Thursday, December 13, 2018

Emergence. A Paradox at the Heart of Reductionism.

Some people are trying to tell us that everything evolves (in a very general sense of that word) out of the interactions, and self-organising tendencies, of very simple particles, and/or mathematical equations.

Stuff around, like us, is simply confusingly complex manifestations of really simple stuff. Simple in principle, simple in variety, that is. The mathematics is hard for most of us, and intractable for specialists.

That's the story. The simple stuff is the outcome of a process called 'reductionism'. The complex stuff, like bacteria, hippopotamuses, religion, arguments about where to eat and iTunes catalogues of  60's music, is down to 'emergence'. There are layers of emergent behaviour, we are told. Things like evolutionary biology and sociology.

All this begs a question or two.

If our processes of analysis are 'emergent' and ultimately down to the emergent mechanism of evolution by natural selection, then how can we even be sure our thinking is 'objective'? Can we know we are seeking the truth, or are we just trying to survive by saying the right things?

I've aired that one before here and there. More fundamentally though there's a point about the whole idea of emergent behaviour. I'm going to highlight this paradox in a certain way after Robert B. Laughlin, a Nobel Laureate Physicist. In 'A Different Universe' (it's a book, not a cosmos), Laughlin points out that we use emergent phenomena, and in particular waves, energy and particles, to try to describe and model underlying final reality. Laughlin himself is rather uncomfortable about this.

In my own words, we are using emergent phenomena as the basis for our attempts at reductionist models.

This is paradoxical. A little thought should show us this is very likely not going to get us to 'final truth' about Physics or anything else.

So much for the rationality espoused by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and company.

Now an honest person will tell you there are many places where our present rational understanding fades off into inherently unknowable mystery. Direct personal experience of absolutely nothing, of the infinitesimal, and of the infinite would be one. My focus here, our attempts to model fundamentals using outcomes of fundamentals, is another. Richard Dawkins' successor at the Oxford Simonyi Chair, Marcus du Sautoy, is on to this idea of what lies beyond rational analysis. It has led Marcus to doubt at least the finality of his atheism.

Now Richard Dawkins, for himself and his followers, is pretty good at working God out, and deciding why He can't be there. But, dear Richard, you are limited to using the creative activities of God in an attempt to deduce the absolute nature of God. A similar paradox to that above. Logically and rationally you are limited to at best partial success here, surely.

The best man can hope for is for the Infinite One who created us from Nothing we know about to reveal Himself as He chooses through avenues we can, at some level and to some degree, comprehend.

I believe that is actually precisely what He has done. Read the first chapter of John's Gospel. Then the rest.

Like Maxwell, look at the created world also.