A thoughtful piece from a generally thoughtful science writer:
Reductionism is a successful way to explain the universe, but it cannot replace experience. This is part of the mystery of life.
If the question is, “Can science explain life?” then the answer I think someday will be “mostly yes,” if what we are aiming for are the processes at work in life. Science has already successfully deployed the technique of reduction to see the building blocks of life. Reduction means looking for explanations or successful predictive descriptions of a system by focusing on its smaller-scale constitutive elements. If you are interested in a human body, then reductions lead down from organs to cells to DNA to genes to biomolecules and so on. That approach has obviously been spectacularly successful.
It has not, however, been enough. The frontier now seems to be understanding life as a complex adaptive system, meaning one in which organization and cause occur on many levels. It is not just the atomic building blocks that matter; influences propagate up and down the scale, with multiple connected networks from genes to the environment and back. As I have written before, information may play an essential role here in ways that do not occur in non-living systems.
But the deeper question remains: will this ongoing process of explanatory refinement exhaust the weirdness of being alive or the mystery of life that I described in the opening? I think not.
Adam Frank, “The mystery of life cannot be solved by science” at Big Think
Couple of thoughts: We many never discover how life actually began because — in the absence of many planets whose life forms we can study — we cannot derive universal laws. Thus, the origin of life must be treated as a historical event. Many historical events cannot be definitively understood because key facts are lost to followup.
It’s not a question of what science can do, as one complacent textbook put it. The information still available to science may not enable us to draw a firm conclusion.
In any event, as Frank says, life turns out to be a complex, adaptive system, among other things, which resists the kind of “explanation” that many researchers used to seek.
What is the “explanation” for Tokyo or New York City? Of course there are many explanations on many levels but no single explanation exhausts everything or lays the question to rest. Or ever could. And that’s part of the nature of life.
“What is explanation for?”
It’s a question I’ve never heard before, and deserves a lot more attention. Frank doesn’t really answer it, but he performs a huge service by asking it.
Stephen Blume addresses this and hypothesized that there is some sort of control mechanism somewhere in the cell and not in anyway connected to DNA and the process of protein making.
Something is controlling the millions of processes going on in the cell. DNA to protein is just one small part of it.
Brilliant article! I’ve never read about “Mary’s Room” that Blume references, but it makes sense.
Reductionism is another way of describing the oversimplifications we use in our world of details and abstractions. In Mary’s Room, the color red, might be a different, experiential dimension accessed only through the sense of sight. Similarly, we can’t taste “red” nor can our emotions be classified as “red” either.
There’s also a spiritual dimension as well as logical, sensual, emotional, and others.
-Q
It is not one or the other. No, reductionism cannot replace experience but neither can experience provide the insights that reductionism can. Reductionism is used because experience has shown that it is a useful tool for investigating how things are put together and how they work.
And reduction has shown that life is not reducible to physics and chemistry, ie matter, energy and what emerges from differential accumulations of their interactions. So it’s time to move on.
Back in 1995, Richard Dawkins had a brief exchange of letters with Michael Poole, who trained as physicist and is also a committed Christian who has written extensively on science and religion.
I want to quote from one of Poole’s letters where he discusses the nature of explanation and also reductionism
jerry:
Immaterial information. It permeates living cells. And each component is loaded with what it requires. And it passes along its information via physical contact, for example during DNA to mRNA transcription. mRNA and DNA are the physical medium for information storage and transport.
Seversky @6,
Fascinating letter–thanks for sharing it!
Thus, the definition of reductionism seems a bit fluid.
– Disassembly into component parts: “The average car is made up of about 1,800 separate parts.”
– Removing non-critical elements: “A car is a moving platform on wheels.”
– Abstraction hierarchy: “A car consists of a body frame, wheels, an engine, several interrelated systems (lubricant, energy, power transmission, and controls). For more detail, click on each link.”
-Q
As to these claims:
Well first off, directly contrary to what he claimed, reductionism has not been a successful way to explain the universe. For a prime and shining example, the universal laws that govern our universe simply refuse to be reduced to materialistic explanations.
Atheists, with their random, ‘bottom-up’, reductive materialistic explanations, simply have no realistic clue why there should even be universal laws that govern the universe in the first place.
The fact that there never will be a ‘bottom-up’ reductive materialistic explanation for the universal laws is not just an obvious common sense fact, but this fact has now been proven to be true via the extension of Godel’s incompleteness into quantum mechanics.
As the following article states, “even a perfect and complete description of the microscopic properties of a material is not enough to predict its macroscopic behaviour.,,,” and they even go on to say that the findings “challenge the reductionists’ point of view, as the insurmountable difficulty lies precisely in the derivation of macroscopic properties from a microscopic description.”
As to Adam Frank’s claim that “Can science explain life?” then the answer I think someday will be “mostly yes,”.
To call that claim unmitigated hubris is to be charitable.
While we may very well have identified many of the various components of life, reductionism, (particularly the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution), have been a resounding failure at explaining how all those components might be put together in order to explain life.
For instance, take a ‘simple cell’, the smallest thing which can be said to harbor life. James Tour offers this following thought experiment to illustrate just how grossly ignorant we are as to explaining how all the components of a ‘simple’ cell might be put together in order to explain life.
Thus, contrary to what Adam Frank claimed, even to simplest non-conscious life, i.e. a ‘simple’ cell, will never be successfully explained in ‘bottom up’ reductionist terms.
And since the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists have been a resounding failure at explaining how even a ‘simple’ cell might be put together, then it should not be all that surprising to find out that Darwinists, with their reductive materialistic explanations, have no realistic clue how any organism might achieve its basic biological form.
As the following article states, “At present, the problem of biological form remains unsolved.”
And, as should be needless to say, since the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinian evolution are at a complete loss to explain how any organism might achieve its basic biological form, then, obviously, any speculations from Darwinists as to how one type/form of organism might transform into another type/form of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality.
Again, although we have identified many of the components that go into life, the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists have been a resounding failure as to actually explaining life.
Moreover, I firmly hold, (via George Ellis), that “the foundational assumption that all causation is bottom up is wrong” and that it is only by moving beyond ‘bottom-up’ reductive materialistic explanations, to the ‘top down’ mental explanations of mind, that we will finally make significant headway in actually understanding life.
Moreover Adam Frank in his article, in concentrating on the irresolvable dilemma that ‘experience’ presents to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists, is very much taking the same exact track that David Chalmers himself did when he first elucidated ‘the hard problem of consciousness’
And although David Chalmers, (and Adam Frank), focused on qualia,,
And although David Chalmers, (and Adam Frank), focused on qualia as the defining attribute of the immaterial mind that will never be reduced to the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists, there are several other defining attributes of the immaterial mind that will also forever be beyond the scope of the reductive materialistic explanations of Darwinists.
Dr. Michael Egnor, who is a neurosurgeon as well as professor of neurosurgery at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, states six properties of immaterial mind that are irreconcilable to the view that the mind is just the material brain. Those six properties are, “Intentionality,,, Qualia,,, Persistence of Self-Identity,,, Restricted Access,,, Incorrigibility,,, Free Will,,,”
Likewise, J. Warner Wallace has a very similar list, (but not an exact match to Dr. Egnor’s list), of six properties of immaterial mind that are irreconcilable with reductive materialism.
And while the specific mental attribute of qualia, as is made evident by ‘Mary’s Room’, is forever beyond the scope of any possible materialistic explanation and/or any possible physical examination.,,,
And while the specific mental attribute of qualia is forever beyond the scope of any possible materialistic explanation and/or any possible physical examination, the other mental attributes that I listed from Dr. Egnor’s list of ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’ (which may also be termed ‘the experience of ‘the Now”), and of ‘free will’, although being irreconcilable with reductive materialism, nonetheless, both of those defining attributes of immaterial mind that Dr. Egnor listed, unlike qualia, do make their presence known to us in recent experimental evidence from quantum mechanics.
As to defining the specific mental attribute of the ‘Persistence of Self-Identity through time’ (and/or ‘the experience of ‘the Now”) in particular, it is first important to note that we each have a unique perspective of being outside of time. In fact we each seemingly watch from some mysterious outside perspective of time as time seemingly passes us by. Simply put, we seem to be standing on an island of ‘now’ as the river of time continually flows past us.
In further defining what the mental attribute of ‘the experience of the now’ actually is, in the following article Stanley Jaki states that “There can be no active mind without its sensing its existence in the moment called now.,,, ,,,There is no physical parallel to the mind’s ability to extend from its position in the momentary present to its past moments, or in its ability to imagine its future. The mind remains identical with itself while it lives through its momentary nows.”
And ‘the experience of ‘the now” also happens to be exactly where Albert Einstein got into trouble with leading philosophers of his day and also happens to be exactly where Einstein eventually got into trouble with quantum mechanics itself.
Around 1935, Einstein was directly asked by Rudolf Carnap (who was a fairly well respected philosopher):
Einstein’s answer was ‘categorical’, he said:
The specific statement that Einstein made to Carnap on the train, “The experience of ‘the now’ cannot be turned into an object of physical measurement, it can never be a part of physics.” was a very interesting statement for Einstein to make to the philosopher since “The experience of ‘the now’ has, from many recent experiments in quantum mechanics, established itself as very much being a defining part of our physical measurements in quantum mechanics.
For instance, the following delayed choice experiment with atoms demonstrated that, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Likewise, the following violation of Leggett’s inequality stressed the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we’re not observing it.
As to the ability of the mind to extend from its ‘experience of the now’ to past moments in time, in recent experiments in quantum mechanics, it is now found that “quantum mechanics can even mimic an influence of future actions on past events”
And as the following 2017 article states, “a decision made in the present can influence something in the past.”
And to drive this point further home, in the following 2018 article Professor Crull provocatively states “entanglement can occur across two quantum systems that never coexisted,,, it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old.”
As well, quantum mechanics also shows us that our present conscious choices that we make ‘now’ ultimately determine what type of future will be presented to us in our measurements of quantum systems.
As leading experimentalist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, “what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
As well, with contextuality, (which is integral to quantum computation), we find that, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation”
The Mind First and/or Theistic implications of quantum experiments such as the preceding, (which highlight ‘the experience of the now’), are fairly obvious. As Professor Scott Aaronson of MIT once quipped, “Look, we all have fun ridiculing the creationists,,, But if we accept the usual picture of quantum mechanics, then in a certain sense the situation is far worse: the world (as you experience it) might as well not have existed 10^-43 seconds ago!”
Moreover, besides the mental attribute of the ‘experience of the now’ making its presence known in quantum mechanics, that mental attribute of free will also makes its presence known in quantum mechanics,
As the late Steven Weinberg, who was an atheist, stated in the following article, “In the instrumentalist approach (in quantum mechanics) humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level.,,, the instrumentalist approach turns its back on a vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.,,, In quantum mechanics these probabilities do not exist until people choose what to measure,,, Unlike the case of classical physics, a choice must be made,,,”
In fact Weinberg, again who was an atheist during his time here on earth, rejected the instrumentalist approach precisely because “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” and because it undermined the Darwinian worldview from within. Yet, regardless of how he and other atheists may prefer the world to behave, quantum mechanics itself could care less how atheists prefer the world to behave.
Although there have been several major loopholes in quantum mechanics over the past several decades that atheists have tried to appeal to in order to try to avoid the ‘spooky’ Theistic implications of quantum mechanics, over the past several years each of those major loopholes have each been closed one by one. The last major loophole that was left to be closed was the “setting independence”, “freedom of choice”, and/or the ‘free-will’ loophole:
And now Anton Zeilinger and company have, as of 2018, pushed the ‘freedom of choice’ loophole back to 7.8 billion years ago, thereby firmly establishing the ‘common sense’ fact that the free will choices of the experimenter in the quantum experiments are truly free and are not determined by any possible causal influences from the past for at least the last 7.8 billion years, and that the experimenters themselves are therefore shown to be truly free to choose whatever measurement settings in the experiments that he or she may so desire to choose so as to ‘logically’ probe whatever aspect of reality that he or she may be interested in probing.
Thus regardless of how Steven Weinberg and other atheists may prefer the universe to behave, with the closing of the last remaining free will loophole in quantum mechanics, “humans are indeed brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”, and thus these recent findings from quantum mechanics directly undermine, as Weinberg himself stated, the “vision that became possible after Darwin, of a world governed by impersonal physical laws that control human behavior along with everything else.”
Moreover allowing free will and/or Agent causality into the laws of physics at their most fundamental level has some fairly profound implications for us personally.
First and foremost, allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics, as the Christian founders of modern science originally envisioned,,,, (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, and Max Planck, to name a few of the Christian founders),,, and as quantum mechanics itself now empirically demands (with the closing of the free will loophole by Anton Zeilinger and company), rightly allowing the Agent causality of God ‘back’ into physics provides us with a very plausible resolution for the much sought after ‘theory of everything’ in that Christ’s resurrection from the dead provides an empirically backed reconciliation, via the Shroud of Turin, between quantum mechanics and general relativity into the much sought after ‘Theory of Everything”.
To give us a small glimpse of the power that was involved in Christ’s resurrection from the dead, the following article found that, ”it would take 34 Thousand Billion Watts of VUV radiations to make the image on the shroud. This output of electromagnetic energy remains beyond human technology.”
Verse:
Holy Shroud or Holy Fire are not evidences for people who hate religion. They will explain anything with just-so stories. They will explain that something immoral ,a trick or something happened while in the same time they will believe any insane story about “the miracle” of darwinian evolution . They will disbelieve any other miracle that would “force” them to live a sinless life.
The Holy Fire, the miracle which occurs each Easter (celebrated by Christian Orthodox Churches) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre the holiest place on earth, where Christ was entombed, and where He finally rose from the dead.( This happens for more than 13 centuries and the property of fire in first minutes is similar to low-temperature plasma . Is the “Holy Fire” Related to the Turin Shroud?
The Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem from 1980 to 2000 was Patriarch Diodoros. Many times, he has received the Holy Fire on behalf of Christendom. His experience is as follows: “I enter the tomb and kneel in holy fear in front of the place where Christ lay after His death and where He rose again from the dead. I find my way through the darkness towards the inner chamber in which I fall on my knees. Here I say certain prayers that have been handed down to us through the centuries and, having said them, I wait. Sometimes I may wait a few minutes, but normally the miracle happens immediately after I have said the prayers. From the core of the very stone on which Jesus lay an indefinable light pours forth. It usually has a blue tint, but the color may change and take many different hues. It cannot be described in human terms. The light rises out of the stone as mist may rise out of a lake – it almost looks as if the stone is covered by a moist cloud, but it is light. This light each year behaves differently. Sometimes it covers just the stone, while other times it gives light to the whole Sepulchre, so that people who stand outside the tomb and look into it will see it filled with light. The light does not burn – I have never had my beard burnt in all the sixteen years I have been Patriarch in Jerusalem and have received the Holy Fire. The light is of a different consistency than normal fire that burns in an oil lamp . . . At a certain point the light rises and forms a column in which the fire is of a different nature, so that I am able to light my candles from it. When I thus have received the flame on my candles, I go out and give the fire first to the Armenian Patriarch and then to the Coptic. Hereafter I give the flame to all people present in the Church.”
The Holy Fire is First a Holy Light – My interview with Patriarch Theophilos III
http://www.holyfire.org/eng/index.htm
PS: These miracles are for Christians to believe more and for atheists to hate more .
Seversky @6
That excerpt offered a very good analysis of how explanations work, when and how we should use different approaches – and a strong argument against Dawkins’ use of reduction as a universal method for explaining reality.
Reductionism has its proper place and role – within limits.
As the OP points out, using reductionistic view for all of life and reality would yield a false understanding. Unfortunately – that’s what most of evolutionary-materialism does.
Bornagain77,
Indeed, physics starts with the reductionism of “massless elephants sliding on frictionless ice,” but it gets more complicated after that.
-Q