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.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Nothing matters. — Frederick KOH

Sounds pretty religious to me.

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

Both the hardware and software levels are abstracts levels. (They're akin to the levels of cell physiology and of whole organism physiology). They also both are real functional levels. The software-level description characterizes real material processes (executions of high-level source code programs) that are both symbolically significant and that abstract away from some features of hardware (or virtual machine) implementation. The hardware-level processes (executions of individual steps of machine code, or, at an even lower level, of elementary binary logical functions) have the same features but what this level abstracts away from are the high-level symbolic modes of operation that are conferred to it (as viewed from above) by the higher level algorithmic structure defined by the software "loaded" into the computer.

Engineers may create structures like this all the time, as you notice, but so does nature. In some cases, the levels may be clear cut, as are the different energy scales in effective field theories, or, in other cases, fail to form neat hierarchies, as is the case for the Earth climate system or for biological organisms. What is common to all of those natural and artifactual (and also cognitive and social) phenomena is the ubiquity of downward causation and their illustrating the inadequacy of Weinberg-style reductionism as a purported description of "the way the world is".

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,

So, contrary to what Weinberg believes, the level of his hypothesized "final theory" isn't fundamental as a matter of "the world being the way it is", where this is conceived as stemming form all the "arrows of explanation" being found empirically to converge towards one single theory of particle physics. It rather consists in this lowest "material" level being dignified by him with the word "fundamental" merely through downgrading as not being really "fundamental" (or as being dependent on mere "historical accidents") all the real arrows of scientific explanation (a majority of them, actually) that don't happen to point towards his favored theory. The real phenomenon of the (partial) autonomy of higher level processes and phenomena from their lower level bases of material constitution just destroys his mythical structure of arrow convergence. This grand structure, rather than being a reflection of anything empirically verifiable in nature, turn out to be a product of his prejudice.

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.

So, you really are after an understanding of the facts that doesn't rest on any conceptually informed perspective at all? Or is there a way to do science without making use of any theoretical or empirical concepts?

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance.

Nothing matters.

Thus spake Nietzsche.

The plover when caught on its nest staggers away, feigning a broken wing. A neat little evolutionary trick known to any ornithologist.

But I'm sure this presents no problem at all for a Weinbergian metaphysics. It is all just meaningless atomic motions in the end, no messages or semiotics in play.

Or if we must admit to something more than just brute material physics here, then we can still pretend that is covered by an analysis of electrochemical action at synapses and within muscles controlling a wing. We can stick to talking about the physics of symbols rather than their meanings.

Indeed, rather like the plover frantic about the prospect of its nest being trodden on, we will be found racing about in a distracting fashion - throwing out a succession of enticingly lame evasions - in the hope of leading any pursuer far from our threatened belief system.

This Aeon essay ought to clear a lot of things up in respect of the deficiencies of philosophical materialism.

Ugh, that only sticks to the loop of reductionism.

This goes back to the question of "What is an electron?" Like the materialist reductionists, the substance dualist and advocates of "mystery" consider thing to be defined by something else, to be reduced that idea.

For someone it say: "well, it's an electron" is considered somehow inadequate. Supposedly, to be talked about, the election must be reduced to something else, whether that be "properties" or "mystery."

The truth is, all along, "it's an electron" was a perfectly fine account. Sure it doesn't tell us what the electron does or how it interacts with other things, but that was never the point-- here we are interested in self-definition, in how an electron is an electron.

Reductionism is the scourge which doesn't allow us to recognise that we talk about other things, which proclaims anything must really be something else or defined by something else. As such it is an act common to both elimative materialism and substance dualists. Neither understand every state has its own being, and so cannot be reduced to properties, ideas or "mystery."

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?

Sartre actually.

Google is failing me, and can't find the quote for some reason, but Nietzsche actually says in the twilight of the idols that the value of life is inestimable, or immeasurable, and from this, suggests that when someone does offer an evaluation, it can only be a symptom of their own constitution.

— Wosret

"The consensus of the sages — I recognized this ever more clearly — proves least of all that they were right in what they agreed on: it shows rather that they themselves, these wisest men, shared some physiological attribute, and because of this adopted the same negative attitude to life — had to adopt it. Judgments, judgments of value about life, for it or against it, can in the end never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are meaningless. One must stretch out one's hands and attempt to grasp this amazing subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated. Not by the living, for they are an interested party, even a bone of contention, and not impartial judges; not by the dead, for a different reason. For a philosopher to object to putting a value on life is an objection others make against him, a question mark concerning his wisdom, an un-wisdom. Indeed? All these great wise men — they were not only decadents but not wise at all." -- Nietzche

Yeah, that one.

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

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.

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?

Does Weinberg give similar caveats for his version what a fundamental theory is? — Frederick KOH

Not so far as I can see. Also, my objections can't be met with mere caveats. What comes closest to caveats in Weinberg's two texts are his acknowledgement that high-level theories are useful irrespective of them actually having been effectively reduced. But his reductionist claims are explicitly metaphysical rather then methodological/pragmatist. So this weak caveat isn't really relevant to my objection to his stronger metaphysical claim.

Another qualification that he offers is rather more akin to an anti-caveat. He distinguishes explicitly his own brand of "grand reductionism" from the more ordinary "petty reductionism" that he identifies with Mayr's "analysis" of a system onto material constituents in order to highlight bottom-up principles and constraints. Pluralists and emergentists are happy to recognize the explanatory fecundity of such a process of analysis. Weinberg is insistent that his own brand of theoretical ("grand") reductionism is much stronger than that. But it is owing to the strength of his claim that the counterexamples to it exemplified by the clear cases of strong emergence, ubiquitous in normal scientific practice, are fatal to it.

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

Yes, for sure. But this merely amounts to material constitutive analysis; something that Ernst Mayr, for instance, readily acknowledges as an important area (albeit just a part) of fruitful scientific inquiry, and that Weinberg tends to downplay as mere "petty reductionism" as contrasting with his own metaphysical claim of "grand reductionism" to a unique "final theory". But Weinberg is also blind to the positive features of the emergent relations (involving 'autonomy' and 'universality', as explained by Karen Crowther) displayed alongside reductive analysis. Those explanatory relevant positive features of emergent phenomena just destroy Weinberg's grand metaphysical claim since they give rise to "explanatory arrows" that point away from his dreamed of final theory.

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.

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

No, that's broadly correct. I get the "equivalence class" concept from George Ellis, mainly. (And I also homed in on it independently in a manuscript titled Autonomy, Consequences and Teleology that I wrote in 2009). It is closely connected to Karen Crowther's idea of "universality", which alongside "autonomy" characterizes emergent phenomena and the emergent norms and/or laws that govern them. It is also closely connected to the idea of "multiple realizability" made use of by functionalists in the philosophy of mind. When a functional system is multiply realizable, then all the possible realizations fall under an equivalence class defined by the functional specification.

But multiple realizability, thus conceived, just is one sort of case where Crowther's more general idea of "universality" is exemplified by emergent phenomena in nature; and hence just one sort of way to characterize equivalance classes of systems that admit of the same high-level explanation. The other two cases consist in (2) equivalence classes of micro-physical realizations of a macro-variable (you can refer back to my discussion of the ideal gas law earlier in this thread, for instance) and cases where the underlying physical theory is underdetermined by the emergent theory. This is what is exemplified by the cases of critical phase transitions or broken symmetries that characterize, among other things, the relations between adjacent "effective field theories" that have their domains of validity tied to distinct energy scales. The phenomena of superconductivity and superfluidity exemplify this.

Then are these autonomous high level theories empirical theories?

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.

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?

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

No, that's exactly what I meant. The theory of the electoweak interaction (i.e. the effective quantum field theory that is found to be empirically valid, as well as theoretically adequate, above the 246 GeV unificaton energy) is underspecified by the theory of quantum electrodynamics. All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale (i.e., any energy below 246 GeV) belong to an equivalence class of theories, such that QED can be derived from any one of them. But the empirical discovery that one specific theory happens to be empirically adequate above 246 GeV (and up to the grand unification energy of the true GUT theory, presumably), adds nothing to the explanation of the validity of the laws of QED over and above this "reducing" theory belonging to the aforementioned equivalence class. This is where the (partial) explanatory autonomy of QED comes from and why the "arrows of explanation" stemming from Weinberg's question as to "Why?" its laws obtain don't point to specific features of the empirically valid theory of the electroweak force one step up (in order of increasing energy scales) in the hierarchy of effective field theories.

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.

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

If for a theory to be fundamental means that it is universal and applies everywhere, at any time, and on every energy/spatial scale, then very few theories are fundamental (not even general relativity). If it means that they provide autonomous explanations that abstract away from features of the contingent material constitution of the entities that they regulate, then stating that they are fundamental doesn't entail anything more than stating that they are autonomous. Hence, I prefer the term "autonomous". Quantum mechanics is more of a framework than it is a theory. It consists in a set of formal features shared by more determinate empirical theories such as quantum electrodynamics. Such theories are likewise autonomous.

The ideas of downward or upward causation don't relate to causal links between the theories themselves which regulate phenomena. They rather pertain to causal relationships between phenomena that belong to distinct levels of description, or scales of intervention. When an intervention on a macro-scale variable reliably produces a specific, targeted, effect on the micro-physical state of a system, for instance, that constitutes an instance of downward causation. The existence of meaningful downward causation is being disputed by some philosophers (such as Jaegwon Kim) and some scientists (such as Sean Carroll) on the same grounds on which they also dispute the existence of strong emergence. They believe both the ideas of strong emergence (and hence of the autonomy of "high-level" theories with respect to "low-level" ones) and the existence of (irreducible) downward causation to be inconsistent with the causal closure of the micro-physical domain. 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.

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.

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. In the comment section of the first one in a series of four blog posts about emergence written by Massimo Pigliucci, George Ellis takes Carroll to task on this very issue (i.e. he points out the inadequacy of Newtonian billiard ball models as a basis for an anti-emergentist argument). Ellis proceed to discuss superconductivity as an example of a emergent theory where the very nature of the "low level entities" (in this case, Cooper pairs) is conditioned by high-level features of a physical system.

As I had suggested, however, even if deterministic Newtonian physics had turned out to be true, strong emergence would still make sense. Werner Heisenberg indeed understood early on, prior even to the development of his matrix mechanics, that if point particles obeying the laws of Newtonian mechanics were somehow conceived to be the material basis of the physical world, it would still not be possible to know determinately all their intrinsic mechanical properties, and thus those properties would become 'noumenal', as it were, and not allowed to be represented as genuine physical magnitudes in an empirically grounded physical theory. (I think that was in The Physicist's Conception of Nature, which I had read in the French edition some 30 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy. But the gist of his argument stuck with me.)

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

I think the only real reason is that he's a bit more tactful. Here is a review of Carroll's latest book which might be of interest.

underspecified — Pierre-Normand

While underdetermination is well known enough in the philosophy of science, could you give a central text which uses the term underspecified.

All the alternative theories that would have been consistent with the validity of QED at the lower energy scale — Pierre-Normand

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say all theories (QED included) would have been consistent with experimental results at the lower energy scale

While underdetermination is well known enough in the philosophy of science, could you give a central text which uses the term underspecified. — Frederick KOH

I meant underdetermined, thank you.