Sure, but I also have a keen, personal, interest in people who argue in this way, because I've got a bit of that myself. It makes me want to stop and ask: alright, all the bullshit out the way, what are you really asking, what are you looking for? It's clearly not what you say you're looking for, you've demonstrated that, so what are you actually after?
I can't answer that for myself, at least for the part of me that's drawn to provocation for the sake of provocation (which, say what you want, is all this thread really amounts to.) So maybe I want to provoke you into giving an answer that'll help me. — csalisbury
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.
Nothing matters. — Frederick KOH
In that case, that's quite an anti-climax. Engineers create structures like this all the time. Engineers who make parts and components at one level are also at the same time creating abstractions for engineers at the next level. — Frederick KOH
The part of your difference with Weinberg where he does not consider
this autonomy to be fundamental - well I am on his side on this,
It is not a difference in the understanding of the facts. It is one of perspective.
I am sure you can debate perspective, but I would rather debate something else.
We can also seek to explain how the software is being enabled to run effectively on a specific machine, and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. But they are answers to a different question, and not even indirectly relevant to the high-level question concerning the obtaining of the input/output structure that is fully explained by the software specification. — Pierre-Normand
— Wosret
We can also seek to explain how the software is being enabled to run effectively on a specific machine, and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. But they are answers to a different question, and not even indirectly relevant to the high-level question concerning the obtaining of the input/output structure that is fully explained by the software specification. — Pierre-Normand
No, it is not possible. That's because it is proven that the high level features shared by systems that belong to the relevant equivalence class fully explain the existence of the high level laws (since the latter can be causally/deductively derived from the former), on the one hand, and since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class. — Pierre-Normand
We can also seek to explain how the software is being enabled to run effectively on a specific machine, and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. But they are answers to a different question, and not even indirectly relevant to the high-level question concerning the obtaining of the input/output structure that is fully explained by the software specification. — Pierre-Normand
Does Weinberg give similar caveats for his version what a fundamental theory is? — Frederick KOH
So attempting to synthesize your position: while "those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class", we can seek to explain how low level features enable the high level ones and such enabling explanations are genuinely reductive. — Frederick KOH
No, it is not possible. That's because it is proven that the high level features shared by systems that belong to therelevant equivalence class fully explain the existence of the high level laws (since the latter can be causally/deductively derived from the former), on the one hand, and since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class. — Pierre-Normand
A further point of clarification. You to refer to "relevant equivalence class" because a single high level theory may have instantiations with different low level features/substrates. Or to use a previous example, the same software can run on different kinds of computers.
Or did you mean something else. — Frederick KOH
Then are these autonomous high level theories empirical theories? — Frederick KOH
Yes. The ideal gal law is an empirical law, and so are quantum electrodynamics or quantum chromodynamics (both of the latter are effective field theories), for instance. Ethological accounts of animal behavior also are empirical. The number of examples from natural or social sciences is almost infinite. Theories that are fully reducible are the exception rather than the rule. — Pierre-Normand
So you consider all these autonomous high level theories. In the case of quantum electrodynamics, electroweak theory is not a reduction, "since those higher-level laws are completely insensitive to any other low level features of material constitution that aren't merely deducible from the system's belonging to the relevant equivalence class."
Or did you mean something else? — Frederick KOH
Yes, I thing that is true also. Causal networks in complex dynamical systems can be very messy and fail to display clear cases of upward and downward causation operating between neatly distinguished levels. — Pierre-Normand
I think this misses the point.
Explanations at any level of emergence can be fundamental. We think of quantum mechanics and general relativity as "fundamental", which they are, but NeoDarwinism and the Theory of Computation are also fundamental.
There is no downwards or upwards causation between fundamental theories. — tom
Those objections at least make some sort of intuitive sense in the framework of deterministic classical mechanics, but they are invalid, in my view, in a way that is simply made even more salient by their failures to go through in the context of quantum physics. — Pierre-Normand
All the more egregiously in the case of Sean Carroll, who is, after all, a physicist. — Wayfarer
It's also a bit disappointing on account of the fact that Carroll, unlike colleagues of his like Hawking, Krauss or Weinberg, isn't utterly dismissive of philosophy. — Pierre-Normand
underspecified — Pierre-Normand
All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale — Pierre-Normand
While underdetermination is well known enough in the philosophy of science, could you give a central text which uses the term underspecified. — Frederick KOH
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