OK, but it seems that we are using "reductionism" differently. You could say
that a hydrogen atom cannot be reduced to an electron + proton because it
exhibits behaviour not exhibited in any of its components; or you could say
that it can be reduced to an electron + proton because these two components
appropriately juxtaposed are necessary and sufficient to give rise to the
hydrogen atom. And if the atom is just a part of UD*, well, that's just
another, more impressive reduction. As for knots, can't any particular
physical knot be described in a 3D coordinate system? This is similar to
describing a particular physical circle or triangle.
Only if God issues everyone with immaterial souls at birth, so that
reproducing the material or functional structure of the brain fails to
reproduce consciousness, would I say that reductionism does not work...
unless you add the soul as an element in the reduction.
Stathis Papaioannou
On 3/12/07, Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>
> Le 11-mars-07, à 17:56, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>
> > Reductionism means breaking something up into simpler parts to explain
> > it. What's wrong with that?
>
>
> Because, assuming comp, neither matter nor mind (including perception)
> can be break up into simpler parts to be explained. That is what UDA is
> all about. First person expection (both on mind and matter) are already
> global notion relying on the whole UD*.
> And empirical physics, currently quantum mechanics, confirms that
> indeed, we cannot explain matter by breaking it into parts. That is
> what "violation of bell's inequality" or more generally "quantum
> information " is all about. This has been my first "confirmation of
> comp by nature": non-locality is the easiest consequence of comp.
>
> A good (and actually very deep) analogy is provided by the structure of
> knots (see the table of knots:
>
> http://www.math.utoronto.ca/~drorbn/KAtlas/Knots/index.html
>
> A knot is closed in its mathematical definition (unlike shoe tangle).
> You cannot break a knot in smaller parts, so that the whole structure
> is explained by the parts. Knots, like many topological structure,
> contains irreductible global information. The same for the notion of
> computations (and indeed those notions have deep relationship, see the
> following two impressive papers:
>
> http://web.comlab.ox.ac.uk/oucl/work/samson.abramsky/tambook.pdf
> http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0606114
>
> I know that Derek Parfit call "comp" the reductionist view". this is a
> very misleading use of vocabulary. Comp is the simplest destroyer of
> any reductionist attempt to understand anything, not just humans.
>
>
> Bruno
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > On 3/12/07, Bruno Marchal < marchal.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >> Le 10-mars-07, à 18:42, John M a écrit :
> >>
> >> > I don't deny the usefulness of science (even if it is reductionist)
> >> ...
> >>
> >>
> >> How could science be reductionist? Science is the art of making
> >> hypotheses enough clear so as to make them doubtable and eventually
> >> testable.
> >>
> >> No scientist will ever say there is a primitive physical universe or
> >> an
> >> ultimate God, or anything like that. All theories are hypothetical,
> >> including "grandmother's one when asserting that the sun will rise
> >> tomorrow. The roots of our confidence in such or such theories are
> >> complex matter.
> >>
> >> Don't confuse science with the human approximation of it. Something
> >> quite interesting per se, also, but which develops itself.
> >> Lobian approximations of it are also rich of surprise, about
> >> "oneself".
> >>
> >> "Science" or better, the scientific attitude, invites us to listen to
> >> what the machine can say and dream of, nowadays. How could such an
> >> invitation be reductionist?
> >>
> >> I would say science is modesty. It is what makes faith necessary and
> >> possible.
> >>
> >> With comp, when science or reason grows polynomially (in a trip from G
> >> to G* for example), then faith "has to" grow super-exponentially.
> >
> >
> > >
> >
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
> >
>
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Received on Mon Mar 12 2007 - 06:38:11 PDT