Spiritual Blogs

Whole Vs Sum Of Parts

Posted by Roaring Lovely on June 19, 2015 at 9:00am
Reductionism is the fuel and the engine that propells the train of science from past to future. If your remove this joker card from the house of cards, the entire wavefunction of science collapses in picoseconds when we observe it carefully. The philosophy of reductionism says give me all the knowledge about the parts and I will give you the knowledge about the whole. So our modern scientist is ever busy studying the components in their isolate conditions dubed 'controlled conditions' in the hope that this will shed enough insight as to how the universe work. But something disturbing still boils in the background. Consider for instance the following quote from a physicist named Philip Warren Anderson:"The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstract the universe. The constractionist hypothesis break down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from sum of its parts."One thing that you should be able to note here is that we can isolate the components and study the laws governing their behaviour as individuals. However, we cannot use such knowledge to say how the system as a whole works! Then what makes Anderson and a bucketfull of other physicists so sure that the laws governing the system as a whole are the laws gorvening each of the components?In the days of Galileo and Newton the train of reductionism received a major switch of gears. It is so because Newton evacuated the whole universe and remained only with the earth and the moon. Studying the laws governing the motion of the earth and the moon, he was soon amusing himself and lots of his fellows that they understood how the entire heavens work! Modern physicists, including Einstein and Schrodinger merely imitate Newton! Einstein evacuates the universe and remains with his train alone. Similarly, all of quantum kendagen experiments majory involves some leprechaun guys named Alice and Bob! It is this thinking in terms of only Alice and Bob that is thought to give us all there is to know about how the entire universe works! Einstein for instance would latter make a whole of space made up of his trains speeding here and there, shrinking, bending, dillating, getting swallowed in black holes etc. This, he terms 'spacetime continum'.A very big nail in the coffin of reductionism was hammered by Poincare. He showed that Newton type reasoning cannot even lead us to definitely understand how 3 heavenly bodies move, let alone the entire heavens! Physicists are, however, yet to learn the true lesson; if we cannot predict the trajectories in a 3-body system using the knowledge we gain from the 2-body system, what basis do we have in insisting that the laws governing the two bodies is the same laws governing the 3 bodies?I had used such reasoning in refuting Sean Caroll's argument against the existence of the soul. Just because he understands the behaviour of some two electrons leads him to think that he understands the physics at work in the brain that involves gazzilions of such particles!! I suggest that you try that by studying the behaviour of a single bee busy sucking some nectar, you can even hit it abit, watch it shy away and then conclude that such is how a swam of bees surrounding the queen behaves! Extrapolation is a very dangerous game. Intrapolation is saver. This happened also when physicists watched how galaxies are spinning to their amazement. Just because we understand the laws gorvening solar system does not mean we understand the laws governing a galaxy. Rather, narture knows better. It does not follow the laws like some blind robot. The laws should be seen as rules. When moving alone on the road, you are not necesarily obeying the traffic rules in a city!Reductionism is even more futile when we attempt to understand awareness in terms of the so thought, fundamental laws, that are each supposed to be understood as blind. But hollism has a good answer. The entire leaving organism behaves as a single whole with its own rules such as freewill that are not necesarily understandable by watching how the individual particles behaves. The entire system such as the brain should not be understood as the behaviour of parts summing up to make the behaviour of the whole. Rather, the behaviour of the whole determines the behaviour of the parts such that how the parts behave in the system is not deducable at all from how they behave in the isolation. Use the case of bees as an analogy. Or you can use some shy guy! When alone, there are some things you can do that you can't do in the streets. You can walk naked etc. But the street out there influence your behaviour as much as you influence the behaviour of the street.
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