Ok, I’m not terribly excited about this. As I see it, biologists are anthropomorphizing a biological system for cognitive efficiency and a philosopher gushes on the matter in a rather pointless way. Assigning behavior to objects doesn’t assign being. That knocks out virtually everything the author was talking about.
And the subject of the essay, “What do organisms mean?” is what in my mathematical experience I would call an ill-posed question. Any answer is nonsensical. One doesn’t have an indication that the actual organisms (rather than the label) have or should have a meaning. So we don’t even have an understanding for what an answer to the question should look like. It’s like asking “what should yellow taste like?” Any definite answer, like “bananas”, will need to explain why yellow shouldn’t taste like other things, like “lemons” or “convertibles”.
A proper answer would be that “yellow” doesn’t have a taste to the great majority of people (it is for them a visual only label) and I doubt many of the remainder, for which visual cues get mixed in the mind with other senses, have a consistent taste (consistency routinely being another victim of ill-posed questions and statements) for the color yellow. Further, the use of the word “should” indicates that there’s some sort of preference or even moral code that exists. Most of us obviously do not have a preference for what a word should taste like. Nor do we have a belief system that requires a particular answer to this queer question.
I think the most valid point in the essay is that anthropomorphizing (or for that matter any model made of a natural object or process) doesn’t always work and can fail in very unintuitive ways. But who in science didn’t already understand that? It’s like teaching a fish to swim.
I don’t see what everyone’s problems with reductionism are.
From an engineering standpoint, it’s perfectly true and understandable that we might come up against systems, as in biology, that are so complex that it is more efficient to model them other ways. (Ways that necessarily leave out details and fail to capture aspects of behavior) Even as few as 60 years ago, things like fluid flow had to be analyzed in terms of fudge factors. We had the reductionists answer far earlier than that, but we couldn’t do anything with it until we had powerful computers.
On the other hand, from a scientific/mathematical perspective, I don’t see how the reductionist idea can fail to be true. If A-B-C = 0, then A = B+C, QED, if A, B, and C are being understood properly. If Stuff B is going on in volume B, and Stuff C is going on in volume C, and you properly account for the interface at the boundary between them, then Stuff A going on in Volume A is the sum of the other two volumes.
If this principle fails, then more than just physics breaks. Logic breaks. Math breaks. Things are not what they are.
So why do people rebel at the idea?
PS – that presupposes that you have a set of laws accurately modeling the behavior of the system at that level. If you do, and you fail to reproduce the natural behavior, then you either need to go one level deeper in your model, or you need to search for new laws that work.
WRT fluid dynamics, we had a set of laws that accurately modeled natural behavior (for continuum flows) in the 1800s, and they were almost useless until the 1960s or so.
Ok, I’m not terribly excited about this. As I see it, biologists are anthropomorphizing a biological system for cognitive efficiency and a philosopher gushes on the matter in a rather pointless way. Assigning behavior to objects doesn’t assign being. That knocks out virtually everything the author was talking about.
And the subject of the essay, “What do organisms mean?” is what in my mathematical experience I would call an ill-posed question. Any answer is nonsensical. One doesn’t have an indication that the actual organisms (rather than the label) have or should have a meaning. So we don’t even have an understanding for what an answer to the question should look like. It’s like asking “what should yellow taste like?” Any definite answer, like “bananas”, will need to explain why yellow shouldn’t taste like other things, like “lemons” or “convertibles”.
A proper answer would be that “yellow” doesn’t have a taste to the great majority of people (it is for them a visual only label) and I doubt many of the remainder, for which visual cues get mixed in the mind with other senses, have a consistent taste (consistency routinely being another victim of ill-posed questions and statements) for the color yellow. Further, the use of the word “should” indicates that there’s some sort of preference or even moral code that exists. Most of us obviously do not have a preference for what a word should taste like. Nor do we have a belief system that requires a particular answer to this queer question.
I think the most valid point in the essay is that anthropomorphizing (or for that matter any model made of a natural object or process) doesn’t always work and can fail in very unintuitive ways. But who in science didn’t already understand that? It’s like teaching a fish to swim.
I don’t see what everyone’s problems with reductionism are.
From an engineering standpoint, it’s perfectly true and understandable that we might come up against systems, as in biology, that are so complex that it is more efficient to model them other ways. (Ways that necessarily leave out details and fail to capture aspects of behavior) Even as few as 60 years ago, things like fluid flow had to be analyzed in terms of fudge factors. We had the reductionists answer far earlier than that, but we couldn’t do anything with it until we had powerful computers.
On the other hand, from a scientific/mathematical perspective, I don’t see how the reductionist idea can fail to be true. If A-B-C = 0, then A = B+C, QED, if A, B, and C are being understood properly. If Stuff B is going on in volume B, and Stuff C is going on in volume C, and you properly account for the interface at the boundary between them, then Stuff A going on in Volume A is the sum of the other two volumes.
If this principle fails, then more than just physics breaks. Logic breaks. Math breaks. Things are not what they are.
So why do people rebel at the idea?
PS – that presupposes that you have a set of laws accurately modeling the behavior of the system at that level. If you do, and you fail to reproduce the natural behavior, then you either need to go one level deeper in your model, or you need to search for new laws that work.
WRT fluid dynamics, we had a set of laws that accurately modeled natural behavior (for continuum flows) in the 1800s, and they were almost useless until the 1960s or so.
It means you’re both doing something right.
Oh, “orgaNISMS.” Never mind…