> abstracted in the relationships that emerge between larger assemblies. Yes, but that's the point. Obviously it's hard to make predictions a macro level pure

> abstracted in the relationships that emerge between larger assemblies. Yes, but that's the point. Obviously it's hard to make predictions a macro level purely from studying it at a super micro level and without looking at parts of the interactions it might even be impossible; but that's not what's being asserted here. What's being asserted here, is, in scott aaronson's words: > In their new work, Hoel and others claim to make the amazing discovery that scientific reductionism is false—or, more precisely, that there can exist “causal information” in macroscopic systems, information relevant for predicting the systems’ future behavior, that’s not reducible to causal information about the systems’ microscopic building blocks. Think about that for a second. You're saying, there's a kind a of 'meta information' in complex systems, that cannot be reduced into information about its constituent parts or how they interact. For example, 'what you might pick for lunch' cannot be represented as a information about your blood, body, atoms, stomach. It's a stupid assertion; if you assert that a system of any complexity cannot be predicted by the behavior of its constituent parts, you're basically saying that 'nothing makes sense'. It's patently false. It's just a flip off to people building probabilistic models like, oh hey, don't bother, that doesn't work. It's just not true. What's mathematically interesting is how they've devised the paper. If you can show, mathematically, that you have more information for predicting future state from considering a macro state than all micro states, that's a pretty interesting result; but it's also exactly the point scott demolishes in his blog post. ...and the rebuttal? > Doing a series of A/B tests to capture the effects of the macroscale states doesn’t correspond to doing a series of A/B tests to capture the effects of microscale states. A randomized trial at the macroscale of medical treatments to see their effect on tumors won’t correspond to an underlying set of microscale randomized trials, because many different microstates make up the macrostates. Which is where we started; ie. the assertion that the behaviour of microscale effects doesn't reflect macro scale effects. ...but we know that it does. We don't invent new drugs by going off and randomly trying crap; we model the molecules and predict the macro scale effects they'll have. What he's asserting here is quite literally, demonstrably false.