posted on Feb, 20 2019 @ 12:31 PM
When people think about this world around us, there seems to be two competing metaphysical positions: reductionism vs. emergentism. The former says
all things can be explained by reducing the thing to something more basic. So, all of human reality can be reduced to the atom, which can be reduced
to the nucleon/electron, which can be reduced (not the electron; it is an 'atomos') to a neutron and proton, which can be redued further to three
quarks each with a charge in a ratio of 3. The reductionist will go further still to explain why quarks have the properties they do; for instance, why
does beta decay - or nuclear radiation happen? The weak force was discovered to explain this decay, which in turn led to the discovery of the heavy
bosons - the two W's and the neutral Z. Still, how did these bosons come about? The theorists discovered the Higgs field and then the Higgs boson (in
2012), which helped explain why the Universe and its fundamental objects have mass. The real enigma is the mysterious neutrino: the force which
emerges in weak force reactions to 'carry away' some charge, and therefore breakdown the perfect symmetry of the universe.
This is the view of the universe from the reductionist perspective. The Higgs boson, as of now, is the most abstract representation of fundamental
particles, with many attributes of all the other particles of the standard model deriving from the influence of this particle. Theories beyond the
Higgs - which attempt to explain qualities like: why does the Higgs field have a 246 GeV charge? Why do the gauge bosons come into being (the 3 heavy
one and the massless photon) posit supersymmetry and string theory and other exotic theories to explain. The belief is that supersymmetry will be
discovered at higher levels of energy than the Higgs (clicking at 125 GeV). Again, everything is being reduced to the abstract numbers of mathematical
physics.
On the other side of the picture is emergnetism. Many philosophers of the past - Hegel, CS Peirce, Whitehead, took an emergentist position (with
Peirce having the most coherent formulation) and in the modern era process philosophies inform the work of certain outstanding neuroscientists - Karl
Pribram, Jason W. Brown, Don Tucker - and in physics, Robert B. Laughlin has argued the significance of emergence in organizing even lower-level
situations - i.e. the electrons mass will change in a superconductor to an exact 1/3rd charge (oooh...mysterious). Emergence explains organization in
terms of the top-down It says what happens at the 'top' of a system (the macroscale) has organizational consequences for the most reduced element in
a system (i.e. the electron).
This vs. that doesn't sit well with me. I look at the world around me and can't help but see that "this and that" MAKE the world see, implying
that the core issue is the way language misleads us into thinking concepts are sufficient, or complete systems of representation, when in fact they
are "snapshots" of reality, a unity of a moment, or situation, which in its fullness in depth is always existing in a simultaneous and field-like
way. But speak, and the field-effect seems to vanish; is this because speech is inherently deceptive? Or, rather - as I believe - that speech can be
ecological in its interests, but that the ecological orientation of a speaking mind depends on that very mind being attuned to ecological conceptions
i.e. to a field-like sensitivity to the field of meanings around you. Because of the feedback and feedforward nature of bodily regulation,
communication, and social situations, humans in a traumatized context are both reflexively cuing in ways that trigger dissociation and idealization in
others, while at the same time they themselves are being reflexively inhibited and focused by amplifying (idealization) and filtering (dissociation)
processes in their brain (the pulvinar). In short, you can have a fully-formed mind with a very deeply felt sense of realness and truth, that is
completely a function of an ecological scaffolding dynamic that starts from the outside-in and the bottom-up, with the outside objects coinciding with
bottom-up dynamics, leaving the mind - the top and "in" - to decide on what to do in this environmental situation. The "how" the feeling process
was generated and how it constitutes a prediction based on past programming simplifies the relation of the mind to the environment. Yet, coherence
means knowing the past; it means that the mind must weave itself perceptually in its own semiotic construction; the facts of physical unity must be
paralleled by a mind that knows how its present state is a construction of a past state in interaction with an environmental variable, for if one
takes the state as a 'de-novo' feeling representation, one risks falling into the delusion of an 'essential self' that has been mysteriously
infused with feelings which a 'higher self' is unfortunately/fortunately living with. True knowledge means treating feelings and cognitions as both
emergent; the former being regulated at the beginning of the life-process, forming the background which the latter grows and evolves from.
Because life is full of complementarities, even in the formation of our mind from feelings and thoughts - both of which constitute 'points' between
physical objects (feelings) and the feelings we experience (feelings being 'objects' that lead to the selection of thoughts) - it stands to reason
that reductionism and emergentism are also complementarity, but primarily in the sense of the universe starting from a simple beginning where physical
laws of symmetry led to the emergence of particles like electrons, nucleons, etc, but over time, as these smaller structures built larger structures,
the larger symmetry had the capacity to modify the functionality of the lower symmetry i.e. what Laughlin notes in his superconductivity. The linking
theme is symmetry, with the symmetry at the macroscale of the superfluid determining the symmetry of the lower scale.
Similar principles can clearly be recognized in human beings. To Laughlin, this may suggest that the universe has no fundamental laws, but this can't
be right: symmetry is the law. There are laws of symmetry and balance which can be invoked to explain the behavior/structure of elements at whatever
unit they appear. All that matters is that the right-level of analysis be found to help explain the emergence of a behavior/structure that needs
explaining.