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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=80556

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_reductionism

Reductionist Ideas

One version is simply the idea that all of nature can eventually be described
scientifically; that there are no inherently unknowable facts.

Sometimes it is used to describe science (particularly physics) as a basis for
ontological reductionism--the idea that everything that exists can be explained
as the interactions of a small number of simple things (such as matter and
energy) obeying physical laws. It is this idea, for example, that Sir John
Eccles criticizes in his book Evolution of the Brain, Creation of the Self when
he says: "I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific
reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account
eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal
activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition....we have to recognize
that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as
material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world."

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/REDUCTIONIS.html

REDUCTIONISM

A doctrine that maintains that all objects and events, their properties, and our
experience and knowledge of them are made up of ultimate elements, indivisible
parts. (Ackoff, l974, p. 8)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

Ontological reductionism is the idea that everything that exists is made from a
small number of basic substances that behave in regular ways. Compare to monism.

Methodological reductionism is the idea that explanations of things, such as
scientific explanations, ought to be continually reduced to the very simplest
entities possible.

Theoretical reductionism is the idea that older theories or explanations are not
generally replaced outright by new ones, but that new theories are refinements
or reductions of the old theory in greater detail.

Scientific reductionism has been used to describe all of the above ideas as they
relate to science, but is most often used to describe the idea that all
phenomena can be reduced to scientific explanations.

Linguistic reductionism is the idea that everything can be described in a
language with a limited number of core concepts, and combinations of those
concepts. (See Basic English and Toki Pona).

The term "Greedy reductionism" was coined by Daniel Dennett to condemn those
forms of reductionism that try to explain too much with too little.

The denial of reductionist ideas is holism; the idea that things can have
properties as a whole that are not explainable from the properties of their
parts.

http://www.counterbalance.net/evp-mind/reduc-frame.html

It's not true to say that there are only quarks and leptons. In addition, there
are things like sulfur atoms and salt molecules and DNA and bacteria and trees
and frogs. All of these things are just as real as the quarks and leptons and
protons and neutrons

Imagine a couple of kids playing with Legos.

Legos are the little plastic blocks that snap together and kids build things out
of them.

Now suppose you've got two kids playing and one of them says, look at all the
stuff on the table; we've got houses and we built cars and we've got airplanes.
But the other kid says no, there aren't really any houses and airplanes and
cars; it's all just Legos.

Are there really only Legos there or are there also cars and airplanes and what
have you?

We connect our concept of reality with having causal powers.

The dispute between the reductionist and the non-reductionist can be recast as a
dispute over causation.

The reductionist says, in effect, all causation is bottom up; that is, the laws
of physics down here determine everything that happens and the causation
percolates upward, determining what happens all the way up to the top.

The non-reductionist, on the other hand, says no, there are new causal factors
and laws at these higher levels of organization that also have to be taken into
account in order to understand what goes
on in our universe.

http://www.counterbalance.net/evp-mind/downw-frame.html

Downward Causation

This is an idea that was introduced in 1972 by Donald Campbell. But it has been
much ignored by both philosophers of science and also by scientists themselves
in the years since then. The one place in science where downward or top-down
causation does get a lot of attention is in psychology.

Campbell's claim was that bottom-up accounts in biology are necessary but
they're not sufficient, they are only partial. In addition to the bottom-up
account in terms of biochemistry, you also need a top-down
account to complement it. Here's his example:

He raises the question: How do you explain the fact that the jaws of worker ants
or termites are so beautifully designed to do the kind of work that termites do,
gnawing wood or the ants carrying seeds. He
says from an engineering view they're optimally designed; you could hardly do
any better job if you were--with those materials--if you set out to design it
yourself. So how to explain that?

Well, the bottom-up account, the termites' genes give instructions for protein
formation and the proteins make up the jaw structure. But this explanation is
incomplete. How come the lucky termite has that particular DNA instead of some
of the countless other possible forms that it could have? How did it come to
have the instructions for such useful jaws?

The answer, of course, is natural selection. Though it has been, in the past,
random production of lots and lots of variants, and only the useful ones have
survived to reproduce. So we have a bottom-up cause in terms of the
macromolecules. But we also have to have a top-down cause in terms of the
ecosystem in which the little bugs live and the way that that has had a
differential effect on the survival and reproduction of the termites as whole
organisms.

The bottom-up part of the explanation is the DNA to protein structure. But then
we've also got the top-down part which is from the environment by means of the
differential survival and reproduction back to the DNA.

And then we start through the whole cycle again.

So downward selection is selectively wiping out a lot of the variation but it's
not interfering with the laws of biology and a fortiori it's not interfering
with the laws of physics.

So this is a particular example of how top-down and bottom-up causation conspire
to produce the world that we've got. We have bottom-up causation that permits a
vast number of varieties at all sorts of levels. And then downward selective
processes determine which of those possibilities actually exist.

For example, chemistry permits something like 10 to the 200th power of different
proteins--a rough estimate. Somebody could probably give me a better number on
that but I just want to give you a ballpark figure of what a vast number of
possibilities there are for large complex molecules. But not all of those exist.

In order to explain why the certain ones that do exist in the world exist, we
have to know how those large complicated molecules fit into biological organisms
and biological processes.

So, in sum, life brings new sorts of causal interactions into the world. These
are consistent with physics but they're not predictable by physics.

Consider for a silly example the difference between shining a flashlight beam on
a pound of hamburger versus shining a flashlight beam on a live animal. The
hamburger is not affected appreciably by the light striking it but the animal
might jump up and run. The physics of the light beam is the same in both cases
but the effect is vastly different.

So the non-reductionist says when you have these more complex structures it's
not that there are new causal forces--psychic forces or vital forces or
whatever. Instead, the causal forces of physics will enter into vastly more
complex interactions. The laws of physics don't predict rabbits but rabbits and
their behavior do not violate the laws of physics.

http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/reductionism.html

Reductionism is a view that asserts that entities of a given kind are
collections or combinations of entities of a simpler or more basic kind or that
expressions denoting such entities are definable in terms of expressions
denoting the more basic entities. Thus, the ideas that physical bodies are
collections of atoms or that thoughts are combinations of sense impressions are
forms of reductionism

Epiphenomenal causation is defined as a relationship between two events which
appears to be a cause and effect relationship, but in fact is merely a
reflection of some other underlying causal process.

Strictly speaking the rock thrown at the chair did not cause the chair to fall
over. Rather the relationship between the thrown rock and the chair is an
epiphenomenon that supervenes on the genuine causal processes of subatomic
particles, in essentially the same way that mental states supervene upon
physical states. For if we granted the existence of emergent macroscopic causal
properties within physics, there would be no reason to deny their existence in
the mental realm.

The causality of tables and chairs is every bit as epiphenomenal as that of
mental states, because both are dependent on more fundamental laws of physics.

All of the laws of chemistry are epiphenomenal, because the behavior of the
elements is really causally dependent on the behavior of protons, neutrons and
electrons. The behavior of these subatomic particles would also be
epiphenomenal, because they are causally dependent on the behavior of quarks.
And now that we recognize that scientific revolutions are a natural part of the
growth of sciences, we cannot discount the possibility that further research
could reveal (if it hasn't already) that quarks have parts. If this happened,
then the behavior of quarks would be epiphenomenal. There is no reason to
be certain that this reductive process ever stops:

Consider the possibility that for any level of order discovered in the universe,
there always exists a deeper taxonomy of kinds and a deeper level of order in
terms of which the lawful order can be explained. It is, as far as I can see, a
wholly empirical question whether or not the universe is like this, like an
"explanatory onion" with an infinite number of explanatory skins. If it is like
this, then there are no basic or ultimate laws to which all investigators must
inevitably led (pp. 293-4).

If this is correct, then quarks would be as bereft of causal powers as beliefs
and desires. If every causal effect is dependent on the behavior of its parts,
and the division of parts into parts goes on forever, there would be no
principled reason to stop the regress at one place rather than another.

http://www.nih.gov/news/NIH-Record/06_27_2000/story01.htm

It is not obvious how consciousness can be understood within the frameworks of
psychological science and neuroscience

Consciousness poses probably the greatest challenge to reductionist approaches

A little thing with 4 letters: N-E-S-S. That thing is the real problem. When you
say redness instead of red, that's the problem. You are putting a lot of stuff
there that doesn't exist

People mean a lot of different things when they talk about consciousness."

Consciousness is kind of an umbrella term that includes various aspects of
perception, attention, and knowledge

The most difficult aspect to describe scientifically is this subjective feeling
of consciousness and what that has to do with neurons and material reality. This
raw subjectivity is hard to capture

If you want to argue that consciousness cannot be explained neurobiologically
because conscious phenomena are intrinsic, and what intrinsic means for you is
it doesn't have any parts and so can't be explained...you're just arguing in a
circle

http://www.leaderu.com/truth/2truth05.html

Transmigration

Imagine that you are in an operating room. A robot brain surgeon is in
attendance. By your side is a potentially human equivalent computer, dormant for
lack of a program to run. Your skull, but not your brain, is anesthetized. You
are fully conscious. The surgeon opens your brain case and peers inside. Its
attention is directed at a small clump of about 100 neurons somewhere near the
surface. It determines the three dimensional structure and chemical makeup of
that clump nondestructively with high resolution 3D NMR holography, phased array
radio encephalography, and ultrasonic radar. It writes a
program that models the behavior of the clump, and starts it running on a small
portion of the computer next to you. Fine connections are run from the edges of
the neuron assembly to the computer, providing the simulation with the same
inputs as the neurons. You and the surgeon check the accuracy of the simulation.
After you are satisfied, tiny relays are inserted between the edges of the clump
and the rest of the brain. Initially these leave the brain unchanged, but on
command they can connect the simulation in place of the clump.

A button which activates the relays when pressed is placed in your hand. You
press it, release it and press it again. There should be no difference. As soon
as you are satisfied, the simulation connection is established firmly, and the
now unconnected clump of neurons is removed. The process is repeated over and
over for adjoining clumps, until the entire brain has been dealt with.
Occasionally several clump simulations are combined into a single equivalent but
more efficient program. Though you have not lost consciousness, or even your
train of thought, your mind (some would say soul) has been removed from the
brain and transferred to a machine.

In a final step your old body is disconnected. The computer is installed in a
shiny new one, in the style, color and material of your choice. You are no
longer a cyborg halfbreed, your metamorphosis is complete.

What Am l?

The idea that a human mind can be transferred to a new body sometimes meets the
following strong objection from some who dispute neither the possibility, nor
its objective manifestations as described. "Regardless of how the copying is
done the end result will be a new person. If it is I who am being copied, the
copy, though it may think of itself as me, is simply a self-deluded imposter. If
the copying process destroys the original then I have been killed. That the copy
may then have a great time exploring the universe using my name and my skills is
no comfort to my mortal remains."

The objection can and should be overcome by intellectual acceptance of an
alternate position, Pattern Identity.

Body identity assumes that a person is defined by the stuff of which a human
body is made. Only by maintaining continuity of body stuff can we preserve an
individual person. Pattern identity, on the other hand, defines the essence of a
person, say myself, as the pattern and the process going on in my head and body,
not the machinery supporting that process. If the process is preserved, I am
preserved. The rest is mere jelly.

Pattern Identity

The body identity position is clear. A matter transmitter is an execution
device. You might as well save your money and use a gas chamber, and not be
taken in by the phony double gimmick.

Pattern identity gives a different perspective. Suppose I step into the
transmission chamber. The transmitter scans and disassembles my jelly-like body,
but my pattern (me!) moves continuously from the dissolving jelly, through the
transmitting beam, and ends up in other jelly at the destination. At no instant
was it (I) ever destroyed.

The biggest confusion comes from the question of duplicates. It is rooted in all
our past experience that one person corresponds to one body. In the light of the
possibility of matter and mind storage and transmission this simple, natural,
and obvious identification becomes confusing nd misleading. Suppose the matter
transmitter is connected to two receivers instead of one. After the transfer
there will be a copy of you in each one. Surely at least one of them is only a
mere copy - they can't both be you, right? Wrong!

Soul in Abstraction

Although we've reasoned from strictly reductionistic assumptions about the
nature of thought and self, the pattern identity position has clear dualistic
implications. Though mind is entirely the consequence of interacting matter, the
ability to copy it from one machine or storage medium to another gives it an
independence and an identity apart from its machinery.

Suppose the message describing a person is written in some static medium, like a
book. A superintelligent being, or just a big computer, reading and
understanding the message might be able to reason out the future evolution of
the encoded person, not only under a particular set of experiences but also
under various alternative circumstances. Existence in the thoughts of a beholder
is no more abstract than as a transformed person-program described in the
previous section, but it does introduce an interesting new twist.

The superintelligent being has no obligation to accurately model every single
detail of the beheld, and may well choose to skip the boring parts, to jump to
conclusions that are obvious to it, and to lump together different alternatives
it does not choose to distinguish. This looseness in the simulation can also
allow some time reversed action - our superintelligent being may choose a
conclusion then reason backwards, deciding what must have preceded it. Authors
of fiction often take such liberties with their characters. The same parsimony
of thought applies to the parts of the environment of the contemplated person
that are themselves being contemplated. Applied a certain way, this parsimony
will affect the evolution of the simulated person and his environment, and may
thus be noticeable to him. Note that the subjective feelings of the simulated
person are a part of the simulation, and with them the contemplated person feels
as real in this implementation as in any other.

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