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#reductionism

1 post1 participant0 posts today
mindsets

"In the study of anything outside human affairs, including the study of complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting."

This—perhaps controversial—quote, about the value of exploring fundamental principles, is from Steven Weinberg in "Is the Universe a Computer?", THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, volume 49, number 16, p. 43. It is worth considering, at least.

#reductionism
#StevenWeinberg

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven

en.m.wikipedia.orgSteven Weinberg - Wikipedia
Philo Sophies

There's no spice in #brevity - about the #insufficiency of #shortened #media

I would like to take a "brief" look at a #media #phenomenon. It's about the fact that “brevity is the spice of life”. During my #studies in #SocialMedia, I noticed a special form of #reductionism (in the literal sense, however), which is already close to #emptying of meaning or #dilution of #content. Just like this text ;-)

philosophies.de/index.php/2024

Philo Sophies

There's no spice in #brevity - about the #insufficiency of #shortened #media

I would like to take a "brief" look at a #media #phenomenon. It's about the fact that “brevity is the spice of life”. During my #studies in #SocialMedia, I noticed a special form of #reductionism (in the literal sense, however), which is already close to #emptying of meaning or #dilution of #content. Just like this text ;-)

philosophies.de/index.php/2024

Continued thread
jan
The limits of mechanistic dogma are very examples of the restrictiveness of self-imposed methodologies that fabricate non-existent artificial ‘limitations’ on science and knowledge. The limitations are due to the nongenericity of the methods and their associated bounded microcosms.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology #reductionism #science #knowledge
#knowledge
Continued thread
jan
Any question becomes unanswerable if one does not permit oneself a large enough universe to deal with the question. The failure of reductionism is that of the inability of a small surrogate universe to exhaust the real one. Equivocations create artefacts.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#relationalbiology #biology #reductionism
#reductionism
Continued thread
jan
The reductionistic claim bears the false witness that if one has enough such [mechanistic physiochemical] surrogates, and knows enough about them, then the biological organization will follow as a corollary. It is not just a technical matter of the impossibility in human terms of acquiring a sufficiently large collection of surrogates. The inherent impredicativity of complexity cannot be analytically resolved. A typical example is that one cannot solve a classical N -body problem by solving N one-body problems.
—Aloisius H. Louie, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology
#reductionism #relationalbiology #artificiallife #life
#life
Continued thread
jan
”Geometry, for example, is a convenient abstraction; it is not concrete reality. … Reductionism is a method, not an ontology. An ethical corollary: when we realize every entity feels at some scale, we might rethink certain experiments that cause suffering.”
—Matthew Segall, Prehensions, Propositions, and the Cosmological Commons
#abstraction #reductionism #ethics
#ethics
Replied in thread
David J. Atkinson

@dpiponi @bjn I am not so dismissive. There was the following essay question on my qualification exam for the doctorate program in computer science #AI . “Can the economy of Bolivia feel pain?” No joke. If you couldn’t discuss this in reference to the philosophical stance of machine functional #reductionism, I think you’d probably fail. (2/3rds of my cohort failed the test as a whole).

Just saying, all late night “wrecked” discussions are not necessary just idle musing. There are some superficially odd propositions that deserve deeper thought. I will think about shoes in a new way thanks to your post. 👍🏼

Continued thread
VeganPizza69 ⓋⒶ

Some selected quotes from the episode description:

<💬>
#catholic parents "they both left the church when they got married"

Raised in a non-religious home

Summers with grand-parents who felt "we need to get a healthy dose of religion because we were missing it from all the other months of the year"

"I was and I still am a very curious, curious kid... I was really fascinated by a lot of the [church] stories and the rituals... but there was no time for asking questions."

Bible stories "some of them are extraordinary - they don't always make sense to a kids mind or an adult mind"

Dad "the Spock in the family", mum an artist

Cousins mostly religious. An argument at ~10 yrs old about evolution and whether He Man has more muscles than Justine :) "No - he has the same number of muscles as me - they're just more developed"

Getting in trouble with grandma for telling cousins we evolved "from something ape-like"

"I'm not somebody that ever talks somebody out of their faith... not anti-religion... I deeply respect people's values and beliefs and faith even though it's different... I find it very easy to co-exist with people who do have a faith."

Enjoying good faith conversations with religious people about nature "I really appreciated how he would give me space to ask questions"

"I'm not religious, I don't believe there's a god, but I am totally open to being wrong about that."

"I practice science with a small 's'... I am someone who loves an elegant experiment tied to field observations - that's what I'm here for."

"Some people could say that I'm a reductionist... reduction is kind of a dirty word... but I can kind of live with it."

"There's definitely been some events in my life that do make me pause... is there something else going on here?"... coincidences vs. something else?

Epistemology: Naturalism vs. fideism (faith), dogmatism or unchallengeable authority or revelation

JW: Even "a naturalistic approach based on evidence and reason... that can be done well and it can be done badly too"

"This naturalistic approach... science... can have some failings... I do think the overall process is robust - but it breaks down because humans are involved... we have some flaws"

The Wood Wide Web story started ~25 years ago from an experiment published in Nature by Suzanne Simard, Melanie Jones and others nature.com/articles/41557

Mycorrhizal fungi, carbon transfer, trees and plants "an ancient relationship... 400-500 million years ago... they can link the two trees below ground... that in itself is super interesting"... organisms from two completely separate kingdoms connected

"Fungi are more closely related to us than they are to plants"

Non photosynthesising plants can get carbon via the fungal network from a photosynthesising plant

"Someone... nobody knows who... called it the Wood Wide Web... it quickly took off... that was 25 years ago."

Pushback to the paper both technical and conceptual "why would it give it up to another plant?"

"From our review there's been less than 30 experiments done in the field on this topic and no one has definitively shown that this carbon is moving through these... common mycorrhizal networks."

"...never been conclusive... always a lot of uncertainty... but then... about 5 years ago... that one book... 'The Secret Life of Trees'"

"I picked up this book... I didn't really care for it... I found the language really kind of infantile... I've never felt the need to anthropomorphise forest or trees to that extent to get me interested in what they're doing and why we should care about them."

52:30 What and Who Matters?
01:19:15 How to Make a Better World?
</💬>

NatureNet transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field - NatureDifferent plant species can be compatible with the same species of mycorrhizal fungi1,2 and be connected to one another by a common mycelium3,4. Transfer of carbon3,4,5, nitrogen6,7 and phosphorus8,9 through interconnecting mycelia has been measured frequently in laboratory experiments, but it is not known whether transfer is bidirectional, whether there is a net gain by one plant over its connected partner, or whether transfer affects plant performance in the field10,11. Laboratory studies using isotope tracers show that the magnitude of one-way transfer can be influenced by shading of ‘receiver’ plants3,5, fertilization of ‘donor’ plants with phosphorus12, or use of nitrogen-fixing donor plants and non-nitrogen-fixing receiver plants13,14, indicating that movement may be governed by source–sink relationships. Here we use reciprocal isotope labelling in the field to demonstrate bidirectional carbon transfer between the ectomycorrhizal tree species Betula papyrifera and Pseudotsuga menziesii, resulting in net carbon gain by P. menziesii. Thuja plicata seedlings lacking ectomycorrhizae absorb small amounts of isotope, suggesting that carbon transfer between B. papyrifera and P. menziesii is primarily through the direct hyphal pathway. Net gain by P. menziesii seedlings represents on average 6% of carbon isotope uptake through photosynthesis. The magnitude of net transfer is influenced by shading of P. menziesii, indicating that source–sink relationships regulate such carbon transfer under field conditions.
#science#reductionism#fungi
Séraphitüs-Séraphîta

◌ is my first reductionist/minimalist/Dadaist/subtle noise study of 2025. There's always something so freeing and therapeutic about creating releases like this. These particular pieces are made up of field recordings I had made with my cell phone. I reduced them to static and manipulated them into something minimal with an almost percussive nature about them.

Listen here:
seraphitus-seraphita.bandcamp.

#static#staticnoise#noisemusic
Philo Sophies

The old and the new #mechanism - part 2
- Explanation attempts for the understanding of the #reductionistic and #positivistic world view -

In this 2nd part of the article, in my opinion, the #complexity of #biological #systems is taken into account and in this respect the #mereological #fallacy in the old #mechanistic #world #view, that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts, is referred to as a #construction #error in #reductionism.

More at: philosophies.de/index.php/2022

Replied in thread
David J. Atkinson

@faz @ai_feed Thanks for posting. This is actually quite an informed essay about #AI and its place in larger discussions of science, technology and ethics. I have quibbles with details, but I agree with the author's general opinion that the human tendency to anthropomorphise almost everything within a framework of intentionality has led popular opinion of AI down an erroneous path. I also agree that systems built with AI technology are not people: They have never gone to grade school, or had a crush on a classmate, or played with a dog. Those are human experiences that machines will never have, just as we will never have machine experiences. That is not to say they are not intelligent. They are their own kind of intelligence, one which we recogize shares some common ground with our own. At the same time, it is far more different than human intelligence than is the intelligence, say, of dolphins or great apes, or whales or even an ant colony. [Plus, we get to define intelligence too. That makes it a slippery concept.]The philosophy of "machine state functionalism" gives us useful, concrete tools to analyze intelligence of whatever kind. We have learned a lot about both human and machine intelligence from functional #reductionism. What we don't understand is "awareness" and especially "awareness of self" in the way we think of our own consciousness. There are plenty of theories, but very little one can test empirically with computers. I didn't finish the essay yet, but is starts out good!

Replied in thread
Preston MacDougall

@tg9541 OK, I have read Stuart Kauffman’s book “At Home in the Universe”, and am familiar with the concept of ‘emergence’, as well as the philosophical conflict concerning #reductionism. But I am also skeptical of #math substituting for #science - as in #StringTheory.

To get to the point of this limited toot, I recall from long ago the discovery (by radiolabeling) that “biological structures are replaced every 8 weeks”, but more recent experiments refuted its generality.

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