I don’t much deal with formal philosophy but am always willing to learn…
By reducing don’t we gain a greater universality rather than a better description of a thing?
e.g. if we looked at an apple and broke it down into its constituent parts on any level we can find, we’d arrive at its chemical then its atomic constitution. So we begin with the thing, then we take two steps of further reduction towards universals; periodic table is a lesser universal than atomic structures.
Wiki; a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. This can be said of objects, phenomena, explanations, theories, and meanings. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism
don’t we simply end up describing other things when describing a thing by other things?
In a computer program that is being used to model the flight of an Airplane, there may be parameters the user can input such as “wind speed” and “air density” and “weight of airplane” and “length of wings” and “circumference of body” and “power of engines” and a million other parameters that we could imagine are useful for modeling the flight of an airplane.
The reductionist position is that these parameters, though useful – INCREDIBLY useful – in modeling the flight of an airplane, are not actual parameters that exist in the “coding,” if you will, of the universe. If you were to be able to translate the algorithms that run the universe, you wouldn’t find anything that corresponds to any of those parameters. All you would find in the coding is alrogithms that determine the behavior of fundamental particles and how they should react to each other and their local environment (and perhaps sometimes non-local environment as well, I’m not sure).
The term “air density,” then, is a useful abstraction – a reductionist wouldn’t say “air density doesn’t exist,” necessarily. Such questions aren’t necessarily the most useful or sensible ones to ask. But he would say that “air density” is an abstraction, one level up from the question “how many air molecules (or whatever the fuck) are in the average cubic centimeter of space in this area?” which is itself an abstraction from another, more microscopic question.
What I have a hard time understanding is:
Is it possible to talk about something that is not an abstraction from another microscopic question?
Is it not turtles all the way down?
That’s a very sensible question in this context. I would say, (a) I don’t think it’s impossible to talk about something that’s not an abstraction of something more fundamental, but I also don’t think I’ve ever in my life once done it, and (b) I really don’t know if it’s turtles all the way down. I like to think it stops somewhere, but I could be wrong I suppose.
Right so there are different levels of description, in that sense we are not describing the airplane and its flight by the levels beneath it [microscopic, algorithmic]. …though we can describe its flight parameters as relative to the object, so the immediate level of factors secondary to the thing itself have a greater relevance ~ are more direct, that the tertiary and other further levels of reduction. Is that a fair assumption?
We are talking about different levels of abstraction and therefore not of the thing itself directly.
By fundamental do we mean more universal?
Volchok
nice one! I assume you mean that the levels of abstraction are not full sets [turtles], you have the turtle [here the plane] then the next level of reductive description contains a certain amount of ambiguity, such that there is no entirety about it.
I think maybe I understand what you’re asking, let me respond to what I think you’re asking:
it’s useful to have a program that uses parameters like “wing span” and “air density” and “cargo weight” and things like that – it’s useful to have abstractions – mostly because we actually don’t have the computing power to do the same calculations using only information about each atom. If we did have a computer capable of knowing all the necessary parameters about each atom (which are themselves also an abstraction, but a less abstract abstraction than the other parameters), and also capable of calculating where they should go given their current state, etc; if we had an accurate model of how atoms behaved and a way to compute their behavior, that model would invariably produce more precise predictions than the model using the more abstract abstractions – BUT of course we neither have such a model nor do we have a computer capable of computing such a model given the trillions upon trillions of atoms needed to track in that situation. and besides, we don’t need that level of precision anyway, so it would just be a waste of computing power even if it were possible.
Fj sorry I was talking about different ‘levels’ of - description. Then I was considering how relative one description is to the next, of one thing as compared to another.
Can we even describe a given thing by another? doesn’t make sense apart from talking in classes, apples, planes, I mean I plane isn’t really the same as another nor an apple.
Faust
If that’s an accurate description then surely two things are two sums, then if those two things contain other equally distinct things then we don’t arrive at the sum?
Well I suppose we are getting into metaphysics here, naturally your statement is true in normal classifications of things.
we cannot classify two things as the same, each would at least have different x,y,z, spatial locations. 1.1. …and perhaps [?] other values like relativistic time and energy.
If we describe a thing accurately, we cannot describe another thing in the same way, ergo;
‘If that’s an accurate description then surely two things are two sums’
The things composing the thing being described, would be subject to the same differentiation as 1 and 2. Ergo; ‘then if those two things contain other equally distinct things then we don’t arrive at the sum’.
so we cannot describe different things in the same terms, an entire collection or class is not ultimately arived at.
Perhaps rather than thinking of classes as say ‘a turtle on an elephants back’, it may be more realistic to think of the turtle [an object] on a cloud, which in turn is on a space which is on an infinity.
Objects as the outsides and infinity as the inside! Rather than the universe as a big object and as the inside of some unknown outside.
I’m still not sure what you mean. I got two “identical” fire hydrants. Sitting next to each other at the warehouse. Sure, they are different hydrants, which i can point out by saying “the one on the right” and “the one on the left”. But beyond that, they are identical. We classify by abstracting the attributes they have in common. How accurate do you need to be?
Infinity is a concept of limited utility. It does look like metaphysics, yes. I don’t know what “an infinity” is.
I agree reductionism is sound for classifications of things, but don’t we have to look at how accurate that is ultimately? Your original statement was sound, but to me that way of looking at things ~ if ultimately inaccurate, gives us a vision of reality which is unreal. Is the universe an object, don’t we then start asking; what’s outside, what was before, am I the sum of my parts? When perhaps a more subtle manner of definition gives us a different picture.
Indeed, here again perhaps we tend to think of infinity as a big thing, unending, rather than simply unlimited. ‘an infinity’ means that it isn’t a specific thing, but there may be an infinity ~ and unlimitedness to the universe.
Well, I’m not sure how you can apply this to the Universe as a whole. I’m not sure what it means to say that the Universe is an object. Frankly, this is the kind of equivocation that metaphysicians are known for. I just don’t think “object” is a word we’d use for the Universe.
Perhaps that we tend to define things by encapsulating and containing them, if we gently rub away all those edges then we remove the limits they impose on our thinking. For some reason I thought that was quite important philosophically.
e.g. people often say what’s before or outside of the universe, this is because they are seeing things as turtles on the backs of elephants, ~ which is most likely completely incorrect. We even classify ourselves in groups.
Is there anything smaller then a quark or a lepton or a boson?
I know that you can’t answer that question but can you even conceptualize something without constituents? I can’t. Just thinking about it makes my head hurt.
I can conceptualize something without constituents. In fact, before I learned about how my body is made of cells and my cells are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms and atoms are…etc., I actually thought that flesh was a continuous, unified thing. I thought my skin was one whole thing, not made of smaller things. I thought each muscle was one whole thing, not made of smaller things. I thought each bone was one whole thing, not made of smaller things. I thought that the macroscopic objects I could see were whole. I’m sure I thought that for a number of years, so in fact, yes, not only can I conceptualize it, I’m almost used to it.
Let me try to answer your original turtle question in a different way: I’m almost certain that it’s not turtles all the way down in this universe. However, it may be the case that this universe is being computed/simulated from a parent universe. I can’t say anything about that one.
I don’t know about simulations but the multiverse theory seems to be gaining some credence. Which begs the question, what is the thing in which our universe and all the other universes reside? And are there other “things” like that out there, each one with millions of universes?
Also, yeah, I’m sure we all once thought that skin was just skin and not made of anything else but did you ever imagined that your skin couldn’t be chopped off into bits? Probably not. What I was talking about was something without constituents that cannot be divided or cut or split. I guess it would be the ultimate building block.
I assume you mean that the levels of abstraction are not full sets [turtles], you have the turtle [here the plane] then the next level of reductive description contains a certain amount of ambiguity, such that there is no entirety about it.