Can science answer everything...?

The rules of the universe as we understand them seem to indicate that things are put together in levels.  Each level has it own building blocks.  As we work up or down the logrithmic scale (powers) of 10 we see that each level is the really the assembly of the building blocks of the levels below.  (great link, make sure you have few minutes before clicking!)

Subatomic particles become atoms, atoms assemble into molecules, molecules assemble into small objects, and so on up the scale until we get galaxies, groups of galaxies and then the universe. 

Humans occupy our own special slot on this scale but we are neither overly big nor terribly small when measured against the whole.  With humans as the baseline there are approximatley 26 powers of 10 between us and the known universe.  There are also about 15 detectable powers of ten below us.

All this brings me to the topic today, Reductionism, or are we nothing but the sum of our parts?

Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituent 

There are three basic types of reductionism:

The distinction between the processes of theoretical and ontological reduction is important. Theoretical reduction is the process by which one theory is absorbed into another; for example, both Kepler's laws of the motion of the planets and Galileo's theories of motion worked out for terrestrial objects are reducible to Newtonian theories of mechanics, because all the explanatory power of the former are contained within the latter. Furthermore, the reduction is considered to be beneficial because Newtonian mechanics is a more general theory--that is, it explains more events than Galileo's or Kepler's. Theoretical reduction, therefore, is the reduction of one explanation or theory to another--that is, it is the absorption of one of our ideas about a particular thing into another idea.

Methodological reductionism is the position that the best scientific strategy is to attempt to reduce explanations to the smallest possible entities. Methodological reductionism would thus hold that the atomic explanation of a substance's boiling point is preferable to the chemical explanation, and that an explanation based on even smaller particles (quarks, perhaps) would be even better.  Methodological reductionism, therefore, is the position that all scientific theories either can or should be reduced to a single super-theory through the process of theoretical reduction.

Finally, ontological reductionism is the belief that reality is composed of a minimum number of kinds of entities or substances. This claim is usually metaphysical, and is most commonly a form of monism, in effect claiming that all objects, properties and events are reducible to a single substance.

Reductionism basically says that everything can be explained by its parts.  There is no such thing as "greater than the sum of the parts" in the sense that the effect of combining things is completely predictable by looking at the properties of the components.  Its very logical and is observable on many levels.  But does it explain everything?  Or better stated, if we understood how everything worked would everything be predictable?

Well, until we know everything, we wont really have an answer will we.  So for now all we can do is debate it.  But reductionism has at its root a fundamental problem:

In science, reductionism can be understood to imply that certain fields of study are based on areas that study smaller spatial scales or organizational units. While it is commonly accepted that the foundations of chemistry are based in physics, and microbiology is rooted in chemistry, similar statements become controversial when one considers larger-scale fields.

The limit of reductionism's usefulness stems from emergent properties of complex systems which are more common at certain levels of organization.

Ah, emergent properties!  The idea that within complex systems new properties emerge.

The usage of the notion "emergence" may generally be subdivided into two perspectives, that of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence". Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the interactions at an elemental level. Emergence, in this case, is merely part of the language, or model that is needed to describe a system's behaviour.

But if, on the other hand, systems can have qualities not directly traceable to the system's components, but rather to how those components interact, and one is willing to accept that a system supervenes on its components, then it is difficult to account for an emergent property's cause. These new qualities are irreducible to the system's constituent parts (Laughlin 2005). The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This view of emergence is called strong emergence. Some fields in which strong emergence is more widely used include etiology, epistemology and ontology.

Regarding strong emergence, Mark A. Bedau observes:

"Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."(Bedau 1997)

However, "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)." (Corning 2002) Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler stated, "it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.(Koestler 1969) Further,

"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."(Anderson 1972)

From a purely scientific perspective, reductionism (or weak emergence) is very compelling.  Personally, my logical side says that everything is explainable.  That would make me a fatalist.

Now, I definitely dont want to go too far down the philosphical rabbit hole here but for me reductionism breaks down when we get to consciousness & free will.

Reductionism to its extreme leaves no place in the universe for free will since things are all based on the predictable path of events that preceeded us (a concept called determinism). 

Determinism is the philosophical proposition that every event, including human cognition and behavior, decision and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences.

Subatomic particles tell atoms what to do and be; atomic properties contol molecular behavior and so on.  If we have true free will then we can control the objects, the molecules, the atoms and the particles.  How can that be since we are only the sum of them? 

There is simply no way I can envision a logical, mechanical explanation for consciousness.  I can discuss it from a biological, chemical, physical, evolutionary, etc.. aspect to it, but the sum of these things just cannot explain how I can contemplate it all.  Well, thats me anyway.  I guess I'm just a dualist.  Or maybe Im an Idealist.  I haven't really made up my mind yet.

Discuss...

Stay Tuned...