At this point it is important to distinguish “Mind theory” from other fields where Reductionism is debated. In this field, Reductionists apparently regard Emergentism as a form of disguised Vitalism/Dualism—if emergent properties can’t be explained by the physical ingredients, they must exist in some non-physical realm.
Standard philosophical emergentism is explicitly a form of dualism..
“As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. ” (WP)
..but standard emergentism has a clause that rogerS omits: emergent properties aren’t just higher-level properties not had by their consitutents, they are higher-level properties which cannot be explanatorily reduced to their constituents.
However, Emergentism can apply equally well to everything from chess playing programs to gearbox vibrations, neither of which involve anything like mysterious spiritual substances, so this can hardly be the whole story.
“Emergentism” can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducbility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a
mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
But being able to offer an uncontentious definition of emergentism does not prove there is nothing contentious about it. It’s a kind of inverted straw man.
The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
This characterization isn’t universally accepted. What you if simple can’t anticipate or compute the high-level effect due to the shear complexity and lack of total knowledge? For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
The constituents of a complex system interact in many ways, including negative feedback and feed-forward control, which lead to dynamic features that cannot be predicted satisfactorily by linear mathematical models that disregard cooperativity and non-additive effects...
An additional peculiarity of complex biological systems is that they are open—that is, they exchange matter and energy with their environment—and are therefore not in thermodynamic equilibrium...
In the past, the reductionist agenda of molecular biologists has made them turn a blind eye to emergence, complexity and robustness, which has had a profound influence on biological and biomedical research during the past 50 years.
The number of new drugs that are approved by the US Food and Drug Administration has declined steadily from more than 50 drugs per annum 10 years ago to less than 20 drugs in 2002. This worrying trend has persisted despite continuous mergers and acquisitions in the industry and annual research and development expenditures of approximately US$30 billion. Commentators have attributed this poor performance to a range of institutional causes . . . However, there is probably a more fundamental reason for these failures: namely, that most of these approaches have been guided by unmitigated reductionism. As a result, the complexity of biological systems, whole organisms and patients tends to be underrated (Horrobin, 2001). Most human diseases result from the interaction of many gene products, and we rarely know all of the genes and gene products that are involved in a particular biological function. Nevertheless, to achieve an understanding of complex genetic networks, biologists tend to rely on experiments that involve single gene deletions. Knockout experiments in mice, in which a gene that is considered to be essential is inactivated or removed, are widely used to infer the role of individual genes. In many such experiments, the knockout is found to have no effect whatsoever, despite the fact that the gene encodes a protein that is believed to be essential. In other cases, the knockout has a completely unexpected effect (Morange, 2001a). Furthermore, disruption of the same gene can have diverse effects in different strains of mice (Pearson, 2002). Such findings question the wisdom of extrapolating data that are obtained in mice to other species. In fact, there is little reason to assume that experiments with genetically modified mice will necessarily provide insights into the complex gene interactions that occur in humans (Horrobin, 2003).
Another defect of reductionist thinking is that it analyses complex network interactions in terms of simple causal chains and mechanistic models. This overlooks the fact that any clinical state is the end result of many biochemical pathways and networks, and fails to appreciate that diseases result from alterations to complex systems of homeostasis. Reductionists favour causal explanations that give undue explanatory weight to a single factor.
Ok then what in the world do you mean by “ cosnsciously” or “parts”? And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms? Is there something magical about then?
Google Craig Venter “synthetic life”
So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake? So an emergent property is just anything accidental? Is software made from parts? So if I make a software application that has unexpected properties whether they are emergent or not all depends on how conscious I was of them when I set out?
I don’t mean anything exotic or hard to guess. Just soldering components onto a board, that kind of thing.
And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms?
We can’t right now.
So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake?
“Emergence” can be present anywhere if you define it broadly enough. It’s not much of a win to prove that emergence is ubiquitous by trivialising the term.
“As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. ” (WP)
As a theory exclusively of the mind, I can see that emergentism has implications like property dualism, but not as a theory that treats the brain just as a very complex system with similar issues to other complex systems.
“Emergentism” can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducibility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts.
My point is that depends if by “behaviour” you mean “the characteristics of a single solution” or “the characteristics of solution space”. In the latter case the meaning of “reduction” doesn’t seem unambiguous to me.
The practical debate I have in mind is whether multibody dynamics can answer practical questions about the behaviour of gearboxes under conditions of stochastic or transient excitation with backlash taken into account, the point being that the solution space in such an application can be very large.
In the context of the mind-body problem, the contentious claim of emergentists is that mental properties can;t be reduced to physical properties in principal. There could be any number of in practice problems involved in understanding complex systems in terms of their parts. No actual reductionists think that all sciences should be replaced by particle physics, because they understand these in-practice problems. The contentiousness is all about the in-principle issues.
Reducing to “physical properties” is not necessarily the same as to “the physical properties of the ingredients”. I would have thought physicalists think mental properties can be reduced to physical properties, but reductionists identify these with the physical properties of the ingredients. I suppose one way of looking at it is that when you say “in principle” the principles you refer to are physical principles, whereas when emergentists see obstacles as present “in principle” when certain kinds of complexity are present they are more properly described as mathematical principles.
Mental events can certainly be reduced to physical events, but I would take mental properties to be the properties of the set of all possible such events, and the possibility of connecting these to the properties of the brain’s ingredients even in principle is certainly not self-evident.
Reducing to “physical properties” is not necessarily the same as to “the physical properties of the ingredients”.
Well, no, but reducing to the properties of (and some suitable well behaved set of relations between) the smallest
ingredients is what reductionists mean by reductionism.
I would have thought physicalists think mental properties can be reduced to physical properties, but reductionists identify these with the physical properties of the ingredients
I would have thought reductionists think they can be reduced and identity theorists think they are already identical.
I suppose one way of looking at it is that when you say “in principle” the principles you refer to are physical principles, whereas when emergentists see obstacles as present “in principle” when certain kinds of complexity are present they are more properly described as mathematical principles.
“in principle” means in the absence of de-facto limits in cognitive and/or computational power.
Mental events can certainly be reduced to physical events, but I would take mental properties to be the properties of the set of all possible such events, and the possibility of connecting these to the properties of the brain’s ingredients even in principle is certainly not self-evident.
Standard philosophical emergentism is explicitly a form of dualism..
“As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. ” (WP)
..but standard emergentism has a clause that rogerS omits: emergent properties aren’t just higher-level properties not had by their consitutents, they are higher-level properties which cannot be explanatorily reduced to their constituents.
“Emergentism” can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducbility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
But being able to offer an uncontentious definition of emergentism does not prove there is nothing contentious about it. It’s a kind of inverted straw man.
This characterization isn’t universally accepted. What you if simple can’t anticipate or compute the high-level effect due to the shear complexity and lack of total knowledge? For instance, the experience of pain can alter human behaviour, but the lower-level chemical reactions in the neurons that are involved in the perception of pain are not the cause of the altered behaviour, as the pain itself has causal efficacy. According to the principles of emergence, the natural world is divided into hierarchies that have evolved over evolutionary time (Kim, 1999; Morowitz, 2002). Reductionists advocate the idea of ‘upward causation’ by which molecular states bring about higher-level phenomena, whereas proponents of emergence accept ‘downward causation’ by which higher-level systems influence lower-level configurations (Kim, 1999).
Have a read:
Reductionism and complexity in molecular biology
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1299179/
Some highlights
The key word is “mechanism”, meaning something deliberately and cosnsciously constructed out of parts. No organism is a mechanism in that sense.
Your characterization is far from universally accepted.
See Mechanisms in Science, Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/science-mechanisms/#ProUndMai
What I say is valid given my definition of mechanism.
Ok then what in the world do you mean by “ cosnsciously” or “parts”? And why do you think we can’t make biological organisms? Is there something magical about then?
Google Craig Venter “synthetic life”
So emergence cannot be present in a mechanism if I “deliberately” make something but it can be it I make a mistake? So an emergent property is just anything accidental? Is software made from parts? So if I make a software application that has unexpected properties whether they are emergent or not all depends on how conscious I was of them when I set out?
I don’t mean anything exotic or hard to guess. Just soldering components onto a board, that kind of thing.
We can’t right now.
“Emergence” can be present anywhere if you define it broadly enough. It’s not much of a win to prove that emergence is ubiquitous by trivialising the term.
As a theory exclusively of the mind, I can see that emergentism has implications like property dualism, but not as a theory that treats the brain just as a very complex system with similar issues to other complex systems.
My point is that depends if by “behaviour” you mean “the characteristics of a single solution” or “the characteristics of solution space”. In the latter case the meaning of “reduction” doesn’t seem unambiguous to me.
The practical debate I have in mind is whether multibody dynamics can answer practical questions about the behaviour of gearboxes under conditions of stochastic or transient excitation with backlash taken into account, the point being that the solution space in such an application can be very large.
In the context of the mind-body problem, the contentious claim of emergentists is that mental properties can;t be reduced to physical properties in principal. There could be any number of in practice problems involved in understanding complex systems in terms of their parts. No actual reductionists think that all sciences should be replaced by particle physics, because they understand these in-practice problems. The contentiousness is all about the in-principle issues.
Reducing to “physical properties” is not necessarily the same as to “the physical properties of the ingredients”. I would have thought physicalists think mental properties can be reduced to physical properties, but reductionists identify these with the physical properties of the ingredients. I suppose one way of looking at it is that when you say “in principle” the principles you refer to are physical principles, whereas when emergentists see obstacles as present “in principle” when certain kinds of complexity are present they are more properly described as mathematical principles.
Mental events can certainly be reduced to physical events, but I would take mental properties to be the properties of the set of all possible such events, and the possibility of connecting these to the properties of the brain’s ingredients even in principle is certainly not self-evident.
Well, no, but reducing to the properties of (and some suitable well behaved set of relations between) the smallest ingredients is what reductionists mean by reductionism.
I would have thought reductionists think they can be reduced and identity theorists think they are already identical.
“in principle” means in the absence of de-facto limits in cognitive and/or computational power.
Errrr...you believe in Token Identity but not Type Identity???