One point to note about Kim and some of the other authors who have written on the topic: Many of them come to it from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, and among their principle concerns are mental causation, epiphenomenalism, eliminativism (about the mental), and so forth. I find it frustrating that in their exclusive focus on the mental they often don't seem to see the larger context of such questions: science (not limited to cognitive science) and other explanatory projects. I am glad that this wider context is the focus of attention here, rather than the parochial questions of the "mental" vs. the "physical." — SophistiCat

I agree entirely. The focus on mind has always been a bit of sideshow I think - albeit a deeply interesting one - but a sideshow nonetheless.

Jaegwon Kim would be one such formidable foil (his work is discussed in above articles). — SophistiCat

Kim represents the view that emergence is "nothing but" the sum of the microphysics. So he stands at the other end of the spectrum to folk who think emergence is real and wholes can shape their own parts by downward causality.

But words like 'Absolutism' and 'Relativism' are just words, nominations. What does it matter if you call something 'absolutism' or 'relativism'? You haven't specified the difference these differences make. — StreetlightX

Those concepts matter. We are having philosophical arguments, after all. We need to use certain concepts to explain what's going on here.
Relativism is context-driven, absolutism is fundamental-driven (you can also say here, foundation-driven). The reductionist explanation doesn't need context as a crutch. As you say, their explanation is "context invarience". Okay. But I do not find the criticism "context invariant" as damaging to a method of explanation, such as the reductionist's. This does not weaken their theory. Why not? It's because context-driven explanation must necessarily use some form of reference point to relativize. And this point of reference must necessarily come from the fundamental laws themselves, which the reductionist had already set out.

As for the cat, what about it? Again, what's the relavence? I think it would be more helpful if you elaborated the stakes involved in invoking these things. — StreetlightX

The significance of Schrodinger's cat, if we follow the context-driven explanation, is that it is necessarily observer-driven. We could not make the judgment unless we look inside the box. The mechanism inside the box is designed so as to leave us guessing -- it could go one way, or another. Reconstruction is observer-driven.

"The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a 'constructionist' one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the science, much less to those of societies". (Anderson, "More Is Different"). — StreetlightX

But I think the mistake here is misunderstanding the reductionist's account of reality. If they want to solve the problem of science, do not look at reductionism. The above quote sounds like they want to talk about the ethical treatment of knowledge as it relates to science. That's fine. They should develop a theory on how best to explain the universe, given the scientist and a context, without having to appeal to reductionism. We should know that reductionism is unforgiving. The very first principles they developed was prior to the modern scientific method. They earned their salt.

To a reductionist, or an idealist, these are the same thing. — Dominic Osborn

Yes, I realize that they are.

But I do not find the criticism "context invariant" as damaging to a method of explanation, such as the reductionist's. This does not weaken their theory. Why not? It's because context-driven explanation must necessarily use some form of reference point to relativize. And this point of reference must necessarily come from the fundamental laws themselves, which the reductionist had already set out. — Caldwell

The problem is that regular reductionist physics targets equilibrium descriptions of nature - nature that has "emerged" in the sense of crossing a critical threshold and now seeming utterly stable. The dynamics are so dead that any source of change or individuation has to be imposed as a further cost or effort.

And that is fine. The contextual or the relational drops out of the picture in terms of accounting for the proximate causes of change. It simply becomes an inert or a-causal backdrop. The taken for granted reference frame.

But the physics that is interesting to emergentists is the physics of the boundaries, the critical thresholds, where the dynamics are still poised or unstable - and hence, switchable. The zone of non-linear instability is where interesting things can happen because that is where information can start to insert itself into the process and control the bifurcations or symmetry breakings for its own reasons.

So there is a whole physics of instability - and the distal causes that can regulate that. And that kind of holistic physics is what can be made large enough to include complexity in general, and also in particular, as the complexity that has the autonomy of life and mind.

In other words, it becomes a physics that includes both information and matter. Where things are materially wobbling on the cusp, that is where information - or semiosis - can insert choices about which way to wobble things.

And it is not as if quantum theory - as our most fundamental theory of materiality - isn't already telling us just this. It is all about the instabilities that get regulated by a mysterious "collapse" - the insertion of an "observer" asking questions that stand for some particular point of view.

So all our best physical theories are completely mechanical and observerless - right until we get to the point where the fundamental instability and contextuality of nature can no longer be ignored in our theory building.

Holism has already beaten reductionism at the level of metaphysical generality.

Reductionism is the most efficient, or least information-requiring, way of modelling a material reality where all the symmetries have been broken to the point that the system has gone to stable equilibrium and all the contextuality can be summed up by a simple macro-state number.

But science keeps developing. Over the past 50 years, it has started to get its head around the more general case of modelling a non-linear and relational world.

It's kind of like how the Euclidean presumptions of Newtonian cosmology turned out to be a highly particular view of the total physics that was possible. Non-Euclidean geometries were the more generic physical model in fact.

So yes, we must impose a stable reference frame to allow some system of measurement - a firm base on which we can construct a story of local deterministic causes acting in an a-causal void.

But it will always be revealed that this in itself is a choice made by an observer. And so it can't be the largest model of the physics if it doesn't also include that observer.

Which is why we need the kind of holism that is about information or semiosis regulating the inherent instability of nature. Biology, for one, is on to it.

All in good spirit. Like I said earlier, if this discussion is about the normative function of account of reality, no need to bother with reductionism. They are situated where they want to be.

Holism has already beaten reductionism at the level of metaphysical generality. — apokrisis

I don't know anything about this. Reductionism is not about generality.