Wiring the Brain

There was some interesting recent discussion on Twitter regarding claims made in a new book by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder , in which she at least seems to assert that everything that happens in the universe is reducible to, and deducible from, the low-level laws of physics. Strikingly, she presents this view as an irrefutable scientific fact, rather than an arguable philosophical position. It’s worth digging into these ideas to probe the notion that the behavior of all complicated things, including living organisms, just comes down to physics in the end.     Patrick Baud quoted several passages from the book, “ Existential Physics ”, that argue that reductionist theories are the only game in town. With the important caveat that I have not read the book in full, and granting that some additional nuance is probably added elsewhere, it is worth quoting these passages in full to try and get the gist of these arguments. I’ve interspersed a few brief comments between the quot...

It’s not true, that there’s nothing new under the sun. The universe is producing novelty all the time. Galaxies, stars, and planets, where none existed before. New elements, new molecules – life itself, with the explosion of new species, and eventually new minds, capable of new thoughts. New types of things at new levels of existence – discrete entities composed of smaller entities, arranged in specific ways. New systems with new properties and new causal powers, governed by new principles. So where does all this novelty come from?   The term emergence is often used to refer to the appearance of qualitatively novel states or processes or properties that arise when things are combined in certain ways. But as with many metaphysical terms, it means different things to different people and in different contexts, and it’s not always clear what, if anything, follows from its use. In particular, it is often not stated whether “emergence” simply refers to an observed phenomenon in ne...