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Niels Bohr’s Argument for the Irreducibility of Biology to Physics (1994)
- neonate 8y agohttp://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_10 http://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_...
- goodstuff9 8y agoI'm making a substanceless comment to point out that I wish more people would automatically start using this service.
- deepnet 8y agoConversely, Jim Al-Khalili on the role of quantum physics in biological mechanisms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM and his BBC version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ONRJ1kTdA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4ONRJ1kTdA
- Upvoter33 8y agoSounds like Bohr doesn't believe the "astonishing hypothesis". As stated on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis: The Astonishing Hypothesis posits that "a person's mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them."
- louwrentius 8y agoBut why, what's his reasoning?
- dogma1138 8y agoHe doesn’t have to have a reason beyond being as flawed of a human being as the rest of us, he thought there must be more to the human condition than just physics and it wasn’t necessarily had to be backed up by rational thought anymore than any other religious or pseudo-religious belief. Issac Newton also believed in things we would laugh about and heck even back then were considered a laughing stock by scientists https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_stud...
- zazen 8y agoThe headline's use of the word "argument" rather implies that he did think he had a reason backed up by rational thought. Like GP, I'm hoping someone with the time and inclination will summarise that argument for us.
- Retric 8y agoPeople’s beliefs tend to be reasonably self consistent. That’s different from being well supported, but still allows them to make “arguments.”
- darkerside 8y agoPhysics may have drawn laughter at the time as well http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html http://www.paulgraham.com/disc.html
- coldtea 8y ago>He doesn’t have to have a reason beyond being as flawed of a human being as the rest of us You're taking what should be proven as a premise. He's only "flawed" if he's wrong, which is not really a closed case. Besides, what's this "he doesn't have to have a reason" thing? He has a reason, and it's exactly the very arguments in TFA.
- dogma1138 8y agoYou can have flawed thinking and still end up being “right” for the wrong reasons or for no reasons at all.
- agumonkey 8y agoIrreducibility sounds different to my ears, it means that emergent properties are more due to biological-level structures rather than pure physics. Of course it's all physics underneath but that doesn't say a lot.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoThat's not what irreducibility means. Irreducibility would be , for example, some kind of biological "atom" that isn't made of physical atoms.
- karmakaze 8y agoThe reason reducibility wins is because 'physics' is a moving target. Imagine that The Milky Way is an organism and in the process of understanding it through physics, we discover that our laws and theories are unable to explain it--e.g. dark matter. That is now part of physics too. So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood.
- goatlover 8y ago> So if we did discover some kind of irreducible biological cell, we'd just name a new area of physics yet to be understood. But what if the irreducible cell is made up of normal matter, but it has strongly emergent properties that can't be explained simply in terms of structure and function of it's physical properties? That's what would make it irreducible, if such things do exist.
- XaspR8d 8y agoWe would probably change our model of physics to accommodate the emergence of those properties? I suppose there's a scale at which the "gap" becomes too large to call it "physics," but the larger the scale, the stranger it would be to find something irreducible across so many levels.
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
- jchanimal 8y agoYou can agree the mental events are made up of the same stuff as physical events, without believing that they can be fully explained in physical terms. https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/ https://www.iep.utm.edu/anom-mon/
- foxes 8y agoIf it's entirely determined by physical stuff thats a contradiction. It may be very complicated, but its still physical.
- bordercases 8y agoNo, because the reduction in-principle would fail if the system's description language could not support explaining the phenomena in the higher level. And going the other way, it could be impossible in-principle to conduct the experiments that get a complete description because the tools required break how it was originally organized. It's also not just about adding more variables because "it's complicated". Biology for example seems to be highly reflexive, that sort of behaviour can't really be accounted for in basic causal models. At best we have models which resemble fluid dynamics, and fluid dynamics is only as good as it is because we don't reduce the phenomena down to every molecule.
- ssadler 8y agoSee also: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294 https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3294
- sooheon 8y agoAnd yet nobody claims that fluids are supernatural and above the laws of physics. It's our ability to understand, explain, and model it that is deficient, not the phenomena that is supernatural.
- bordercases 8y agoMaxwell's Demon might have a thing or two to say to you. The fallacy is to believe that reduction is a total property of the territory, rather than a property of some of the territory that lends to a certain kind of map. We know that there are phenomena in the world with strong boundaries and there are phenomena with weaker boundaries. It may be that at low scales things can be easily separated, but that doesn't have to translate to how easy it is to tease-apart macro-phenomena. Heck below atoms, which lend themselves most strongly to the reductionist intuition, we have quantum waves. The wave-particle duality should at least simultaneously give reduction and non-reduction some credence.
- raverbashing 8y agoCan I reduce what I see now on the screen of my computer to physical phenomenon that has happened in a finite amount of time? Yes. Is it practical or treatable? Probably not.
- zadler 8y agoI dont understand this, life is already quite well explained by thermodynamics and the second law, which i also find to be a quite underappreciated concept. Physical processes at the quantum mechanical level are reversible, but at the macro level they do not reverse. Life is a process which is able to adapt to changing and irreversible circumstances. It does not seem to make sense to explain life in terms of quantum mechanics.
- zmix 8y agoObscene prices...
- rusanu 8y agoIsn't this 'the argument of personal incredulity'? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_fallacy > I cannot imagine how P could be true; therefore P must be false.
- 13415 8y agoNo, it's an inference to the best explanation where for various reason it is thought that physics does not offer the best explanation. If the physical explanation is not even sufficient, then it cannot be the best explanation. That's the gist of the argument. Of course, there is disagreement about what counts as a sufficient explanation or the best explanation at a time and others may disagree. It's philosophy of science, not science.
- goatlover 8y agoNo, the argument is that we can't see how P could be true, even though plenty of people assume that P is true. But P could also be false. It's questioning the assumption that P is true because nobody has succeeded so far in showing that it is. It might or might not be. We don't know.
- sofal 8y agoAre you talking about the argument outlined in the article? I don't see where you're getting that from. The article in the OP is about the argument that the explanation of characteristic biological functions by physics is impossible. Niel argues for epistemological anti-reductionism. It's not about throwing doubt on the assumption that reductionism is true, it is specifically arguing that it is in fact false using the analogy of the complementarity that governs the explanation of the stability of atoms.
- goatlover 8y agoMore so a response to the parent that the article in the OP was an argument from incredulity. Still not convinced that arguing for impossibility is the same as arguing form incredulity, if you have a good argument for impossibility. So for example, Chalmers arguing that consciousness can't be reduced to physics is not an argument from incredulity. Rather, it's an argument that it's conceptually impossible. People might disagree with either Bohr or Chalmers arguments, but that's different from them committing this particular fallacy, unless it can be pointed out how Bohr or Chalmers were arguing from a failure of imagination.
- JPLeRouzic 8y agoI like the list of keywords that were generated automatically, particularly one that looks like coming straight out of Iain M. Banks' "Culture" : "Emphasis Mine"
- eternalban 8y agoThe opening paragraph is puzzling as it breezily mentions that NB, "even in his youth", was familiar with deep questions regarding the relationship between biology and physics. Neil's Bohr's father was an accomplished and famous physician [1][2]. No doubt father and son had quite interesting discussions over dinner regarding this very topic. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bohr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Bohr [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr_effect
- hyperion2010 8y agoMy gut reaction to these arguments has always been to disagree, however I think that I have been missing the more nuanced interpretation, with which I actually agree. Of _course_ biology won't be explainable using just the mathematics for basic physics. Quantum physics and classical physics are able to account for an enormous amount of the complexity of in the universe. However, their representation is so compressed, and has been developed and tested on such 'low dimensional' system, that there are surely mathematical laws that they simply cannot encode, nor should we expect them to. The number of stable combinations of fundamental particles and the number of different orbital configurations etc. etc. are a set of rules with which everything 'must' be consistent (unless there is a major shift in our understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe). However, they give us little to no insight into what other constraints might be imposed on systems where the phenomena they describe are merely parts (yes I know that I have a wave function). All this to say that it seems to me that there must be other mathematical laws that do not follow directly from 'basic' physics, that also constrain the behavior of more complex physical systems. The answer is not therefore that biology irreducible to some mathematical description, which is how I usually interpreted these arguments, but rather that there are additional mathematical laws that are needed. Perhaps that rather than despairing at the 'irreducibility' of biology to physics, we merely need to extend our notion of 'physics' to include the mathematical laws that constrain biology.
- aaronblohowiak 8y agoMonism is on the retreat in many, many fields “lately”. We still haven’t really understood all the implications of post Newtonian determinism, and thermodynamics isn’t super useful here either because most of the systems we care about are “open”.. also, models (even those with high predictive power locally) don’t compose in a way that allows for predictive power of emergent phenomena. A hierarchical mutual-causality framework (a la Ascendency) will likely get us where we need to go to understand things more better. This is all being actively discussed in philosophy of science circles, iirc Edit: am just a hobbyist at this stuff, I’m probably wrong ;)
- bordercases 8y agoHN is surprisingly slow when it comes to 21st Century PhilSci. It didn't stop with Feynman.
- dwaltrip 8y agoAny good resources to read about this?
- aaronblohowiak 8y agoI came to learn about it through Ecology: The Ascendant Perspective, which is a very fun read in general. If you want harder to read stuff, you could go to Popper or more contemporary, Eric Hochstein.
- dwaltrip 8y agoThanks!