Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

London Anarchist bookfair 2020

Red Cat said:
I'm not sure why you would assume I have more background knowledge of a specialist area though.
Click to expand...

Because you commented on it, quite dismissively so, something along the lines of that such abstractions make you queasy and no wonder that I need all those words to hold on to. It shouldn't be unreasonable to assume that if a person comments, especially out-of-hand dismissively, on a subject that they at least have some knowledge on the subject they're commenting on.

Perhaps this is part of the problem here- you assume people are arguing from and for the same models, and values, and yet, we're not.
Click to expand...

As for values, that much seems obvious, as the endless stream of "you're being a dickhead" comments demonstrates. I do think it's also partially because people are so quick to make various claims on things they don't know about, for example earlier with Rhydiccal who is surely aware that he's not a biologist nor has other scientific training yet that in no way stopping him from playing biology teacher and talking a load of BS. If I am presented with a subject I don't know about I simply acknowledge I don't have the requisite knowledge and limit my claims to that which I do know about, for example in my edit to my previous post in response to you bringing up the social sciences.

I understand what a scientific model is in physics and your explanation makes sense in that context. I suppose I don't think of only physics when I think of science, and I don't think that all science should proceed as though it is physics, or as though the underlying physics is the true science. So your argument did appear to be very abstract in the wider context of science.
Click to expand...

I'm a reductionist so we'll have to agree to disagree there. You may find Solomonoff's theory of induction interesting though, just google it. It's based on closely related notions but meant to be more generally applicable, putting it more in philosophy proper rather than science as such. Edit: There seems to be a decent intuitive/non-mathematical overview of it here although it is quite long.

Anyway, I do appreciate the explanation, but it's a huge detour from the discussion on the thread so perhaps we should leave it there.
Click to expand...

Ok, agreed.
 
Last edited:
kenny g said:
I am afraid your posts would suggest you are far from being a reductionist but are instead far more of an extendalist. You may find John Parkin's theory of "Fuck It Therapy" interesting though. Fuck It Therapy by John Parkin | Waterstones
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what an extendalist is and google didn't give any results. No idea why my posts would suggest I'm not a reductionist, but to be clear, I meant reductionist in the scientific sense. In particular the belief that physics provides a full and complete description of the world and other disciplines (chemistry, biology, even social sciences) are in principle, if not in practice, reducible to it.
 
Larry Noppius said:
In particular the belief that physics provides a full and complete description of the world and other disciplines (chemistry, biology, even social sciences) are in principle, if not in practice, reducible to it.
Click to expand...
If you are truly a reductionist how can you justify your position if the parts I have bolded in the above quote are true?
 
kenny g said:
If you are truly a reductionist how can you justify your position if the parts I have bolded in the above quote are true?
Click to expand...

Not sure what exactly you're looking for. If you're looking for an argument of how one theory can in principle reduce to another even if not in practice, then you can look at the correspondence principle which reduces quantum mechanics to Newtonian mechanics. We have no hope in hell of ever practically modeling a macroscopic system (say, a baseball) in quantum terms since the number of degrees of freedom is prohibitive, it would require a supercomputer orders of magnitude beyond what we can hope to accomplish. Yet that doesn't mean one can't show how Newtonian mechanics, which can in practice model a baseball, arises from quantum mechanics through particular constructive and destructive interference of the wave function. The same is true, for, say reducing chemistry to physics. We don't have a hope in hell of modeling a chemical system in purely quantum terms but we can still show how one arises from and reduces to the other.
 
Last edited:
Larry Noppius said:
Not sure what exactly you're looking for. If you're looking for an argument of how one theory can in principle reduce to another even if not in practice, then you can look at the correspondence principle which reduces Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics. We have no hope in hell of ever practically modeling a macroscopic system (say, a baseball) in quantum terms since the number of degrees of freedom is prohibitive, it would require a supercomputer orders of magnitude beyond what we can hope to accomplish. Yet that doesn't mean one can't show how Newtonian mechanics, which can in practice model a baseball, arises from and reduces to quantum mechanics through particular constructive and destructive interference of the wave function. The same is true, for, say reducing chemistry to physics. We don't have a hope in hell of modeling a chemical system in purely quantum terms but we can still show how one arises from and reduces to the other.
Click to expand...

Which is a pretty good exposition of why reductionism isn't practical. It is an article of faith.
 
kenny g said:
Which is a pretty good exposition of why reductionism isn't practical. It is an article of faith.
Click to expand...

That's pretty anti-intellectual, just because something isn't practical doesn't mean it's just an article of faith. It isn't practical to go stand on the surface of Pluto to see whether you don't change into a unicorn, therefor it is but a mere "article of faith" to believe that if you were to go stand there that you wouldn't instantly turn into a unicorn?
 
Larry Noppius said:
That's pretty anti-intellectual, just because something isn't practical doesn't mean it's just an article of faith. It isn't practical to go stand on the surface of Pluto to see whether you don't change into a unicorn, therefor it is but a mere "article of faith" to believe that if you were to go stand there that you wouldn't instantly turn into a unicorn?
Click to expand...

One approach to take is to choose a form of explanation which is the simplest available whilst also being testable and reproducible. That is where an attempt to state all reductionist accounts are valid fails. They are not the simplest available and would often be impossible to test due to their very complexity, If you want to say they are as valid as the negation of an absurdity then you aren't really claiming much.
 
kenny g said:
One approach to take is to choose a form of explanation which is the simplest available whilst also being testable and reproducible. That is where an attempt to state all reductionist accounts are valid fails. They are not the simplest available and would often be impossible to test due to their very complexity, If you want to say they are as valid as the negation of an absurdity then you aren't really claiming much.
Click to expand...

How are they not the simplest available? A theory which reduces to another underlying theory adds zero information, its results are directly entailed by the underlying theory. It seems to me that the irreductionist position is the more complex one, because it requires a theory to add things not directly entailed by the underlying theory. And while it's certainly true that it's impractical to test, so is the irreductionist position, equally so.
 
Larry Noppius said:
How are they not the simplest available? A theory which reduces to another underlying theory adds zero information, its results are directly entailed by the underlying theory. It seems to me that the irreductionist position is the more complex one, because it requires a theory to add things not directly entailed by the underlying theory. And while it's certainly true that it's impractical to test, so is the irreductionist position, equally so.
Click to expand...
It is not impractical to test a theory as to where one lone snooker ball is going to travel using Newtonian mechanics. It would be impractical using quantum mechanics. It is simplest to use Newtonian mechanics. If you were predicting the movement of one snooker ball from the collisions of thousands of snooker balls probability theories may be the simplest approach. A reductionist approach to all situations introduces unnecesary complexity and non-verfiability, and is unscientific.
 
kenny g said:
It is not impractical to test a theory as to where one lone snooker ball is going to travel using Newtonian mechanics. It would be impractical using quantum mechanics. It is simplest to use Newtonian mechanics. If you were predicting the movement of one snooker ball from the collisions of thousands of snooker balls probability theories may be the simplest approach. A reductionist approach to all situations introduces unnecesary complexity and non-verfiability, and is unscientific.
Click to expand...

That seems a pretty strange example to use to argue against reductionism given that this is one of the few cases where we can directly prove that the quantum description does reduce to the Newtonian description. What parts of Newtonian mechanics, exactly, do you think are not entailed by quantum mechanics? And I'm not sure exactly how you're using the term complexity here, but it's the other way around. Let Q be the quantum description of a system and N the Newtonian description, then the position that Q reduces to N (Q logically entails N) means that the union Q u N is no more complex than Q. To the contrary, it is the position that Q does not reduce to N (Q does not logically entail N) which makes Q u N more complex than Q. No idea why you would call reductionism unscientific, it's almost built into physics: special relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics in the limit of small velocities, general relativity reduces to Newtonian gravity in the limit of weak fields, etc. Edit: I'd get it if you'd argue against reductionism from, say, psychology to physics as there is of course no direct proof available. But to argue against reductionism between theories within physics seems strange, as there we actually have direct proofs of it.
 
Last edited:
MadeInBedlam said:
Any poster that hasn’t been banned is a wimp
Click to expand...

That's not what I said. By far the largest majority of posters who haven't been banned probably haven't been banned because they already had a position that was congruent with the "community values" and hence were never "threatened" with a ban to change their position.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

stethoscope
London Anarchist Bookfair 2024
2 3 4 5
Replies
147
Views
6K
redsquirrel
R
steeplejack
London Anarchist Bookfair 2023/24
23 24 25 26 27
Replies
800
Views
37K
smokedout
S
danny la rouge
Bookfairs: anarchist, radical, other. (Not the LABF).
2
Replies
54
Views
4K
hitmouse
hitmouse
J
Calling all women and allies in Brixton! London
Replies
16
Views
622
Gramsci
Gramsci
ska invita
London Anarchist Bookfair 2022
37 38 39 40 41
Replies
1K
Views
48K
nogojones
nogojones
Back
Top Bottom