Can Everything be Reduced to Pure Physics?

octelcogopod

To DoctorDick;

While i understand on some level what you are saying, I obviously do not comprehend it the way I should.
I'm not even a student of anything, I just come here for the fun of it.

I hate to dissapoint people, like you, but I'm afraid I have no other choice in the matter.
Maybe some day I will sit in my university chambers, reading over your material, and then suddenly understand it, but until then..

I wish you the best of luck though, I have a hard time believing only you are capable of understanding this, there must be someone else out there in the right position, that can fully understand it.

I don't know what to say, I feel like I'm supposed to be all excited and amazed that we finally solved this age long debate, but somehow my enthusiasm is lackluster.

But combined with moving-fingers posts, it's all starting to fall into the right places.

Philocrat

Yes, undisputedly, science in which physics is a part does make very interesting and useful deductions about the notion of physical reality. The deduced estimates, predictions and paradigms do hold because we do follow the arguments in the respective disciplines.

But when we turn our attention to the issue of reduction, we immediately encounter hair-splitting paradigms. Here is the problem: with regards to the human life form, as far is this thread is concerned, the issue concerns the need to reduce the non-material aspect of it to pure matter (soul to matter, mental to physical, immaterial to material, etc.). So, the question is can physics, and physics alone, do this? If you have had the time to read through the whole thread, you should have noticed several arguments and counter-arguments for and against. One of the key problems that emerged from all this is the counter-argument in many of the postings which claims that "there is something over and above the material", and that this aspect of the human self is non-material or immaterial and irreducible to material or matter. In fact, this is where there is a sort of stalemate on this thread, if one wishes to look at it that way. This thread has not been able to move on due to this one unresolved issue.

Now, the other problem fundamental to this is the issue of 'INTERDISCIPLINARY REDUCTIONISM', for example, from Biology, to Chemistry and to Physics. It is not clear whether physics accepts this as a possibility, because if it does, then the claim that only physics can explain everything returns the whole argument back to square one. So, the question now is: do we accept interdisciplinary reductionism as a possibility? If we do, a paradox of the most notorious kind ensues or manifests. The problem splits two ways...and head in opposite endless directions: (1) the reduction of things from one microscopic scale to next ad infinitumm, and (2) the reduction of things from one macroscopic scale to the next ad infinituum. Hence, INTER-SCALE REDUCTIONISM is bi-directional and both unfortunately lead to what is known in philosophy as 'INFINTE REGRESS': that is, reducing to ever smaller scales tends to go on forever and the same is true when reducing things into ever larger cosmological objects.

If such two-headed reductionism is possible, things just get complicated and intellectually irresolvable when it turns out that other disciplines should directly or indirectly contribute to it.

Hence, some people are arguing both on this thread and elsewhere in the forum that, interdisciplinary reductionism is problematic because whichever direction you choose to start reducing things from one scale to the next, you never finish doing so. That it is an endless reductive effort.

Anyway, I hope I have done enough to update you on the key underlying problems of this thread.

Many thanks.