I'm still not sure I'm fully convinced by anti-reductionism, but I'm glad this channel exists to defend it. I think reductionism isn't to be accepted lightly either. You certainly push some important questions forward. The format is really good work too, great quality videos! I hope you keep making them, you deserve more views!
Thanks! Fair enough, reductionism is a super useful tool too, not denying that. But I just dont think it will ever get us a complete picture. We’ve been trained to be Cartesian reductionists for 400 years so of course its very counterintuitive to do anything else. Glad I made you think though!
@@SubAnimaI feel like (as far as I understand) reductionism and anti-reductionism are both just different perspectives, both useful in their own rights. And while they are not mutually exclusive (in the sense that they can both be equally correct and true in the real world), what isn't mutually exclusive in this conversation is determinism and non-determinism. From a bottom-up perspective it certainly would seem that everything is determnistic more or less (quantum mechanics does throw a wrench in the cogs here and there), yet from a top-bottom perspective non-determinism would seem to be true.
@@ohauss Lol that was my first thought too! He's only 336 years behind. "Biology in nondeterministic therefore it can't be physics".... Uh -cough- quantum mechanics -cough cough-.
This sounds to me more like a pragmatic argument. I think most would agree that it's completely unrealistic to try and build complex systems based solely on the laws of physics we know today. I think the argument from reductionists is *if* we had perfect knowledge of the state of every particle in the universe (and the universe itself), then there's no reason we couldn't calculate exactly what everyone and everything would do in the future and what they did in the past. Now whether that's actually true can be debated, but I think that's the main point. I don't know if I've misinterpreted you in some way though. I did watch this pretty quickly.
That is the general take. I would take the counter point even further than the video does: you say ‘there’s no reason we couldn’t in principle calculate everything’ - yes there is. Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves.
I don’t know that this is actually true. Fundamentally, the best we know about the atoms of our world is that they follow the laws of quantum mechanics, which are probabilistic. So if we had knowledge of all the atoms, the most we would know (given our current knowledge) is the wave function which describes the possible states of the system, and even then it would be some likelihood of happening. That seems actually impossible to know, especially when we consider that there are wave functions which we do not know, such as entangled states.
Some mistakes (afaik): 1) The phase space in physics is also infinite (reductionism ≠ finitism). 2) There are turing machines that change their own source code. The Von Neumann architecture is a circuit (in your computer right now) based on this idea, and is what allows your computer to have multiple programs that you can add, modify, and remove.
1) Biological systems don't even have an infinite phase space, but an *indefinite* one that is constantly expanding. We could never write it down. That was the idea I wanted to convey but it may not have been clear. I made a follow up video exploring this idea further here: ua-cam.com/video/oDG_7Ame0m0/v-deo.html 2) Right, but that still requires a programmer to modify things. The program/computer can't do it itself whilst biological systems can (unless you're a creationist that believes that God must intervene to tidy up organisms).
@@SubAnima"biological systems have indefinite phase space." Not exactly still sure what makes the word "phase" and "space" work together.. autological? But being indefinite, well on reductionist point of view things will be viewed more of an "chaotic system" than "simple A → B" A pattern always follows up at macro level but that doesn't nullify the interactions that make it up there, given the supercomputers computing, arguably all particles information and interaction, will end up yielding most accurate and near perfect calculation (not perfect maybe due to quantum mechanics, not exactly sure from this position tbh.) The argument of screwdriver being used as a function to serve some other structure, is but not accurate. A specific rule like Newton's law of motions will not bend due to a "choice" unless you believe in God but that's still out of context of science for it runs over naturalism, not with other domains involved with God or smth. "The argument is there is still a programmer." This is another mistake, according to how you attempt to put it. For example simple to put forward, a virus or worm are malicious programs that can self replicate. Arguably nothing truly "self" replicates except just binding structure around it just like it's own GIVEN it has resources to do so. The organism fades out of exists if there are none. The example I gave may truly not look correct for its a program, not hardware. But that's what I like to put lights on (_drumrolls??_) everything here is hardware lol.. Take those transistors and mechanism that just pull out in just the right way for logic gates to work so to make storage for information and retrieval of it so possible for the very mechanism. Then let the mechanism run on the information it can modify. Arguably who put this mechanism is still a programmer, but the problem is there was always this chance to make it actually true as well. this leads to some arguments relating "chaos leading order." But that is now separate discussion, for what is to be known is "physical laws themselves coded by randomness" is but at least much tangibly holdable argument. And about creationism, idk if that's how fancy God _must ought to be_ for its arguably more like "game theory" than just science now. Which is why it's better separating answering "how" of what science (scientific method) ends up tackling with brilliance for human intellect and "why" by some religious beliefs of moral side support, cause reductionism like this one, always bleeds to some consequentialistc ideas often exploiting and robbing humans out of their deontological beliefs. All sides have a certain threshold, name it any profession. I see biology better at understanding complex interactions between macro organism. Physics will actually do a terrible job by jumbling it like bad cable maintenance of some super computer.
A correction for the correction: While the self-modifying Turing machine is indeed one type of Turing machine, it has nothing to do with the Von Neumann architecture. The latter is just a model of computer that differs from the Harvard architecture by using the same memory for instructions and data. While this fundamentally allows self-modifying code (because the shared memory has to be both readable and writable), it is not a requirement, and its use is strongly discouraged. The Von Neumann architecture just makes it very easy to accidentally overwrite instructions or execute data, leading to huge security issues (buffer overflow). While the Harvard architecture allows to use a ROM as instruction memory, making self-modifying code impossible, instructions can (and usually are) also stored in RAM that just doesn't share the same address space with the data memory, but still can be written, allowing self-modifying code.
@@SubAnima This is silly. You could certainly define the phase space of a biological system. Here is one (classical, not quantum, but a quantum one exists as well): {(x_1, p_1) x ... (x_j, p_j) x ... x (x_N, p_N) | where j is an index that labels all particles in a cat} where x symbolizes position and p symbolizes momentum. Then you can run through Hamilton's equations for the equations of motion for the cat. The problem is that no one has (and likely no one ever will have) the computational resources to solve such a system of equations. It can be done in principle, but never in practice. But my point is that it is simply wrong to say the phase space is constantly expanding. It has a finite dimension: 6*N, where N is the number of particles in the cat.
@@eljeorgo Ah, now I understand how the name of von Neumann ended up here! :D Von Neumann simply was the guy who first used the concept of a "singularity" in a technological concept. It has nothing to do with the "von Neumann architecture", which really just describes the physical layout of a computer. The underlying idea of a "technological singularity" is that a program on a fundamental level is nothing else than a set of instructions that receive some input and produce some output. This output can of course also be another program. So if one could write a program that is smart enough to write an even smarter version of itself, that smarter version could write another, even more smarter version, and so on. Even more so, such a smart program could also design faster computers, so with each iteration it would take less time to create the next iteration, causing an "explosion" of intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that soon would surpass all human intelligence and - from our perspective - could be seen as "god-like". This is what von Neumann called a "technological singularity". Whether this would be good or bad is a matter of discussion. Every tool can be used to do something productive or destructive, and an artificial superintelligence would be the most powerful tool imaginable. It could be extremely good, as such a superintelligence could probably easily solve problems that otherwise would require thousands of years of research when done by human scientists, but it could also end up extremely bad, like ... the destruction of the human civilization. 😆 Should we be worried? I'd say: No. Currently we don't know whether it's even possible to create an AGI (artificial general intelligence), let alone a runaway reaction that results in a superintelligence. There might even be fundamental limits, like the overhead of communication in parallel systems that eventually causes computers to actually get _slower_ when additional CPUs are added instead of faster. So if people are talking about the dangers of a technological singularity, they usually want to distract from actual real-life problems caused by comparatively dumb systems, like privacy issues caused by ubiquitous surveillance using facial recognition.
@@SubAnima"What is life?" isn't a mystery. It's a semantic discussion. "Life" is whatever we decide is the most useful definition for didactics and scientific progress.
According to who and by what metric. I am in immunology and can guarantee we know masive amount but the general public is incredibly ignorant. This video is trash.
I think you're conflating what the most useful way a human can understand a system with claims about the reality of how that system operates. You're making claims that a reductionist perspective is "wrong" and I disagree with that. I would agree that it is not necessarily the most useful framework for problem solving though. If you're playing chess against a computer you need to understand the rules of the game and what your and opponent is are doing. You don't need to understand it's programming language, Assembly, Kernel architecture, or how transistors work. And 99.99% of people reading the machine code would be completely useless. But that doesn't change the fact that every aspect of the game is dictated by those fundamental rules. I see no evidence that reductionism or physicalism is incorrect, only that the human mind is far better at understanding concepts and models.
Thanks for your well-reasoned comment. I still disagree with “every aspect of the game is dictated by those fundamental rules” because: The laws of physics may dictate how all the atoms in universe bump around, but that does not mean that all the causes of the system are from the bottom alone. The phenomena of biology disappear if we just track atoms. Particularly the phenomenon of how things get that way: “why is organism the way it is? Why does the chess board look the way it does, what caused it to get that way?” These do not merely emerge from the ‘fundamental’ level. They need us to look to relevant higher level causes (e.g. development/evolution and some humans programming/building the computer in the first place) Physics typically ignores these questions by sidestepping “why these laws?” But biologists deal with them all the time. Physics (in principle) could give us an explanation of how all the atoms move, but it won’t be able to explain why things are the way that are or how the initial conditions came to be in the first place. Take a look at this blog post too by Kevin Mitchell: www.wiringthebrain.com/2022/08/getting-to-bottom-of-reductionism-is-it.html?m=1
@@SubAnima I don't understand what you're saying about causes and where they originate or that the phenomena of biology "disappear". Emergent properties are the result of interactions. A single atom does not have a state of matter, but states of matter can be understood as interactions between many single atoms. Why questions are tricky, I think Feynman does a good job of explaining what I mean in this video: ua-cam.com/video/MO0r930Sn_8/v-deo.html I think any closed system can be described by describing it's component parts. The appearance of the chess board in an instance of the game can be fully derived from the program. Why a person wrote the program the way they did is still subject to the physical laws that govern their brain and how they interact with their environment. Kevin Mitchell says the alternative to reductionism is holism. I can't really wrap my head around holism. My day job is a biologist, though my degree is in molecular, cell, and developmental biologist so maybe I'm more sympathetic to the reductionist, physicalist explanations than an ecologist.
I'm saying that biological phenomena and their corresponding causes not only have little to do with the laws of physics, but that they cannot be derived from them (hence they disappear if we only take the low level perspective). Michela Massimi outlines it quite nicely with the example of water (global.oup.com/academic/product/perspectival-realism-9780197555620 , p.285-286): "Laws of nature are not ‘ladders’ to access different domains of inquiry in the hope to reduce a plurality of phenomena to a set of essential properties regarded as metaphysically explanatory. If anything, laws or lawlike dependencies are tied to specific phenomena. The engineers of Alhambra [a medieval sophisticated water supply system] could succeed without any knowledge of chemical laws about water being H2O. ... Water concerns all these phenomena at once: ground-water motion no less than droplet formation or chemical bonds. Some of the laws involved-like Darcy’s law for ground-water motion-are not reducible to, say, the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics. Laws are not ladders. A phenomena-first approach is congenial to the pluralism inherent in perspectival realism, and is anti-reductionist in denying any foundations. ... Insisting that water is H2O, while true, does not begin to answer the question as to why all these phenomena have historically been grouped together under the natural kind concept of water." This kind of "who cares if organisms have atoms in them, there's so much more stuff going on that has nothing to do with the physics" mindset emerges once we place process, not substance, first and foremost in our ontology. I made a video on that here (ua-cam.com/video/vaJcmWjMNwo/v-deo.html ) or you can check out the brilliant book Everything Flows (doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001 ). And emergent properties are not simply the result of interactions of their parts - in that we can't derive the higher level laws from the smaller ones (due to 'broken symmetries' as argued beautifully in P.W. Anderson's classic 'more is different': cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf ) Yeah I would also say that modern biology (perhaps minus ecology) is deeply steeped in reductionism, perhaps leading to your current worldview. I made a video on a brief history of the reductionist/organicist debate here: ua-cam.com/video/YV5ZjAZGw4Y/v-deo.html
The thing is that organisms are made of atoms, not the other way around, organisms make atoms move because the chemical energy inside their cells allows them to. You can't predict how organisms will move their atoms because of the quantity of internal processes ( composed of atoms and energy ) and the variety and complexity of its molecules, on the other hand you can predict more accurately how materials and pure chemical substances will behave because all or most of it is made of the same molecule or chemical element The bigger the scale, the more irrelevant are the properties of the constitutents of its constitutents, example: When you're making a bulding the quantum properties of the atoms or moleculles of the concrete hardly will make a difference. Taking it a step further: On the cosmic scale our existence as species or even the existence of life in this planet is pretty irrelevant both in space ( we're a tiny fraction of the matter in the universe ) and time ( our existence has been and will be a blink in the scale of the universe lifetime ), suddenly a meteor strikes the earth and we're gone, the laws of the universe govern us.
@@GabrielMartinez-zm9dg Cells are made of atoms, the energy is contained in the chemical bonds (or elementary particles). Whether organisms move atoms or the other way around is purely a semantic argument, not a testable claim. I agree predicting the behavior of an organisim from first principles is not a tractable problem. Just because we don't have the ability to do something currently doesn't mean it can't be done. It was always physically possible to land on the moon, but it was only achieved in 1969. The nature of the problem has been the same for millennia, it was our technology that made it possible. As I stated in my first comment, understanding the smallest components of a system is rarely an effective way to understand a system. So I agree a construction worker doesn't need to think about quantum mechanics, that doesn't mean that the concrete is not governed by those laws. Relevance is subjective. My life is relevant to me and people that know me regardless of the fraction of the universe that my atoms represent. What fraction of the time or space of the universe does an entity need to occupy to be relevant? 1%? 10%? 50%? It's not a testable question, it's a personal one.
A lot of these behavior comes from the chemical nature of molecules themselves. Not from something special. Atoms don't behave like rigid gears isn't a new paradigm, nor is "foreign to physics", nor is anything deserving this much emphasize. For example - the spectral gap of solids is similarly incomputable. I suspect this has more to do with being a complex system than being something completely something different.
What he means there're more dimensions to the things we need to describe about biology if we wanted understand it just from pure physics (how hard would it be to deduce and articulate mathematically). It's imcomplete, you can't explain concepts like agency with the strong nuclear force or a Lorentz transformation! Let's say, how and why a 'self-sustained' system has to seek and find other system to keep sustaining itself? Why does it do that? How that comes to be?
@@m3rify The last question u put is a Turing machine like behavior. This channel purposefully avoids many such paradigms. His criticisms are as though we're stuck to Rene Descarte's defination of Machine!
It's not just complexity (which makes the system just immensely difficult to reduce), it's recursiveness, which makes the system essentially irreducible. As someone stated in a comment above: "Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves."
All natural phenomena are ultimately a part of physics, but this does not in any way imply that our current knowledge of reality or even the paradigms in which we are used to work with are in any way suitable to understanding phenomena as complex as life, evolution or adaptation, the dynamics of social interactions and so on. Certainly specific parts can be investigated with standard methods, like transport phenomena through cellular membranes, the mechanism of photosynthesis, population dynamics in various environments, but there is obviously a very big leap in going from these parts to the whole which is a living organism or a society. Clearly there is no point in picking on Newton, as the phenomenon of life is far beyond the program of classical physics and quite possibly even beyond the current paradigm of quantum mechanics. More so, the "reductionist" approach is rather anachronistic at this point and not really an all-pervasive presence anymore within the physics community. It has its place, but also its limits of applicability. As the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Phillip Anderson expressed quite beautifully, "more is different".
Thanks for your comment and well-reasoned critique, I genuinely appreciate it :) 1. What do you mean by 'all natural phenomena are ultimately apart of physics'? Do you mean to say that everything that happens in the universe can ultimately be expressed in the language of physics, and really at the smallest level, quantum mechanics? If so, I will disagree on the principle that we are limited beings not Laplace's demon. Maybe in a few centuries time we could build a computer to simulate organisms using the Schrödinger equation and perfectly predict what happens to it, up to quantum randomness. But we don't have such a tool. We need a philosophy of science that can work right now - one that can be used to make scientific progress with the tools we actually have. There is no point pondering about supercomputers or trying to be Laplace's demon. More importantly, there is still no organism in this picture. Predicting where atoms end up is not doing biology, like I said in the video. 2. I wasn't just picking on Newton, although I didn't have time to articulate the full argument. Lee Smolin argues quite convincingly in Time Reborn that the Newtonian paradigm still dominates physics today even in GR and QM. We still have (probabilistic) state spaces, (probabilistic) laws that govern the system and boundary conditions are required to make any sense of experimental data. This picture is still very similar to Newton's. Plus there are some questions we cannot answer with QM that we do seriously want to answer in biology - namely 'why these laws?' In biology, we ask all the time why an organism is the way that it is (e.g. why does a newt look the way it does). But you can't explain why the Schrödinger equation exists in the first place with QM alone. You need something else. Quoting Smolin (p.250, Time Reborn): “Cosmological questions such as 'Why these laws?' and 'Why these initial conditions?' cannot be answered by a method that takes the laws and initial conditions as input [like QM or GR]. The remedy must be radical, involving not just the invention of a new theory but a new method and hence a new kind of theory.” See also: arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378 3. The reductionist approach is anachronistic, we agree on that. But physicists are still spouting it today. Sabine's book was published just this year, which I quoted at the start of the video. Sean Carroll argued much the same in The Big Picture (2016) basically saying everything is physics, and the rest is just our imagination. But a useful imagination - he calls it 'poetic naturalism.' This is not a good approach for doing science, as I already said in point 1. Sure it might not have an all-pervasive presence as much as it did, but it still exists, hence why I made the video.
@@SubAnima 1. This point is largely about semantics, but what I mean is that everything happening in the Universe is ultimately a physical phenomenon, from elementary particles scattering on each other to a newt crawling on a shore and thinking newty thoughts. But this doesn't mean in any capacity that the former (elementary particles scattering) necessarily implies the latter (the newt and its newty thoughts) or that it would even make sense to attempt doing that. A large part of the mechanics and functions of biology really boils down to quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and thermal phenomena, but it is nowhere implied that the way we understand these fields today can explain the whole picture of a living organism, or that they will ever be able to do so. Uncovering the whole picture is the point of research and of the scientific method, but it is nowhere implied that the tools and methods we have developed in the present day are sufficient, just as the tools and methods of the XVIIth century weren't adequate for the discoveries of the early XXth century. The only thing that can really be done in this regard is to keep trying different things and see what eventually works. 2. Clearly some of the simpler aspects of reality can be approximated sufficiently well through differential equations subject to boundary conditions. I wouldn't necessarily call this a Newtonian paradigm outside of the specific fields that are "classical". Differential equations and boundary conditions can mean very different things in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics itself is presently understood as an approximation of a broader theory, namely quantum field theory. The latter is quite powerful in some specific regards, but is still very far from answering questions that are much, much simpler than the origin of life or really the physics behind many aspects of biological organisms, specifically the newty thoughts. Some physical theory will one day encompass the phenomenon of life as well, but that day may well be very far away and that theory might very well look as strange to our present minds as the squiggles of today would look to a scholar of the 1600s. 3. Everything is indeed physics, but I think that one of the points Sean was trying to make in that book is that you cannot reduce all of physics to elementary particles and their interactions. It's also really dependent on what crowds you hang out with. In condensed matter physics, nuclear physics or really any situation where you have many bodies undergoing strong mutual interactions, you won't make it very far with a reductionist approach.
Any argument that poses biology and its electrochemical nature as 'beyond physics' in any way other than as a delineation for the sake of linguistics just doesn't seem grounded to me. If your point is that the two shouldn't be used interchangeably in conversation that's fine, but the study of biology as it exists today wouldn't exist without advanced physics research over the past 300 years if not more. The study of electromagnetic fields is almost solely responsible for our knowledge of medical imaging, bio-electric interactions, and molecular biology. Cells dividing is easily explained through molecular physics, specifically M Phase and mitosis, which we again would not know about without the atomic and molecular physics research that came before. So much medical tech was basically happened upon because of either atomic or astronomic research, for example research into EM fields has helped us understand HOW BIRDS NAVIGATE for migration. That is something we NEVER, not in a million years would have figured out if we didn't have advanced knowledge of how individual electrons in a molecule can affect its behavior and alter the entire system its interacting with. As others have said, its a valid difference to defend in the sake of conversational communication, but thats as far as it goes. @@SubAnima
@@roughlyadequate6165You didn't touch any of the fundamental parts of biology. Physics didn't create biology btw. Chemistry and biology existed way before physics did. Physics didn't change anything fundamental about these things at all. It simply boosted it's understanding through making the reason behind physical phenomena be examined.
@@WeebSlayer71 I don't think you understand the conflation between language and the actual physical truth of reality. None of these physical structures rely on our nomenclature to define them, they exist without us. 'Physics' is just the words for our study of the FUNDAMENTAL building blocks of our universe. There is no biological structure that isn't comprised of particles, and we are not capable of truly understanding the concept we define as 'biology' without understanding the underlying structures that make it possible. Your assertion that physics isn't the oldest form of science is debatable, as most of the oldest ruins found on this planet are calendars that perfectly track the sun and moon. Babylonians are known to have heavily studied the stars, there was also Pythagoras in Mesopotamia. Even before that was the study of math and physics in the Indus Valley 4thM BCE. Most of the greatest medical research advancements right now are powered by atomic levels of understanding in protein acid interactions. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” ― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Indeed, many fascinating phenomena can only be appreciated from larger perspectives, but that doesn't change the fact: at the end it's all physics. So, I wouldn't say "biology can't be reduced to physics", I would phrase it as "biology is not useful when reduced to physics". The movement of the atoms does depend on the shape of the box, but only because of electromagnetic interactions with the walls of said box, so a simulation of the fundamental particle interactions is sufficient to reproduce reality. Ignoring top-down causation will indeed make us miss out on more interesting explanations, but it won't change the outcome of the simulation. The universe doesn't care about top-level laws, it only evolves through its fundamental interactions.
I would rephrase it to: "It's not practical to reduce biology to physics." Actually it's not even practical to reduce chemistry to physics, because every system of more than a few atoms takes like forever to calculate. That doesn't mean though that it is not possible. We _know_ that every chemical process can be described using quantum mechanics, we just don't have the computational power to actually do it. Behind all the gobbledygook anti-reductionists basically claim that the standard model of particle physics is incomplete, that it doesn't describe all interactions that happen on energy scales that are relevant for biology and other higher level sciences. The problem is that they have zero evidence for this claim and also do not propose any extension or alternative that goes beyond magic. It is pseudo-science at best and mysticism at worst. I think many anti-reductionists do this because they are overwhelmed by the exponentially growing complexity when going from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, and from biology to social sciences, which admittedly also hurts my brain when just thinking about it. Some may even believe that opposing reductionism will safe the idea of free will. This video actually borrows one argument from the free will debate by claiming that the inability to predict decisions is proof that it is fundamentally impossible. PS: I actually had to laugh at the example with the movement of atoms, as to completely ignore that the box also is made of particles (and hence must the part of the model) in a way is quite similar to how quantum physicists tend to ignore that a measurement device also is a quantum object and thus should be part of the model. xD
I think clarifing what we mean by physics is important here. If we just mean 'reality' then the matter becomes tautological: of course biology, a part of reality, is encompassed by the whole of reality. But if we mean a particular science that generates a set of descriptions of certain phenomena, then there is space for many questions. I think the point of the video is to challenge, the attitude that the descriptions, methods, and assumptions brought about by physics as a science can be applied to biology, it being a different phenomenon than that studied by physics.
@@doctorinternet8695This issue would make sense, but I would say physics, by definition, is the science studying the most fundamental phenomena of reality, therefore as you say it encompasses biology. The "certain phenomena" that physics studies are just literally all phenomena. If there was any phenomenon in biology that can't be reduced to physics, this would mean that the physical theory is incomplete and this new phenomenon would have to be added into it. But there is no evidence at all for such a phenomenon to exist.
@@doctorinternet8695 By "physics" I mean the fundamental mechanics or particle interactions as described by the standard model and QFT. That is the only 'reality', everything else emerges from it. Systems larger than a few atoms will indeed start getting out of hand and become too complex to simulate as mentioned by @NeovanGoth making other perspectives much more practical. I think the video does know this (from remarks such as "there are no new forces involved"), it's just a bit misleading is all. It doesn't clearly acknowledge that all biological phenomena are emergent from the fundamental laws of physics, and that it's just a matter of extracting meaningful top-level explanations for us humans to learn from.
@@japar107you fail to realize chemistry causes physics just the same way physics causes chemistry. Physics is not by definition the study of the most fundamental, it is concerned with a specific set of simplified system dynamics. Fundamental is not actually meaningful if you read up on the philosophy of fundamentalism.
with sufficient information, you can express the top-down causes as bottom-up causes. the problem is not anything that can't be fundamentally described in terms of physics; it just requires so much information to create that description that it's more practical, efficient, helpful, accurate, etc. to model biology, sociology, etc. in their own terms rather than in terms of physics. that's how i see it
It's all about levels of abstraction. By your logic, high-level languages like python aren't just machine language because we can't understand them by just reading the generated machine code. Which makes no sense
I can already see a flourishing UA-cam channel. I like the new insight, the editing where you really show your inspiration aka source and show us how it all relate to each other. You definitely set new standard for including source material in a video format when discussing idea.
If physics is the study of an existence of anything at all, and biology operates within this existence then biology must be reducible to physics. This entire video boils down to the definition and scope of what physics is. In my opinion physics is an understanding of the states our universe can be in and how the universe transitions from state to state. Biology must be just physics.
Physics cannot explain state transition at the fundamental level nor at complex macroscopic levels sufficiently. For microscopic phenomenon, quantum uncertainty becomes a problem. For complex macro phenomenon, computability becomes a problem. Someone might make the case but in principle complex systems are deterministic, but that's a stupid argument. No computer other than existence itself can simulate such a system given the time and space constraints. In other words, to simulate what a bunch of house flies will do, it's easier to just observe rather than compute every molecule of the house flies + environment.
@@abhishekshah11 I agree. That’s why biology is very useful. We take the computation that the universe (or in the way you put it “existence”) is, and then compress it. These compressions are abstractions and they work for making calculations. However they are subject to chaos and don’t predict perfectly accurately forever. These compressions are depended on scale for sure so that is why they break down when the scale changes and why it’s not useful to know quantum mechanics if your trying to do heart surgery. Biology must be just physics… but we still must study biology ofc
@@abhishekshah11 also there are two modes of thinking here. I’m assuming that “physics” is the study of what is. So there is a separation between “what is” and the models we use in physics to define “what is”. Our models break down but “what is” is still just “what is” operating however it does. In this sense biology must just break down to “what is”, which is my definition of physics
Physics can explain something up until the point where it becomes alive and determines its own function. After that the topology of the landscape is no longer static and it becomes very hard to reduce things to laws. Biology and maybe psychology can explain this stuff from a top down perspective while physics and chemistry can help from a bottom up perspective, but I don't blame him for being annoyed by reductionists who value their perceived superiority over making actual progress. I'm sure physicists find the same reductionist argument from math reductionist tedious so it's always bewildering when they make it themselves.
@@juliawilliams1355 I think that physics can explain even the most complex of phenomena such as life. However it’s not useful with current technology because it’s incomputable. Imagine a computer powerful enough to simulate some creature to the most fundamental physical unit. The biological behaviors exhibited could be explained by the physical laws that govern those units. However, our understanding of these laws at a macroscopic level is still called biology, but can definitely be reduced to physics (even if the physics is unknown). The idea that there is some emergent force that has influence on macroscopic phenomena directly would suggest some sort of “god-like” intervention the top down explanation might make more sense to humans but doesn’t necessarily mean it is the cause behind the effect.
[4:59] you are conflating an embryo for an atom, but a embryo is made of atoms. If you were to zoom in on each of the atoms in the embryo you would find that they all follow the rules of physics. Just because they are in an embryo it does not change the rules of physics. So now lets say that the machine applies its software by the atom (not an arbitrary system of atoms) then you could simulate an embryo. It would not be practical but it would be possible.
And the "self revolution" of DNA is also possible to simulate. DNA is made of atoms. in order to simulate it evolving accurately you would need a lot more simulated then just the organism.
3:26 "WWI... can't be reduced to physics without making our explanations meaningless." Could be more accurately worded, "Can't be reduced to physics without taking more time and computational energy than will ever be realistically available." Just because we don't have the resources to predict everything from the bottom up doesn't mean that everything isn't actually being caused mechanistically from the bottom up. Obviously, because The Flesh is weak and can only dig up so much silicon to produce so many computers, we need multiple scientific disciplines to span multiple levels of abstraction in order to make sense of the universe at large. But that isn't because of the way the universe works, that's just the limitations of our meatware. Just because the only computer capable of calculating the future of the universe is the exact universe itself doesn't make the universe non-deterministic in any way.
This is now a purely religious claim. If it is impossible to determine that the universe is a machine, yet we still hold to the unwavering assumption that the universe is a machine, then we are not doing science anymore. Moreover, we should embrace considering other ways of looking at the universe that are non-mechanistic.
@@SubAnima I'm just not sure what a "non-mechanistic" view actually is supposed to mean. You seem to agree at multiple points during your video that the only thing standing in the way of mechanistic perspectives are the physical limitations of observation and calculation. See user @DANGJOS, their comment sums my own perspective exactly. And so do your own comments at multiple points, specifically after 8:40. I'm not saying that the only tool we need, as humans, to understand the universe, is Physics. Like you say, we are just apes. We can only physically construct a finite amount of computers, and we can barely keep them cool enough to simulate astrophysical phenomena, relatively simple and reduceable compared to biological phenomena. But that isn't the claim of mechanistic reductionism. The claim isn't that physics, an earthly/human/academic/scientific institution, is a tool we should be able to expect will emergently recreate and perfectly explain every higher order scientific discipline one day, and so therefore those disciplines are of no real utility, mere abstract thought games or something. The claim is that the processes that physics attempts describe are at the root of all other higher order scientific disciplines. That, given a hypothetically infinite resource of correct observational data about each particle in the universe and well cooled computational power, they *could* be emergently reverse engineered by brute force from lower order laws. It is understood that those conditions are a fantasy, and that in order to understand life on earth we are going to need to look at it from every level of abstraction available, I'm certainly not disputing that at all. Just... the universe doesn't care about our models, or our limitations that prevent us from producing perfectly accurate models. In fact, I don't necessarily believe such perfectly accurate models can possibly exist. I think it's reasonable to assume that the only thing capable of perfectly modeling the universe is the actual, totally unreduced, universe itself.
This seems like an overexaggeration of what reductionism / determinism are suggesting, mostly out of... wounded pride, I guess? I think it's fairly obvious to anyone who argues for reductionism that once something is constructed out of a bunch of small particles, that new construction sort of "takes on a life of it's own", but what I think you're missing is that now, you're not looking at how one individual thing interacts but what happens when a whole bunch of things are clumped together in a fairly specific way. Physicists certainly understand that when discussing quantum physics vs. classical physics, but they'd also argue that a sufficiently complete model of a molecule at a "quantum level" would behave almost exactly like a higher-level model of it. (More accurately actually, though not in a meaningful way.) It doesn't then follow that quantum physicists are "superior scientists" who will eventually subsume all of physics into their own domain, because trying to model everything like that would be absurd; complex to the point of impossibility. The same idea applies here, suggesting that someone _could_ model a biological organism through physics doesn't mean it'd be worth doing or that biologists aren't just as important as physicists are. (You said yourself that you're not arguing for some "other force".)
@@NeovanGothExcept his position is even more strange since apparently he doesn't even do that, as he does not want to argue for any "other force". This leaves a completely contradictory position, where he says that biological organisms are entirely composed of particles described by physics, yet the organism as a whole can not be explained by physics.
@@happyduck1 That's exactly what I meant with "magic". ;) They are basically proposing the existence of _something_ supernatural that _somehow_ gives certain complex constructs of particles (like living beings) properties that can't be derived from laws of nature, neither known nor unknown. In Judaism this is called "rûaḥ" (רוּחַ), which translates to "breath of life" or "spirit of life", as in Genesis 2:7, which says: "And God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." This "rûaḥ" isn't a physical thing, it's some kind of divine force that can have an effect on the physical world, but is not part of the physical world. Of course modern scientists wouldn't call it "supernatural" or a "divine force". Instead, they don't define it _at all_. They just claim that not everything we can observe can be reduced to laws of nature, and that's it. Don't ask, just believe! ;)
Physics is useless when reduced to math. And math is useless when reduced to logic. And logic is useless when reduced to philosophy. I wounded not only your pride, but your life. Stop making non-sequitur arguments in scientific discourse, you genious.
@@NeovanGothI would like to hear what you have to say about quantum decoherence? Is it still magic? Do you put the word magic to everything that is counter Intuitive to you?? Does reality care about if you like it being computational, determenistic and reductionalistic?? You absolute fool... If no entirely new laws can be introduced you wouldn't have your beloved classical physics and locality so stop the reductionalistic bullshit.
Hey, I am a graduate student in physics. Thanks for some insightful biology content. Definitely lead me to develop lot of curiosity in biology. But I would like to suggest that there are many improvements that physics has been making. What you mentioned in the video regarding the box is something that is usually covered in Boundary conditions in phyiscs and is an integral part of the explaination. And there are defintely theories in development using large scale boundary conditions as a new perpective especially in astronomy. Ofcourse the theories are in their infancy. Plus understanding complex structures via metabolism first approaches are also being considered to understand how life survives in ever increasing entropy timelines.
I would argue that physics is more fundamental as is has the power to explain all phenomena bigger than it, but the same can the said for biology, since physics is far more precise, by many order of magnitude. I would argue that other sciences study the macro patterns or emergent phenomena coming from physics, that are not evident in the governing equations. The study of these emergent phenomena is also important .
This video is interesting and well put together, but ultimately I disagree with the thesis. For instance, towards the end, the phase is not "literally infinite", just very large - it is bound by the space the organism lives in. Just because we can't describe it doesn't mean it couldn't be described in principle, especially as states are discrete at the quantum level. The talk of agency seemed imprecise and almost spiritual - how and when does the magical ability arise? Do single cells have it? Flies? Or only higher mammals? The outward appearance of individuality and agency does not lead so easily to them being fundamental. As the gas example showed, physics can deal with top down causation. It seemed to me the author wants to divorce emergent properties from physics, but I see no reason to. Yes, the toolkit of biology may be practically more appropriate - and I am all for more interdisciplinary thinking. However, I would push to have physicists (and others) focus more on emergent, higher order complex systems, not draw a line between physics and biology. After all, there is but the natural world - our distinctions are arbitrary. Many thanks for a great contribution to the discourse!
Hey thanks for the response and the nice words, even though you disagree. It makes me smile to get well-articulated critiques compared to heated polemics. First, I disagree that the space is just 'very large.' There is a large amount of literature defending my claim that it can't be pre-defined [given in the sources doc in the description; see Kauffman (2014), Cortes et al. (2022) and Roli, Jaeger and Kauffman (2022)]. The problem is that the configuration space is always expanding, even at the quantum level - see section 4.1 of the Cortes paper (arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378). More pragmatically, we can see that the 'space the organism lives in' could always expand. Perhaps an insect starts its life in some tree, it might then hop to a new tree, or get moved to another country by us humans and for all we know could get sent into space, possibly even to another planet. You'd have to include the whole universe in the model to get *all* possibilities, and at that point the organism has disappeared entirely as your model is too big to be useful and you are no longer doing biology. Even then, we'd have no explanation for why those states were chosen over others. This is a question we like to ask in biology but not so much in physics. We are constantly asking "why do insects have feature X, why do they live in habitat Y, how did it get to be this way?" Physics cannot answer the question of "why these laws?" which is why I lean on the side of drawing a line between the questions physics (in its current form) can answer and the questions biology is interested in. Distinctions are arbitrary yes, but there are right and wrong tools for the job. See chapter 4 of Lee Smolin's Time Reborn for discussion on this. Second, agency sounds spiritual because teleology was jettisoned from 'science' during the scientific revolution particularly by Newton and especially Descartes. See my video: ua-cam.com/video/YV5ZjAZGw4Y/v-deo.html It need not be so spiritual-sounding (if that's how it came across, apologies) and can be easily naturalised. See Chapter 12 "Naturalised goals" in Organisms, Agency and Evolution by Denis Walsh (doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719 ) And yes, agency exists from cells all the way up. No consciousness required. Walsh defends this quite well in my opinion, it is a great read, even if you still disagree afterwards. Nonetheless, thanks for watching and commenting!
@@SubAnima Many thanks for taking the time to respond and pointing me to more cool resources! The concept of an expanding phase space making it undefinable is very intriguing - my only immediate worry is that such an expanding problem would apply to explaining non-living things, too? The self-organisation feels like a stronger argument than the phase space. You've also made me think more about teleology. My background is funnily enough going from physics to neuroscience research, so I've been primed to be extra sceptical of the "why these laws" question. I can now see what you meant a lot better! My final qualm is about the importance of "the organism" as a unit of analysis. I agree in a final analysis the whole universe would need to be included from a physics point of view, but don't see that as an immediate fundamental problem. However, if as you say we are to explain biology - and hence organisms - you're right physics may not be the right tool, giving us either "basic blocks only" or "literally everything there is" as explanatory levels. Thanks again for your work and pushing me to consider things from a different point of view!
@@marcosamuelfabus1044 Great to hear I've at least got you thinking! 1. Yes you make a good point on expanding phase spaces outside biology. It could well be applied to physics and I imagine that the case of the organism may be applied in many new ways outside its original domain. Perhaps even physics might rebuild itself inspired by biology. Crazy I know, but it is what Smolin says could indeed happen in light of Physics' inability to answer "why these laws?" In that case, the boundaries of physics and biology may blur in a new way with biology actually being the more 'general' science. I don't think I'll make just that claim as this video is controversial enough, but it's interesting to think about. 2. That's interesting you have a physics -> neuroscience background. I would highly suggest reading Evan Thomson's work on of all of this then - particularly embodied cognition and enactivism. Might ease you into the idea of non-spooky teleology. psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-19965-007 3. Throughout the 20th century, biologists stopped studying the organism - we reduced it down to genetics and biochemistry. Some, like nobel prize winning biologist François Jacob said that: "On n'interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires" (we no longer study life in our laboratories [just chemistry basically]) Many are now calling for a "Return of the Organism" into biology. There is even a very cool group called ROTO-RUB after this: rotorub.wordpress.com/ And here is an intro to what their group does: www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contributions/putting-the-organism-back-into-biology/
@@SubAnimaIMO the problem is that you basically introduce magic just because calculating quantum mechanics is really hard. If I'm not mistaken, this is based on the idea of string emergence; that complex systems somehow can develop behavior that by any means cannot be described by looking at a more fundamental level. As far as I know, there is zero evidence that strong emergence exists, and not even a proposal of how it could work. It's easy to say "WWI cannot be explained by the movement of atoms", because the movement of atoms clearly would be no practical or even remotely sensible way to do this. It's much harder though to explain what else is required, so it always ends up at magic.
The fact that I'm an organism with infinite possibilities and that I can attempt to conceive a law by which I can describe all of them is already mind blowing enough
I think the framing of this video is far more reductive than the idea that biology can be explained by physics. We know for certain that all that's really happening when a protein interacts with a molecule is just electrostatic forces acting between them. Sure, we don't really reduce biology down to physics in every application, because something that can be simply explained by one biological rule needs thousands of physics equations to represent. Imagining that biology can't work as physics because cells act "on their own" is entirely glossing over all the chemical energy released as mechanical forces through metabolic processes. I really don't think anyone has ever considered that there's no regulation within an organism the way you're describing with the "bottom-up" perspective. All those regulative processes that happen in the top-down perspective are only there because of other bottom-up processes that are made to regulate. Sure, when you think about a whole organism only in terms of each individual reaction between atoms, then you're easily going to get lost. Nobody is TRYING to do that, but the point is that it IS possible. Another fun thing about turing machines is that any system upon which a turing machine can be built means that that system is turing complete. Because we can arrange atoms into a turing machine, atoms are turing complete and can be simulated by any other turing machine. I think the main point people are trying to make with "biology can be explained with physics" is that fundamentally, anything can be calculated given enough processing power.
Exactly. There are bottom-up processes that aren't caused by top down processes. But there is no top-down process that isn't caused by bottom-up processes
Thanks, glad it at least made you think! I'm sure plenty of people are gonna disagree with it and that's fine :). Just wanted to articulate the anti-reductionist point of view and put it out there.
I feel your conflating metaphysics with epistemology, knowledge does not change how things are. perhaps we can't reduce biology down to physics from a useful perspective or easy to understand one, but metaphysically it states that biology is just complex physics, whether we can understand it or not
im loving your channel please give us more! i like how deep you go and not just the surface info, related concepts and implications and unknowns all help so much!
Beautiful video as always SubAnima! I fully agree with this point and was recently talking to a friend about this. There is a quote by Rutherford that says that all of science is physics or stamp collecting. And it is a ridiculously ignorant quote. Loved your exposure and editing skills with the video. Unfortunately youtube didn’t show me your upload on time, hence the late positive feedback. Great content as always and can’t wait to see more!
Anyone could agree that the behavior of a fluid can be reduced to the laws of physics. If there's a swirling sinkhole and a bubbling source in fluid dynamics, both can also be reduced to physics. However, seeking to understand the process from larger structures like vortexes is a more efficient approach. Similarly, computers can solve differential equations and operate on the basis of binary calculus. But no mathematician would prefer to solve a differential equation from the perspective of binary calculus. So, the utility of changing perspective does not negate the ultimate causality of what is observed. What makes biology irreducible to physics is that perspective itself is a causality. As Roger Penrose has already stated, the quantum world is deterministic, and the classical world is too. But it is observation, the collapse of the state vector, the interpretation from the quantum world to the classical world perspective that causes the break in determinism. So, the biological world can be reduced to physics, yes, but only when no one is looking. However, in contrast to what has been said now, neural networks can be summoned as witnesses in this trial. Artificial intelligence, trained to adjust the weights of its signal exchange network, may be able to recognize figures, the visual ensemble as a whole, regardless of the integral components of the figure. But neural networks are composed of subunits that follow deterministic laws. Weight adjustments are governed by a model algorithm of rewards and penalties. The question is: can our subjective experience of pain and pleasure be reduced to a rewards and penalties algorithm? Does the existence of a rewards and penalties algorithm spontaneously generate an experience of pain and reward? These subjective experiences are called qualia. Qualia are at the core of the perspective observation and may be the essence of what in biology cannot be reduced to physics.
life is still just atoms moving according to the laws of physics though. Of course we need multiple different fields of science to understand it and study it- but thats no reason to imply life actually violates thermodynamics or otherwise breaks the laws of physics.
Yet anti-reductionists believe that life isn't just atoms moving according to the laws of physics, but that there is (to take the example from the video) a box that for some reason isn't made of atoms and hence can't be part of physical models. What this box is made of then and how this helps to do science, they do not explain. It's basically magic. Which is why anti-reductionism IMO is pseudo-science at best, and mysticism at worst.
Biology is an extension of physics, period. We can't understand biology in it's entirety via physics and we never* will. However, we can already understand some of it via chemistry, which is an extension of physics. If chemistry can explain biology and physics can explain chemistry, then that means physics MUST be able to explain biology. It doesn't matter if we can't describe biology via physics. It's theoretically possible to simulate biology by simulating physics and that's all we need. If one we're to make a complete physics simulation and somehow was able to render it into an image we can understand, everything would work as expected. And by expected, I mean that we could, if we somehow managed to transport every bit of information about a human into that simulation, describe that human through biology, for example. The important part is that the human can function without separately modeling any other scientific fields, such as biology. You can't simulate physics by simulating biology, though. You'd get a higher level simulation that's actually useful for the field of biology, but it certainly wouldn't help with physics. And, actually, we can understand some parts of biology through physics. Like, say, air leaving your lungs when your diaphragm relaxes. And also, yes, we can actually model what you'd decide to do with a screwdriver, because, well, at that point, we'd have to model you. And that includes your brain. The impulses in your brain are probably deterministic, but it's not like we can understand them and we likely never will. The ONLY problem with the reductionist argument that I can think of is if atoms aren't deterministic. We don't know that for sure, though, so we can't rule out reductionism. Also, there's a lot more at play than atoms simply moving: - Electrical charges. (did you forget neurons exist?) - Bonds between atoms. (you have to be joking when you're comparing a box with freely floating, unidentified atoms to biology being reduced to physics) - Energy stored within molecules. (nope, atoms don't move on their own, but the external force you're talking about sure is there!) - The properties of the atoms and the molecules they make up. (just look at the periodic table and tell me you can adequately describe atoms with a box of bouncing circles) - Quantum physics. (which we don't fully understand yet) You've thoroughly mocked physics in this video by completely forgoing most of what makes physics what it is. This is not educating anyone. It's spreading misinformation and unless you somehow convince me otherwise, that's my stance. Though, knowing myself, if you were to present actual evidence that isn't just "we can't describe it yet and look how unrelated these things seem" then I'd probably believe you.
Collective intelligence, chaos, above and below the phase change things are predictable but the in-between space is not. The boundary conditions are just as important as the agent, and somehow collectively matter organizes itself, and once organized the constraints on the organization leads to cycles and then to sensing, and expands the collection.
Thanks! Been tossing up whether to do a video going into the details of Rosen’s argument. It’s definitely on the list. Hopefully I get around to it ;) If not, there are some brilliant interviews about Rosen on the Dialectical Systems UA-cam page, you should check out!
Nice video. Although, I'm not completely fond of your attempt to degrade physics. Indeed, physics is more fundamental than biology, exactly because deals with lower levels of reality. Even chemistry is more fundamental than biology. (Math and philosophy are at the very bottom). Yes, there are emergent properties in the universe, when a system is made of many and complex elements (like a living organism). Yes, these new properties can't be fully comprehended while only having in mind the properties of their parts. That can be observed in physics itself - gravity can't be explained on small scales (or dark energy for example). When you introduce new elements to a system, new properties emerge ("Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes"), which are not present on smaller scales. But there are 2 direct contradictions with what you said: 1. Organisms (and their atoms) are not so strictly separate from their environment, as you present them, it's not so clear where an organism ends and it's surrounding environment starts, they're not isolated systems. 2. Organisms still ultimately obey entropy - earth receives certain amound of energy from the sun, we (people and all living creatures) use it in all sorts of different ways (sometimes even store it in batteries), live our lives, grow, interact with each other and the planet, but on the end, sooner or later, the exact same amount of energy is irradiated away from earth in the form of heath, and contributes to the total dispersion of energy and the increasing entropy of the universe, just like any other celestial body.
Thanks! I'd pass it back to you and say that I'm not completely fond of your attempt to say that physics is more fundamental than biology. What do you mean by 'more fundamental'? Sure it deals with smaller things but why should that make it the more fundamental science? Surely we agree that there are phenomena in biology that can't be explained with the tools of physics (as the video laid out, e.g. self-organisation) and there are phenomena in physics that can't be explained by biology (e.g. quantum mechanics). That's totally fine and is why we have multiple sciences. But one cannot be reduced into the other. They're complementary tools, which *together*, give us useful insight into the world. Responding to my alleged contradictions: 1. I never claimed that organisms are separate from their environment, I believe quite the contrary, the environment plays a huge role. But organisms clearly have a self-producing aspect that is not explored by DEs. That is the point I was trying to make. 2. I never said organisms do not obey "entropy" (I suppose you mean the second law of thermodynamics?). Again quite the contrary, organisms have very interesting thermodynamic properties, which are being still being explored e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2204.09379 Perhaps you are referring to the title where I said biology 'can't be reduced to' physics. I meant that in a knowledge-making (epistemic) sense - physics cannot be used to explain biology completely. Of course, organisms still obey the laws of physics. No-one is claiming that they don't (at least, I don't know any modern day vitalists).
@@SubAnimaLove a theory of knowledge rebuttal to the claim that you were “degrading” physics. There is a bizarre chauvinistic impulse in science and certain science enthusiasts to declare physics (or math) the only “real” field, and thereby claim that all others are mere offshoots. I really appreciate how clearly you articulate the foundational differences in how the fields approach knowledge, and that all of them learn from each other but are not “mere derivatives” of each other. Except, of course, philosophy is the only *real* field, since all others are mere splinters. That’s why it was titled the Philosophy of the Natural World! (/s)
@@SubAnima Us being unable to map out and properly describe the phase state of an organism and declaring of this, that biology can't be reduced to mere physical properties is kind of a logical fallacy. That the phase space is indefinite and thus can't be described is not true, because at every given moment it turns definite due to collapse of the wave functions of every atom being observed by it's neighbours. It is self containing and self limiting. Saying, that a function chart is impossible to be described, because it contains an indefinite amount of possibilities to be formed, looses it's meaning, once the function manifests out of its input values. Even if chaotic interferences and the movement at the edge of chaos can lead to vastly different results, it still stands, that it could be described and replicated. It's just very hard and unlikely. You are confusing ability and possibility. Our current we is unable to do it, thus declaring it impossible is not the right way. Even the top down self organisation aspect of life follows thermo dynamic laws. Organisms are kind of an "energetic-loop-bug", constantly sacrificing energetic values and creating entropic compensations for the amount of information and order that is stored in the organism. We can track the amount of energy going into an organism, how it is distributed, stored and used. We can observe the properties of proteins and how they function. (In one of your videos you claimed, that machines have to have "solid parts" and because proteins can be flexible and have different configurations they shouldn't be considered machine like seems like a wrongly applied axiom, that messes up the conclusion) It is possible to observe the genes, how they are translated and result in a cellular structure (I didn't say a specific) and how they add up in the complete organism. It could be possible to calculate the entropic and energetic gains of the DNA being unfolded etc. That we are not able to do so, doesn't mean it's impossible. In this we are forgetting, that everything, that describes natural laws is inherently physics, because physics just describes matter. The blood flow can be described by physics. We can see how fast it's moving, with which rhythm it's coming, the pressure it has. Why the body is doing with the blood what it's doing, is a different question, but even that can be described by physics, if you look at the correct places with the correct equipment. We can measure the amount of adrenaline. We can see how the g-protein changes its configuration, we can measure the phosphorylation states, we can measure the Ca2+ influx, we can measure the change of potential, we can see the heart and vein cells contract, we can see how the angiotensin is released and so on. If necessary we can even go further back than the adrenaline release, the light stimulus being received and translated into a picture, the areas where the picture is interpreted, a reaction is formed, the Sympathicus gets activated and so on. Only, because we are unable to fully grasp and describe it and thus replicate it, doesn't mean, it is impossible to deduce biology to physics. But nice video anyway.
Wouldn't the dependence of living organism to the laws of physics (or as you put it, it's obedience) make physics more fundamental than biology? I mean of course, one can debate and philosophy about what is meant and understood with any word under a given context (that's part of the fun of dialogue in the end), but I believe that the common connotations of the word are pretty clear thou. @@SubAnima
@@SubAnima Physics are more fundamental in the sense that physics can exist separately and independently from biology, though biology is dependent on more fundamental areas of science such as physics and chemistry to exist within our universe. If physics ceased to exist, biology would. If biology ceased to exist, physics would carry on in a lifeless universe.
Physics is very much more fundamental than biology. While it has proven of limited use to hold a reductionist view of the world, it is very much the case that emergent properties and chaos theory play into the different layers of complexity starting from the fundamental sciences like physics and going up in complexity to other sciences like biology. Biology CAN be reduced to physics, it's just more complex than we though and more mechanisms need to be taken into account. I don't think anyone disputes there is also top down influence in the world, even in a basic living being, let alone in complex ones like us that shape the world around us. That is the most basic definition of life, altho not all encompassing, the ability to shape resources around it and in it, to help it reproduce. And that includes the ability to adapt. So nobody is, to my knowledge, disputing that it's not just bottom up but also top down. Biology CAN be reduced to physics, it's just a lot more complicated than we originally thought. Hence why explaining everything as simply "atoms giggling" is so oversimplified that it is indeed comical :)
We could theoricallly, however using only physics as a tool to study some biology areas such as taxonomy and animal behavior would be incredibly hard and overall inefficient.
@@SubAnima any biological process can be theoretically be explained through biochemistry (of how compounds interact with each other), then we can theoretically explain that chemistry with physical chemistry (of the different molecules & atoms/elements) then we can explain that with physics so therefore you can theoretically explain biological processes through physics.
The point SubAnima makes that it is fundamentally impossible to explain say animal behavior even with the most complex physical model, perfect knowledge of each particle, and practically infinite computing power. It sounds ridiculous, and srsly, I think it is. It is the needless introduction of magic while completely ignoring the knowledge that even small sets of simple rules can create staggering complexity given the right initial state.
I stumbled on your channel through "How not to think about cells" video. I'd say that I'm not convinced and would still lean towards reductionism. Would love to discuss this in person :) But I still like the channel and want to see more, because it brings a refreshing perspective that makes me think more on those things. Which I appreciate :) As for the some anti-reductionism arguments. Taking WW1 as an example. Jiggling mass of atoms hitting other jiggling mass of atoms would explain everything. But when we are talking about WW1 we are talking about concepts created by humans on higher levels of reality. So for us equations explaining atoms behaviour are not an intuitive explanation. So we resort to all the mentioned higher level discussion of imperialism and nationalism. So it seems to me like reduction to atoms should explain everything, but we then need to make a transition to bridge concepts from different levels of reality (atom-organism or WW1) or abandon the higher level altogether if it makes sense to do so in the given situation. I see one issue with my reasoning, and that is, assumption of determinism of atom's behaviour. And well, it seems as if on a quantum level that is not how they actually behave (though I don't know enough about this Science, and thus I'm only considering it as a possibility). In that case, I wonder, if reductionism won't lead us in the long run to discover that life is probabilistic. And organisms behaving like they do not in accordance with the predetermined scenario, but rather mostly according to most likely scenarios, and sometimes, not the most likely.
Whenever you say it can’t be reduced down to physics, you probably are not reducing it enough. It’s like physicists saying we found the smallest particle, only to rick ross themselves 30years later. Physics is the rule and Biology an application of that rule you will never be able to dispute that. But it makes little sense looking at biology with physics glasses on. That much I will admit. Today, we don’t have to create our software with Machine code anymore, we have other language’s that work as a shortcut for all the stuff that Machine code can do. But that still doesn’t mean that machine code can’t do the stuff that python can. In fact, fundamentally it is all the same. Biology and Physics are not seperate, we created that separation. But looking at those seperate parts we created it is clear that physics can explain more phenomena going on in biology than biology can even attempt to explain what happens in physics. If you learn physics you will inevitably be confronted with the whole spectrum of science. Any other science class is way more isolated and the students shiver when they even hear the word "physics" because that is where the "crazy" one are. I think the only time I ever had some hint of physic in Biology class was when we talked about thermodynamics to understand the brownian motion of molecular sized objects. In my physics class we had a whole hall of fame tour with all the scientists form across the fields with signed graphs, pictures, best of and everything in between. That is the way you should look at this.
Good video, but im disappointed that more research didn't go into this. I'd strongly suggest reading further into simulation and particularly molecular dynamics. The major limitation in this field is the astronomical computing power and phenomena that we have yet to understand. The real question is if we could ever reproduce and predict organism behavior if we had "complete" physics knowlege and unlimited computing power. It is mostly a theoretical question since it's pragmatically close to impossible
There's at least one thing that breaks Sabine Hossenfelder's quote: consciousness. It really is more than the sum of its parts, often called strong emergence. We know a lot of what brain cells do and we have no idea how or why consciousness emerge; and the more we know about brain cells the less likely it seems we'll ever have an answer.
I don’t think much can be said about consciousness. As crazy as it might first sound, I’ve come to be convinced that this concept doesn’t refer to anything (at least in the way you use it here to refer to something non-physical)
Much more importantly hard problem of consciousness,and specially the idea of how Artificial intelligence will link with this. I usually reflection this argument when conflicted against reductionism to be end all be all for all situations. The argument is as follows - If an Artificial intelligence is made that is by some testing standards of any sort, consisting of consciousness and is deemed to be a " entity" just like humans are, then is it their mathematical model just formula for consciousness or is their structure making consciousness? This to my concern leads to problem that everything is conscious cause you can run the model upon any mechanically device you may construct, be it digital computers to transistors of running water, gears to mere light Ray's used to compute and give response as well by help of some material interactions. And if possible then try purely with protons. The point is the formula is what determined it all, and is people ready to accept that? Are people ready to accept a specific configuration of chairs and how turbulence between their structures by air at specific rates can generate conscious thoughts if done just right by most precise methods unknown to man, it's ridiculous but a idea lovely to sci fi hit the nerves of future generations. To my concern it only tells us that verificationism may not always work out to give absolute truth like consciousness within some systems, inturn there being no way to determine consciousness in robots. (PS : consciousness only means something related to being referred as "soul" or "qualia" or "integrated assembly of electrons." You call it smth else.)
We have significant traction on consciousness and are probably about to figure it out. These are respectively an "unfinished philosophy" paper with iffy physical interpretation and a technical details biology paper, but I think they're pretty core: look up "relativistic consciousness" and "consciousness depends on slow critical dynamics"
No it doesn't. There is zero evidence that strong emergence is required to explain consciousness, or even that strong emergence exists at all. It is basically the introduction of magic and not scientific.
It doesn't feel to me like you proved the point you were apparently trying to prove here. Yes, there are other useful frameworks, no one is denying that. When people say everything can be reduced to its parts, they just mean, like you said, that if only we had complete knowledge of the system, then we could predict every behaviour from bottom up. This is akin to saying that, if only you knew exactly how to unbreak the egg and had enough time to waste then you could, in principle, put it back together. Of course, no one is saying that is practically possible, but it is true nonetheless just as it is true that every higher aspect of this universe is just a consequence of the emergent properties of atoms
If we look to historical materialism we can see a corollary in that framework's conception of a contradiction. Two forces/phenomena acting on each other form the basis of each contradiction. In this way it's very easy to understand systems like biological organisms as described in this video, both an emergent whole and a series of parts that make it up. It's a more holistic view of things that will lead to better insight.
I wanna count on those things that look out to be not checked - (Not exactly the same thing you said in video but what understood from it.) 1) "Organisms making themselves is not yet determined" I already see this being a mistake for its not thought out far enough. We are still looking completely on naturalistic point of view, and arguably there exists nothing like "a function that generates itself." Not to mention a combination of two functions that add and reduce the environmental information that exists equally or a combination of such functions leading to such pathways. Again the possibility makes it questionable that biological systems may just have significant amount of such criterions interacting with environment within themselves and outside to reproduce their own kind. 2) criterions may not exists (from the analogy of screw driver as a structure being used to conclude that it's function can be used to do alot of different stuff... However i argue it falls straight again for the same mistake which i guess i can summarize in one word, shortsightedness, I do not think this discredits you by any standards for we humans are fallible to error, even this criticism of specific key points that triggered my neurons to trigger my motor neuro- i shall stop this brackets.. -_-) From what i get this on argues for what an organism can do is far vast and _free_ from what crude reductionism will lead to as a conclusion for next state achieved of the universe and it's constituents. But that - 1. Firstly taps outside the naturalistic perspective for the while cause some may not actually accept crude naturalism to be end all be all. Some argue with idea of hard problem of consciousness and hence attempt to put meta physical criterions to allow _free will_ to be afloat, else physical states can be known to determine next move with better accuracy or precision than before. 2. There exists a necessity for a specific structure to commit indefinite tasks, is but not true from start. A screw driver for example, can't fly all on its own except Newtons law is violated by Nth time, and hence be next bird in zoologists textbooks, which may start writing on their own as some "automaton". (The book, which never had structural framework to actually do that.) The idea of looking from Top to bottom as of looking stuff to mere atoms to my conception also is just non sensical and is much mistaken by physicts. The idea that you can understand and do science in much more simplicity than taking care of complex interactions of atoms for every organism forever takes out grand structural beauty and patterned interaction on macro level between structures of atoms which are the organisms like ants collaborating as a mighty nation (until the fire nation arrives 🤨🤨🤨) This is but what i understood and had to say for its contradictory to my limited understanding as far as of now.
Top down causation does appear in physics. Boundary condition of an object determine the collective (i.e. acoustic) modes of the macro object, which determines how the atoms will move when the object is excited.
I think, the best argument here is the screwdriver, for which we can not compute all its future uses and therefore, we can not explain the world in terms of constituents of a screwdriver (and its surrounding). However, in order for making this into a real argument, one has to rigorously show that indeed, it is not possible to know all future use-types of a screwdriver. I can imagine something like an argument along the idea that each found use of a screwdriver does not lower the number of possible other uses (as with normal search algorithms), but instead increases it. And ofcourse screwdrivers being an analogy for proteins and other multi-purpose "inventions" of evolution. In other words, a rigorous proof is needed that the number of possibilities to arrange matter into living beings and "things" (with purposes) tends to increase over time.
And that is exactly the argument Stuart Kauffman has been making with his “TAP equation” arxiv.org/pdf/2204.14115.pdf See also links in the sources doc :)
@@SubAnima Wow, thank you for the link! I will look into this; however, already from the start, I am a bit sceptical, because (while writing the first comment) I already thought to myself: That can probably not be shown rigorously, because life can go extinct or go through very narrow bottlenecks, where the number of possibilities to arrange matter into living beings (and "things") decreases instead of increases. Therefore, monotony can probably only be demonstrated within some rather strict boundary conditions... But I'll definitely look into the paper! Thanks a lot!
Great video! To me this video proves that materialism can't be considered a scientific theory of everything, including life, because it didn't put forward any evidence of biology and life in general. How do atoms come together in the exact amount to form a cell? How did the atoms form the boundaries they are in so they don't wiggle out of it? What is the formula for this? Materialism perspective doesn't even explain laws in physics like gravity; how do atoms in space know that objects with mass must have certain amount of gravity if laws of physics are not some external force but just ultimately matter? How do those atoms form this law of gravity and other laws of physics? What really bizar is to me that most philosophers and scientists in physics deduce from materialism that we don't have any free will. Of course we are made of atoms but a human has like a thousand 'layers' of emerging properties, if not more, from just atoms and molecules. *How is this not the most reductionist idea ever!*
dude biology cannot be compared with Newtonian physics. You can't compare newtons theorems vs Jan van Ijeken's interpretations which was rather recent. Thi is so hypocritic
I think you make a lot of really good points on top down and bottom up causation, but I feel like the one thing that’s missing is that this doesn’t show that physics is not enough, rather it just shows that a piece of the physics puzzle is missing. We can’t fully understand everything through static models of physics, but that’s because nature is not static. Physics is still the fundamental building block of how everything works, it’s just that other fields use those building blocks and build different theories and mechanisms. Physics on it’s own may not be enough, but that does not mean that physics is not enough, rather I believe that more refers to the need to include a context that overseas the physics going on more accurately. Considering what we know about chemistry in the world as it is (uncertainty), it seems impossible to make a theory that is able to properly describe any system in any specific context without establishing the conditions of the system separately in order to have an accurate description of what’s going on. Ultimately though, the floor boards are still physics, and all you’re doing is tweaking what you do with that physics.
Great video, very thought provoking. You mentioned Turing, and the Halting Problem came to my mind... can it be considered an argument against reductionism in general?
I think the halting problem ia definitely an argument against reductionism. As well as the greater concept that is godels incompleteness theorem. Both pojnt to the limitations of our description of reality, and therefore, our ability to reduce one phenomenon to a set of descritions The problem of immanence states this in a more phylosophical way: we assume we a but a part of reality, embeddes in it. We are immanent beings, as opposed to transcendent ones. So our perspective will always be limited, and no set of descriptions will apply yo everything
@@doctorinternet8695 An undecidable problem can emerge from a system that operates according to deterministec rules, and there's no contratiction with that. If the system is large enough, it can have a non-deterministic "feel" at the macro levels. On the other hand I'm not familiar with the problem of immanence. I'll look into that.
When you perform a physics experiment, the result ALWAYS defies predictions in some small way. The fact that we call this "noise" and choose to characterize the broader trend is a product of of reductionism. However, we know in physics that 2 or more trends can come together to make a new trend that could never be expressed in terms of just one of the trends. I think this is why we see emergent chemical phenomena, and I see no reason why this can't produce emergent biological phenomena either.
What I find funny is that a lot of people reduce molecules to just a collection of atoms and that they’re “equal” to that collection of atoms, but in reality the atoms of a molecule actually behave differently from their free counterparts specifically because they’re part of the molecule. Their shapes and sizes and electronegativities/electropositivities are different according to the configurations of atoms they’re bound to and as such can’t be viewed without taking into consideration the molecule as a whole. Atoms in molecules don’t behave the same way they’d behave by themselves and the same applies to life with its numerously complex molecules and cells, where things like the laws of physics act as a building block but are not the totality of laws and logic that dictate the organism. Even something like the second law of thermodynamics which many people view as a fundamental law for example, isn’t actually a fundamental law but one that emerges from the interactions of many parts, it’s a statistical law that emerges in a way similar to natural selection or numerous other emergent properties (like behaviors or other things), and what’s interesting is that an emergent law like that is vitally important to physics, in a way where you can’t talk about any structure in physics (like an atom for example) without taking it into account. So the reductionist view that you can just look at the most basic parts and figure everything out without taking into account new logic that emerges from the now greater whole I feel is a large misunderstanding of science that a lot of people unfortunately make.
I'd say an important concept for understanding the non-reducibility of biology to physics (and other similar situations) is supervenience. Kinda disappointed you didn't mention it, but the aspects you mentioned were interesting, too. Also, I'd like to add that one phenomenon that first appears at the level biology but is not present in pure physics is the concept of digitally coded information. This exemplifies how there are levels to reality that add qualitatively new concepts despite operating entirely within the laws of the lower levels.
The possibility of "supervenience without entailment" or "supervenience without reduction" is contested territory among philosophers. - Copied from Wikipedia In principle, if you could perfectly predict the most fundamental units of reality, then its all deterministic and everything is reducible. But I believe physicists have demonstrated that there is true randomness at the quantum level. I think this randomness is a good argument for non-reducibility. If that randomness has effects on higher orders of matter that those higher orders can themselves change, then your argument holds true. But I don't know that kind randomness has effects that are relevant for chemical reactions which is what biology is directly built upon. I hope I'm not too incoherent.
I think you are mistaking a philosophical principle for a practical approach to science. No one says that to study biology we should start by studying physics from which we can discover the laws of biology. reductionism is just a philosophical principle, one that I am not sure I agree with, but all those who adopt it know that for practical terms you cannot study biology, sociology nor economics just by studying physics. The systems are too complex for a reductionist approach to be possible. So I don't think you have adressed reductionism in the way it should be adressed, you used a practicality argument to answer a statement about principles.
The elementary particles of mathematics are the natural numbers. In fact, the entire mathematics was formed from them, but in the meantime new and new objects, concepts had to be invented, discovered and applied. Natural numbers are also known to a limited extent by animals. I once observed a fox carrying the 5 newborn cubs to a safer place (about 80 m distance) one by one. The 5th little fox crawled away and was not visible. However, the fox knew that she had 5 cubs, so she searched for it until she found it. We can and should build on the lower level, but we always have to add something extra, something new in quality, if we are to be able to build on the next level.
This video is radical - that biologists and chemists have been following it for hundreds of years instead of using quantum mechanics and atomic interactions to dictate their field. So much revolutionary ideas you got here.
I like to think of this in terms of computer science. Technically we could program a video game totally in machine code or assembly (which allows us greater control over computer hardware) but why would we torture ourselves like that when we have programming languages that offer higher levels of abstraction and makes it easier for us to follow the logic of programming a video game. In the same way, physics lets us understand the hardware of the universe and is kind of like the assembly language of the universe (mathematics would be the machine code) yes we could use physics to understand some biological phenomenon, but I feel as though Biology is such a higher level of abstraction that the underlying assembly (physics) or machine code (math) would be too complex to be useful. In some rare instances it could be useful, but generally it probably isn’t.
Any thoughts on whether Markovian mathematics, especially of the sort Karl Friston is working with, will crack some of the strange boundary issues discussed here with biology? On a side note - for cell differentiation in embryos Michael Levin's been doing some really astonishing work.
Feeling that behavioral of those molecular-level "particles bumping" and the larger "life system" somehow "working on its own" do have the reminiscence of comparing quantum physics and the classical more "human-size" scale of physics.
I admire your work. I just wanted to comment about your example of atoms in a box illustrating top down causation. This is not true because the square has an external causal effect which affects the movement of the atoms. This is a simple action and reaction between the atoms and the boundaries of the square. The top down causation will be that the collective behaviour of the atoms affecting the behaviour of the single atom, without any external effect.
I would say that thinking of biology and physics in this way is kinda limiting. I mean, physics is just taking some principles and applying to predict certain things (events, probabilities, values, etc.). While biology it focuses mainly in organisms. The difference is blurry when you are trying to predict patterns in organisms, because organisms are made out of atoms and their interactions. Like it is said in the video it is useless to say that this happened because this particle moved to this place, you need to interpret the results that the methods of physics give you, and for that you need abstractions. For example physics predicts electrons moving in an atom in a certain way, we can use that abstracting the core idea (orbitals and bonds) and now you have chemistry, that's why you have chemista and physicists working sometimes in the same topic, because they are basically talking about the same thing. It is a bit misleading that it's neither chemistry or physics, because of an arbitrary line that makes these words ambiguos in the context. Analogously for biology it's the same, You have from animals to peptides and enzymes moving from here to there, which and it is of course biology. But these are simply different abstractions of physics, because they are more useful and digestible for the human mind. You could predict every atom movement ever but without these abstractions you could not understand it. Again abstracting to these levels are not ignoring the physics, because it's physics, just making it easier to see.
Standing in a techno club with earphones in listening to this. I didn't quite catch the whole concept but you should never stop doing this - do other things too.
The gap between physics and biology comes down to the metaphysics of biology, the very term metaphysics means "above physics" you cannot explain consciousness and other such topics with physical means, questions like does thought have mass are very profound questions, but if you want to be scientifically rigorous and consistent, the only way of approach to finding answers these things has to be through physics and mathematical models, if another avenue of explanation for these things is consistent and obeys what we see and know, sure it might considered as an alternative to the scientific method, but if there is another such thing that governs these things, it has to be inherently random.
Reductionism is usually understood as ontological claim, rather than epistemological. So in this case, arguments involving impossibility to know/predict something, are irrelevant.
Though I enjoyed the content of this video, I would still have to disagree. Strictly speaking, I believe everything can be reduced to fundamental laws. For instance, time always seems to keep moving forward, which preserves our concept of causality. The cause always comes before the effect. Sure, biological systems are very much complex but it is only because of causality that we are able to have some understanding of it. We never see an instance of the effect preceding its cause (that would be time travel!). Any self-respecting scientist wouldn't jump to conclusions without first considering what is already known and what has already happened. It's just that with this extreme form of reductionism, we won't always make good use of it as far as the progress of knowledge is concerned, but that doesn't make it untrue.
The question is where the first version of that self-modifying code came from. The video mentions self-replicating machines and states that - contrary to life - they couldn't exist without someone having built their ancestors, just as there needs to be someone to write the first version of the self-modifying program. I believe this is wrong. Given the right initial conditions, the first version of such a program could be created by pure coincidence, by randomly switching bits and executing whatever instructions they may represent, until eventually one set of instructions would resemble a self-modifying program. This is incredibly improbable, but not impossible.
@@thinksie Actually in believe much if not most anti-reductionism comes from a lack of imagination. Many people seem to almost actively refuse the idea of complex systems being able to emerge from a couple of simple rules, although experiments like Conways Game of Life impressively show the opposite.
@@NeovanGoth Yeah the idea that you can only group something if it's made from enough elements is obvious and doesn't change much more than philosophy. Computers work on bits, 1 or 0, and manage to work something out of it only because we built them with some abstraction. Look we could add the numbers and be like 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 = 8, most logic, but what did we actually choose? Multiplicative method 2⁰+2¹+2²+2³+2⁴+2⁵+2⁶+2⁷, which is 255. And adding one more of these meaningless bits potentially gives us 2x higher number. But we still chose to group them so they only get so high in different processors. People think that freedom emerges from lack of the rules. I think it's called chaos. Real freedom is in a world that has rules, and you still have some free space. So our World has it's rules, and everything emerges from them, simple. Saying that it's too complicated is just funny. There is not an infinite amount of chemistry, it's actually quite limited, and if you want to limit it more to the actual environment and resources it wouldn't be so hard for a first life to emerge randomly. Even if improbable, the idea of chance is if given enough trying and the chance isn't exactly 0, it'll happen sometime. We're multicellular organisms omg so improbable that all my cells will work together! Well it actually makes sense if you ask me. It's a good survival strategy and we did show experimentally a single cellular organism that started grouping I believe!
@@thinksie "People think that freedom emerges from lack of the rules. I think it's called chaos." In mathematics, chaos means when tiny changes in the initial conditions result in completely different results. The results are still determined by rules, but it's difficult (or even practially impossible) to predict them due to lack or decent knowledge of the initial conditions. I would call the lack of rules randomness, as without rules, it is not only hard, but impossible to predict a result even with perfect knowledge, and this is true randomness. "Real freedom is in a world that has rules, and you still have some free space." In this regard I am skeptic. As I said, results are either determined by rules, or random, unless we throw materialism away and introduce literal magic, like a soul that is able to make decisions while being neither driven by deterministic laws of nature, nor quantum randomness. I think the concept of freedom doesn't have a physical meaning at all, that it instead is a purely mental concept. Decisions _feel_ free when they are the result of a conscious thought process that is not limited by obvious constraints. It doesn't matter whether the thought process has been executed by deterministic molecular circuitry and could be predicted if the exact initial conditions would be known, or even contains a certain quantum randomness. That doesn't make it feel any less free (unless being high on Ketamine, oh boy does this drug show how little conscious control it requires to run around and do stuff 😂).
You are the best Biology channel I have seen. I think Biology is incredibly important and was thinking about majoring in bio computing, but all the bio I've seen in textbooks is so boring. Thank you😊 but also cant decide what I wanna major in theres so much cool science
It is only by keeping an all encompassing perspective where every forces that exist and influence each other, we will be able to understand the dynamics of life. Having said that, we cannot box physics or biology or chemistry into separate boxes as their boundaries are fixed by reductionist views which may be far from actuality.
If I understood you correctly, it looks like one would have a difficult time using the wrong type of lens to make sense of a target sized organization, not that it cannot be done. You absolutely can make sense of things by interacting with it, it will just take a ginoumous amount of time because you are using a bad lens for the job?
Reductionism is a naive approach to science, as it oversimplifies complex phenomena and fails to account for emergent properties and interactions between components. So glad you made the video!
nailed it with this one. agency and where that comes from is an utter mystery. why does a cell even move or decide to correct its own DNA upon replication? motivation of biological systems have no understanding from the scientific community. videos like this help challenge traditional scientific thinkers to realize how little we understand biology, how much there is left to be discovered
The laws of physics are idealizations, reflective not of nature but of the extent to which we can model nature. Our natural way of doing science is to assume a given pattern extends, and we update our models when we find exceptions to that pattern. The same could well be true of the whole deterministic, linear, reductionistic framework which is so amenable to our language yet never cleanly reflected in nature.
love your videos! but I always seem to wonder when considering the self organization of organisms (i.e. autopoiesis) is how is this not a new brand of vitalism?
The question can be interpreted in multiple different ways. I'm inclined to answer YES! There are interpretations where the answer is clearly YES and others where it's clearly NO. I'm not expecting very much profound to be said here other than messing about with words a bit.
My perspective is that bottom-up and top-down are both useful because all physical laws can be used in both directions of time - the past and the future. Similar to the parallel of derivatives and integrals. Can I reason like this? Or does one have any objections? Because I didn't start studying yet and would appreciate an experts opinion on my perspective. Thank you for the great video again.
Bottom-up and top-down causes are both important, I'd agree with that. But in terms of the role of time, I'm not so much an expert and many physicists debate about it. I've read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin which argues that the orthodoxy of "time as a stubbornly persistent illusion" is wrong and needs to be overturned placing time as fundamental, not emergent. More interesting for a biologist like me, is that Smolin also argues that the laws of physics change over time, and therefore we need to have a theory that explains 'why these laws?' It's a good read, i'd recommend it. Again, not an expert. Thanks for watching!
I certainly agree with much of this video. However I think you have brushed over many areas of actually practiced non-reductionist physics. Condensed matter theory, as a notable example, generally sidesteps the kind of ontological reductionism you've ascribed to physics. It is very important to distinguish between actual study in physics in the modern day on one hand, and popphys entertainment on the other hand.
...It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not-out there, as constellations-already grouped in the sky. So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference. - Alan Watts
A neutron star would quickly reduce all biology into neutrons, which we call physics, so yes, it can, a neutron star would do it just by existing with it's mass.
My guy excellent video. I've pondered this for some years and thought "ah yes physics is everything" and then thought "math is physics so it must be everything", I now know I have no idea. Thanks for cool content, you need more subs in my biased opinion
my answer would be "yes, but we will never be able to comprehend it" because the human mind can no better visualize the physical complexity of an organism than it can visualize the scale of a galaxy
Newt-on
Where from is this accent? Germany? (currently I am learning english, so I can't recognize accents)
I'm still not sure I'm fully convinced by anti-reductionism, but I'm glad this channel exists to defend it. I think reductionism isn't to be accepted lightly either. You certainly push some important questions forward. The format is really good work too, great quality videos! I hope you keep making them, you deserve more views!
Thanks! Fair enough, reductionism is a super useful tool too, not denying that. But I just dont think it will ever get us a complete picture. We’ve been trained to be Cartesian reductionists for 400 years so of course its very counterintuitive to do anything else. Glad I made you think though!
@@SubAnimaI feel like (as far as I understand) reductionism and anti-reductionism are both just different perspectives, both useful in their own rights. And while they are not mutually exclusive (in the sense that they can both be equally correct and true in the real world), what isn't mutually exclusive in this conversation is determinism and non-determinism. From a bottom-up perspective it certainly would seem that everything is determnistic more or less (quantum mechanics does throw a wrench in the cogs here and there), yet from a top-bottom perspective non-determinism would seem to be true.
@@SubAnima If that's your view of physics, you have over a century to catch up.
@@ohauss Lol that was my first thought too! He's only 336 years behind. "Biology in nondeterministic therefore it can't be physics".... Uh -cough- quantum mechanics -cough cough-.
@@phyricquinn2457 So you're telling that quantum mechanics is what caused the world war one. Thanks! That's very useful
This sounds to me more like a pragmatic argument. I think most would agree that it's completely unrealistic to try and build complex systems based solely on the laws of physics we know today. I think the argument from reductionists is *if* we had perfect knowledge of the state of every particle in the universe (and the universe itself), then there's no reason we couldn't calculate exactly what everyone and everything would do in the future and what they did in the past. Now whether that's actually true can be debated, but I think that's the main point. I don't know if I've misinterpreted you in some way though. I did watch this pretty quickly.
That is the general take. I would take the counter point even further than the video does: you say ‘there’s no reason we couldn’t in principle calculate everything’ - yes there is. Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves.
@@anywallsocket Good point
Did you have it on 2x speed?
@@peytonhanel7059 I think I had it on 1.75x speed
I don’t know that this is actually true. Fundamentally, the best we know about the atoms of our world is that they follow the laws of quantum mechanics, which are probabilistic. So if we had knowledge of all the atoms, the most we would know (given our current knowledge) is the wave function which describes the possible states of the system, and even then it would be some likelihood of happening. That seems actually impossible to know, especially when we consider that there are wave functions which we do not know, such as entangled states.
Some mistakes (afaik):
1) The phase space in physics is also infinite (reductionism ≠ finitism).
2) There are turing machines that change their own source code. The Von Neumann architecture is a circuit (in your computer right now) based on this idea, and is what allows your computer to have multiple programs that you can add, modify, and remove.
1) Biological systems don't even have an infinite phase space, but an *indefinite* one that is constantly expanding. We could never write it down. That was the idea I wanted to convey but it may not have been clear. I made a follow up video exploring this idea further here: ua-cam.com/video/oDG_7Ame0m0/v-deo.html
2) Right, but that still requires a programmer to modify things. The program/computer can't do it itself whilst biological systems can (unless you're a creationist that believes that God must intervene to tidy up organisms).
@@SubAnima"biological systems have indefinite phase space."
Not exactly still sure what makes the word "phase" and "space" work together.. autological?
But being indefinite, well on reductionist point of view things will be viewed more of an "chaotic system" than "simple A → B"
A pattern always follows up at macro level but that doesn't nullify the interactions that make it up there, given the supercomputers computing, arguably all particles information and interaction, will end up yielding most accurate and near perfect calculation (not perfect maybe due to quantum mechanics, not exactly sure from this position tbh.)
The argument of screwdriver being used as a function to serve some other structure, is but not accurate. A specific rule like Newton's law of motions will not bend due to a "choice" unless you believe in God but that's still out of context of science for it runs over naturalism, not with other domains involved with God or smth.
"The argument is there is still a programmer."
This is another mistake, according to how you attempt to put it.
For example simple to put forward, a virus or worm are malicious programs that can self replicate.
Arguably nothing truly "self" replicates except just binding structure around it just like it's own GIVEN it has resources to do so. The organism fades out of exists if there are none.
The example I gave may truly not look correct for its a program, not hardware.
But that's what I like to put lights on (_drumrolls??_) everything here is hardware lol..
Take those transistors and mechanism that just pull out in just the right way for logic gates to work so to make storage for information and retrieval of it so possible for the very mechanism. Then let the mechanism run on the information it can modify.
Arguably who put this mechanism is still a programmer, but the problem is there was always this chance to make it actually true as well. this leads to some arguments relating "chaos leading order." But that is now separate discussion, for what is to be known is "physical laws themselves coded by randomness" is but at least much tangibly holdable argument.
And about creationism, idk if that's how fancy God _must ought to be_ for its arguably more like "game theory" than just science now. Which is why it's better separating answering "how" of what science (scientific method) ends up tackling with brilliance for human intellect and "why" by some religious beliefs of moral side support, cause reductionism like this one, always bleeds to some consequentialistc ideas often exploiting and robbing humans out of their deontological beliefs. All sides have a certain threshold, name it any profession. I see biology better at understanding complex interactions between macro organism. Physics will actually do a terrible job by jumbling it like bad cable maintenance of some super computer.
A correction for the correction: While the self-modifying Turing machine is indeed one type of Turing machine, it has nothing to do with the Von Neumann architecture. The latter is just a model of computer that differs from the Harvard architecture by using the same memory for instructions and data.
While this fundamentally allows self-modifying code (because the shared memory has to be both readable and writable), it is not a requirement, and its use is strongly discouraged. The Von Neumann architecture just makes it very easy to accidentally overwrite instructions or execute data, leading to huge security issues (buffer overflow).
While the Harvard architecture allows to use a ROM as instruction memory, making self-modifying code impossible, instructions can (and usually are) also stored in RAM that just doesn't share the same address space with the data memory, but still can be written, allowing self-modifying code.
@@SubAnima This is silly. You could certainly define the phase space of a biological system. Here is one (classical, not quantum, but a quantum one exists as well):
{(x_1, p_1) x ... (x_j, p_j) x ... x (x_N, p_N) | where j is an index that labels all particles in a cat} where x symbolizes position and p symbolizes momentum.
Then you can run through Hamilton's equations for the equations of motion for the cat.
The problem is that no one has (and likely no one ever will have) the computational resources to solve such a system of equations. It can be done in principle, but never in practice.
But my point is that it is simply wrong to say the phase space is constantly expanding. It has a finite dimension: 6*N, where N is the number of particles in the cat.
@@eljeorgo Ah, now I understand how the name of von Neumann ended up here! :D Von Neumann simply was the guy who first used the concept of a "singularity" in a technological concept. It has nothing to do with the "von Neumann architecture", which really just describes the physical layout of a computer.
The underlying idea of a "technological singularity" is that a program on a fundamental level is nothing else than a set of instructions that receive some input and produce some output. This output can of course also be another program. So if one could write a program that is smart enough to write an even smarter version of itself, that smarter version could write another, even more smarter version, and so on. Even more so, such a smart program could also design faster computers, so with each iteration it would take less time to create the next iteration, causing an "explosion" of intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that soon would surpass all human intelligence and - from our perspective - could be seen as "god-like". This is what von Neumann called a "technological singularity".
Whether this would be good or bad is a matter of discussion. Every tool can be used to do something productive or destructive, and an artificial superintelligence would be the most powerful tool imaginable. It could be extremely good, as such a superintelligence could probably easily solve problems that otherwise would require thousands of years of research when done by human scientists, but it could also end up extremely bad, like ... the destruction of the human civilization. 😆
Should we be worried? I'd say: No. Currently we don't know whether it's even possible to create an AGI (artificial general intelligence), let alone a runaway reaction that results in a superintelligence. There might even be fundamental limits, like the overhead of communication in parallel systems that eventually causes computers to actually get _slower_ when additional CPUs are added instead of faster.
So if people are talking about the dangers of a technological singularity, they usually want to distract from actual real-life problems caused by comparatively dumb systems, like privacy issues caused by ubiquitous surveillance using facial recognition.
Biology is truly one of the less understood fields at this moment
Totally. “What is life?” is still a mystery, what a great time to be a biologist though!
@@SubAnima"What is life?" isn't a mystery. It's a semantic discussion. "Life" is whatever we decide is the most useful definition for didactics and scientific progress.
So the quantum physics.
According to who and by what metric. I am in immunology and can guarantee we know masive amount but the general public is incredibly ignorant. This video is trash.
So we can help scientists by processing data from boinc distributed computing software to understand better ❤
I think you're conflating what the most useful way a human can understand a system with claims about the reality of how that system operates. You're making claims that a reductionist perspective is "wrong" and I disagree with that. I would agree that it is not necessarily the most useful framework for problem solving though. If you're playing chess against a computer you need to understand the rules of the game and what your and opponent is are doing. You don't need to understand it's programming language, Assembly, Kernel architecture, or how transistors work. And 99.99% of people reading the machine code would be completely useless. But that doesn't change the fact that every aspect of the game is dictated by those fundamental rules. I see no evidence that reductionism or physicalism is incorrect, only that the human mind is far better at understanding concepts and models.
Thanks for your well-reasoned comment. I still disagree with “every aspect of the game is dictated by those fundamental rules” because:
The laws of physics may dictate how all the atoms in universe bump around, but that does not mean that all the causes of the system are from the bottom alone. The phenomena of biology disappear if we just track atoms. Particularly the phenomenon of how things get that way: “why is organism the way it is? Why does the chess board look the way it does, what caused it to get that way?”
These do not merely emerge from the ‘fundamental’ level. They need us to look to relevant higher level causes (e.g. development/evolution and some humans programming/building the computer in the first place)
Physics typically ignores these questions by sidestepping “why these laws?” But biologists deal with them all the time.
Physics (in principle) could give us an explanation of how all the atoms move, but it won’t be able to explain why things are the way that are or how the initial conditions came to be in the first place.
Take a look at this blog post too by Kevin Mitchell: www.wiringthebrain.com/2022/08/getting-to-bottom-of-reductionism-is-it.html?m=1
@@SubAnima I don't understand what you're saying about causes and where they originate or that the phenomena of biology "disappear". Emergent properties are the result of interactions. A single atom does not have a state of matter, but states of matter can be understood as interactions between many single atoms.
Why questions are tricky, I think Feynman does a good job of explaining what I mean in this video: ua-cam.com/video/MO0r930Sn_8/v-deo.html
I think any closed system can be described by describing it's component parts. The appearance of the chess board in an instance of the game can be fully derived from the program. Why a person wrote the program the way they did is still subject to the physical laws that govern their brain and how they interact with their environment.
Kevin Mitchell says the alternative to reductionism is holism. I can't really wrap my head around holism. My day job is a biologist, though my degree is in molecular, cell, and developmental biologist so maybe I'm more sympathetic to the reductionist, physicalist explanations than an ecologist.
I'm saying that biological phenomena and their corresponding causes not only have little to do with the laws of physics, but that they cannot be derived from them (hence they disappear if we only take the low level perspective). Michela Massimi outlines it quite nicely with the example of water (global.oup.com/academic/product/perspectival-realism-9780197555620 , p.285-286):
"Laws of nature are not ‘ladders’ to access different domains of inquiry in the hope to reduce a plurality of phenomena to a set of essential properties regarded as metaphysically explanatory. If anything, laws or lawlike dependencies are tied to specific phenomena. The engineers of Alhambra [a medieval sophisticated water supply system] could succeed without any knowledge of chemical laws about water being H2O. ...
Water concerns all these phenomena at once: ground-water motion no less than droplet formation or chemical bonds. Some of the laws involved-like Darcy’s law for ground-water motion-are not reducible to, say, the Navier-Stokes equations in fluid dynamics. Laws are not ladders. A phenomena-first approach is congenial to the pluralism inherent in perspectival realism, and is anti-reductionist in denying any foundations. ...
Insisting that water is H2O, while true, does not begin to answer the question as to why all these phenomena have historically been grouped together under the natural kind concept of water."
This kind of "who cares if organisms have atoms in them, there's so much more stuff going on that has nothing to do with the physics" mindset emerges once we place process, not substance, first and foremost in our ontology. I made a video on that here (ua-cam.com/video/vaJcmWjMNwo/v-deo.html ) or you can check out the brilliant book Everything Flows (doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198779636.001.0001 ).
And emergent properties are not simply the result of interactions of their parts - in that we can't derive the higher level laws from the smaller ones (due to 'broken symmetries' as argued beautifully in P.W. Anderson's classic 'more is different': cse-robotics.engr.tamu.edu/dshell/cs689/papers/anderson72more_is_different.pdf )
Yeah I would also say that modern biology (perhaps minus ecology) is deeply steeped in reductionism, perhaps leading to your current worldview. I made a video on a brief history of the reductionist/organicist debate here: ua-cam.com/video/YV5ZjAZGw4Y/v-deo.html
The thing is that organisms are made of atoms, not the other way around, organisms make atoms move because the chemical energy inside their cells allows them to.
You can't predict how organisms will move their atoms because of the quantity of internal processes ( composed of atoms and energy ) and the variety and complexity of its molecules, on the other hand you can predict more accurately how materials and pure chemical substances will behave because all or most of it is made of the same molecule or chemical element
The bigger the scale, the more irrelevant are the properties of the constitutents of its constitutents, example:
When you're making a bulding the quantum properties of the atoms or moleculles of the concrete hardly will make a difference.
Taking it a step further:
On the cosmic scale our existence as species or even the existence of life in this planet is pretty irrelevant both in space ( we're a tiny fraction of the matter in the universe ) and time ( our existence has been and will be a blink in the scale of the universe lifetime ), suddenly a meteor strikes the earth and we're gone, the laws of the universe govern us.
@@GabrielMartinez-zm9dg Cells are made of atoms, the energy is contained in the chemical bonds (or elementary particles). Whether organisms move atoms or the other way around is purely a semantic argument, not a testable claim.
I agree predicting the behavior of an organisim from first principles is not a tractable problem. Just because we don't have the ability to do something currently doesn't mean it can't be done. It was always physically possible to land on the moon, but it was only achieved in 1969. The nature of the problem has been the same for millennia, it was our technology that made it possible.
As I stated in my first comment, understanding the smallest components of a system is rarely an effective way to understand a system. So I agree a construction worker doesn't need to think about quantum mechanics, that doesn't mean that the concrete is not governed by those laws.
Relevance is subjective. My life is relevant to me and people that know me regardless of the fraction of the universe that my atoms represent. What fraction of the time or space of the universe does an entity need to occupy to be relevant? 1%? 10%? 50%? It's not a testable question, it's a personal one.
A lot of these behavior comes from the chemical nature of molecules themselves. Not from something special. Atoms don't behave like rigid gears isn't a new paradigm, nor is "foreign to physics", nor is anything deserving this much emphasize. For example - the spectral gap of solids is similarly incomputable. I suspect this has more to do with being a complex system than being something completely something different.
What he means there're more dimensions to the things we need to describe about biology if we wanted understand it just from pure physics (how hard would it be to deduce and articulate mathematically). It's imcomplete, you can't explain concepts like agency with the strong nuclear force or a Lorentz transformation!
Let's say, how and why a 'self-sustained' system has to seek and find other system to keep sustaining itself? Why does it do that? How that comes to be?
@@m3rify The last question u put is a Turing machine like behavior. This channel purposefully avoids many such paradigms. His criticisms are as though we're stuck to Rene Descarte's defination of Machine!
@@m3rify
Because entropy.
@@aniksamiurrahman6365 Would you want to elaborate why is a 'Turning Machine like' behavior?
It's not just complexity (which makes the system just immensely difficult to reduce), it's recursiveness, which makes the system essentially irreducible. As someone stated in a comment above: "Beyond obvious pragmatic limits, there is the fact that recursive systems have intrinsic computational irreducibility. This is made manifest in Gödel’s work in formal logic and Turing’s halting problem in computer science. These are proven facts - some questions have undecidable answers, and related directly to systems which process themselves."
All natural phenomena are ultimately a part of physics, but this does not in any way imply that our current knowledge of reality or even the paradigms in which we are used to work with are in any way suitable to understanding phenomena as complex as life, evolution or adaptation, the dynamics of social interactions and so on. Certainly specific parts can be investigated with standard methods, like transport phenomena through cellular membranes, the mechanism of photosynthesis, population dynamics in various environments, but there is obviously a very big leap in going from these parts to the whole which is a living organism or a society. Clearly there is no point in picking on Newton, as the phenomenon of life is far beyond the program of classical physics and quite possibly even beyond the current paradigm of quantum mechanics. More so, the "reductionist" approach is rather anachronistic at this point and not really an all-pervasive presence anymore within the physics community. It has its place, but also its limits of applicability. As the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Phillip Anderson expressed quite beautifully, "more is different".
Thanks for your comment and well-reasoned critique, I genuinely appreciate it :)
1. What do you mean by 'all natural phenomena are ultimately apart of physics'? Do you mean to say that everything that happens in the universe can ultimately be expressed in the language of physics, and really at the smallest level, quantum mechanics?
If so, I will disagree on the principle that we are limited beings not Laplace's demon. Maybe in a few centuries time we could build a computer to simulate organisms using the Schrödinger equation and perfectly predict what happens to it, up to quantum randomness.
But we don't have such a tool. We need a philosophy of science that can work right now - one that can be used to make scientific progress with the tools we actually have. There is no point pondering about supercomputers or trying to be Laplace's demon.
More importantly, there is still no organism in this picture. Predicting where atoms end up is not doing biology, like I said in the video.
2. I wasn't just picking on Newton, although I didn't have time to articulate the full argument. Lee Smolin argues quite convincingly in Time Reborn that the Newtonian paradigm still dominates physics today even in GR and QM.
We still have (probabilistic) state spaces, (probabilistic) laws that govern the system and boundary conditions are required to make any sense of experimental data. This picture is still very similar to Newton's.
Plus there are some questions we cannot answer with QM that we do seriously want to answer in biology - namely 'why these laws?' In biology, we ask all the time why an organism is the way that it is (e.g. why does a newt look the way it does). But you can't explain why the Schrödinger equation exists in the first place with QM alone. You need something else. Quoting Smolin (p.250, Time Reborn):
“Cosmological questions such as 'Why these laws?' and 'Why these initial conditions?' cannot be answered by a method that takes the laws and initial conditions as input [like QM or GR]. The remedy must be radical, involving not just the invention of a new theory but a new method and hence a new kind of theory.”
See also: arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378
3. The reductionist approach is anachronistic, we agree on that. But physicists are still spouting it today. Sabine's book was published just this year, which I quoted at the start of the video. Sean Carroll argued much the same in The Big Picture (2016) basically saying everything is physics, and the rest is just our imagination. But a useful imagination - he calls it 'poetic naturalism.'
This is not a good approach for doing science, as I already said in point 1. Sure it might not have an all-pervasive presence as much as it did, but it still exists, hence why I made the video.
@@SubAnima
1. This point is largely about semantics, but what I mean is that everything happening in the Universe is ultimately a physical phenomenon, from elementary particles scattering on each other to a newt crawling on a shore and thinking newty thoughts. But this doesn't mean in any capacity that the former (elementary particles scattering) necessarily implies the latter (the newt and its newty thoughts) or that it would even make sense to attempt doing that. A large part of the mechanics and functions of biology really boils down to quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and thermal phenomena, but it is nowhere implied that the way we understand these fields today can explain the whole picture of a living organism, or that they will ever be able to do so. Uncovering the whole picture is the point of research and of the scientific method, but it is nowhere implied that the tools and methods we have developed in the present day are sufficient, just as the tools and methods of the XVIIth century weren't adequate for the discoveries of the early XXth century. The only thing that can really be done in this regard is to keep trying different things and see what eventually works.
2. Clearly some of the simpler aspects of reality can be approximated sufficiently well through differential equations subject to boundary conditions. I wouldn't necessarily call this a Newtonian paradigm outside of the specific fields that are "classical". Differential equations and boundary conditions can mean very different things in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics itself is presently understood as an approximation of a broader theory, namely quantum field theory. The latter is quite powerful in some specific regards, but is still very far from answering questions that are much, much simpler than the origin of life or really the physics behind many aspects of biological organisms, specifically the newty thoughts. Some physical theory will one day encompass the phenomenon of life as well, but that day may well be very far away and that theory might very well look as strange to our present minds as the squiggles of today would look to a scholar of the 1600s.
3. Everything is indeed physics, but I think that one of the points Sean was trying to make in that book is that you cannot reduce all of physics to elementary particles and their interactions. It's also really dependent on what crowds you hang out with. In condensed matter physics, nuclear physics or really any situation where you have many bodies undergoing strong mutual interactions, you won't make it very far with a reductionist approach.
Any argument that poses biology and its electrochemical nature as 'beyond physics' in any way other than as a delineation for the sake of linguistics just doesn't seem grounded to me. If your point is that the two shouldn't be used interchangeably in conversation that's fine, but the study of biology as it exists today wouldn't exist without advanced physics research over the past 300 years if not more. The study of electromagnetic fields is almost solely responsible for our knowledge of medical imaging, bio-electric interactions, and molecular biology. Cells dividing is easily explained through molecular physics, specifically M Phase and mitosis, which we again would not know about without the atomic and molecular physics research that came before.
So much medical tech was basically happened upon because of either atomic or astronomic research, for example research into EM fields has helped us understand HOW BIRDS NAVIGATE for migration. That is something we NEVER, not in a million years would have figured out if we didn't have advanced knowledge of how individual electrons in a molecule can affect its behavior and alter the entire system its interacting with. As others have said, its a valid difference to defend in the sake of conversational communication, but thats as far as it goes. @@SubAnima
@@roughlyadequate6165You didn't touch any of the fundamental parts of biology.
Physics didn't create biology btw. Chemistry and biology existed way before physics did. Physics didn't change anything fundamental about these things at all. It simply boosted it's understanding through making the reason behind physical phenomena be examined.
@@WeebSlayer71 I don't think you understand the conflation between language and the actual physical truth of reality. None of these physical structures rely on our nomenclature to define them, they exist without us. 'Physics' is just the words for our study of the FUNDAMENTAL building blocks of our universe. There is no biological structure that isn't comprised of particles, and we are not capable of truly understanding the concept we define as 'biology' without understanding the underlying structures that make it possible. Your assertion that physics isn't the oldest form of science is debatable, as most of the oldest ruins found on this planet are calendars that perfectly track the sun and moon. Babylonians are known to have heavily studied the stars, there was also Pythagoras in Mesopotamia. Even before that was the study of math and physics in the Indus Valley 4thM BCE. Most of the greatest medical research advancements right now are powered by atomic levels of understanding in protein acid interactions.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Indeed, many fascinating phenomena can only be appreciated from larger perspectives, but that doesn't change the fact: at the end it's all physics.
So, I wouldn't say "biology can't be reduced to physics", I would phrase it as "biology is not useful when reduced to physics".
The movement of the atoms does depend on the shape of the box, but only because of electromagnetic interactions with the walls of said box, so a simulation of the fundamental particle interactions is sufficient to reproduce reality. Ignoring top-down causation will indeed make us miss out on more interesting explanations, but it won't change the outcome of the simulation. The universe doesn't care about top-level laws, it only evolves through its fundamental interactions.
I would rephrase it to: "It's not practical to reduce biology to physics."
Actually it's not even practical to reduce chemistry to physics, because every system of more than a few atoms takes like forever to calculate. That doesn't mean though that it is not possible. We _know_ that every chemical process can be described using quantum mechanics, we just don't have the computational power to actually do it.
Behind all the gobbledygook anti-reductionists basically claim that the standard model of particle physics is incomplete, that it doesn't describe all interactions that happen on energy scales that are relevant for biology and other higher level sciences. The problem is that they have zero evidence for this claim and also do not propose any extension or alternative that goes beyond magic. It is pseudo-science at best and mysticism at worst.
I think many anti-reductionists do this because they are overwhelmed by the exponentially growing complexity when going from physics to chemistry, from chemistry to biology, and from biology to social sciences, which admittedly also hurts my brain when just thinking about it. Some may even believe that opposing reductionism will safe the idea of free will. This video actually borrows one argument from the free will debate by claiming that the inability to predict decisions is proof that it is fundamentally impossible.
PS: I actually had to laugh at the example with the movement of atoms, as to completely ignore that the box also is made of particles (and hence must the part of the model) in a way is quite similar to how quantum physicists tend to ignore that a measurement device also is a quantum object and thus should be part of the model. xD
I think clarifing what we mean by physics is important here. If we just mean 'reality' then the matter becomes tautological: of course biology, a part of reality, is encompassed by the whole of reality.
But if we mean a particular science that generates a set of descriptions of certain phenomena, then there is space for many questions.
I think the point of the video is to challenge, the attitude that the descriptions, methods, and assumptions brought about by physics as a science can be applied to biology, it being a different phenomenon than that studied by physics.
@@doctorinternet8695This issue would make sense, but I would say physics, by definition, is the science studying the most fundamental phenomena of reality, therefore as you say it encompasses biology. The "certain phenomena" that physics studies are just literally all phenomena. If there was any phenomenon in biology that can't be reduced to physics, this would mean that the physical theory is incomplete and this new phenomenon would have to be added into it. But there is no evidence at all for such a phenomenon to exist.
@@doctorinternet8695 By "physics" I mean the fundamental mechanics or particle interactions as described by the standard model and QFT. That is the only 'reality', everything else emerges from it.
Systems larger than a few atoms will indeed start getting out of hand and become too complex to simulate as mentioned by @NeovanGoth making other perspectives much more practical.
I think the video does know this (from remarks such as "there are no new forces involved"), it's just a bit misleading is all. It doesn't clearly acknowledge that all biological phenomena are emergent from the fundamental laws of physics, and that it's just a matter of extracting meaningful top-level explanations for us humans to learn from.
@@japar107you fail to realize chemistry causes physics just the same way physics causes chemistry. Physics is not by definition the study of the most fundamental, it is concerned with a specific set of simplified system dynamics. Fundamental is not actually meaningful if you read up on the philosophy of fundamentalism.
with sufficient information, you can express the top-down causes as bottom-up causes. the problem is not anything that can't be fundamentally described in terms of physics; it just requires so much information to create that description that it's more practical, efficient, helpful, accurate, etc. to model biology, sociology, etc. in their own terms rather than in terms of physics. that's how i see it
It's all about levels of abstraction. By your logic, high-level languages like python aren't just machine language because we can't understand them by just reading the generated machine code. Which makes no sense
I can already see a flourishing UA-cam channel. I like the new insight, the editing where you really show your inspiration aka source and show us how it all relate to each other. You definitely set new standard for including source material in a video format when discussing idea.
Thanks so much John!
If physics is the study of an existence of anything at all, and biology operates within this existence then biology must be reducible to physics. This entire video boils down to the definition and scope of what physics is. In my opinion physics is an understanding of the states our universe can be in and how the universe transitions from state to state. Biology must be just physics.
Physics cannot explain state transition at the fundamental level nor at complex macroscopic levels sufficiently. For microscopic phenomenon, quantum uncertainty becomes a problem. For complex macro phenomenon, computability becomes a problem. Someone might make the case but in principle complex systems are deterministic, but that's a stupid argument. No computer other than existence itself can simulate such a system given the time and space constraints. In other words, to simulate what a bunch of house flies will do, it's easier to just observe rather than compute every molecule of the house flies + environment.
@@abhishekshah11 I agree. That’s why biology is very useful. We take the computation that the universe (or in the way you put it “existence”) is, and then compress it. These compressions are abstractions and they work for making calculations. However they are subject to chaos and don’t predict perfectly accurately forever. These compressions are depended on scale for sure so that is why they break down when the scale changes and why it’s not useful to know quantum mechanics if your trying to do heart surgery. Biology must be just physics… but we still must study biology ofc
@@abhishekshah11 also there are two modes of thinking here. I’m assuming that “physics” is the study of what is. So there is a separation between “what is” and the models we use in physics to define “what is”. Our models break down but “what is” is still just “what is” operating however it does. In this sense biology must just break down to “what is”, which is my definition of physics
Physics can explain something up until the point where it becomes alive and determines its own function. After that the topology of the landscape is no longer static and it becomes very hard to reduce things to laws. Biology and maybe psychology can explain this stuff from a top down perspective while physics and chemistry can help from a bottom up perspective, but I don't blame him for being annoyed by reductionists who value their perceived superiority over making actual progress.
I'm sure physicists find the same reductionist argument from math reductionist tedious so it's always bewildering when they make it themselves.
@@juliawilliams1355 I think that physics can explain even the most complex of phenomena such as life. However it’s not useful with current technology because it’s incomputable. Imagine a computer powerful enough to simulate some creature to the most fundamental physical unit. The biological behaviors exhibited could be explained by the physical laws that govern those units. However, our understanding of these laws at a macroscopic level is still called biology, but can definitely be reduced to physics (even if the physics is unknown). The idea that there is some emergent force that has influence on macroscopic phenomena directly would suggest some sort of “god-like” intervention the top down explanation might make more sense to humans but doesn’t necessarily mean it is the cause behind the effect.
Spirits are real, atoms are just their legos
Based
Liked just out of spite for the dogmatic, arrogant physicalists.
[4:59] you are conflating an embryo for an atom, but a embryo is made of atoms. If you were to zoom in on each of the atoms in the embryo you would find that they all follow the rules of physics. Just because they are in an embryo it does not change the rules of physics. So now lets say that the machine applies its software by the atom (not an arbitrary system of atoms) then you could simulate an embryo. It would not be practical but it would be possible.
And the "self revolution" of DNA is also possible to simulate. DNA is made of atoms. in order to simulate it evolving accurately you would need a lot more simulated then just the organism.
3:26 "WWI... can't be reduced to physics without making our explanations meaningless." Could be more accurately worded, "Can't be reduced to physics without taking more time and computational energy than will ever be realistically available."
Just because we don't have the resources to predict everything from the bottom up doesn't mean that everything isn't actually being caused mechanistically from the bottom up. Obviously, because The Flesh is weak and can only dig up so much silicon to produce so many computers, we need multiple scientific disciplines to span multiple levels of abstraction in order to make sense of the universe at large. But that isn't because of the way the universe works, that's just the limitations of our meatware. Just because the only computer capable of calculating the future of the universe is the exact universe itself doesn't make the universe non-deterministic in any way.
This is now a purely religious claim. If it is impossible to determine that the universe is a machine, yet we still hold to the unwavering assumption that the universe is a machine, then we are not doing science anymore. Moreover, we should embrace considering other ways of looking at the universe that are non-mechanistic.
@@SubAnima I'm just not sure what a "non-mechanistic" view actually is supposed to mean. You seem to agree at multiple points during your video that the only thing standing in the way of mechanistic perspectives are the physical limitations of observation and calculation. See user @DANGJOS, their comment sums my own perspective exactly. And so do your own comments at multiple points, specifically after 8:40. I'm not saying that the only tool we need, as humans, to understand the universe, is Physics. Like you say, we are just apes. We can only physically construct a finite amount of computers, and we can barely keep them cool enough to simulate astrophysical phenomena, relatively simple and reduceable compared to biological phenomena. But that isn't the claim of mechanistic reductionism.
The claim isn't that physics, an earthly/human/academic/scientific institution, is a tool we should be able to expect will emergently recreate and perfectly explain every higher order scientific discipline one day, and so therefore those disciplines are of no real utility, mere abstract thought games or something. The claim is that the processes that physics attempts describe are at the root of all other higher order scientific disciplines. That, given a hypothetically infinite resource of correct observational data about each particle in the universe and well cooled computational power, they *could* be emergently reverse engineered by brute force from lower order laws. It is understood that those conditions are a fantasy, and that in order to understand life on earth we are going to need to look at it from every level of abstraction available, I'm certainly not disputing that at all. Just... the universe doesn't care about our models, or our limitations that prevent us from producing perfectly accurate models. In fact, I don't necessarily believe such perfectly accurate models can possibly exist. I think it's reasonable to assume that the only thing capable of perfectly modeling the universe is the actual, totally unreduced, universe itself.
This seems like an overexaggeration of what reductionism / determinism are suggesting, mostly out of... wounded pride, I guess? I think it's fairly obvious to anyone who argues for reductionism that once something is constructed out of a bunch of small particles, that new construction sort of "takes on a life of it's own", but what I think you're missing is that now, you're not looking at how one individual thing interacts but what happens when a whole bunch of things are clumped together in a fairly specific way. Physicists certainly understand that when discussing quantum physics vs. classical physics, but they'd also argue that a sufficiently complete model of a molecule at a "quantum level" would behave almost exactly like a higher-level model of it. (More accurately actually, though not in a meaningful way.) It doesn't then follow that quantum physicists are "superior scientists" who will eventually subsume all of physics into their own domain, because trying to model everything like that would be absurd; complex to the point of impossibility. The same idea applies here, suggesting that someone _could_ model a biological organism through physics doesn't mean it'd be worth doing or that biologists aren't just as important as physicists are. (You said yourself that you're not arguing for some "other force".)
Correct. Anti-reductionists basically introduce magic because quantum mechanics is really hard to calculate.
@@NeovanGothExcept his position is even more strange since apparently he doesn't even do that, as he does not want to argue for any "other force". This leaves a completely contradictory position, where he says that biological organisms are entirely composed of particles described by physics, yet the organism as a whole can not be explained by physics.
@@happyduck1 That's exactly what I meant with "magic". ;) They are basically proposing the existence of _something_ supernatural that _somehow_ gives certain complex constructs of particles (like living beings) properties that can't be derived from laws of nature, neither known nor unknown.
In Judaism this is called "rûaḥ" (רוּחַ), which translates to "breath of life" or "spirit of life", as in Genesis 2:7, which says: "And God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."
This "rûaḥ" isn't a physical thing, it's some kind of divine force that can have an effect on the physical world, but is not part of the physical world.
Of course modern scientists wouldn't call it "supernatural" or a "divine force". Instead, they don't define it _at all_. They just claim that not everything we can observe can be reduced to laws of nature, and that's it. Don't ask, just believe! ;)
Physics is useless when reduced to math.
And math is useless when reduced to logic.
And logic is useless when reduced to philosophy.
I wounded not only your pride, but your life.
Stop making non-sequitur arguments in scientific discourse, you genious.
@@NeovanGothI would like to hear what you have to say about quantum decoherence? Is it still magic? Do you put the word magic to everything that is counter Intuitive to you?? Does reality care about if you like it being computational, determenistic and reductionalistic?? You absolute fool... If no entirely new laws can be introduced you wouldn't have your beloved classical physics and locality so stop the reductionalistic bullshit.
Hey, I am a graduate student in physics. Thanks for some insightful biology content. Definitely lead me to develop lot of curiosity in biology. But I would like to suggest that there are many improvements that physics has been making. What you mentioned in the video regarding the box is something that is usually covered in Boundary conditions in phyiscs and is an integral part of the explaination. And there are defintely theories in development using large scale boundary conditions as a new perpective especially in astronomy. Ofcourse the theories are in their infancy. Plus understanding complex structures via metabolism first approaches are also being considered to understand how life survives in ever increasing entropy timelines.
I would argue that physics is more fundamental as is has the power to explain all phenomena bigger than it, but the same can the said for biology, since physics is far more precise, by many order of magnitude. I would argue that other sciences study the macro patterns or emergent phenomena coming from physics, that are not evident in the governing equations. The study of these emergent phenomena is also important .
This video is interesting and well put together, but ultimately I disagree with the thesis. For instance, towards the end, the phase is not "literally infinite", just very large - it is bound by the space the organism lives in. Just because we can't describe it doesn't mean it couldn't be described in principle, especially as states are discrete at the quantum level.
The talk of agency seemed imprecise and almost spiritual - how and when does the magical ability arise? Do single cells have it? Flies? Or only higher mammals? The outward appearance of individuality and agency does not lead so easily to them being fundamental.
As the gas example showed, physics can deal with top down causation. It seemed to me the author wants to divorce emergent properties from physics, but I see no reason to. Yes, the toolkit of biology may be practically more appropriate - and I am all for more interdisciplinary thinking. However, I would push to have physicists (and others) focus more on emergent, higher order complex systems, not draw a line between physics and biology. After all, there is but the natural world - our distinctions are arbitrary.
Many thanks for a great contribution to the discourse!
Hey thanks for the response and the nice words, even though you disagree. It makes me smile to get well-articulated critiques compared to heated polemics.
First, I disagree that the space is just 'very large.' There is a large amount of literature defending my claim that it can't be pre-defined [given in the sources doc in the description; see Kauffman (2014), Cortes et al. (2022) and Roli, Jaeger and Kauffman (2022)].
The problem is that the configuration space is always expanding, even at the quantum level - see section 4.1 of the Cortes paper (arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378).
More pragmatically, we can see that the 'space the organism lives in' could always expand. Perhaps an insect starts its life in some tree, it might then hop to a new tree, or get moved to another country by us humans and for all we know could get sent into space, possibly even to another planet. You'd have to include the whole universe in the model to get *all* possibilities, and at that point the organism has disappeared entirely as your model is too big to be useful and you are no longer doing biology.
Even then, we'd have no explanation for why those states were chosen over others. This is a question we like to ask in biology but not so much in physics. We are constantly asking "why do insects have feature X, why do they live in habitat Y, how did it get to be this way?" Physics cannot answer the question of "why these laws?" which is why I lean on the side of drawing a line between the questions physics (in its current form) can answer and the questions biology is interested in. Distinctions are arbitrary yes, but there are right and wrong tools for the job. See chapter 4 of Lee Smolin's Time Reborn for discussion on this.
Second, agency sounds spiritual because teleology was jettisoned from 'science' during the scientific revolution particularly by Newton and especially Descartes. See my video: ua-cam.com/video/YV5ZjAZGw4Y/v-deo.html
It need not be so spiritual-sounding (if that's how it came across, apologies) and can be easily naturalised. See Chapter 12 "Naturalised goals" in Organisms, Agency and Evolution by Denis Walsh (doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316402719 ) And yes, agency exists from cells all the way up. No consciousness required. Walsh defends this quite well in my opinion, it is a great read, even if you still disagree afterwards.
Nonetheless, thanks for watching and commenting!
@@SubAnima Many thanks for taking the time to respond and pointing me to more cool resources!
The concept of an expanding phase space making it undefinable is very intriguing - my only immediate worry is that such an expanding problem would apply to explaining non-living things, too? The self-organisation feels like a stronger argument than the phase space.
You've also made me think more about teleology. My background is funnily enough going from physics to neuroscience research, so I've been primed to be extra sceptical of the "why these laws" question. I can now see what you meant a lot better!
My final qualm is about the importance of "the organism" as a unit of analysis. I agree in a final analysis the whole universe would need to be included from a physics point of view, but don't see that as an immediate fundamental problem. However, if as you say we are to explain biology - and hence organisms - you're right physics may not be the right tool, giving us either "basic blocks only" or "literally everything there is" as explanatory levels.
Thanks again for your work and pushing me to consider things from a different point of view!
@@marcosamuelfabus1044 Great to hear I've at least got you thinking!
1. Yes you make a good point on expanding phase spaces outside biology. It could well be applied to physics and I imagine that the case of the organism may be applied in many new ways outside its original domain. Perhaps even physics might rebuild itself inspired by biology. Crazy I know, but it is what Smolin says could indeed happen in light of Physics' inability to answer "why these laws?"
In that case, the boundaries of physics and biology may blur in a new way with biology actually being the more 'general' science. I don't think I'll make just that claim as this video is controversial enough, but it's interesting to think about.
2. That's interesting you have a physics -> neuroscience background. I would highly suggest reading Evan Thomson's work on of all of this then - particularly embodied cognition and enactivism. Might ease you into the idea of non-spooky teleology. psycnet.apa.org/record/2014-19965-007
3. Throughout the 20th century, biologists stopped studying the organism - we reduced it down to genetics and biochemistry. Some, like nobel prize winning biologist François Jacob said that: "On n'interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires" (we no longer study life in our laboratories [just chemistry basically])
Many are now calling for a "Return of the Organism" into biology. There is even a very cool group called ROTO-RUB after this: rotorub.wordpress.com/
And here is an intro to what their group does: www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contributions/putting-the-organism-back-into-biology/
@@SubAnimaIMO the problem is that you basically introduce magic just because calculating quantum mechanics is really hard. If I'm not mistaken, this is based on the idea of string emergence; that complex systems somehow can develop behavior that by any means cannot be described by looking at a more fundamental level. As far as I know, there is zero evidence that strong emergence exists, and not even a proposal of how it could work. It's easy to say "WWI cannot be explained by the movement of atoms", because the movement of atoms clearly would be no practical or even remotely sensible way to do this. It's much harder though to explain what else is required, so it always ends up at magic.
@@NeovanGothYou're the only one who brought up anything magical here my guy.
Read the linked paper instead of drowning in ignorance lol.
The fact that I'm an organism with infinite possibilities and that I can attempt to conceive a law by which I can describe all of them is already mind blowing enough
I think the framing of this video is far more reductive than the idea that biology can be explained by physics. We know for certain that all that's really happening when a protein interacts with a molecule is just electrostatic forces acting between them. Sure, we don't really reduce biology down to physics in every application, because something that can be simply explained by one biological rule needs thousands of physics equations to represent. Imagining that biology can't work as physics because cells act "on their own" is entirely glossing over all the chemical energy released as mechanical forces through metabolic processes.
I really don't think anyone has ever considered that there's no regulation within an organism the way you're describing with the "bottom-up" perspective. All those regulative processes that happen in the top-down perspective are only there because of other bottom-up processes that are made to regulate.
Sure, when you think about a whole organism only in terms of each individual reaction between atoms, then you're easily going to get lost. Nobody is TRYING to do that, but the point is that it IS possible. Another fun thing about turing machines is that any system upon which a turing machine can be built means that that system is turing complete. Because we can arrange atoms into a turing machine, atoms are turing complete and can be simulated by any other turing machine. I think the main point people are trying to make with "biology can be explained with physics" is that fundamentally, anything can be calculated given enough processing power.
Exactly. There are bottom-up processes that aren't caused by top down processes. But there is no top-down process that isn't caused by bottom-up processes
great channel , dont stop posting your amazing work .
cant wait for your channel to blow up on youtube.
Thank you so much, it means a lot! Next video is about halfway done, but im taking a break for the holidays. Should be up mid-Jan :))
@@SubAnima wow , can't wait to watch the new video .
I am sure someday the youtube algorithm will work in your favor .
Another thought provoking video. I don't agree with 100% of what is in there, but some nice concepts to conceptually chew on.
Thanks, glad it at least made you think! I'm sure plenty of people are gonna disagree with it and that's fine :). Just wanted to articulate the anti-reductionist point of view and put it out there.
I feel your conflating metaphysics with epistemology, knowledge does not change how things are. perhaps we can't reduce biology down to physics from a useful perspective or easy to understand one, but metaphysically it states that biology is just complex physics, whether we can understand it or not
im loving your channel please give us more! i like how deep you go and not just the surface info, related concepts and implications and unknowns all help so much!
Beautiful video as always SubAnima! I fully agree with this point and was recently talking to a friend about this. There is a quote by Rutherford that says that all of science is physics or stamp collecting. And it is a ridiculously ignorant quote. Loved your exposure and editing skills with the video. Unfortunately youtube didn’t show me your upload on time, hence the late positive feedback. Great content as always and can’t wait to see more!
Thanks so much for the ongoing support! The Rutherford quote is indeed a classic (anti-classic?) :)
Anyone could agree that the behavior of a fluid can be reduced to the laws of physics. If there's a swirling sinkhole and a bubbling source in fluid dynamics, both can also be reduced to physics. However, seeking to understand the process from larger structures like vortexes is a more efficient approach. Similarly, computers can solve differential equations and operate on the basis of binary calculus. But no mathematician would prefer to solve a differential equation from the perspective of binary calculus.
So, the utility of changing perspective does not negate the ultimate causality of what is observed. What makes biology irreducible to physics is that perspective itself is a causality. As Roger Penrose has already stated, the quantum world is deterministic, and the classical world is too. But it is observation, the collapse of the state vector, the interpretation from the quantum world to the classical world perspective that causes the break in determinism. So, the biological world can be reduced to physics, yes, but only when no one is looking.
However, in contrast to what has been said now, neural networks can be summoned as witnesses in this trial. Artificial intelligence, trained to adjust the weights of its signal exchange network, may be able to recognize figures, the visual ensemble as a whole, regardless of the integral components of the figure. But neural networks are composed of subunits that follow deterministic laws.
Weight adjustments are governed by a model algorithm of rewards and penalties. The question is: can our subjective experience of pain and pleasure be reduced to a rewards and penalties algorithm? Does the existence of a rewards and penalties algorithm spontaneously generate an experience of pain and reward? These subjective experiences are called qualia. Qualia are at the core of the perspective observation and may be the essence of what in biology cannot be reduced to physics.
life is still just atoms moving according to the laws of physics though. Of course we need multiple different fields of science to understand it and study it- but thats no reason to imply life actually violates thermodynamics or otherwise breaks the laws of physics.
Yet anti-reductionists believe that life isn't just atoms moving according to the laws of physics, but that there is (to take the example from the video) a box that for some reason isn't made of atoms and hence can't be part of physical models. What this box is made of then and how this helps to do science, they do not explain. It's basically magic. Which is why anti-reductionism IMO is pseudo-science at best, and mysticism at worst.
Biology is an extension of physics, period.
We can't understand biology in it's entirety via physics and we never* will.
However, we can already understand some of it via chemistry, which is an extension of physics.
If chemistry can explain biology and physics can explain chemistry, then that means physics MUST be able to explain biology.
It doesn't matter if we can't describe biology via physics. It's theoretically possible to simulate biology by simulating physics and that's all we need.
If one we're to make a complete physics simulation and somehow was able to render it into an image we can understand, everything would work as expected.
And by expected, I mean that we could, if we somehow managed to transport every bit of information about a human into that simulation, describe that human through biology, for example.
The important part is that the human can function without separately modeling any other scientific fields, such as biology.
You can't simulate physics by simulating biology, though. You'd get a higher level simulation that's actually useful for the field of biology, but it certainly wouldn't help with physics.
And, actually, we can understand some parts of biology through physics. Like, say, air leaving your lungs when your diaphragm relaxes.
And also, yes, we can actually model what you'd decide to do with a screwdriver, because, well, at that point, we'd have to model you. And that includes your brain. The impulses in your brain are probably deterministic, but it's not like we can understand them and we likely never will.
The ONLY problem with the reductionist argument that I can think of is if atoms aren't deterministic. We don't know that for sure, though, so we can't rule out reductionism.
Also, there's a lot more at play than atoms simply moving:
- Electrical charges. (did you forget neurons exist?)
- Bonds between atoms. (you have to be joking when you're comparing a box with freely floating, unidentified atoms to biology being reduced to physics)
- Energy stored within molecules. (nope, atoms don't move on their own, but the external force you're talking about sure is there!)
- The properties of the atoms and the molecules they make up. (just look at the periodic table and tell me you can adequately describe atoms with a box of bouncing circles)
- Quantum physics. (which we don't fully understand yet)
You've thoroughly mocked physics in this video by completely forgoing most of what makes physics what it is.
This is not educating anyone. It's spreading misinformation and unless you somehow convince me otherwise, that's my stance.
Though, knowing myself, if you were to present actual evidence that isn't just "we can't describe it yet and look how unrelated these things seem" then I'd probably believe you.
This feels like deliberately missing to point to be contrarian
Collective intelligence, chaos, above and below the phase change things are predictable but the in-between space is not. The boundary conditions are just as important as the agent, and somehow collectively matter organizes itself, and once organized the constraints on the organization leads to cycles and then to sensing, and expands the collection.
Really great video and great channel.
Looking forward to the next one about Robert Rosen's mathematical argument.
Thanks! Been tossing up whether to do a video going into the details of Rosen’s argument. It’s definitely on the list. Hopefully I get around to it ;) If not, there are some brilliant interviews about Rosen on the Dialectical Systems UA-cam page, you should check out!
the quality of your videos is amazing. such relevant discussion presented with excelent arguments in this one!
great videos! keep em coming!
Nice video. Although, I'm not completely fond of your attempt to degrade physics. Indeed, physics is more fundamental than biology, exactly because deals with lower levels of reality. Even chemistry is more fundamental than biology. (Math and philosophy are at the very bottom). Yes, there are emergent properties in the universe, when a system is made of many and complex elements (like a living organism). Yes, these new properties can't be fully comprehended while only having in mind the properties of their parts. That can be observed in physics itself - gravity can't be explained on small scales (or dark energy for example). When you introduce new elements to a system, new properties emerge ("Merely quantitative differences, beyond a certain point, pass into qualitative changes"), which are not present on smaller scales. But there are 2 direct contradictions with what you said: 1. Organisms (and their atoms) are not so strictly separate from their environment, as you present them, it's not so clear where an organism ends and it's surrounding environment starts, they're not isolated systems. 2. Organisms still ultimately obey entropy - earth receives certain amound of energy from the sun, we (people and all living creatures) use it in all sorts of different ways (sometimes even store it in batteries), live our lives, grow, interact with each other and the planet, but on the end, sooner or later, the exact same amount of energy is irradiated away from earth in the form of heath, and contributes to the total dispersion of energy and the increasing entropy of the universe, just like any other celestial body.
Thanks! I'd pass it back to you and say that I'm not completely fond of your attempt to say that physics is more fundamental than biology.
What do you mean by 'more fundamental'? Sure it deals with smaller things but why should that make it the more fundamental science?
Surely we agree that there are phenomena in biology that can't be explained with the tools of physics (as the video laid out, e.g. self-organisation) and there are phenomena in physics that can't be explained by biology (e.g. quantum mechanics). That's totally fine and is why we have multiple sciences. But one cannot be reduced into the other. They're complementary tools, which *together*, give us useful insight into the world.
Responding to my alleged contradictions:
1. I never claimed that organisms are separate from their environment, I believe quite the contrary, the environment plays a huge role. But organisms clearly have a self-producing aspect that is not explored by DEs. That is the point I was trying to make.
2. I never said organisms do not obey "entropy" (I suppose you mean the second law of thermodynamics?). Again quite the contrary, organisms have very interesting thermodynamic properties, which are being still being explored e.g. arxiv.org/abs/2204.09379
Perhaps you are referring to the title where I said biology 'can't be reduced to' physics. I meant that in a knowledge-making (epistemic) sense - physics cannot be used to explain biology completely. Of course, organisms still obey the laws of physics. No-one is claiming that they don't (at least, I don't know any modern day vitalists).
@@SubAnimaLove a theory of knowledge rebuttal to the claim that you were “degrading” physics.
There is a bizarre chauvinistic impulse in science and certain science enthusiasts to declare physics (or math) the only “real” field, and thereby claim that all others are mere offshoots.
I really appreciate how clearly you articulate the foundational differences in how the fields approach knowledge, and that all of them learn from each other but are not “mere derivatives” of each other.
Except, of course, philosophy is the only *real* field, since all others are mere splinters. That’s why it was titled the Philosophy of the Natural World! (/s)
@@SubAnima Us being unable to map out and properly describe the phase state of an organism and declaring of this, that biology can't be reduced to mere physical properties is kind of a logical fallacy. That the phase space is indefinite and thus can't be described is not true, because at every given moment it turns definite due to collapse of the wave functions of every atom being observed by it's neighbours. It is self containing and self limiting. Saying, that a function chart is impossible to be described, because it contains an indefinite amount of possibilities to be formed, looses it's meaning, once the function manifests out of its input values. Even if chaotic interferences and the movement at the edge of chaos can lead to vastly different results, it still stands, that it could be described and replicated. It's just very hard and unlikely. You are confusing ability and possibility. Our current we is unable to do it, thus declaring it impossible is not the right way. Even the top down self organisation aspect of life follows thermo dynamic laws. Organisms are kind of an "energetic-loop-bug", constantly sacrificing energetic values and creating entropic compensations for the amount of information and order that is stored in the organism. We can track the amount of energy going into an organism, how it is distributed, stored and used. We can observe the properties of proteins and how they function. (In one of your videos you claimed, that machines have to have "solid parts" and because proteins can be flexible and have different configurations they shouldn't be considered machine like seems like a wrongly applied axiom, that messes up the conclusion) It is possible to observe the genes, how they are translated and result in a cellular structure (I didn't say a specific) and how they add up in the complete organism. It could be possible to calculate the entropic and energetic gains of the DNA being unfolded etc. That we are not able to do so, doesn't mean it's impossible. In this we are forgetting, that everything, that describes natural laws is inherently physics, because physics just describes matter. The blood flow can be described by physics. We can see how fast it's moving, with which rhythm it's coming, the pressure it has. Why the body is doing with the blood what it's doing, is a different question, but even that can be described by physics, if you look at the correct places with the correct equipment. We can measure the amount of adrenaline. We can see how the g-protein changes its configuration, we can measure the phosphorylation states, we can measure the Ca2+ influx, we can measure the change of potential, we can see the heart and vein cells contract, we can see how the angiotensin is released and so on. If necessary we can even go further back than the adrenaline release, the light stimulus being received and translated into a picture, the areas where the picture is interpreted, a reaction is formed, the Sympathicus gets activated and so on. Only, because we are unable to fully grasp and describe it and thus replicate it, doesn't mean, it is impossible to deduce biology to physics. But nice video anyway.
Wouldn't the dependence of living organism to the laws of physics (or as you put it, it's obedience) make physics more fundamental than biology? I mean of course, one can debate and philosophy about what is meant and understood with any word under a given context (that's part of the fun of dialogue in the end), but I believe that the common connotations of the word are pretty clear thou. @@SubAnima
@@SubAnima Physics are more fundamental in the sense that physics can exist separately and independently from biology, though biology is dependent on more fundamental areas of science such as physics and chemistry to exist within our universe. If physics ceased to exist, biology would. If biology ceased to exist, physics would carry on in a lifeless universe.
Physics is very much more fundamental than biology. While it has proven of limited use to hold a reductionist view of the world, it is very much the case that emergent properties and chaos theory play into the different layers of complexity starting from the fundamental sciences like physics and going up in complexity to other sciences like biology. Biology CAN be reduced to physics, it's just more complex than we though and more mechanisms need to be taken into account. I don't think anyone disputes there is also top down influence in the world, even in a basic living being, let alone in complex ones like us that shape the world around us. That is the most basic definition of life, altho not all encompassing, the ability to shape resources around it and in it, to help it reproduce. And that includes the ability to adapt. So nobody is, to my knowledge, disputing that it's not just bottom up but also top down. Biology CAN be reduced to physics, it's just a lot more complicated than we originally thought. Hence why explaining everything as simply "atoms giggling" is so oversimplified that it is indeed comical :)
I discovered this channel a few days ago, and it has quickly become one of my favorites
We could theoricallly, however using only physics as a tool to study some biology areas such as taxonomy and animal behavior would be incredibly hard and overall inefficient.
What do you mean by we could "theoretically"?
@@SubAnima any biological process can be theoretically be explained through biochemistry (of how compounds interact with each other), then we can theoretically explain that chemistry with physical chemistry (of the different molecules & atoms/elements) then we can explain that with physics so therefore you can theoretically explain biological processes through physics.
The point SubAnima makes that it is fundamentally impossible to explain say animal behavior even with the most complex physical model, perfect knowledge of each particle, and practically infinite computing power. It sounds ridiculous, and srsly, I think it is. It is the needless introduction of magic while completely ignoring the knowledge that even small sets of simple rules can create staggering complexity given the right initial state.
I stumbled on your channel through "How not to think about cells" video. I'd say that I'm not convinced and would still lean towards reductionism. Would love to discuss this in person :) But I still like the channel and want to see more, because it brings a refreshing perspective that makes me think more on those things. Which I appreciate :)
As for the some anti-reductionism arguments. Taking WW1 as an example. Jiggling mass of atoms hitting other jiggling mass of atoms would explain everything. But when we are talking about WW1 we are talking about concepts created by humans on higher levels of reality. So for us equations explaining atoms behaviour are not an intuitive explanation. So we resort to all the mentioned higher level discussion of imperialism and nationalism.
So it seems to me like reduction to atoms should explain everything, but we then need to make a transition to bridge concepts from different levels of reality (atom-organism or WW1) or abandon the higher level altogether if it makes sense to do so in the given situation.
I see one issue with my reasoning, and that is, assumption of determinism of atom's behaviour. And well, it seems as if on a quantum level that is not how they actually behave (though I don't know enough about this Science, and thus I'm only considering it as a possibility). In that case, I wonder, if reductionism won't lead us in the long run to discover that life is probabilistic. And organisms behaving like they do not in accordance with the predetermined scenario, but rather mostly according to most likely scenarios, and sometimes, not the most likely.
I think that it is possible to justify the rules of chemistry whith quantum phisics as well as justifying the "rules" of biology with chemistry
Whenever you say it can’t be reduced down to physics, you probably are not reducing it enough.
It’s like physicists saying we found the smallest particle, only to rick ross themselves 30years later.
Physics is the rule and Biology an application of that rule you will never be able to dispute that.
But it makes little sense looking at biology with physics glasses on. That much I will admit.
Today, we don’t have to create our software with Machine code anymore, we have other language’s that work as a shortcut for all the stuff that Machine code can do.
But that still doesn’t mean that machine code can’t do the stuff that python can. In fact, fundamentally it is all the same.
Biology and Physics are not seperate, we created that separation. But looking at those seperate parts we created it is clear that physics can explain more phenomena going on in biology than biology can even attempt to explain what happens in physics.
If you learn physics you will inevitably be confronted with the whole spectrum of science.
Any other science class is way more isolated and the students shiver when they even hear the word "physics" because that is where the "crazy" one are. I think the only time I ever had some hint of physic in Biology class was when we talked about thermodynamics to understand the brownian motion of molecular sized objects. In my physics class we had a whole hall of fame tour with all the scientists form across the fields with signed graphs, pictures, best of and everything in between.
That is the way you should look at this.
Good video, but im disappointed that more research didn't go into this. I'd strongly suggest reading further into simulation and particularly molecular dynamics. The major limitation in this field is the astronomical computing power and phenomena that we have yet to understand. The real question is if we could ever reproduce and predict organism behavior if we had "complete" physics knowlege and unlimited computing power. It is mostly a theoretical question since it's pragmatically close to impossible
There's at least one thing that breaks Sabine Hossenfelder's quote: consciousness. It really is more than the sum of its parts, often called strong emergence. We know a lot of what brain cells do and we have no idea how or why consciousness emerge; and the more we know about brain cells the less likely it seems we'll ever have an answer.
I don’t think much can be said about consciousness. As crazy as it might first sound, I’ve come to be convinced that this concept doesn’t refer to anything (at least in the way you use it here to refer to something non-physical)
Much more importantly hard problem of consciousness,and specially the idea of how Artificial intelligence will link with this.
I usually reflection this argument when conflicted against reductionism to be end all be all for all situations.
The argument is as follows -
If an Artificial intelligence is made that is by some testing standards of any sort, consisting of consciousness and is deemed to be a " entity" just like humans are, then is it their mathematical model just formula for consciousness or is their structure making consciousness?
This to my concern leads to problem that everything is conscious cause you can run the model upon any mechanically device you may construct, be it digital computers to transistors of running water, gears to mere light Ray's used to compute and give response as well by help of some material interactions. And if possible then try purely with protons.
The point is the formula is what determined it all, and is people ready to accept that? Are people ready to accept a specific configuration of chairs and how turbulence between their structures by air at specific rates can generate conscious thoughts if done just right by most precise methods unknown to man, it's ridiculous but a idea lovely to sci fi hit the nerves of future generations.
To my concern it only tells us that verificationism may not always work out to give absolute truth like consciousness within some systems, inturn there being no way to determine consciousness in robots.
(PS : consciousness only means something related to being referred as "soul" or "qualia" or "integrated assembly of electrons." You call it smth else.)
We have significant traction on consciousness and are probably about to figure it out. These are respectively an "unfinished philosophy" paper with iffy physical interpretation and a technical details biology paper, but I think they're pretty core: look up "relativistic consciousness" and "consciousness depends on slow critical dynamics"
Then watch the critical brain hypothesis video from artem kirsanov
No it doesn't. There is zero evidence that strong emergence is required to explain consciousness, or even that strong emergence exists at all. It is basically the introduction of magic and not scientific.
It doesn't feel to me like you proved the point you were apparently trying to prove here. Yes, there are other useful frameworks, no one is denying that. When people say everything can be reduced to its parts, they just mean, like you said, that if only we had complete knowledge of the system, then we could predict every behaviour from bottom up. This is akin to saying that, if only you knew exactly how to unbreak the egg and had enough time to waste then you could, in principle, put it back together. Of course, no one is saying that is practically possible, but it is true nonetheless just as it is true that every higher aspect of this universe is just a consequence of the emergent properties of atoms
If we look to historical materialism we can see a corollary in that framework's conception of a contradiction. Two forces/phenomena acting on each other form the basis of each contradiction. In this way it's very easy to understand systems like biological organisms as described in this video, both an emergent whole and a series of parts that make it up. It's a more holistic view of things that will lead to better insight.
I recommend The Dialectical Biologist by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levin
It's a great book, I might make a video on dialectics specifically in the future :)
@@SubAnima wow, I'd love that!
An interesting thought: Mathematics also has an "indefinite phase space", thanks to Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
I wanna count on those things that look out to be not checked -
(Not exactly the same thing you said in video but what understood from it.)
1) "Organisms making themselves is not yet determined"
I already see this being a mistake for its not thought out far enough. We are still looking completely on naturalistic point of view, and arguably there exists nothing like "a function that generates itself."
Not to mention a combination of two functions that add and reduce the environmental information that exists equally or a combination of such functions leading to such pathways. Again the possibility makes it questionable that biological systems may just have significant amount of such criterions interacting with environment within themselves and outside to reproduce their own kind.
2) criterions may not exists (from the analogy of screw driver as a structure being used to conclude that it's function can be used to do alot of different stuff... However i argue it falls straight again for the same mistake which i guess i can summarize in one word, shortsightedness, I do not think this discredits you by any standards for we humans are fallible to error, even this criticism of specific key points that triggered my neurons to trigger my motor neuro- i shall stop this brackets.. -_-)
From what i get this on argues for what an organism can do is far vast and _free_ from what crude reductionism will lead to as a conclusion for next state achieved of the universe and it's constituents.
But that -
1. Firstly taps outside the naturalistic perspective for the while cause some may not actually accept crude naturalism to be end all be all. Some argue with idea of hard problem of consciousness and hence attempt to put meta physical criterions to allow _free will_ to be afloat, else physical states can be known to determine next move with better accuracy or precision than before.
2. There exists a necessity for a specific structure to commit indefinite tasks, is but not true from start. A screw driver for example, can't fly all on its own except Newtons law is violated by Nth time, and hence be next bird in zoologists textbooks, which may start writing on their own as some "automaton". (The book, which never had structural framework to actually do that.)
The idea of looking from Top to bottom as of looking stuff to mere atoms to my conception also is just non sensical and is much mistaken by physicts. The idea that you can understand and do science in much more simplicity than taking care of complex interactions of atoms for every organism forever takes out grand structural beauty and patterned interaction on macro level between structures of atoms which are the organisms like ants collaborating as a mighty nation (until the fire nation arrives 🤨🤨🤨)
This is but what i understood and had to say for its contradictory to my limited understanding as far as of now.
Top down causation does appear in physics. Boundary condition of an object determine the collective (i.e. acoustic) modes of the macro object, which determines how the atoms will move when the object is excited.
I think, the best argument here is the screwdriver, for which we can not compute all its future uses and therefore, we can not explain the world in terms of constituents of a screwdriver (and its surrounding). However, in order for making this into a real argument, one has to rigorously show that indeed, it is not possible to know all future use-types of a screwdriver. I can imagine something like an argument along the idea that each found use of a screwdriver does not lower the number of possible other uses (as with normal search algorithms), but instead increases it. And ofcourse screwdrivers being an analogy for proteins and other multi-purpose "inventions" of evolution. In other words, a rigorous proof is needed that the number of possibilities to arrange matter into living beings and "things" (with purposes) tends to increase over time.
And that is exactly the argument Stuart Kauffman has been making with his “TAP equation” arxiv.org/pdf/2204.14115.pdf
See also links in the sources doc :)
@@SubAnima Wow, thank you for the link! I will look into this; however, already from the start, I am a bit sceptical, because (while writing the first comment) I already thought to myself: That can probably not be shown rigorously, because life can go extinct or go through very narrow bottlenecks, where the number of possibilities to arrange matter into living beings (and "things") decreases instead of increases. Therefore, monotony can probably only be demonstrated within some rather strict boundary conditions... But I'll definitely look into the paper! Thanks a lot!
dude this is good stuff. I really thought this video had in the range of hundreds of thousands of views. nice one dude
Thanks so much!!
Great video! To me this video proves that materialism can't be considered a scientific theory of everything, including life, because it didn't put forward any evidence of biology and life in general. How do atoms come together in the exact amount to form a cell? How did the atoms form the boundaries they are in so they don't wiggle out of it? What is the formula for this?
Materialism perspective doesn't even explain laws in physics like gravity; how do atoms in space know that objects with mass must have certain amount of gravity if laws of physics are not some external force but just ultimately matter? How do those atoms form this law of gravity and other laws of physics?
What really bizar is to me that most philosophers and scientists in physics deduce from materialism that we don't have any free will.
Of course we are made of atoms but a human has like a thousand 'layers' of emerging properties, if not more, from just atoms and molecules.
*How is this not the most reductionist idea ever!*
dude
biology cannot be compared with Newtonian physics. You can't compare newtons theorems vs Jan van Ijeken's interpretations which was rather recent. Thi is so hypocritic
What do you think about Rupert Sheldrake's morphic fields?
I suppose I should rethink my plans to study internet culture by reducing it down to transistor switches and logic gates.
I think you make a lot of really good points on top down and bottom up causation, but I feel like the one thing that’s missing is that this doesn’t show that physics is not enough, rather it just shows that a piece of the physics puzzle is missing. We can’t fully understand everything through static models of physics, but that’s because nature is not static. Physics is still the fundamental building block of how everything works, it’s just that other fields use those building blocks and build different theories and mechanisms. Physics on it’s own may not be enough, but that does not mean that physics is not enough, rather I believe that more refers to the need to include a context that overseas the physics going on more accurately. Considering what we know about chemistry in the world as it is (uncertainty), it seems impossible to make a theory that is able to properly describe any system in any specific context without establishing the conditions of the system separately in order to have an accurate description of what’s going on. Ultimately though, the floor boards are still physics, and all you’re doing is tweaking what you do with that physics.
Great video, very thought provoking. You mentioned Turing, and the Halting Problem came to my mind... can it be considered an argument against reductionism in general?
Forget it, it was a silly question. Great video!
I think the halting problem ia definitely an argument against reductionism. As well as the greater concept that is godels incompleteness theorem.
Both pojnt to the limitations of our description of reality, and therefore, our ability to reduce one phenomenon to a set of descritions
The problem of immanence states this in a more phylosophical way: we assume we a but a part of reality, embeddes in it. We are immanent beings, as opposed to transcendent ones. So our perspective will always be limited, and no set of descriptions will apply yo everything
@@doctorinternet8695 An undecidable problem can emerge from a system that operates according to deterministec rules, and there's no contratiction with that. If the system is large enough, it can have a non-deterministic "feel" at the macro levels. On the other hand I'm not familiar with the problem of immanence. I'll look into that.
amazing stuff! could you do a video on the evolution / origin of decision-making and goal-seeking?
i love your channel ! Great job :D
When you perform a physics experiment, the result ALWAYS defies predictions in some small way. The fact that we call this "noise" and choose to characterize the broader trend is a product of of reductionism. However, we know in physics that 2 or more trends can come together to make a new trend that could never be expressed in terms of just one of the trends. I think this is why we see emergent chemical phenomena, and I see no reason why this can't produce emergent biological phenomena either.
What I find funny is that a lot of people reduce molecules to just a collection of atoms and that they’re “equal” to that collection of atoms, but in reality the atoms of a molecule actually behave differently from their free counterparts specifically because they’re part of the molecule. Their shapes and sizes and electronegativities/electropositivities are different according to the configurations of atoms they’re bound to and as such can’t be viewed without taking into consideration the molecule as a whole. Atoms in molecules don’t behave the same way they’d behave by themselves and the same applies to life with its numerously complex molecules and cells, where things like the laws of physics act as a building block but are not the totality of laws and logic that dictate the organism.
Even something like the second law of thermodynamics which many people view as a fundamental law for example, isn’t actually a fundamental law but one that emerges from the interactions of many parts, it’s a statistical law that emerges in a way similar to natural selection or numerous other emergent properties (like behaviors or other things), and what’s interesting is that an emergent law like that is vitally important to physics, in a way where you can’t talk about any structure in physics (like an atom for example) without taking it into account. So the reductionist view that you can just look at the most basic parts and figure everything out without taking into account new logic that emerges from the now greater whole I feel is a large misunderstanding of science that a lot of people unfortunately make.
I'd say an important concept for understanding the non-reducibility of biology to physics (and other similar situations) is supervenience. Kinda disappointed you didn't mention it, but the aspects you mentioned were interesting, too.
Also, I'd like to add that one phenomenon that first appears at the level biology but is not present in pure physics is the concept of digitally coded information. This exemplifies how there are levels to reality that add qualitatively new concepts despite operating entirely within the laws of the lower levels.
The possibility of "supervenience without entailment" or "supervenience without reduction" is contested territory among philosophers.
- Copied from Wikipedia
In principle, if you could perfectly predict the most fundamental units of reality, then its all deterministic and everything is reducible. But I believe physicists have demonstrated that there is true randomness at the quantum level. I think this randomness is a good argument for non-reducibility. If that randomness has effects on higher orders of matter that those higher orders can themselves change, then your argument holds true. But I don't know that kind randomness has effects that are relevant for chemical reactions which is what biology is directly built upon.
I hope I'm not too incoherent.
Wow.. Loving your videos!
I think you are mistaking a philosophical principle for a practical approach to science. No one says that to study biology we should start by studying physics from which we can discover the laws of biology. reductionism is just a philosophical principle, one that I am not sure I agree with, but all those who adopt it know that for practical terms you cannot study biology, sociology nor economics just by studying physics. The systems are too complex for a reductionist approach to be possible. So I don't think you have adressed reductionism in the way it should be adressed, you used a practicality argument to answer a statement about principles.
The elementary particles of mathematics are the natural numbers. In fact, the entire mathematics was formed from them, but in the meantime new and new objects, concepts had to be invented, discovered and applied.
Natural numbers are also known to a limited extent by animals. I once observed a fox carrying the 5 newborn cubs to a safer place (about 80 m distance) one by one. The 5th little fox crawled away and was not visible. However, the fox knew that she had 5 cubs, so she searched for it until she found it.
We can and should build on the lower level, but we always have to add something extra, something new in quality, if we are to be able to build on the next level.
This video is radical - that biologists and chemists have been following it for hundreds of years instead of using quantum mechanics and atomic interactions to dictate their field. So much revolutionary ideas you got here.
are you familiar with OSR as introduced by james ladyman etal in 'every thing must go'?
I like to think of this in terms of computer science.
Technically we could program a video game totally in machine code or assembly (which allows us greater control over computer hardware) but why would we torture ourselves like that when we have programming languages that offer higher levels of abstraction and makes it easier for us to follow the logic of programming a video game.
In the same way, physics lets us understand the hardware of the universe and is kind of like the assembly language of the universe (mathematics would be the machine code) yes we could use physics to understand some biological phenomenon, but I feel as though Biology is such a higher level of abstraction that the underlying assembly (physics) or machine code (math) would be too complex to be useful. In some rare instances it could be useful, but generally it probably isn’t.
This guy is trying so hard to convince himself that there is free will
Any thoughts on whether Markovian mathematics, especially of the sort Karl Friston is working with, will crack some of the strange boundary issues discussed here with biology? On a side note - for cell differentiation in embryos Michael Levin's been doing some really astonishing work.
Feeling that behavioral of those molecular-level "particles bumping" and the larger "life system" somehow "working on its own" do have the reminiscence of comparing quantum physics and the classical more "human-size" scale of physics.
The images you show are always striking
I'd love a very deep dive into this concept ie the gaps between the statistically relevant peer reviewed conclusions
I admire your work. I just wanted to comment about your example of atoms in a box illustrating top down causation.
This is not true because the square has an external causal effect which affects the movement of the atoms. This is a simple action and reaction between the atoms and the boundaries of the square.
The top down causation will be that the collective behaviour of the atoms affecting the behaviour of the single atom, without any external effect.
I would say that thinking of biology and physics in this way is kinda limiting. I mean, physics is just taking some principles and applying to predict certain things (events, probabilities, values, etc.). While biology it focuses mainly in organisms. The difference is blurry when you are trying to predict patterns in organisms, because organisms are made out of atoms and their interactions. Like it is said in the video it is useless to say that this happened because this particle moved to this place, you need to interpret the results that the methods of physics give you, and for that you need abstractions. For example physics predicts electrons moving in an atom in a certain way, we can use that abstracting the core idea (orbitals and bonds) and now you have chemistry, that's why you have chemista and physicists working sometimes in the same topic, because they are basically talking about the same thing. It is a bit misleading that it's neither chemistry or physics, because of an arbitrary line that makes these words ambiguos in the context. Analogously for biology it's the same, You have from animals to peptides and enzymes moving from here to there, which and it is of course biology. But these are simply different abstractions of physics, because they are more useful and digestible for the human mind. You could predict every atom movement ever but without these abstractions you could not understand it. Again abstracting to these levels are not ignoring the physics, because it's physics, just making it easier to see.
Standing in a techno club with earphones in listening to this. I didn't quite catch the whole concept but you should never stop doing this - do other things too.
The gap between physics and biology comes down to the metaphysics of biology, the very term metaphysics means "above physics" you cannot explain consciousness and other such topics with physical means, questions like does thought have mass are very profound questions, but if you want to be scientifically rigorous and consistent, the only way of approach to finding answers these things has to be through physics and mathematical models, if another avenue of explanation for these things is consistent and obeys what we see and know, sure it might considered as an alternative to the scientific method, but if there is another such thing that governs these things, it has to be inherently random.
Reductionism is usually understood as ontological claim, rather than epistemological. So in this case, arguments involving impossibility to know/predict something, are irrelevant.
Though I enjoyed the content of this video, I would still have to disagree. Strictly speaking, I believe everything can be reduced to fundamental laws. For instance, time always seems to keep moving forward, which preserves our concept of causality. The cause always comes before the effect. Sure, biological systems are very much complex but it is only because of causality that we are able to have some understanding of it. We never see an instance of the effect preceding its cause (that would be time travel!). Any self-respecting scientist wouldn't jump to conclusions without first considering what is already known and what has already happened. It's just that with this extreme form of reductionism, we won't always make good use of it as far as the progress of knowledge is concerned, but that doesn't make it untrue.
In software engineering there is a concept of self-editing code, so...
The question is where the first version of that self-modifying code came from. The video mentions self-replicating machines and states that - contrary to life - they couldn't exist without someone having built their ancestors, just as there needs to be someone to write the first version of the self-modifying program.
I believe this is wrong. Given the right initial conditions, the first version of such a program could be created by pure coincidence, by randomly switching bits and executing whatever instructions they may represent, until eventually one set of instructions would resemble a self-modifying program. This is incredibly improbable, but not impossible.
@@NeovanGoth yup, sounds 'bout right. I liked the video at the beginning, but later I lackes some imagination :D
@@thinksie Actually in believe much if not most anti-reductionism comes from a lack of imagination. Many people seem to almost actively refuse the idea of complex systems being able to emerge from a couple of simple rules, although experiments like Conways Game of Life impressively show the opposite.
@@NeovanGoth Yeah the idea that you can only group something if it's made from enough elements is obvious and doesn't change much more than philosophy.
Computers work on bits, 1 or 0, and manage to work something out of it only because we built them with some abstraction. Look we could add the numbers and be like 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1 = 8, most logic, but what did we actually choose? Multiplicative method 2⁰+2¹+2²+2³+2⁴+2⁵+2⁶+2⁷, which is 255. And adding one more of these meaningless bits potentially gives us 2x higher number. But we still chose to group them so they only get so high in different processors.
People think that freedom emerges from lack of the rules. I think it's called chaos. Real freedom is in a world that has rules, and you still have some free space.
So our World has it's rules, and everything emerges from them, simple. Saying that it's too complicated is just funny. There is not an infinite amount of chemistry, it's actually quite limited, and if you want to limit it more to the actual environment and resources it wouldn't be so hard for a first life to emerge randomly. Even if improbable, the idea of chance is if given enough trying and the chance isn't exactly 0, it'll happen sometime.
We're multicellular organisms omg so improbable that all my cells will work together! Well it actually makes sense if you ask me. It's a good survival strategy and we did show experimentally a single cellular organism that started grouping I believe!
@@thinksie "People think that freedom emerges from lack of the rules. I think it's called chaos."
In mathematics, chaos means when tiny changes in the initial conditions result in completely different results. The results are still determined by rules, but it's difficult (or even practially impossible) to predict them due to lack or decent knowledge of the initial conditions. I would call the lack of rules randomness, as without rules, it is not only hard, but impossible to predict a result even with perfect knowledge, and this is true randomness.
"Real freedom is in a world that has rules, and you still have some free space."
In this regard I am skeptic. As I said, results are either determined by rules, or random, unless we throw materialism away and introduce literal magic, like a soul that is able to make decisions while being neither driven by deterministic laws of nature, nor quantum randomness.
I think the concept of freedom doesn't have a physical meaning at all, that it instead is a purely mental concept. Decisions _feel_ free when they are the result of a conscious thought process that is not limited by obvious constraints. It doesn't matter whether the thought process has been executed by deterministic molecular circuitry and could be predicted if the exact initial conditions would be known, or even contains a certain quantum randomness. That doesn't make it feel any less free (unless being high on Ketamine, oh boy does this drug show how little conscious control it requires to run around and do stuff 😂).
Wow. I have just discovered your channel. Please keep up the good work.
You are the best Biology channel I have seen. I think Biology is incredibly important and was thinking about majoring in bio computing, but all the bio I've seen in textbooks is so boring. Thank you😊 but also cant decide what I wanna major in theres so much cool science
It is only by keeping an all encompassing perspective where every forces that exist and influence each other, we will be able to understand the dynamics of life. Having said that, we cannot box physics or biology or chemistry into separate boxes as their boundaries are fixed by reductionist views which may be far from actuality.
If I understood you correctly, it looks like one would have a difficult time using the wrong type of lens to make sense of a target sized organization, not that it cannot be done. You absolutely can make sense of things by interacting with it, it will just take a ginoumous amount of time because you are using a bad lens for the job?
Reductionism is a naive approach to science, as it oversimplifies complex phenomena and fails to account for emergent properties and interactions between components. So glad you made the video!
nailed it with this one. agency and where that comes from is an utter mystery. why does a cell even move or decide to correct its own DNA upon replication? motivation of biological systems have no understanding from the scientific community. videos like this help challenge traditional scientific thinkers to realize how little we understand biology, how much there is left to be discovered
The laws of physics are idealizations, reflective not of nature but of the extent to which we can model nature. Our natural way of doing science is to assume a given pattern extends, and we update our models when we find exceptions to that pattern. The same could well be true of the whole deterministic, linear, reductionistic framework which is so amenable to our language yet never cleanly reflected in nature.
For anyone interested in this topic, I recommend the paper "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?".
OF COURSE.
active matter is active matter, no matter how complex. and what Hidden Sector fields are involved.
love your videos! but I always seem to wonder when considering the self organization of organisms (i.e. autopoiesis) is how is this not a new brand of vitalism?
The question can be interpreted in multiple different ways. I'm inclined to answer YES! There are interpretations where the answer is clearly YES and others where it's clearly NO. I'm not expecting very much profound to be said here other than messing about with words a bit.
Have you read Consilience by EO Wilson? That’s a great read
My perspective is that bottom-up and top-down are both useful because all physical laws can be used in both directions of time - the past and the future. Similar to the parallel of derivatives and integrals. Can I reason like this? Or does one have any objections? Because I didn't start studying yet and would appreciate an experts opinion on my perspective. Thank you for the great video again.
Bottom-up and top-down causes are both important, I'd agree with that. But in terms of the role of time, I'm not so much an expert and many physicists debate about it.
I've read Time Reborn by Lee Smolin which argues that the orthodoxy of "time as a stubbornly persistent illusion" is wrong and needs to be overturned placing time as fundamental, not emergent.
More interesting for a biologist like me, is that Smolin also argues that the laws of physics change over time, and therefore we need to have a theory that explains 'why these laws?'
It's a good read, i'd recommend it. Again, not an expert. Thanks for watching!
I certainly agree with much of this video. However I think you have brushed over many areas of actually practiced non-reductionist physics. Condensed matter theory, as a notable example, generally sidesteps the kind of ontological reductionism you've ascribed to physics. It is very important to distinguish between actual study in physics in the modern day on one hand, and popphys entertainment on the other hand.
...It means that it is a marvelous system of wiggles in which we describe things and events in the same way as we would project images on a Rorschach blot, or pick out particular groups of stars in the sky and call them constellations as if they were separate groups of stars. Well, they’re groups of stars in the mind’s eye, in our system of concepts. They are not-out there, as constellations-already grouped in the sky. So, in the same way, the difference between myself and all the rest of the universe is nothing more than an idea. It is not a real difference.
- Alan Watts
Another point is the what a system is? Is it objective or not, etc.?
A neutron star would quickly reduce all biology into neutrons, which we call physics, so yes, it can, a neutron star would do it just by existing with it's mass.
My guy excellent video. I've pondered this for some years and thought "ah yes physics is everything" and then thought "math is physics so it must be everything", I now know I have no idea. Thanks for cool content, you need more subs in my biased opinion
How is physics fundamental for psychology or sociology? In terms of history or scientific understanding?
my answer would be "yes, but we will never be able to comprehend it" because the human mind can no better visualize the physical complexity of an organism than it can visualize the scale of a galaxy