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PrawnOfFate comments on The real difference between Reductionism and Emergentism - Less Wrong
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Comments (14)
Standard philosophical emergentism is explicitly a form of dualism..
"As a theory of mind (which it is not always), emergentism differs from idealism, eliminative materialism, identity theories, neutral monism, panpsychism, and substance dualism, whilst being closely associated with property dualism. " (WP)
..but standard emergentism has a clause that rogerS omits: emergent properties aren't just higher-level properties not had by their consitutents, they are higher-level properties which cannot be explanatorily reduced to their constituents.
"Emergentism" can only be applied to gearboxes if the irreducbility clause is dropped. The high-level behaviour of a mechanism is always reducible to its the behaviour of its parts, because a mechanism is built up out of parts, and reduction is therefore, literally, reverse engineering.
But being able to offer an uncontentious definition of emergentism does not prove there is nothing contentious about it. It's a kind of inverted straw man.
As a theory exclusively of the mind, I can see that emergentism has implications like property dualism, but not as a theory that treats the brain just as a very complex system with similar issues to other complex systems.
My point is that depends if by "behaviour" you mean "the characteristics of a single solution" or "the characteristics of solution space". In the latter case the meaning of "reduction" doesn't seem unambiguous to me.
The practical debate I have in mind is whether multibody dynamics can answer practical questions about the behaviour of gearboxes under conditions of stochastic or transient excitation with backlash taken into account, the point being that the solution space in such an application can be very large.
In the context of the mind-body problem, the contentious claim of emergentists is that mental properties can;t be reduced to physical properties in principal. There could be any number of in practice problems involved in understanding complex systems in terms of their parts. No actual reductionists think that all sciences should be replaced by particle physics, because they understand these in-practice problems. The contentiousness is all about the in-principle issues.
Reducing to "physical properties" is not necessarily the same as to "the physical properties of the ingredients". I would have thought physicalists think mental properties can be reduced to physical properties, but reductionists identify these with the physical properties of the ingredients. I suppose one way of looking at it is that when you say "in principle" the principles you refer to are physical principles, whereas when emergentists see obstacles as present "in principle" when certain kinds of complexity are present they are more properly described as mathematical principles.
Mental events can certainly be reduced to physical events, but I would take mental properties to be the properties of the set of all possible such events, and the possibility of connecting these to the properties of the brain's ingredients even in principle is certainly not self-evident.
Well, no, but reducing to the properties of (and some suitable well behaved set of relations between) the smallest ingredients is what reductionists mean by reductionism.
I would have thought reductionists think they can be reduced and identity theorists think they are already identical.
"in principle" means in the absence of de-facto limits in cognitive and/or computational power.
Errrr...you believe in Token Identity but not Type Identity???