Reductionism
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Reductionism. Almost one year ago, in April of 2007, Matthew C. submitted the following suggestion for an overcoming bias topic. How and why the current reigning philosophical hegemon, reductionistic materialism, is obviously correct, while the reigning philosophical viewpoints of all past societies and civilizations are obviously suspect. I remember this because I looked at the request and deemed it legitimate, but I know I couldn't do that topic until I'd started on the mind projection fallacy sequence, which wouldn't be for a while. But now it's time to begin addressing this question. And while I haven't yet come to the materialism issue, we can now start on reductionism. First, let it be said that I do indeed hold that reductionism, according to the meaning I will give for that word, is obviously correct, and to perdition with any past civilizations that disagreed.
This seems like a strong statement, at least the first part of it. General relativity seems well supported, yet who knows but that some future physicist may overturn it." On the other hand, we are never going back to Newtonian mechanics. The ratchet of science turns, but it does not turn in reverse. There are cases in scientific history where a theory suffered a wound or two and then bounced back. But when a theory takes as many arrows through the chest as Newtonian mechanics, it stays dead. To hell with what past civilizations thought. Seems safe enough. When past civilizations believed in something that has been falsified to the trash heap of history. And reductionism is not so much a positive hypothesis as the absence of belief.
In particular, disbelief in a form of the mind projection fallacy. I once met a fellow who claimed that he had experiences as a Navy gunner. And he said, when you fire artillery shells, you've got to compute the trajectories using Newtonian mechanics. If you compute the trajectories using relativity, you'll get the wrong answer. And I, and another person who was present, said flatly, No. I added, You might not be able to compute the trajectories fast enough to get the answers in time. Maybe that's what you mean? But the relativistic answer will always be more accurate than the Newtonian one. No, he said. I mean that relativity will give you the wrong answer because things moving at the speed of artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not relativity.
If that were really true, I replied, you could publish it in a physics journal and collect your Nobel Prize. Standard physics uses the same fundamental theory to describe the flight of a Boeing 747 airplane and collisions in the relativistic heavy ion collider. Nuclei and airplanes alike, according to our understanding, are obeying special relativity, quantum mechanics, and chromodynamics. But we use entirely different models to understand the aerodynamics of a 747 and a collision between gold nuclei in the RHIC. A computer modeling the aerodynamics of a 747 may not contain a single token, a single bit of RAM. That represents a quark. So is the 747 made of something other than quarks? No, you're just modeling it with representational elements that do not have a one-to-one correspondence with the quarks of the 747.
The map is not the territory. Why not model the 747 with chromodynamic representation? Because then it would take a gazillion years to get any answers out of the model. Also, we could not store the model on all the memory on all the computers in the world as of 2008. As the saying goes, the map is not the territory, but you can't fold up the territory and put it in your glove compartment. Sometimes you need a smaller map to fit in a more cramped glove compartment, but this does not change the territory. The scale of a map is not a fact about the territory, it's a fact about the map. If it were possible to build in Rana a chromodynamic model of the 747, it would yield accurate predictions. Better predictions than the aerodynamic model, in fact.
To build a fully accurate model of the 747, it is not necessary, in principle, for the model to contain explicit descriptions of things like airflow and lift.
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