Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism • Hacker News Board

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#21

Post by jamesrcole » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:24 PM UTC

mcguire wrote: post #16

mmirate wrote: post #3

Why does scientific reductionism need an antidote? "antidote to scientific reductionism" seems about as useful as "antidote to nonblindness".

Is quantum mechanics a good model to describe chemistry? Biology? Psychology? History?

That doesn't mean that it is something in need of an antidote (which is specifically what the person you were replying to was bringing up).

Of course understanding quantum mechanics does not give you an understanding of psychology, and nothing about reductionism claims it does!

Reductionism says basically that everything is evolving configurations of quantumn-mechanical elements, interacting in quantum mechanical ways.

But it does not directly telll you anything specifically about what the different kinds of (massive) configurations are or the ways those evolve over time. Such details are what we capture in our knowledge of fields such as Psychology.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#22

Post by collyw » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #6

collyw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we wouldn't have any concepts of art or beauty or music or many of the things that seem to make life worth living.

Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant. Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.

Music to me is a perfect example. The X factor or various shows try to reduce it to a formula and to me the result is crap (in my opinion).

Likewise with cooking, but I guess many people like McDonalds.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#23

Post by sudosteph » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:35 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #6

collyw wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we wouldn't have any concepts of art or beauty or music or many of the things that seem to make life worth living.

Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant. Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.

I've been reading Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" which goes in very deep on cellular automata and possible applications on it, and I couldn't agree more with you more. There's even one section where he uses cellular automata logic to formally derive the fundamental rules of propositional logic.

He basically re-wrote that section for his blog recently if anyone is curious: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2018/11/logic-explainability...

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#24

Post by jamesrcole » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #22

naasking wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant. Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.

Music to me is a perfect example. The X factor or various shows try to reduce it to a formula and to me the result is crap (in my opinion). Likewise with cooking, but I guess many people like McDonalds.

That's not reductionism. I won't repeat what I've argued elsewhere in this thread - it should be pretty easy to find my explanation of why.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#25

Post by sudosteph » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

collyw wrote: post #22

naasking wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant. Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.

Music to me is a perfect example. The X factor or various shows try to reduce it to a formula and to me the result is crap (in my opinion). Likewise with cooking, but I guess many people like McDonalds.

A pop culture "formula" to tailor a piece of art to suit the tastes of a particular audience is not really an example of actual scientific reductionism though. It could potentially be "scientism" if anyone actually believed it was scientific, but I don't think most would.

A better example of a reduction that relates to music, would be about how you can predict which combinations of notes will sound dissonant by looking at intervals between the frequencies of notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consonance_and_dissonance ). Yes, it means a lot properties of music can be defined in relatively simple mathematical terms (timing and chord theory being other ways) - but that doesn't mean the interaction between those properties isn't still complex and beautiful. It just gives us more ways to explore that beauty.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#26

Post by naasking » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

sudosteph wrote: post #23

naasking wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Conway's game of life is simply brilliant. Reduction gives your appreciation new depths.

I've been reading Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" which goes in very deep on cellular automata and possible applications on it, and I couldn't agree more with you more. There's even one section where he uses cellular automata logic to formally derive the fundamental rules of propositional logic. He basically re-wrote that section for his blog recently if anyone is curious: https://blog.stephenwolfram.com/20…

Interesting article! You may also be interested in Computability Logic [1]:

> Computability Logic (CoL) understands computational problems in their most general – interactive sense. [...] CoL provides a generalization of the Church-Turing thesis to the interactive level. The classical concept of truth turns out to be a special, zero-interactivity-degree case of computability. This makes classical logic a special fragment of CoL. Being a conservative extension of the former, computability logic is, at the same time, by an order of magnitude more expressive, constructive and computationally meaningful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computability_logic

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#27

Post by Terr_ » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

I can't find the clip at the moment, but I recall a Futurama episode where the professor finally unlocks the last secret of the universe and gets really depressed that there is nothing else to do.

Fortunately, he realizes nobody knows why the universe has a limited number of things to discover...

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#28

Post by coldtea » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 6:21 PM UTC

naasking wrote: post #17

coldtea wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules. Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm.

> Because [some of us] don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules. Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm. And if investigation reveals that all art and music are governed by simple rules, you're suddenly going to dislike all art and music? How precisely does revealing the hidden reality suddenly reduce how pleasing something is to the senses?

>How precisely does revealing the hidden reality suddenly reduce how pleasing something is to the senses?

How "pleasing something is to the senses" is a complex phenomenon, not some crude constant -- and it's subjective basis has a lot of interplay with eras, norms, goals, and lots of other stuff, including how we feel and what we know about it.

When you know how the "sausage is made" you can like it less, even to the point of affective how pleasant the taste is to you.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#29

Post by coldtea » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

jamesrcole wrote: post #13

coldtea wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would reductionism reduce the majesty of complexity? Cellular automata are about as simple and reductionist as you can get, but they produce breathtaking complexity. Because we (well, some of us) don't really like breathtaking complexity that's reducible to some simple rules. Or at least don't like that kind of complexity to be the norm.

That's not what reductionism is. It says there are certain elements that interact with each other in certain ways. It does not concern itself with the nature of configurations of such elements, and how those evolve. These may be extremely complex configurations, of huge numbers of the elements, that evolve in very complex ways. A really important point about this, which is usually misunderstood, is that "does not con…

>Also, this is not a matter of what we "like" or "dislike". It's a matter of how reality is or isn't, and what we like or dislike has no bearing on that.

What we know about how reality is or isn't has a very big impact on what we like or dislike.

Re: Bewilderment is the antidote to scientific reductionism

#30

Post by _Schizotypy » Fri, Nov 16, 2018, 7:19 PM UTC

throwrhebrick wrote: post #18

superkuh wrote: post #14

Seeing the title I thought this article was going to be about the "problem" of reductionism. But it delightfully doesn't fall into that trap and acknowledges that reductionism to the lowest useful components does not necessarily imply low complexity. Then goes on to express wonderment at the remaining complexity after reductionism. That's fine, I guess. Just as long as we all remember there's no such thing as a chemi…

> there's no such thing as a chemical that makes you fall in love. I read this article a while ago that suggests love is produced by the releasing of various chemicals: https://www.thoughtco.com/the-chemistry-of-love-609354 .

This feels like a complete "no shit"