Re: Emergent Properties

Just a small query: what is considered the antonym or opposite to the word/concept/percept 'reductionism,' 'reduced' or 'reducible'?

  It seems at least that (human) communication cannot be reduced to physical explanations or levels alone. That is, it does not 'emerge' according to any laws of physics.
   
  Arago
   
  
Randy Isaac <randyisaac@adelphia.net> wrote:
    Several decades ago, I enjoyed reading Donal Mackay's books and his concepts of hierarchical, complementary levels of meaning and the fallacy of "nothing-buttery". There's a lot of good insight there but it's not clear that he's precluded reductionism in the second sense above. Emergent properties of complex systems may indeed require several complementary levels of explanation, each of which is complete in its own realm, yet none of which is a complete explanation of the system. This would not deny the reductionist view of underlying forces being the sole origin of all the levels. Mackay also gives examples where human intelligence has imposed meaning. One of his examples was a sentence written in chalk on a blackboard. It can be described "completely" chemically and physically at various levels but must also be explained at the level of meaning of the alphabet, the vocabulary, and the sentence structure. This is an example where the meaning is imposed from outside the
 system and has nothing to do with the inherent system itself.

  Net: I'm not a reductionist but making a clear argument against
reductionism isn't so easy either.

Randy

                
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Received on Sat May 6 21:17:41 2006