Wednesday, December 14, 2011

A Request

REDUCTIONISTS:  stopping at atoms is arbitrary.  Stopping at electrons or quarks is arbitrary.  Find me the uncuttable or be silent.
at 1:20 PM

5 comments:

David said...

I don't know of anything a down quark decays into... isn't that uncuttable?

December 21, 2011 6:50 PM
Nick said...

Thank you, David! You have fulfilled my request, and I have therefore decided to become a reductionist. It's down quarks all the way down... THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED 'DOWN QUARKS'.

December 26, 2011 7:44 AM
David said...

I just don't see how you arrive at the conclusion that electrons and quarks are an arbitrary place to stop. Physicists may have been wrong in thinking the atom was indivisible (although I don't think many physicists held that view for very long), but they gave up their belief in response to just the right kind of evidence; finding something smaller that atoms can be broken into. Our best evidence is that there is nothing smaller a down quark (or electron, or several other subatomic particles for that matter) could break into.
What's arbitrary about stopping at the smallest thing you can find when your stated purpose was to do just that (this was originally an attack on reductionism, right)?

December 26, 2011 10:31 AM
Nick said...

Dave, I was thinking at the time of ontological reductionism, the view that only that which is most basic exists (tables=not real). Of course there is nothing wrong with saying that explanatory power is gained by arriving at the smallest possible level of analysis, and then proceeding to do the best one can with the smallest/least divisible materials one can find. But ontological reductionism (such as is found in Buddhist and certain rather crude western metaphysical traditions) needs much more than this: a level of description which is entirely populated by uncuttables and which can meaningfully be said to "compose" larger-scale objects. I take it that the existence of down quarks is not enough to demonstrate that such a level of description exists.

December 29, 2011 5:59 PM
David said...

Fair enough- I don't have a particularly strong stance for or against most reductionism(s) for what it's worth. I am much more sympathetic to a reductive theory that at least writes some kind of promissory note about mereology (e.g. that tables and chairs are real, like elementary particles- just not elementary, like elementary particles) rather than dismissing the macro-level behavior altogether.

I think that elementary-stuff-only type reductionism runs into problems even if we grant them their bottom level: assume a world that just consists of little particles that are indivisible but otherwise much like ordinary water molecules (I don't really need indivisible for my case- I'm trying to grant it to the reductionist here)- finding a description of something as simple as "ice" strictly in terms of micro-level behavior of our "water" is either really hard or actually impossible, depending on who you ask. Nobody on the "really hard" side has done it, as far as I know...

(example totally cribbed from Batterman- I forget which paper, though, and his interest is emergent behavior rather than directly dealing with ontology)

December 30, 2011 10:33 AM

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