistic account of the universe “should” be. Past experience tells us that small anomalies sometimes require the overthrow of entires swathes of science, in the name of reductionism: there keep turning up cases where science considers it necessary, not futile, to work things out in terms of the lower levels of description.
I think you are making a bad generalization when you turn to Newtonian mechanics vs. general relativity. There are important ways in which mesons and hadron are emergent from quarks that have no correspondence to the relationship between Newtonian mechanics and GR.
As length scales increase, quarks go from being loosely bound fundamental degrees of freedom to not-even-good-degrees-of-freedom. At ‘normal’ length scales, free quarks aren’t even allowed. The modern study of materials is also full of examples of emergence (it underlies much work on renormalization groups), although its farther from my expertise so the only example to spring to mind was liquid helium.