Doesn’t this change pure reductionism into something else?
Everything above the level of fundamental physics is essentially informational in nature. It has interfaces upwards (its behaviors) and it has interfaces downwards (the necessary behaviors of its substrate). Something like an electron may plug straight into fundamental physics, but an atom plugs into electrons and a molecule plugs into atoms.
This layering means you could lift something right off its substrate and run it on anything else that provides the same interfaces. So for example you can do protein chemistry on a computer atom-simulator. At that point, is it really fair to say “quarks fully describe a hand” when it would be equally interface-valid (if not in this case true) to say “a sufficiently powerful simulator fully describes a hand”? The quarks become less a reduction and more a circumstantial fact: “this hand is implemented using quarks”.
It makes sense to humans (modelers), who can recognize hands, to say “this hand is implemented using quarks”, and “that hand is implemented using sand (which, incidentally, is implemented using quarks)”. But when we say “quarks fully describe a hand” I think part of the meaning is an acknowledgment that reducing to quarks gets you closer to the territory. (Hands are only in our maps.)
Doesn’t this change pure reductionism into something else?
Everything above the level of fundamental physics is essentially informational in nature. It has interfaces upwards (its behaviors) and it has interfaces downwards (the necessary behaviors of its substrate). Something like an electron may plug straight into fundamental physics, but an atom plugs into electrons and a molecule plugs into atoms.
This layering means you could lift something right off its substrate and run it on anything else that provides the same interfaces. So for example you can do protein chemistry on a computer atom-simulator. At that point, is it really fair to say “quarks fully describe a hand” when it would be equally interface-valid (if not in this case true) to say “a sufficiently powerful simulator fully describes a hand”? The quarks become less a reduction and more a circumstantial fact: “this hand is implemented using quarks”.
It makes sense to humans (modelers), who can recognize hands, to say “this hand is implemented using quarks”, and “that hand is implemented using sand (which, incidentally, is implemented using quarks)”. But when we say “quarks fully describe a hand” I think part of the meaning is an acknowledgment that reducing to quarks gets you closer to the territory. (Hands are only in our maps.)